Monkeys with wrenches, Chickens with electricity, and other things that don’t make sense-A day in the life of an off-grid solar installer

[HNL2LHC]

Man you guys are making progress. You know if you were to put down the phone and lend a hand Denise could get the work done faster!!

Jerome is a fun town. We should do a trip this fall or after New Years. Oh, and there is a good wine-tasting scene in Cottonwood.

That is a great idea Angie. Let’s figure a way to make that happen.

 

[The Chicken]

Today was a day of not a lot of visual progress on the job.
So I’d like to take a moment and talk about a couple that a bunch of you here may recognize.
That couple is Joel and Amy. You may know them as Fort Rock Farms or Wash 11 and his wife-but we know them as our best friends and neighbors and frequent accomplices in making pour decisions.

What Denise and I do wouldn’t be possible if Joel and Amy didn’t take care of our homestead while we are gone days and sometimes weeks at a time.
We’ve got our chicken program pretty dialed in to where it doesn’t need much more than a check once and awhile to make sure the water system is working, but the dogs and cats that keep the property free from pests require twice daily care.
And so it is that Joel and Amy come down to our place and feed our gaggle of critters twice a day.

The critters are typically very excited when Amy-AKA Bringer Of The Food shows up.

Often they have to show up early in the morning or late at night because they have their own busy schedule.

Denise planted a bunch of flowers that need daily attention too, and Joel makes sure they stay alive long enough for us to somehow kill them when we get home.

Denise and I really miss our mutts when we are gone, so we often get fun pictures of them.

So this is a big shout out and heartfelt thank you to Joel and Amy for taking care of our place and our beloved mutts ( ok, we love the cats too) and allowing us the ability to go work on these remote jobs. Thank you two!!!

 

[wash11]

Today was a day of not a lot of visual progress on the job.
So I’d like to take a moment and talk about a couple that a bunch of you here may recognize.
That couple is Joel and Amy. You may know them as Fort Rock Farms or Wash 11 and his wife-but we know them as our best friends and neighbors and frequent accomplices in making pour decisions.

What Denise and I do wouldn’t be possible if Joel and Amy didn’t take care of our homestead while we are gone days and sometimes weeks at a time.
We’ve got our chicken program pretty dialed in to where it doesn’t need much more than a check once and awhile to make sure the water system is working, but the dogs and cats that keep the property free from pests require twice daily care.
And so it is that Joel and Amy come down to our place and feed our gaggle of critters twice a day.

View attachment 1416877

The critters are typically very excited when Amy-AKA Bringer Of The Food shows up.
View attachment 1416881

Often they have to show up early in the morning or late at night because they have their own busy schedule.
View attachment 1416882

Denise planted a bunch of flowers that need daily attention too, and Joel makes sure they stay alive long enough for us to somehow kill them when we get home.
View attachment 1416886

Denise and I really miss our mutts when we are gone, so we often get fun pictures of them.

View attachment 1416887

So this is a big shout out and heartfelt thank you to Joel and Amy for taking care of our place and our beloved mutts ( ok, we love the cats too) and allowing us the ability to go work on these remote jobs. Thank you two!!!

Happy to do it! You guys do just as much for us. Plus, we get the added benefit of Dan's terrible jokes and those hideous Crocks

 

[The Chicken]

What are the specs on this system? Batteries/amp hours, output at full loads etc......

It’s pretty legit.
By the numbers:
90 commercial solar panels for a total of 49.5 Kw.
30 batteries for a total of 154Kwh of storage.
Three Solark 15k inverters paralleled in single phase for a continuous output rating of 189 amps.
By comparison, the entire camp currently runs on a 60 amp fused circuit off of their generator(s).
Really, the design principle wasn’t so much for raw output amperage, the third inverter was mostly to give maximum solar collection ability for the locations short duration solar production window.

To put this in perspective, we have a customer in Wikenburg running only one of these inverters, 8 batteries, and 48 smaller 400w panels and they run an entire large house complete with two air conditioners and a deep well pump and that location almost never touches the grid for power.

 

[The Chicken]

Thursday morning-now that we’ve finally managed to finish all the conduit on the roof, it was time to pull in the 15 solar circuit home runs.
So early in the morning as soon as it was light enough to see I was up on the roof with the intent of getting done before it got too hot on that reflective roof.
Denise was stationed in the inverter room managing all the wire spools. We have these pretty cool Bluetooth headsets that allow us full time hands free open mic communications that really help for running equipment, pulling wire, etc.

