Got tons of those same brackets we’re screwing onto our aluminum beams. Just picked up rebar rings for the concrete and some panel placeholders we had fabricated to connect the beams and ensure distances are correct while they cure in the concrete.
40 aluminum I-breams, 30 beams each with 8 z brackets and 10 beams with just 4 brackets. 40 holes to dig in the ground and each to be filled with 16 bags of concrete. Then we have to install the 35 panels and start the trenching.
Gonna be a party!
Do you have a mini skid steer? Because this would be a lot easier with one of those. They cost about 3k for the little ones that you stand on the rear of. They are tracked and you could probably drive it up the drive way. They have a little kabota 25HP diesel engine, and boom arms. While they move around on their own, they often serve as an anchor point that can mostly arbitrarily positioned in 3d space with a 25HP hydraulic power supply. So you can run a trencher, an auger, a cement mixer etc. Without any of that they can lift 300-600 pounds per scoop in their bucket. I used one to spread out 46 tons of gravel in a week last summer.
Just for reference on the space freeze dried food takes, this shelf full of these bins (so in this picture imagine the three or four empty spots are filled with bins for a total of 48 bins) – this is literally over a TON of food (which many people can fit in a garage).
These bins hold:
500 eggs
239 pounds of cheddar cheese
132 pounds of mozzarella
219 pounds of bell peppers
919 cups of tomatoes
95 pounds of onions
105 pounds of zucchini
209 pounds of green beans
246 pounds of broccoli
231 pounds of corn
3080 ounces of Rotel
102 pounds of cream cheese
358 cups of spaghetti sauce
303 cans (10.5 ounce) of various soups
24 avocados
35 pounds of ham
124 pounds of thin cut pork chops
24 pounds of rotisserie chicken and roast turkey
10 pounds of potatoes
236 pounds of peas
33 bananas
71 pounds of okra
36 x “ready made” meals (4 taco bake, 2 chicken pasta, 16 gumbo and 14 tuna noodle)
By taking the water out you can store an enormous amount of food efficiently. This is more than a ton of food but it doesn’t weigh a ton without the water.
I consider freeze dried food storage (that you DIY with a freeze dryer) to be the ultimate investment before stocks and bonds or gold or anything else once you have land. Price inflation means you’re saving money since food will be far more expensive (good luck matching this ROI with an index fund) and even if it isn’t in some fantastic scenario and food gets cheaper, you can literally eat your “losses” unlike other investments.
Yeah we have a track loader with auger, cement mixer, forks, and bucket. Got stuck driving the trail up here but we finally got it up after rescuing it with an excavator. It’s a workhorse.
A computer dork like me isn’t digging all those holes and mixing all that concrete and doing all that trenching by hand…
We had five placeholders welded (I still need to learn to weld so that I can do this kind of thing myself in the future) that ensure our I-beams are spaced properly for the solar panels. Got the first set of beams in a couple test holes (four foot deep, 18" diameter). Now we’ll build a box that will fit between the two holes for the placeholder to sit on to help us ensure beams are plumb and such. Then we’ll pour concrete and replace the placeholder with a solar panel. And then do that 48 more times. Then the trenching begins. Fixed vertical and optimized for winter production.
Might be an interesting youtuber for your interest.
also dumpster diving for metals to melt.
I’ve seen a few of his videos, will definitely check out more. Would be a fun hobby. I think I need to learn how to cast metal next so I can make something useful out of it.
Huh??? It’s just a box.
Keeps the I-beams suspended 6" from the bottom of the holes and allows us to ensure it’s plumb and level while curing in concrete. These are just test holes, but soon after I do a bit of dirt work, we’ll be putting in 35 more such panels all fixed vertical for winter.
Almost ready for the real work. Just have to make three more sand tables to hold a total of six pallets of concrete, so that we can mix that concrete (26 x 60# bags per pallets for a total of 156 bags) to fill the first batch of holes. Then we can wash out the mixer, switch to forks, and load up six more pallets before going onto the next batch of holes (40 holes to be filled with concrete total). Elevating the pallets should make it easier to dump each bag into the mixer and save some back pain.
I know that you are doing a lot of work to keep them plumb, but that looks like a lot of work, have you considered just hanging them with fewer vertical supports? That they they could swing in the wind…
I am thinking of something like the golden gate bridge with a steel cable then cables down periodically supporting a steel tube that the panels can rotate on.
On the other hand lots of people have made systems like the one you are making now, and they work.
Sounds like an interesting idea, and it might work, but it’s too late now. Engineer paid, beams and concrete arrived, it’s go time with the current plan. We are going to do one more final array after these five are added to the existing 2, so maybe I’ll revisit the idea.
Happy Independence Day to all. Unfortunately the holiday has become much like Christmas, in that adults understand we’re celebrating something that doesn’t actually exist and it’s only children who think it does. We still celebrate it just as an ideal and in memory of the great Americans who sacrificed everything to provide us with the opportunities we squander today through our immorality and our lack of principle. If it wasn’t for great Americans like many of our Founding Fathers who passed the sacrificial torch to giant Americans like Dr. King and Malcolm X and Fred Hampton who in turn provided shoulders for the best among us today like Edward Snowden, we might not even have any concept of independence and freedom from tyranny. Here on the homestead we don’t celebrate actual independence, since we lost that a long time ago, but we do celebrate the sacrifices of Americans who gave so much in an attempt to make our constitutional promises a reality.
