The Chicken
off-grid solar installer
- Joined
- Jan 5, 2016
- Messages
- 174
- Reaction score
- 1,574
Greetings! I have been wanting to write some stories to post up on RDP for years because I figure a lot of people here would really enjoy them.
A very few of you here may recall my stories back in the good ‘ol days of Glamisdunes.com.
The problem is putting these tales together takes quite a bit of time-something I seem to lack anymore.
Well, recent events made me decide I need to at least take a stab at sharing some of my misadventures, so here goes my first installment.
My stories have typically been about my personal experiences, and usually involve my work, and all the messed up situations I somehow find myself in, all the messed up things I find myself working on, and occasionally, the cool shit I get to do when it’s not all going to hell. I expect this story will be no different.
Sit back, relax, and I hope you all enjoy the ride!
First, a little background for context.
My wife, Denise, and I own and operate an electrical contracting business. It’s small. Really small-her and I are currently the entire company. We do everything from initial point of contact with a customer through the actual field work and everything in between. Currently, and for a number of years now, our primary focus is on off-grid solar system installations. We have had the great good fortune to work on a lot of really neat projects for a lot of really great people. We generally handle an entire installation in-house; secondary design considerations, setting the ground mount arrays, trenching, conduit, wiring, inverters, batteries-the whole job from start to finish and often a lot more than just installing the power system.
In order to do that, we have an arsenal of cool tools to enable us to punch above our weight, so to speak.
If people here seem interested, perhaps I will do a thread on our gaggle of cool tools, but in the interest of getting this story moving, lets jump into this past Mondays misadventures.
This is how we roll out to a typical job. I drive the Freightliner service truck and tow whatever equipment we need, and Denise drives the F-350 service truck and drags along our heavily modified toyhauler that is our mobile office and living quarters.
This past Monday, after a day and a half of loading up equipment and supplies, and dealing with a lot of issues in the process, we left our home base in Fort Rock, and headed East for the Prescott area for a pretty big job up in the Mingus Mountains at a 4H camp there that is completely off grid and in dire need of a power upgrade.
It’s a job that has taken over 6 months to put together, and has had a lot of delays and hurdles to clear, so finally getting to head out and do the work was pretty exciting!
Typically, I let Denise lead and I follow, which works out well because I have a lead foot and she keeps me from going too fast. The trip went pretty well, considering that we got a late start, all the way to Chino Valley. There we began the dreaded run through all the round-abouts they have installed there. God-those get old!
We survived the round-abouts and down-town traffic and somehow miraculously managed to even stay together through all the traffic. Finally, we left Prescott Valley in our rear view and began the long pull up the mountain from Prescott Valley to the summit of Mingus mountain.
If you’ve never gone up the 89a from Prescott Valley to Mingus Mountain, you’re missing out-it’s beautiful.
Unless you are towing big long heavy trailers, in which case, you are not missing out, as the route is one of the steepest, most winding, and narrowest paved roads in the state, and the beauty of the drive will likely be lost to you as you work to get all your crap up the road safely. The route climbs about 2000 feet in about 4 miles, with most of the elevation change taking place in the last half of the climb up.
Denise had been dreading this part of the trip due to its steep grade, extremely sharp turns, and little margin for error, so she was pretty tense by the time we started the ascent. I was able to talk to her on the CB and hopefully help her out, and fortunately, traffic was pretty light.
I wasn’t surprised when she made the whole trip up like a boss without a glitch and picked perfect lines the whole way.
It wasn’t exactly a picnic for me behind her in the Freight Shaker as I weighed close to 50 thousand pounds and the road was steep enough and the turns tight enough, that I was in the low range of the 10 speed gear box and trying to keep my momentum and speed just right to avoid too many gear shifts that I could potentially screw up. LOL.
It was with great relief that we finally hooked a right at the summit to get off the 89a and onto the backroads with less pressure!
That relief was to be short lived.