Another cool tool we have is this Milwaukee power fish tape. It really helps get wire pulls done, especially because my shoulders, elbows, wrists and hands aren’t what they used to be after decades of work abuse.

Our wire pulling morning started great, but then I screwed the pooch and created the mother of all birds nests. It took us both an hour and a half to untangle this mess.

After fixing that disaster, and neither one of us in a very good mood as a result of the time lost, we came down off the roof to find some dude laying under the Freightshaker.

Turns out it was RDP’s own Monkeys Wrench, and he had come up the hill to nurse a bunch of our crap back into proper shape.
The previous week I had noticed that one of the airbags was showing some signs of damage from a run-flat situation we had awhile back, so a call to Kevin and he brought new bags to the job and changed them out while we worked, and he also worked on a whole bunch of other little items that needed attention.
Here he is, not thrilled I’m taking his picture, and with a disappointing downgrade from his Knipex pliers of last week to a one-size-fits-none wrench.

Questionable tools or not, he had all our stuff fixed, tuned up, lubed, and ready to rock in pretty short order.
We talked him into one last picture and he was on his way.

As for us, there was still a lot of shit to be done to get the solar connected to the inverters, so we kept at it.
Denise handled all the termination down in the inverter room while I went up top and worked my sun tan into a sunburn and also put some wires together.

Finally, after a long hot day, I took a selfie and walked off the roof for hopefully the last time at just after 6 pm.

Even though we are about 3 days behind schedule, it felt good to finally have the roof work buttoned up, and we were looking forward to doing some AC wiring tomorrow and then turning everything on to see if it all works like it’s supposed to.
Would we be able to actually get this up and running tomorrow, or would we fall victim to yet another setback?…

 

[rivermobster]

Looks awesome.

 

[Waterjunky]

Thank you for the time you are investing in documenting all this. We really appreciate it.
I love tagging along on projects like this. My own toys and projects are not nearly as large or interesting.

 

[The Chicken]

Friday.
Today’s the day we become either heros or zeros.
If we can get this big expensive mess to power up and make electricity-we’re heros.
If there are issues three weeks worth of work comes to only frustration today.
And there are often issues.
First, as you can see, there are a lot of components we’ve had our hands on over the course of the last weeks, and at any stage of the installation process, we can make a mistake. We have a lot of little tricks and processes in place all designed to prevent mistakes from happening, or to catch them before they become a problem-but we are human, and this is, after all, construction, and sometimes shit just happens.
One of the processes we have in place is checking, double checking, and double checking some more all of the different systems wiring as we go. Even though this is one power system, it actually has four distinct and separate power systems within it-the solar power system at about 500 volts DC maximum, the battery power system at about 56 volts maximum, the generator power system at 120/240 AC volts, and the inverter output system at 120/240 volts AC.
We have methods of installing and checking each of these systems to insure they are connected correctly-but there always comes that nerve wracking point where you checked everything you can, and it’s time to throw the switches and hope you didn’t miss something that’s going to let the magic smoke out of a bunch of expensive components.
At this point, the solar and battery systems were fully installed, checked, and a go for liftoff. And we could power up those systems and test for functionality.
But we decided we at least wanted to complete the AC wiring between the inverters and combiners first, so that was the first order of the day.
Here’s the wiring getting installed in all its messy glory.

Well, that looks terrible, and it’s hard to work on, so a little zip tie magic is in order.

