The First Frost, The Coffee Cart Has Seen Better Days, Moving The Solar Shack & Installing A Solar Panel
It was quite the chilly morning and we got the first real hard frost of the season here which thankfully was not accompanied by high winds during the daytime. After the initial cold front made its way into the area (late in the evening) the winds actually slacked off but whoa did it cause a lot of branches and leaves to drop from the trees when it was blowing hard and once the sun came up I immediately noticed just how littered with fallen tree branches the dog yard was which was fine and all because it made for some convenient firewood.
The morning was rather pleasant in the warmth of the shelter and although I spent a really long time working on my daily writing stuff (almost four hours) I felt pretty damned clear-headed afterwards. It seems that of late I have a lot of stuff 'bubbling below the surface' (so to speak) and spelling everything out helps me at least drag a few things into the light of perspective where it can be examined. There is also a lot of stuff that never makes it into the writing and for all of that stuff I think that I need to continue making other kinds of creative content to help channel it accordingly. Aside from putting my 'creative juices' into my day to day projects I think that making art is a good usage of my time and I never really regret the time that I invest in doing so. I should really look at perhaps making more art over the coming winter months and see what all I can come up with. I do not know how the hell it happened but it seems like I have a wellspring of inspiration at the moment so I may as well put it to good use while it lasts.
All that jazz aside, once the sun was up I bundled up in a few layers of warm clothes, put on a liberal amount of chapstick and went to working on stuff outdoors. It was brisk outside to say the least but by the time that I finished my routine chores I was feeling quite warm inside my layers of clothes and even my feet were ultra warm thanks to those Muck boots that I bought for myself several months back. Once I finished all my routine stuff I finally moved everything off my coffee cart and got the cart itself moved to a location where it would be more useful. I wound up putting it alongside that section of fencing that I made with chicken wire last week and wow it sure makes bringing stuff back and forth between the greenhouse and the shelter a heck of a lot easier because I can set stuff atop the cart and am capable of reaching over the fence to get to it without the need to go in and out of the dog yard gate carrying just a few things at a time. I did notice that the frame of the coffee cart has 'seen better days' and the wood has become incredibly rotten and even has mushrooms sprouting from it in various places!
Once I got the coffee cart moved I rearranged where the water line was along the trail and disconnected a section of the dog yard fence so that I would have an opening to bring large items through. My big goal was to move the 'solar shack' from the place where I had built it (and camped) upon my arrival here. Since the shack is basically just four pallets screwed together with a bunch of miscellaneous pieces of wood bracing and black locust legs to keep it up off the ground... it is quite frigging heavy to say the least. Somehow I managed to 'walk' the little shack through the grove in front of the greenhouse to the inside of the dog yard where I then re-installed it by digging holes for the shack's legs and 'planting' it in the ground. Since the shack is pretty ugly I used a bunch of old roofing metal scraps to cover two of the exterior walls and made it blend in more with the rest of my setup in the shelter area. I still have to scavenge up some siding for the rest of the solar shack but just covering two of the walls was quite the improvement visually as well as a good way to add some protection to the plastic (and tarp material) from both the sun's UV and falling tree branches.
I was so stoked with how the solar shack came out that I then spent some time figuring out a way to mount my largest solar panel on its roof, building a frame for the panel, installing it and wiring it up to that same battery, charge controller and DC utility port that I have had in the shack since I first built it last year. The battery is just that marine grade deep cycle that I bought new almost four years ago but it sure has worked well in combination with that big panel for charging my cordless tool batteries with that sweet DC to DC charger that I have and a few times it has even come in handy for charging small devices like five volt battery packs and phones when the grid was down. The other really cool thing about that particular standby system is that I can power a router with it via a twelve volt DC cord and even that aspect of my communication needs are not affected by the grid being down.