I had dropped down into second to make the turn off, and once straightened out, I picked up speed and upshifted to third on the steep hill.
And that’s when everything went to shit.
I executed what felt like a perfect 2-3 shift, hit the accelerator pedal and-nothing!
What the hell? It took me a few seconds to get sorted out as the truck was rapidly losing all forward momentum on the steep hill, but I finally realized that the engine has died.
Shit!
I radio Denise that I have a dead truck, but she has little choice but to continue on up the tight winding road to find somewhere to pull off-which ends up being a couple miles further along.
As the truck came to a stop, I stepped on the brakes to keep from rolling back down the steep hill and try to restart the engine. Not happening. I set the park brakes and got out of the truck to assess the situation.
At this point in time, it was about 2 pm, and we had been up since around 3:30 am and had a long day already behind us fighting issues with loading parts, fueling trucks, and generally just lots of frustrating and tiring delays. We had planned on being in camp-still a solid hour away under good conditions, by noon. Already late, tired, and a bit frazzled, I then found myself staring down the barrel of possibly really expensive repairs and maybe even an outrageous tow bill. It’s one of the drawbacks of such a big truck-when things go bad on the road, it’s generally really expensive.
I’m not gonna lie, I was borderline about to freak out with the full weight of what my current situation could cost and entail, and I was struggling to get my shit together and figure my way out of the current dilemma. Normally I’m pretty good at assessing, troubleshooting, and figuring out some crafty way to get out of sticky situations without too much drama or expense-but I was really nervous that I had finally come up against something that was going to really get painfully expensive.
So here’s where it all came to a halt. Stuck on a steep narrow two lane piece of blacktop with a disappointingly high volume of traffic needing to get by considering the location.
OK. Time to figure out how to get over this. First, I tried to simply just start the truck. No dice, and after only just a couple short cranks, the batteries were too low to even turn the engine over, which was unusual. So maybe I’ve just got a charging system issue and the ECU quit due to low voltage? Alright, I’ve got a big NOCO jump box for just such occasions, so I got it hooked up and hit the starter. The engine lit right off! Yeah!! I’m saved!
Nope. As soon as the engine fired up, it then immediately revved up on it’s own, then died, and would not restart. Crap.
So is it some wiring/electrical issue? This era of Cummins M-11 have a couple known issues, a few of which I’ve sorted out on this truck. Now I’m really nervous. Wiring issues can be time consuming to sort out, I don’t have the repair manuals with me to help and don’t remember what wires were the ones to check to make sure the ECU is getting power or even how to check the fuel shut off solenoid. AAHHHHHH!!!
Just as I’m about to hit freak out mode, I happen to notice a small puddle of fuel on the ground under the fuel/water separator. What’s this?! Did the drain fitting come loose and allow the fuel system to suck air? That would certainly explain everything!
As it turns out, I have had to bleed the air from this trucks fuel system a few too many times and have that down to an art form. I take an air nozzle and connect it to the fuel tanks vent and put a little positive pressure on the fuel tank and crack all the necessary valves and fittings. And this truck has a separate hydraulically driven air compressor. Of course, the catch here is that the engine has to be running to run the hydraulics. Thankfully, I have a habit of running that air compressor at every start up to make sure the air system has pressure in case of an emergency like this, so I know I at least have some air to play with.
As soon as I pressurized the fuel system, my problem became readily apparent. The water separator drain bowl had cracked, meaning the fuel system had indeed sucked in air, causing the engine to die.
Simple problem, and a simple fix-if I had another separator bowl on hand. Crap. Getting one of those could be a nightmare in and of itself! I could just bypass this filter if I had the right fitting to put the inlet and outlet hoses together, as I’m pretty sure there is a second filter on the system. This could be risky though, as these type of injectors are extremely fickle and do not tolerate dirty fuel.
And I have dead batteries and a now dead jump box to deal with even if I get this sorted out.
I realize it’s time to call in some help.
