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15 Feb ’12
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tomorrow is suppose to be 70, should be able to finish up the prep
15 Feb ’12
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pork, did your generator have an auto start on it?
5 Mar ’12
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Do you mean auto-start to help charge the batteries when they were low? If so, then no, we used a remote starter (little key fob) to turn on the generator from ~200ft away. Worked well and we could determine when to start the generator, which worked well for us.
Auto-starting generators are kind of a no-no in the solar world, in general, because they aren't very 'smart'. For example, if you have the generator auto-start when voltage drops to a certain point for a certain length of time, then you may have issues if you start a really heavy load (dryer, blow dryer, etc.) and then you have the generator kick in, even when you didn't want it to. Also, there is some fear that an auto-starting generator may in some way damage your battery bank.
Now that being said... if my Outback inverter would have supported auto-starting my generator then I definitely would have used it. My wife was home a lot and it was up to her to monitor the battery bank. I would have preferred that it did it automatically -- even though she did a great job monitoring it. To take this one step further... there are different types of 'auto-starting' for generators based on what type of electric start they have -- 2 wire or 3 wire. A 2 wire generator is what is common in a lot of the cheaper electric start generators today. 3 wire generators are more commonly found on whole house generators -- with way more sophisticated electronics. The Outback inverters can be made to work with 3 wire generators (I bought the kit 🙁 ) but they cannot be used, or used easily, with 2 wire generators. I didn't want to buy a super expensive generator and so just stuck with manually electrically starting my 2 wire generator. Other brands of inverters can handle 2 wire auto-starting, so if that is what you are looking for I would suggest you check out those brands.
15 Feb ’12
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Threads are combined, it was a good day. Was able to get the pig pen knocked down
Hope to get the chicken coop down today.
15 Feb ’12
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So my buddy the electrician popped in yesterday so I could pick his brain. His suggestion was to run the conduit that is already sticking out of the side of the house up the outside wall past the lights.
And run an aerial feed to my Dad's cabin.
Put the workshop behind Dad's cabin and put a small sub panel in Dad's cabin and wire everything from there.
That way if and when we switch to solar we can use the existing cabin for Battery Bank, inverter, etc and then just back feed from there into the house. That makes a whole lot of sense to me.
5 Mar ’12
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So your solar equipment would be stored in your dad's cabin? Brilliant idea since it is already there, big enough, insulated, etc.
Are you still happy with mulching your yard space? Would you do it again?
15 Feb ’12
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Yeah, there's a lot of stuff right now that is up in the the air. My dad has a new lady friend and there is a chance he might be moving out, with my daughter graduating and everything that is going on with her, we are going to build a little studio above the work shop for her own private space. Thoughts are to either blow out the back side of the current cabin and have steps going up into it or offset it and continue the deck around the front of the current cabin and have steps going up to the studio.
Still happy with the yard, it's a work in progress yet and should all come together nicely this summer if everything works out.
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