I am hoping that with the solar shack now being closer to the shelter site that I can get the rest of my solar panels and batteries setup and make it the main hub for my micro-grid. I do not want to make things too elaborate inside the shack itself but I do want to create some insulated boxes for the batteries and perhaps even bury some heavy gauge wires to carry DC electricity to either the shelter itself or at least into the storage room where I can utilize it more conveniently than needing to walk outside to the shack itself. Running heavy gauge wire for a DC main line always gets dodgy but I think that I have a pretty good plan for it but it will assuredly require a DC breaker box to make it safe. Fuse blocks are nice and all but whoa those DC breaker boxes sure are a much better approach in my opinion especially if all the connected devices will have their own fuses which they should have anyway!
Late in the afternoon I got some assistance from one of my fellow homesteaders and we were able to roll the second big solar panel on its little trailer to inside the dog yard where we parked it beside the solar shack. I have to say that the two big panels look super cool side by side in the dog yard but they sure do take up a lot of space. I am unsure if the panel on the trailer will remain where it is currently because it gets a good bit of shade cast onto it late in the day. I am even considering keeping that panel more or less mobile and if the need arises I can manually move it to get the best sunlight throughout the day. I am undecided on that one though because I tend to like anchoring solar panels down to the ground so that the wind cannot damage them. We will see how all of that works out but for now I am liking the overall progress on the solar setup and am confident that I can sort out the rest of the setup one way or another over the coming days. That sort of electricity independence is pretty damned enticing so I won't be procrastinating much on that front.
Anyway, I have rambled on a good bit here and not even covered some other things that I had planned on covering. Suffice it to say that it was a very productive day and by the end of it I even wrote more on that post-apocalyptic story of mine and got it shared late last night before I over thought it all and failed to post it! At some point I should try to find all the unpublished parts to that story and make sure that they actually get shared but for now I am happy just to be working on it again.
Well, I am going to wrap this up and get it all edited and posted. The sun is now up and although it is quite chilly I want to get outdoors and make an early start on my day getting the rest of the solar power sorted out as well as some other projects. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night and I will invariably do the same.
The new solar shack setup with the big panel mounted on top of it!
Thanks for reading!
More about me: I have been doing property caretaking (land stewardship) for many years (decades) and live a rather simple life with my dogs doing what most folks would consider to be an 'alternative minimalist lifestyle' but what I often just think of as a low-impact lifestyle where I get to homestead and spend the majority of my time alone with my dogs in the woods doing projects in the warmer months and taking some downtime during the colder months.
A little over three years ago I began sharing the adventures (misadventures) of my life via writing, videos, pictures and the occasional podcasts and although my intention was to simply share my life with some friends it undoubtedly grew into much more than that over the years and now I find myself doing what equates to a full-time job just 'sharing my life' which is not even all that glamorous or anything but hey folks seem to enjoy it so I just keep doing it!
The way that the Fantastica Chronicles came about is that I was living at another place when I started chronicling and sharing my days but eventually I wound up moving to a new place. The new place is a homestead named 'Fantastica' so I started with 'Day 1' upon my arrival here and just kept documenting my days much like I had done for the previous nine hundred and fifty-seven days at the last place that I lived.
I have mostly done that 'documenting' at Fantastica exclusively with words (and pictures) opting not to do the videos because as I learned at the last place, sharing videos over an intermittent and slow internet connection is horribly time consuming and what I often think of as an 'ulcer inducing' experience. All that said, I opted for simplicity with the documentation and have no real regrets for doing so.
The way that I look at it is that I give it all my best each day and while some stuff I write is better than others I think that for the most part I do a pretty good job at doing what I am doing which is simply 'sharing my life' as candidly as I possibly can and whatever folks get (or do not get) from it there is always the satisfaction of me doing what I set out to do... which is to simply share my life.
Follow me on the Hive blockchain here:
https://peakd.com/@jacobpeacock
Please check out the Homesteading Community On The Hive Blockchain:
https://peakd.com/c/hive-114308/created
A playlist of my Jacob Goes Off Grid Videos can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8CsWYxlqp36dEFkg5mnlzgY41bE761oK
Please consider becoming a patron on my Patreon page!!!
https://www.patreon.com/jacobpeacock
Contribute via Paypal:
https://PayPal.me/jacobpeacock
That Is All For Now!
This post was originally posted to the Hive Blockchain here:
https://peakd.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-429