I need a mechanic.
Not just any mechanic, but a mercenary mechanic.
It was time to call Monkeyswrench!
Slight problem there though-on this remote mountain summit, I had absolutely ZERO cell service!
Fortunately, this is a problem that I encounter often and happened to have the solution on hand. So I deployed our portable Victron 12 volt inverter and our Starlink satellite system. After a minute for the Starlink to boot up, and my phone set to enable calling over WiFi, I’m able to send pictures, texts, and make a phone call to RDPs very own Monkeyswrench.
After some discussion, Kevin and I conclude that I can indeed bypass that filter for a few miles if I can scrounge up the correct parts, and that he should come up the mountain to help me get it started again and jump the low batteries on the truck. For perhaps the first time that day, fortune shined upon me, as Kevin not only lives only a few miles from where I was broken, but was available to come bail my sorry ass out. Awesome!
About this time, the director of the camp that we are already supposed to be at happens to drive up. She didn’t recognize me at first, as we had met, but she had never seen our work trucks. I explained to her what was going on, that we should be rolling soon, and could she please relay what was going on to Denise, who presumably would be found parked along the side of the road somewhere ahead. The camp director was having her own issues, as she was guiding a 28 foot box truck in to the camp that had all the solar components that we were supposed to be on site unloading. That truck driver looked frazzled too. Seemed like everyone involved with the project was running late and having a total Monday on the top of this mountain, LOL.
I began scouring our electrical work truck for plumbing parts. LOL.
Right about then, the cutest roadside assistance ever shows up in the form of my wife, Denise, driving our Polaris Ranger. We often take our venerable old Ranger to jobs with us, as it proves invaluable in moving us and parts around jobsites that often span several acres.
Denise, who knows me well, and who herself knows her way around solving problems and getting shit done, had unloaded the Ranger from the toyhauler, brought a cooler full of water, and a bag of snacks! I love that girl!
Her and I then found an electrical fitting that we turned into a plumbing fitting by applying a ton of Blue Monster Teflon tape, and bypassed the filter assembly. We then plugged the filter to keep dirt out, and together we ran the air hose and wrenches to purge most of the air from the remaining fuel system. Then all we could do was wait for Kevin to show up with a vehicle big enough to jump-charge the Freight Shaker enough to hopefully get it started.
Denise jumped back in the Ranger and high-tailed it back to her truck for the huge jumper cables we keep on it, and for more snacks. Shortly after Denise returned, the Monkeyswrench himself showed up to make this mess a real roadside party.
Here Kevin is doing his best Austin Powers turning the Excursion around on the narrow road to get the front of it to the front of our truck. LOL.
The three of us then got busy final bleeding the fuel system, charging batteries, trying to direct traffic and not get run over, and getting the truck started. It took a little doing, but before long, the Cummins grumbled back to life. Once it did, it was immediately apparent that a broken fuel filter was not the only issue we had-not only was the alternator not putting out much voltage or current, but the noises coming from it clearly indicated that the front bearing set was preparing to permanently retire. Yikes.
But the truck was up and running, so we decided to get this circus moving again and that Kevin would follow us to our destination in case we had any other issues and needed more help. A couple miles up the road, we linked up with Denise who dropped in behind us, and then we had ourselves a convoy!
We eased our little convoy in the last rough miles over dirt roads into the camp without much further drama over the course of about 45 minutes. After some head scratching with camp staff as to where to park a lot of large truck and trailer in a small bit of real estate, we began to get unloaded, un hooked, un packed and our camp within the camp set up.
Kevin headed back home with whatever information he needed to procure us repair parts, as he would be returning to effect more permanent repairs the following week.
It took Denise and I till about 9pm to get everything setup and ready for tomorrows work to begin. We were both exhausted, as it had been a long, long day. Several days, actually. But we had our work trailer set up in a nice spot that was right next to the building that we would be working on. Here’s a birds eye view of our camp spot.