It’s at this point of one of these installs that I start to like what I see. The plan is coming together, everything is starting to look nice, the parts pile is finally getting small, and the successful end of a job well done is near.
That is, if it all works.
And so it was time to quit delaying and start flipping switches.
We start with the batteries.
In this case, the batteries are kinda complicated.
First, there are 30 batteries total.
They are divided into groups of three for the high current DC wiring-every three batteries has a home run 2/0 positive and negative cable that go to the 48 volt buss bar system for a total of 10 groups of batteries.
But these batteries all have to talk to each other and to the inverters too, and for that the batteries are connected in groups of six, with each group of six batteries consisting of five slave batteries that communicate to one master battery, for a total of five communication groups.
Each master battery controls its slaves, and communicates to a data hub that manages communications between the five master batteries, and communicates to the master inverter, which itself has two slaves.
By my math, there are 34 computers in this system that all have to talk to each and get along, and if one computer isn’t happy, chances are, none of them are happy and nothing works.
What could possibly go wrong?
We go through the process of starting the first stack of batteries-and one by one they go through their self check like they are supposed to-and all go into alarm and shutdown mode.
Shit.
They keep self checking, but won’t come out of alarm mode.
Not a great start to getting this system to run.
Tired of six separate alarm piezos screaming in our ears, we imitate the shutdown sequence and start going over everything to see if we can figure out what’s wrong.
Denise and I dig into the manuals again which are thin on any real information and written in “Chinglish” as seems to be the norm these days.
After going over everything with a fine tooth comb, we can’t find anything wrong.
Well, shit. These are computers, after all, maybe they just wanted a power cycle?
So we initiated the startup sequence again and…
Success!!
All the batteries in the first stack self checked and powered up just fine.
And after that, the other four stacks powered up without incident.
Woo!!
Then we powered up the inverters, which went as expected, and programmed them to run in parallel with each other. That requires a power cycle of the inverters…and they all powered back up and running in a parallel configuration just like they should be.
Woo!!
Now it was time to do some more programming and get them set up online for remote monitoring and control.

Once we verified battery charge settings and that the batteries were indeed talking to the inverters like they were supposed to, it was time to energize the solar circuits.
Those all energized without issue and began charging the batteries.
While I worked on some other stuff, Denise-who is a certified Solark installer by the way, worked on getting the inverters connected to the internet and monitoring cloud.
Once she had that done, we could look at the system as a whole to see what it’s doing.

Here it is ingesting an impressive 40,472 watts of solar, which translates into about 697 amps of power going into and charging the batteries.
Yeah baby!

At this point, the better part of Friday was behind us, and it was time to roll it up and head home before our dogs began to think we had abandoned them.

We left most of our gear under the roof of this large pavilion and hit the road.

Next week-tying this solar power system into the camps power distribution system and making sure all that works properly.

 

[monkeyswrench]

I would have keeled over if the batteries did that That, or gone full Gallagher with the "Sledge-o-matic". That is insane!

For some reason I think the first stack was already talking to the others, and said "Hey, watch this! I'm going to give them a heartattack."

 

[Sawtooth]

Well if that’s the best you can do I guess it’s ok ! Very impressive Mr. & Mrs Chicken, it’s great to see there are still people in the trades that enjoy what they do and take pride in their work…..especially the stuff nobody is ever going to see. For just being the two of you you guys kicked ass and took the time to post the project in detail here, kudos, I appreciate it! I think no matter how many times you do something and how confident you are there is always a pit in one’s stomach…..just means you have heart in the project.
Question; do you do any consulting type work for say a much smaller scale project for an RV, like reviewing a planned system and pointing out what might be weakness’s and or products that might be better suited.

 

[Sandlord]

You got me on that first pic of the wiring.
I was like, what the fuck, thats not Dans work.
Then I scrolled down to the next pic.

 

[BabyRay]

Fun and interesting thread! Thanks for posting this up for everyone to see.

 

[attitude]

Great write up & bad ass installation. I’m surprised there is enough zip ties in AZ for both you and DCB lol.

 

[rivermobster]

Almost 700 AMPS of power...

I'm still trying to wrap my head around THAT!!!

 

[Mandelon]

What an amazing system. Impressive to see.

I want to work up a simple solar system to power a fountain pump. My plan is to rig it in with my swimming pool system so it would pump pool water through my black rubber solar panels when the sun shines. It has to push the water up 12 feet to the roof top. A panel or two, a couple batteries and a 12V bilge pump. I can rig all that, but also some sort of controller would obviously be needed but I have no clue about that part.

Any suggestions on where on the net I should go to research something like this?

 

[The Chicken]

Well if that’s the best you can do I guess it’s ok ! Very impressive Mr. & Mrs Chicken, it’s great to see there are still people in the trades that enjoy what they do and take pride in their work…..especially the stuff nobody is ever going to see. For just being the two of you you guys kicked ass and took the time to post the project in detail here, kudos, I appreciate it! I think no matter how many times you do something and how confident you are there is always a pit in one’s stomach…..just means you have heart in the project.
Question; do you do any consulting type work for say a much smaller scale project for an RV, like reviewing a planned system and pointing out what might be weakness’s and or products that might be better suited.

