Off The Grid

Experimental pig feeder. 55 gallon drum with a toilet flange screwed to the bottom. A short 4” pipe reaches down within 1” of the bottom of that 5 gallon bucket. I cut 8 slots down in the top rim of the 5 gallon bucket and bent the tabs outward to attach to bottom of the 55 gallon drum.

My concern is ants getting in the food. May have to sprinkle diotenatous earth around this thing.

Feeding the pigs and I played eine kleine Nacht Musik and they got confused and started looking around. It literally stopped them from eating.

This poor dumb ass won’t give me his ball but wants to play. It’s difficult to play fetch when you won’t give up the ball. So he started teasing me by dropping it when I gave up and walked away. Now it rolled under the tool chest and he’s sad. Awwwwwww

A couple months ago I put an extra hinge pin under the swinging side of a gate. Now the goats can’t warp the gate when they all stand on it.

For paintball and airsoft or whatever, idk I'm not your dad.

FWIW, I presently use one of these 100amp transfer switches on one of my solar inverters. https://a.co/d/004nY6J7 . I find it reliable and it pulls no current after switching because it latches. So unlike a standard relay it doesn't draw any power when it's "on".

So... more additions to the house. Since my power company stopped paying me 1:1 for the power I export, I'm now going to switch my carport from grid to house as needed. Recently it dawned on me that in order to pull 20kwh from the grid at night, I have to generate 50kwh during the day. Screw that! I'm going to stop using the grid to export my excess power and use the grid only as an emergency generator.

I have two of these transfer switches to be wired in series. One will select between "house batteries" and "grid import" and the other one will simply turn power to the carport on/off. Note that these switches are 6 DIN rail units wide so a 12 slot box will fit two of them perfectly.

The plan is to have HA monitor the car's SoC and when it gets below 40%, I'm going to put the car port on grid power and allow the car to charge to 40%. Once we are there, I'll allow the car to charge from the house system directly only if the house battery is >70%. I'll also hack into the Tesla wall charger Rs485 port and command the EVSEs in the car port to raise and lower the permissible charging amps to the cars. That way if the house is pulling more power than the inverters can supply, I'll slow the cars down. Since I can command each Tesla charger individually, I can priortize filling one car over the other.

A neat thing about my solar system is that it's AC coupled. This means that although my battery inverters can make 12kw, my solar inverters can make 22kw in total. This means during the daytime, I can charge the cars at significantly more power than the 12kw that my primary inverter makes.

Worth watching part 1. But here’s a tiny house pontoon boat. Neat neat neat.

https://youtu.be/WhUzV9JT6eE

First year with good pears. Hoping for 40 pear halves and 40 pear sauce.

I guess it's a shopping night. Semiauto magnetic slingshot. https://a.co/d/04rxXFEf You'll put your eye out kid.

Saddest thing. Someone dropped off a puppy. We saw him on way to town today about a mile from here. Each time we go by with intent to catch him he runs off into the woods. But he keeps sitting by the road waiting in vain for his person to return for him.

I set a live animal trap and we’ll go back after dark and see if we’ve caught him.

Looks like the potato chip people and beef people are in cahoots. “Some settling may occur during transit. “

Next on the list for guerrilla networking is to simply pull up at a tower site with a white truck, hiviz and a hard hat.

More guerrilla networking. Here's another mesh node thrown over a tree branch.