Tuesday promised to be a better, more productive day. Tuesday, it would turn out, was kinda a liar…
A very few of you here may recall my stories back in the good ‘ol days of Glamisdunes.com.
The problem is putting these tales together takes quite a bit of time-something I seem to lack anymore.
Well, recent events made me decide I need to at least take a stab at sharing some of my misadventures, so here goes my first installment.
My stories have typically been about my personal experiences, and usually involve my work, and all the messed up situations I somehow find myself in, all the messed up things I find myself working on, and occasionally, the cool shit I get to do when it’s not all going to hell. I expect this story will be no different.
Sit back, relax, and I hope you all enjoy the ride!
First, a little background for context.
My wife, Denise, and I own and operate an electrical contracting business. It’s small. Really small-her and I are currently the entire company. We do everything from initial point of contact with a customer through the actual field work and everything in between. Currently, and for a number of years now, our primary focus is on off-grid solar system installations. We have had the great good fortune to work on a lot of really neat projects for a lot of really great people. We generally handle an entire installation in-house; secondary design considerations, setting the ground mount arrays, trenching, conduit, wiring, inverters, batteries-the whole job from start to finish and often a lot more than just installing the power system.
In order to do that, we have an arsenal of cool tools to enable us to punch above our weight, so to speak.
If people here seem interested, perhaps I will do a thread on our gaggle of cool tools, but in the interest of getting this story moving, lets jump into this past Mondays misadventures.
This is how we roll out to a typical job. I drive the Freightliner service truck and tow whatever equipment we need, and Denise drives the F-350 service truck and drags along our heavily modified toyhauler that is our mobile office and living quarters.
This past Monday, after a day and a half of loading up equipment and supplies, and dealing with a lot of issues in the process, we left our home base in Fort Rock, and headed East for the Prescott area for a pretty big job up in the Mingus Mountains at a 4H camp there that is completely off grid and in dire need of a power upgrade.
It’s a job that has taken over 6 months to put together, and has had a lot of delays and hurdles to clear, so finally getting to head out and do the work was pretty exciting!
Typically, I let Denise lead and I follow, which works out well because I have a lead foot and she keeps me from going too fast. The trip went pretty well, considering that we got a late start, all the way to Chino Valley. There we began the dreaded run through all the round-abouts they have installed there. God-those get old!
We survived the round-abouts and down-town traffic and somehow miraculously managed to even stay together through all the traffic. Finally, we left Prescott Valley in our rear view and began the long pull up the mountain from Prescott Valley to the summit of Mingus mountain.
If you’ve never gone up the 89a from Prescott Valley to Mingus Mountain, you’re missing out-it’s beautiful.
Unless you are towing big long heavy trailers, in which case, you are not missing out, as the route is one of the steepest, most winding, and narrowest paved roads in the state, and the beauty of the drive will likely be lost to you as you work to get all your crap up the road safely. The route climbs about 2000 feet in about 4 miles, with most of the elevation change taking place in the last half of the climb up.
Denise had been dreading this part of the trip due to its steep grade, extremely sharp turns, and little margin for error, so she was pretty tense by the time we started the ascent. I was able to talk to her on the CB and hopefully help her out, and fortunately, traffic was pretty light.
I wasn’t surprised when she made the whole trip up like a boss without a glitch and picked perfect lines the whole way.
It wasn’t exactly a picnic for me behind her in the Freight Shaker as I weighed close to 50 thousand pounds and the road was steep enough and the turns tight enough, that I was in the low range of the 10 speed gear box and trying to keep my momentum and speed just right to avoid too many gear shifts that I could potentially screw up. LOL.
It was with great relief that we finally hooked a right at the summit to get off the 89a and onto the backroads with less pressure!
That relief was to be short lived.
I had dropped down into second to make the turn off, and once straightened out, I picked up speed and upshifted to third on the steep hill.
And that’s when everything went to shit.