Thank you!
Yes we do consulting work. Often we will consult on the entire property development, as we have extensive experience in developing off-grid properties and all the unique challenges that come with these locations in Arizona. A few thousand spent having us help develop a plan or going over existing plans can often save a customer tens of thousands in property development mistakes.
And we do have experience in RV electrical as well.
If you have time, check out the great website Rivermobster put together for us. I think it gives someone looking at it a pretty good sense of who we are and what we can do if they look through it.

DRE-Solar – Off-Grid Solar Installations in Northern Arizona

Done Right Electrial - We Specialize in Quality Installations of Off-Grid Solar Based Power Systems.

dre-solar.com

 

[The Chicken]

What an amazing system. Impressive to see.

I want to work up a simple solar system to power a fountain pump. My plan is to rig it in with my swimming pool system so it would pump pool water through my black rubber solar panels when the sun shines. It has to push the water up 12 feet to the roof top. A panel or two, a couple batteries and a 12V bilge pump. I can rig all that, but also some sort of controller would obviously be needed but I have no clue about that part.

Any suggestions on where on the net I should go to research something like this?

Thank you!

Funny you mention this, we are actually working on a project very similar to this right now! We have actually pulled off of the solar pool project to be on this Camp project I've been writing about here.
Pentair actually makes a solar pool heater controller to control your pump and the valve necessary to regulate pool temperature. (Pentair Solartouch)
For the solar electric part, that can be a bit trickier.
Likely the easiest and most cost effective way would be to install the necessary number of solar panels and a small inverter to run your pump. However, pumps are demanding loads, and you may find that the quantity of panels and size of the inverter needed to be effective for this application expensive enough to warrant whole home solar.
You MAY be able to sort of cheat it in with a low volume DC water pump-like an RV style pump-and some panels and a motor controller.
The data I've seen of the lift and flow requirements for the solar pool heaters seem to indicate a pretty high flow pump and plumbing, so you would be defiantly doing some R&D and experimenting with a small pump.

 

[The Chicken]

Almost 700 AMPS of power...

I'm still trying to wrap my head around THAT!!!

The crazy thing is, this system has the ability to ingest about 8000 watts more solar, for about another 100Amps of battery charging power. We would just have to add panels to the other side of the roof.

 

[rivermobster]

The crazy thing is, this system has the ability to ingest about 8000 watts more solar, for about another 100Amps of battery charging power. We would just have to add panels to the other side of the roof.

How many amps can just the batteries alone supply, if they were at full charge?

Could this system run 220?

 

[The Chicken]

Saturday -wait a minute! It’s Saturday, nobody works on Saturday!

Reminds me of something someone said to me once:
“It’s nice being an entrepreneur; you only have to work half days. Just pick which 12 hours you want to work!”
LOL. There’s more than a little truth in that joke.
Being away and on a job that requires us to work such long days really kills our ability to get anything more than some very basic office work done.
For me, my office work nemesis is estimates.
For whatever reason, all the jobs we quote are always unique, and each one has very specific challenges and different parts requirements. Meaning every estimate is an almost from scratch one-off, and as such requires a lot of time.
I’ve been trying for years to streamline or speed up this process, but I haven’t found any short cuts that work yet.
And if there is any part of dealing with us that isn’t great, I’d have to say it’s the quote process and how long it can take us to give someone a solid number, especially if we are on a job, there just isn’t the time or space for me to really do that kind of work in the job trailer. I know we disappoint people sometimes at this critical stage, and it kills me to let people down and also miss opportunities, but there’s only two of us to make all this work. It’s one of the down sides to being such a small company.
So with that being said, here’s what my office looks like when I walked into it today to try and catch up on at least some office work instead of have a day off.

Yeah, it’s a mess. Two desks, two computers, three monitors, a work table set up just to deal with the excessive amount of paperwork one particular job has created… Welcome to my little slice of hell.

At any given time I’ll have a dozen internet tabs open, collecting the specs on components or looking at remote projects for layouts, a bunch of PDF files open for prints or other specs, my note pad getting lots of, um, Chicken scratch, and a calculator that seems to mock me at every turn.

As I’m sure a lot of you here know, none of the work or fun stuff happens unless this monster has been slain first.

Anyway, enough complaining from me today-I’d better get back to work before Denise finds out I’m on RDP again!

 

[calkid]

Thanks for sharing your project with us, very clean work. It's nice putting faces with screen names.

 

[The Chicken]

How many amps can just the batteries alone supply, if they were at full charge?

Could this system run 220?