“…you also see a place that has forty thousand dollars worth of solar panels or they have a brand new fifty thousand dollar tractor, or they’re going to move building material with a helicopter… I saw that one time on television! Who the heck has a helicopter? That’s so unrealistic I don’t even know how to relate to that.” “I think there is a Hollywood version of off-grid living and then there is a an actual version of off-grid living and I don’t know that the two of them have a whole lot in common.”
His wife is Girl in the Woods and their son just started his own off grid channel on a piece of land near Fairbanks. He makes a good point, having money to spend on technological tools makes the experience of living off grid different. That’s no different than anything in life. The city slicker taking public transportation vs the person who owns a car. I think he’s incorrect to suggest one of them is Hollywood and one is real. Both are real even if he can’t relate to one, just as many can’t relate to having his background in concrete and construction or having been on a TV show (I think he was on one of those TV shows that drops you out into the wilderness to see if you can survive for an extended period).
Who has a helicopter, lol, he’s right that is unrealistic for us, but I don’t begrudge those who do have one. We will have to stick with renting one from time to time until we win the lottery though. We don’t have a public YouTube channel like BushRadical or his wife or his son, and don’t have Patreon or any of that but even if we did I’m sure we wouldn’t make any money doing it. Those days seem to have dried up. We just share unlisted videos to a small number of people because we enjoy sharing the nature.
He and his wife were young and started doing this life and then started earning money by monetizing it on YouTube. My wife and I started old after careers and after saving money to live an on grid lifestyle while off grid, trading young joints and strong backs and youth for money to rent machines and buy solar panels. Different approaches. If I could do it all over again I would have done a combination of the two approaches like the Simple Living Alaska folks did. They nailed it.
On your solar panel upright assembly photo it looks like you are using sink plated screws. That will probably become one of the weak points of the assembly. I would recommend using stainless steel pop rivets instead. While there are hand tools for pop rivet fastener, you can also get battery powered, or air powered. I know harbor freight has an air tool.
Aluminum is close to wood in its pull out strength, and pop rivets have a flange which greatly increases the strength.
The only screws on the assembly are a) the self tapping screws that came with the Renogy Z-brackets to hold the brackets into the beams and b) the screws that hold the placeholders (and later the panels) into the Renogy Z-brackets.
Which screws are you referring to? I am wondering about the first screws, the self tapping screws, that mount the brackets into the beams. They are snug when drilling them into the beam but there isn’t much for them to hold onto since the beam flange is fairly thin and they don’t come with nuts so we’re probably going to get some nuts to put on there.
We’re planning on using M8 and M6 screws with washers and lock nuts to hold the panels into the Renogy Z-brackets.
I think his point is that the vast majority of off-griders are really quite poor, so extravagant off-grid luxury homes are rare and TV shows just showing those gives many people the wrong impression.
Still, I just shared it here for the humor…
I wonder if that’s true that the vast majority of off-grinders are poor? Maybe. We’re more in the Thomas Massie camp on that score.
At 9:00 he responds to Theo Von asking him how much money he saves living off grid by stating “I don’t think I’ve saved a dime, it costs a lot to do it.” I do think that ultimately we’ll save a great deal of money because of our economic reality and the certainty of massive inflation and likely hyperinflation, so the money we spend now for things we need is a great investment. Regardless, it takes a ton of money now to live as we live admittedly which, ironically, looks pretty poor because until I get our water set up I still look homeless most of the time.
Sure, you can live in a box in the woods for a lot less. But that’s not for us. Anybody who gets their ideas from TV and would approach such a thing without doing basic research is not going to fare well on or off grid more than likely. Stupidity does in fact hurt.
As for us, if your post was meant to relate to us and perhaps it wasn’t, we’re not in the extravagant camp yet. But we hope to be! We have no finished floor, no interior walls, no running water. But we do have a good solar system and some machines to do the work. People have differing view of luxury but that isn’t luxurious as far as I see it. Still, I’m very happy to have the opportunity and space to live as we do with what we have. Many people don’t.
We celebrated the 4th and the gorgeous sunny day by giving a whole cherry cheesecake to the critters, grilling burgers, and flying the FPV drone around the peat moss bog. The weasels didn’t attend our little deck party (haven’t seen them in over a month now) but the birds and squirrels enjoyed the feast, especially the Gray Jays’ new Junior. That Jay couple has been with us from the beginning, from way back when we lived in the yurt and they’d show up for rice cakes. Every year they bring their new Junior(s) by which is good since we’re subsidizing them.
Used the laser level for the first time and did the dirt work for the five new arrays. Dug two small trenches for two arrays, and one nearly 80 foot trench for three other arrays. Sloped property but the trenches are level within about 6 inches. Next we’ll put up a string line and auger the holes, brace up the beams, and pour the concrete. Once the arrays are in we’ll then grade the dirt a bit to use the slope to our advantage to keep snow from blocking the panels.
The larger three array trench is pretty level but could use a little bit more leveling.
Next summer we’ll terrace the space between the arrays and add a bunch of garden grow beds.
These five new arrays will take our solar production up to 30KW. So on a nice April day with snow on the ground, we could produce the average American household usage over 24 hours…in a single hour.