I executed what felt like a perfect 2-3 shift, hit the accelerator pedal and-nothing!
What the hell? It took me a few seconds to get sorted out as the truck was rapidly losing all forward momentum on the steep hill, but I finally realized that the engine has died.
Shit!
I radio Denise that I have a dead truck, but she has little choice but to continue on up the tight winding road to find somewhere to pull off-which ends up being a couple miles further along.
As the truck came to a stop, I stepped on the brakes to keep from rolling back down the steep hill and try to restart the engine. Not happening. I set the park brakes and got out of the truck to assess the situation.
At this point in time, it was about 2 pm, and we had been up since around 3:30 am and had a long day already behind us fighting issues with loading parts, fueling trucks, and generally just lots of frustrating and tiring delays. We had planned on being in camp-still a solid hour away under good conditions, by noon. Already late, tired, and a bit frazzled, I then found myself staring down the barrel of possibly really expensive repairs and maybe even an outrageous tow bill. It’s one of the drawbacks of such a big truck-when things go bad on the road, it’s generally really expensive.
I’m not gonna lie, I was borderline about to freak out with the full weight of what my current situation could cost and entail, and I was struggling to get my shit together and figure my way out of the current dilemma. Normally I’m pretty good at assessing, troubleshooting, and figuring out some crafty way to get out of sticky situations without too much drama or expense-but I was really nervous that I had finally come up against something that was going to really get painfully expensive.
So here’s where it all came to a halt. Stuck on a steep narrow two lane piece of blacktop with a disappointingly high volume of traffic needing to get by considering the location.
OK. Time to figure out how to get over this. First, I tried to simply just start the truck. No dice, and after only just a couple short cranks, the batteries were too low to even turn the engine over, which was unusual. So maybe I’ve just got a charging system issue and the ECU quit due to low voltage? Alright, I’ve got a big NOCO jump box for just such occasions, so I got it hooked up and hit the starter. The engine lit right off! Yeah!! I’m saved!
Nope. As soon as the engine fired up, it then immediately revved up on it’s own, then died, and would not restart. Crap.
So is it some wiring/electrical issue? This era of Cummins M-11 have a couple known issues, a few of which I’ve sorted out on this truck. Now I’m really nervous. Wiring issues can be time consuming to sort out, I don’t have the repair manuals with me to help and don’t remember what wires were the ones to check to make sure the ECU is getting power or even how to check the fuel shut off solenoid. AAHHHHHH!!!
Just as I’m about to hit freak out mode, I happen to notice a small puddle of fuel on the ground under the fuel/water separator. What’s this?! Did the drain fitting come loose and allow the fuel system to suck air? That would certainly explain everything!
As it turns out, I have had to bleed the air from this trucks fuel system a few too many times and have that down to an art form. I take an air nozzle and connect it to the fuel tanks vent and put a little positive pressure on the fuel tank and crack all the necessary valves and fittings. And this truck has a separate hydraulically driven air compressor. Of course, the catch here is that the engine has to be running to run the hydraulics. Thankfully, I have a habit of running that air compressor at every start up to make sure the air system has pressure in case of an emergency like this, so I know I at least have some air to play with.
As soon as I pressurized the fuel system, my problem became readily apparent. The water separator drain bowl had cracked, meaning the fuel system had indeed sucked in air, causing the engine to die.
Simple problem, and a simple fix-if I had another separator bowl on hand. Crap. Getting one of those could be a nightmare in and of itself! I could just bypass this filter if I had the right fitting to put the inlet and outlet hoses together, as I’m pretty sure there is a second filter on the system. This could be risky though, as these type of injectors are extremely fickle and do not tolerate dirty fuel.
And I have dead batteries and a now dead jump box to deal with even if I get this sorted out.
I realize it’s time to call in some help.
I need a mechanic.
Not just any mechanic, but a mercenary mechanic.
It was time to call Monkeyswrench!
Slight problem there though-on this remote mountain summit, I had absolutely ZERO cell service!