These particular batteries are rated to charge or discharge at a continuous 100 Amps each, so theoretically there’s 3000 amps at about 52 volts on tap.
However, there are some practical limitations to that number, and in the case of this particular system, the limit to how much current the batteries can be charged or discharged at is the number of inverters there are. With 3 of these inverters, the maximum charge or discharge current will be a pretty healthy 825 amps.

As for your 220 question-all of the above data about current levels is on the 48 nominal volt DC buss.
The inverters take that 48 Volt DC and change it to 120/240 volts AC just like you have in your house. The maximum AC output current the inverters can produce at 240 volts is about 188 amps. That output number is a little variable depending on whether the solar panels are producing or not.
So this system is pretty comparable to a 200 amp residential service on the Ac output side.

 

[Yarder]

These particular batteries are rated to charge or discharge at a continuous 100 Amps each, so theoretically there’s 3000 amps at about 52 volts on tap.
However, there are some practical limitations to that number, and in the case of this particular system, the limit to how much current the batteries can be charged or discharged at is the number of inverters there are. With 3 of these inverters, the maximum charge or discharge current will be a pretty healthy 825 amps.

As for your 220 question-all of the above data about current levels is on the 48 nominal volt DC buss.
The inverters take that 48 Volt DC and change it to 120/240 volts AC just like you have in your house. The maximum AC output current the inverters can produce at 240 volts is about 188 amps. That output number is a little variable depending on whether the solar panels are producing or not.
So this system is pretty comparable to a 200 amp residential service on the Ac output side.

I love it when you talk nerdy to me...

 

[Cooter01]

You are a lucky man, every picture Denise is smiling!

 

[HNL2LHC]

Great looking work as expected. You willing to do work in Peach Springs and Havasu?

What an amazing system. Impressive to see.

I want to work up a simple solar system to power a fountain pump. My plan is to rig it in with my swimming pool system so it would pump pool water through my black rubber solar panels when the sun shines. It has to push the water up 12 feet to the roof top. A panel or two, a couple batteries and a 12V bilge pump. I can rig all that, but also some sort of controller would obviously be needed but I have no clue about that part.

Any suggestions on where on the net I should go to research something like this?

@Ziggy might be able to help you he has an impressive solar powered fountain in his pool.

 

[Ziggy]

Great looking work as expected. You willing to do work in Peach Springs and Havasu?

@Ziggy might be able to help you he has an impressive solar powered fountain in his pool.

That thing finally shit the bed, solar panel totally delaminated.

 

[The Chicken]

You are a lucky man, every picture Denise is smiling!

It's because I bribe her to smile and put up with me with Tequila shots.

 

[The Chicken]

Great looking work as expected. You willing to do work in Peach Springs and Havasu?

@Ziggy might be able to help you he has an impressive solar powered fountain in his pool.

Thank you!
We cover just about the whole state. If someone is willing to pay, we are willing to travel.
Although to be fair, I really avoid doing work in the hotter parts of the state in the summer time anymore-I just don't handle the heat like I used to.

 

[rivermobster]

These particular batteries are rated to charge or discharge at a continuous 100 Amps each, so theoretically there’s 3000 amps at about 52 volts on tap.
However, there are some practical limitations to that number, and in the case of this particular system, the limit to how much current the batteries can be charged or discharged at is the number of inverters there are. With 3 of these inverters, the maximum charge or discharge current will be a pretty healthy 825 amps.

As for your 220 question-all of the above data about current levels is on the 48 nominal volt DC buss.
The inverters take that 48 Volt DC and change it to 120/240 volts AC just like you have in your house. The maximum AC output current the inverters can produce at 240 volts is about 188 amps. That output number is a little variable depending on whether the solar panels are producing or not.
So this system is pretty comparable to a 200 amp residential service on the Ac output side.

That's a ton of power.

 

[The Chicken]

Monday morning, week 4.
By our original schedule, we were supposed to be done with this job the previous Friday-but we all know how that went.
We pushed through a long weekend of office work so that we could head back up the mountain today, and so it was that we rolled away from our place well before sunup this fine Monday morning.
Denise once again drove so that I could attempt to make some progress putting together some bids as we bounced down all the rough roads Arizona has to offer us.

We made a stop at a customers property in Paulden to check on their progress. We had previously Installed a pretty robust power system for them- you can actually check it out here-

14.6KW off-Grid – DRE-Solar

Done Right Electrial - We Specialize in Quality Installations of Off-Grid Solar Based Power Systems.

dre-solar.com

Now their construction is finally catching up to their power system and we will be installing the panels and beginning building wiring on their amazing custom home.
Here is the 400 amp main panel we had previously installed on their power shed.

From there we will be installing sub panels on the detached house.

This couple has battled every sort of struggle and setback you can imagine for several years trying to get their dream home built. It’s awesome to see them finally getting close to the finish line!

After we arrived on the job up on Mingus Mountain, we spent several more hours on the computers and doing conference calls dealing with a couple of exciting projects we have coming up.

Then, we finally had the ability to get out and do some real work. Denise went over to the generator shed and worked her magic on straightening out some underground conduits that had been poorly installed so that we could connect our above ground conduits to them.
I worked on the other end, which had even more installation issue challenges, and did something I hate having to do-I installed two flexible metal conduit sections from the PVC to connect to our gutter.

I hate this crap.
But I had no option as the severely mis-aligned underground conduits that someone else installed left no option to use hard conduit.
I suppose there is actually nothing wrong with it when it’s used properly, but it seems the solar industry is in love with flexible conduit strung all over the place because it’s fast and cheap and it drives me crazy how terrible it looks.
My dislike of flex probably comes from my commercial and industrial background where this stuff is frowned upon and clean hard pipe work is a must. My mild OCD probably doesn’t help either.

Anyway, that’s about all we got done Monday-except we staged a bunch of parts, tools and equipment for tomorrow which should allow us to have a kick ass day progress wise.
We shall see if we manage to kick ass or get our ass kicked.

 

[stephenkatsea]

That’s a good looking pack of pups you have back at your place. Does one of them tend to be the dominant Leader of the Pack? One looks like a Great Pyrenees. Amazing dogs. Our daughter has 2 of them in northern NV. They have a number of other animals, the oldest GP assumes the duty of Boss Man.

 

[The Chicken]

Tuesday morning.
Big day.
We need to finish the 2” feeder conduits for the inverter and generator outputs that connect the two systems together and to the whole camp.
Yesterday we had loaded everything into the Freightshaker that was needed at the generator shack, and I lit it off to build air in the pre-dawn hours.

Once at the generator shack, one of our first tasks was to extend the existing gutter that handles all the different generators and camp feeders wiring so we could add to it.
And that’s when we discovered there had been a mixup with the gutter we had ordered-we were sent an outdoor rated gutter instead of an indoor one.
Which means they won’t bolt together as the two styles are built significantly differently.
With the nearest indoor gutter a day away at best, and a tight time schedule, there was nothing to do but modify the outdoor gutter to fit.
Here’s Denise marking out where to cut the new gutter.

With a cutoff wheel, a flappy disc, and a big hammer (really), the new gutter was able to bolt up to the old.

One really cool thing that had been happening in the camp for the past 5 days that we got to see a little of was an annual training event that Az game and fish puts on for their new recruits. There were something like 50 AZG&F officers here and the few glimpses of their event we got to see was really interesting.
And it turns out they had some really good cooks along for the event and they fed us on a number of occasions, and this morning we got awesome breakfast burritos delivered right to our job site!
Nom, nom, nom!!

We got to meet and hang out with a couple of their officers here and there. Cool people.

Anyway, back to work.
We finished up the conduits, wall penetrations, and junction box work , and it was time to prepare for the wire pulls.
This would consist of sucking in a string( more on this in a second), pulling in a larger pulling rope, and pulling a rag through the conduits to make sure they were clean and don’t damage the wires.
Sucking a string. Don’t worry it’s not perverse.
For us, it involves setting up a good shop vac at one end of the conduit, and then a bucket of what’s called blow line at the other. Blow line is a very lightweight rope. I’ve used a bunch of fancy things designed to pull in the blow line-but the thing that I find works best is my homemade sandwich baggies like this.

I’ve been an electrician for about 25 years, and the process of sucking a string never ceases to amuse me, amaze me, and make me giggle every time. I’ll try and post a video of it later.

Anyway, after all that, it was wire pull time-a tall order for two people.
Cue a few more cool tools.
This is our mini tugger, and with a pulling force of up to 3000 pounds, it makes it possible for Denise and I to do this by ourselves.

At the other end of the pull, is Denise handing well over a thousand pounds of wire by herself. And while this is no easy task and a hell of a work out, it’s made possible by our wire spool jacks that support the spools and let then unwind with relative ease.

Without too much drama, we completed both wire pulls, and still had a half a day to go with termination and make up.