Fortunately, this is a problem that I encounter often and happened to have the solution on hand. So I deployed our portable Victron 12 volt inverter and our Starlink satellite system. After a minute for the Starlink to boot up, and my phone set to enable calling over WiFi, I’m able to send pictures, texts, and make a phone call to RDPs very own Monkeyswrench.
After some discussion, Kevin and I conclude that I can indeed bypass that filter for a few miles if I can scrounge up the correct parts, and that he should come up the mountain to help me get it started again and jump the low batteries on the truck. For perhaps the first time that day, fortune shined upon me, as Kevin not only lives only a few miles from where I was broken, but was available to come bail my sorry ass out. Awesome!
About this time, the director of the camp that we are already supposed to be at happens to drive up. She didn’t recognize me at first, as we had met, but she had never seen our work trucks. I explained to her what was going on, that we should be rolling soon, and could she please relay what was going on to Denise, who presumably would be found parked along the side of the road somewhere ahead. The camp director was having her own issues, as she was guiding a 28 foot box truck in to the camp that had all the solar components that we were supposed to be on site unloading. That truck driver looked frazzled too. Seemed like everyone involved with the project was running late and having a total Monday on the top of this mountain, LOL.
I began scouring our electrical work truck for plumbing parts. LOL.
Right about then, the cutest roadside assistance ever shows up in the form of my wife, Denise, driving our Polaris Ranger. We often take our venerable old Ranger to jobs with us, as it proves invaluable in moving us and parts around jobsites that often span several acres.
Denise, who knows me well, and who herself knows her way around solving problems and getting shit done, had unloaded the Ranger from the toyhauler, brought a cooler full of water, and a bag of snacks! I love that girl!
Her and I then found an electrical fitting that we turned into a plumbing fitting by applying a ton of Blue Monster Teflon tape, and bypassed the filter assembly. We then plugged the filter to keep dirt out, and together we ran the air hose and wrenches to purge most of the air from the remaining fuel system. Then all we could do was wait for Kevin to show up with a vehicle big enough to jump-charge the Freight Shaker enough to hopefully get it started.
Denise jumped back in the Ranger and high-tailed it back to her truck for the huge jumper cables we keep on it, and for more snacks. Shortly after Denise returned, the Monkeyswrench himself showed up to make this mess a real roadside party.
Here Kevin is doing his best Austin Powers turning the Excursion around on the narrow road to get the front of it to the front of our truck. LOL.
The three of us then got busy final bleeding the fuel system, charging batteries, trying to direct traffic and not get run over, and getting the truck started. It took a little doing, but before long, the Cummins grumbled back to life. Once it did, it was immediately apparent that a broken fuel filter was not the only issue we had-not only was the alternator not putting out much voltage or current, but the noises coming from it clearly indicated that the front bearing set was preparing to permanently retire. Yikes.
But the truck was up and running, so we decided to get this circus moving again and that Kevin would follow us to our destination in case we had any other issues and needed more help. A couple miles up the road, we linked up with Denise who dropped in behind us, and then we had ourselves a convoy!
We eased our little convoy in the last rough miles over dirt roads into the camp without much further drama over the course of about 45 minutes. After some head scratching with camp staff as to where to park a lot of large truck and trailer in a small bit of real estate, we began to get unloaded, un hooked, un packed and our camp within the camp set up.
Kevin headed back home with whatever information he needed to procure us repair parts, as he would be returning to effect more permanent repairs the following week.
It took Denise and I till about 9pm to get everything setup and ready for tomorrows work to begin. We were both exhausted, as it had been a long, long day. Several days, actually. But we had our work trailer set up in a nice spot that was right next to the building that we would be working on. Here’s a birds eye view of our camp spot.
Tuesday promised to be a better, more productive day. Tuesday, it would turn out, was kinda a liar…
. I’m wondering how the rest of the job goes.. lol. Holy shit!