I’ll come back to that later, because right now( Wednesday morning) the boss is giving me that look that means I’d better get my ass out of the trailer and to work!

 

[The Chicken]

Sucking a string in action!

 

[Mandelon]

All the specialty equipment you have is mind blowing. I have what I thought was a ton of contractor tools, but I'm at 1% of what you guys roll out with.

 

[The Chicken]

All the specialty equipment you have is mind blowing. I have what I thought was a ton of contractor tools, but I'm at 1% of what you guys roll out with.

We haven’t even gotten to the non-electrical tools we have.
Because the work we do often covers more than just electrical, and also because we have small heavy equipment that we often have to repair or maintain, we have a lot of tools.
And we couldn’t function without most of them.

 

[The Chicken]

That’s a good looking pack of pups you have back at your place. Does one of them tend to be the dominant Leader of the Pack? One looks like a Great Pyrenees. Amazing dogs. Our daughter has 2 of them in northern NV. They have a number of other animals, the oldest GP assumes the duty of Boss Man.

Thank you! We love our mutts.
And you’ve hit on one of my favorite subjects-our dogs. I won’t get too into it here because I don’t have time, but at some point I’d like to circle back to this subject and explain just how important, and how interesting, our critters are to us.
There is one Great Pyrenees pure bred dog in our pack-that’s Stella, our mama dog, and she is without a doubt, the boss of the pack.
Papa dog is a Great Pyrenees/Anatolian Shepherd mix with a sprinkling of Boxer thrown in for fun, and he is without a doubt the greatest dog we have ever had. Amazing personality, fun to be around, loves everyone, ( except for anything that crosses our fence uninvited. ) and a constant ham.
The other three dogs are Bosco and Stella’s kids, and they are Minnie, Hulk ( who’s a girl, and how she got her name and why we have her is a story in itself), and Bernie.
Bosco and Stella have two more kids who are probably pretty well known around here-Joel and Amy’s Gus and Maggie. One big happy mutt family up here!

 

[rivermobster]

Sucking a string in action!


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What a great idea!!!

 

[stephenkatsea]

Thanks again for this great thread. Including mention of your mutts made it even better. Are you available for future projects?

 

[The Chicken]

Thanks again for this great thread. Including mention of your mutts made it even better. Are you available for future projects?

Thank you for checking out the thread, and I’m glad you have enjoyed it.
I had hoped to entertain and maybe even educate some people about what we do. I think it’s a pretty neat industry ( although I don’t agree with a lot of “ green” energy thoughts or policies-but that’s a discussion for another time), and I think how it is that we do it and our story is unique and interesting.
And while I’m not primarily here to pimp our business, I’d be lying if I said I don’t hope some people here like our work enough to retain our services. So yes, we are available for future projects. It is, after all, what we do.

 

[poncho]

Fascinating thread, look forward to every update, I have a geek mechanical mind.

 

[81Sprint]

Sucking a string in action!


View attachment 1419350

Use the vacuum all the time, such a time saver!

But, what's even more fun, when you know the pipe is full of water, send the apprentice to the other side to stand in front of the pipe to "listen". Then on the smart side (JW) hook up some compressed air and clean that pipe run out. Usually you get a M'FER!! across the radio

 

[Taboma]

Use the vacuum all the time, such a time saver!

But, what's even more fun, when you know the pipe is full of water, send the apprentice to the other side to stand in front of the pipe to "listen". Then on the smart side (JW) hook up some compressed air and clean that pipe run out. Usually you get a M'FER!! across the radio

We're thinking alike --- make that 4" with a few gallons of condensation accumulated over the years and that is a great learning experience for an apprentice. They're just not prepared for the usually pretty putrid geyser that's coming their way.

 

[81Sprint]

We're thinking alike --- make that 4" with a few gallons of condensation accumulated over the years and that is a great learning experience for an apprentice. They're just not prepared for the usually pretty putrid geyser that's coming their way.

Years ago, had a sump pump down in a 12' deep comm vault that was full to the top of water, nasty water. Was pumping it into a water mule behind the truck with an apprentice on the hose into the mule keeping a hold of it. I happened to be walking by, and he got a phone call and took his hands off the hose, guess who got a bath that day. I was not very pleasant to be around for a week or so.

 

[Joe mama]

Not sure how I missed this thread, just read the whole thing. I love these threads and the story in this thread with the photos is outstanding!!! Thanks for taking the time to share. Now where can I pick up a Denise, she is awesome.

 

[The Chicken]

Tuesday, week 4, continued…
After the wire pulls, there is a TON of termination and wire management.
Cue another cool tool…

This little Milwaukee 12v cable cutter speeds things up and saves my worn out wrists and hands.
As someone pointed out earlier, something about these “300 dollar” tools weighing you down and not being very portable…there’s some truth there-I don’t pull out out stripper tool, the power cutters, or a lot of these fancy tools for just two or three terminations-I still do that old school with manual cutters and a razor knife.
But when you are in an inverter room doing dozens of terminations, it’s such a time and body saver.
Oh yeah-I wish any of these tools were anywhere NEAR 300 bucks.

Anyway, the day ground on and we got most of what we wanted done accomplished.
I honestly was ready to quit around 5:30 when we were finishing up a panel change out in the generator shack.
That work made the generators not functioning as far as powering the camp.
Denise says” This means we won’t have nice hot showers in the cabin tonight. “
FUCK.
She was right.
No electricity, no controls for the hot water heater.
Fuck that.
I basically mentally and physically dropped a gear and put the hammer down to push the inverter connections in record time.
Because I’d had my heart set on a luxurious long hot shower tonight!!

It wasn’t quite perfect, and not 100% done, but the system was ready to power the entire camp for the first time.
This was to be something of a historic moment-if we had done everything correctly.
It would be an expensive and disappointing moment if we did anything wrong.
We did all our last double checks, and finally it was time to throw the last switches and find out…

And so, at a little past 7 pm after a 14 hour work day, the last switches were closed and the new solar power system powered up this camp for the first time.
It’s a little hard to grasp how this system will be a paradigm shift for how this camp operates.
They have been entirely generator powered for at least 30 years.
No more noise.
No more using gallons of fuel every single day.
No more power outage every night.
It’s huge.
It really was an historic moment.
And for the first time ever, and the camp dates back to the 50’s, this camp had electricity all night.
Everyone involved is super excited.

Here’s how the inverter room, now powering the entire camp, looked when we ended the day.

All that was left for us to do was have celebratory beverages…

…and of course, go take those nice long hot showers!!

 

[RichL]

So impressive!

 

[bilz]

You both looked really satisfied.
Great read, thanks for sharing.

 

[Long Way Home]

Well done..

 

[monkeyswrench]

That place will be so perfect with the sound of silence. My hearing kind of sucks, and the permanent ringing never seems to completely go away. The good thing is noise like that fades away most of the time, just kind of comes and goes. No generator noise will allow everyone to hear the leaves rustling, or the breeze through the pines.

 

[The Chicken]

Wednesday, week 4.
While the camp was, indeed, up and running on the new power system, there was still a ton of details to take care of.
Wiring needed cleaned up, the generator t taps and panels needed finished, the camps new main distribution panel in the generator shack needed finished, several large j boxes full of nonsense needed attention and there were still two old solar systems that needed removed from the system.

The first order of business was to clean up and finish the inverter room. Pictures don’t do justice to the mess that the previous night’s thrash-a-thon left behind. It looked like a tornado went through the room.

We spent some time cleaning up , completing the last wiring details, and making sure everything was in proper shape.

During this period, a man named Henry stopped by because he had heard the camp was now live on its new solar system. He was ecstatic and impressed.
Now, it turns out Henry wasn’t just some random guy-he more or less founded the camp, ran it for years under several different forms, and eventually sold it to UofA -and sold was really more like donated. So Henry is a pretty big deal around here.
And he wasn’t the only one that kept showing up and checking out the project. A handful of other people who had either supervised the camp, worked there, or spent time as a youth here have been filtering in and out over the past weeks-all excited with the progress. People who stay or work here seem to build life long ties to this place, and it’s easy to see why-it’s a beautiful, unique place tucked in a hidden little draw. It’s been truly a pleasure to be a part of it.

Anyway, once the inverter room wiring was complete-it was time to put all the covers and dead fronts on for the last time.

Then it was off to the generator shack to wrap that up.

This j box and several like it needed cleaned up and the wiring reconfigured to work properly with the new power scheme.

One of the old solar systems we removed and I forgot to get a single picture.
Oops.
The second one was tucked in a tiny dark room that reeked of rodent feces and urine, so we masked up and went in to dismantle it.

Once that system was dismantled, it was once again past 7 pm, another really long day was in the books, and the only thing left to do was have another celebratory beverage-and go get another one of those Hollywood showers!