Generator Genius

OK. So we’re not small engine mechanics but after three years of not having city or county utilities, we’ve gotten to know The Generator pretty well.

That’s because we run the shit out of them.

We have solar also but our system is 1200 watts and it’s limited in the off-seasons. During the summer, however, the sun runs EVERYTHING.

The rest of the year we use generators: small ones, big ones, efficient ones, gas guzzling monsters for the 220 volt jobs, loud ones, quiet ones, two strokers, 1500 watt ones, 3700 watt ones, orange ones, green ones, generators from Walmart, gens from North 40.

We got ’em all in a generator graveyard behind our shed, but not before we go through the “keep ’em alive” checklist before one or the other finally kicks the bucket:

• check the oil when it’s shut down and the oil is in the pan, and do oil changes
• spark plug – pull it out and clean the gap with sandpaper or get a new one. They get carbon deposits on them.
• fuel filter – if it has one. I’ve never seen a generator with a fuel filter but I guess they exist. Replace if it has one?
• air filter – wash and dry it if it’s soaked with oil and/or dust.
• spark arrester at the exhaust – yes, this can impair airflow through an internal combustion system. Remove it and clean it regularly.
• check that the gas doesn’t have water in it. You can add a product called  Heat, which gets water out of gas but I can’t say how effectively. You can always drain the tank and refill with good gas.
• the carburetor gets mucked up with hundreds of hours of usage and might need to be cleaned. We take it to a shop for this or, to keep things running in the interim, spray carb cleaner directly into the butterfly port while the engine’s running. It’ll bog it down temporarily then recover.

I’ve probably forgotten something, but there you go. If all else fails, buy a new one and retire the old one to the graveyard or sell it on Craigslist for repair.

We may not be able to fix them after a certain point but there are people out there who can.

Mushroom Farm

Morel mushrooms are highly sought after and are currently going for forty-plus dollars a pound.

They’re apparently hard to cultivate but we got lucky – you see, they already like it here. They grow on our property. Just not enough to sell but enough to make mushroom “slurry” out of. A slurry is a kind of spore soup used to propagate more mushrooms.

We’ve been tossing around the idea of farming mushrooms since we moved onto our almost four acres of land in eastern Washington a couple of years ago. We were thinking of growing oyster or medicinal mushrooms but our tight budget, the need for snow-load rated greenhouses, and a lack of knowledge have kept us from moving forward.

Then I had a great idea – the mighty morel!

I’m no expert on them but my husband and I have been harvesting them for a couple of years and know they bring a pretty penny – dried or fresh. The biggest problem is that they only grow once a year – in the spring – and for a very limited time. May is morel month but we only find them for about two weeks. You have to know where they grow and we haven’t yet found any good spots locally.

The competition seems fierce.

We’ve been up and down many forest service and DNR (Department of Natural Resources) roads looking for them but not a one have we seen – until we get back home. Turns out we are fortunate to have land that is naturally host to morels.

In our area of the Pacific Northwest, they grow around Ponderosa pines in slightly grassy to semi-spongy areas and often along roadsides. My understanding is that the mycelium (which lives under ground), have a symbiotic relationship with certain tree roots. The mushrooms themselves are the fruiting bodies of the organism.

We dried out the few we’ve found and started the spore slurry. This is the first time I’ve made the mixture and the idea is to soak the mushrooms in water that has had salt and molasses added in order to germinate the spores. The molasses feeds the rapidly reproducing spore population and the salt keeps the bacteria away.

After soaking the slurry for twenty-four to forty-eight hours, you spray or pour it around host trees where, theoretically, they’ll search for roots to become roommates with.

 I was stirring the slurry with a wooden paddle when the thought came to me that if they like wood, why not add pieces directly to the slurry then bury them under trees? The thought is that the spores will find and start a home before they are planted. This will be an experiment that won’t show results for a couple to a few years when the mushrooms grow – if they take at all.

If this works, we might eventually have enough mushrooms to harvest to sell.

For the time being, we’ll have to content ourselves with the ten  to twenty we find each year.

 

The Amazing Miracle Pallet

Free wood!

If you live off the grid or just have a lot of projects requiring wood, pallets are perfect.

They are a great choice for many reasons:

• They’re free
• They’re already nailed together
• There are plenty of them
• They have a billion possible uses
• You can find them EVERYWHERE

Where can you find them?

• Behind grocery stores
• In the alleys behind hardware stores
• In the garbage/recycling areas of businesses
• On Craigslist

What can you do with them?

• Make furniture for your house.
• Craft projects: Signs, decorations, hangers for jewelry, etc.
• Shop uses: shelves, tool holders, work tables.
• Dismantle them and burn them
• Build a shed or even a house out of them.

To cut them up or dismantle individual planks use:

• a jig saw
• a circular saw
• a pry bar
• a nifty tool we bought at an Ace Hardware called The Wrecker (a fancy pry bar with extra “bars” for whatever leverage you need
• a hammer and a chisel for working the nails out
• a hammer to just whack the slats free (might break it)
• a couple of two by fours to remove individual planks without breaking them

For assembling various projects use:

• A drill and drill bits for pilot holes through thick boards
• A screw guide for the drill (a MUST)
• Wood or deck screws of varying lengths
• Nails
• Brackets made by screwing two pieces of wood together or metal ones from the hardware store to add extra strength at attachment points
• Circular saw for cutting leg lengths and larger straight surfaces
• Hand saw
• Hammer
• C-clamp for holding pieces together tightly (the third arm) while installing screws
• Jig saw
• Tape measure
• Wood router
• Wood pencil for marking (works even on wet surfaces)
• Other hardware such as hooks and hangers
• Varnish

 General tips:

• That screw guide for your drill makes sinking those long screws SO much easier
• C-clamp for securing pieces – night and day
• Pilot holes for those thick pieces. You’ll strip the screws otherwise
• Pilot holes to prevent cracking. You don’t always have to but if the wood is prone to cracking or on the thin side, it’ll help
• Look for the better specimens in pallets. There are some shitty torn up ones you just pass up
• If you do end up with a shitty pallet, you can add slats from another shitty pallet to make one whole shitty pallet

Here are some photos of things we’ve done so far:

 

 

 

Moving Into The New Shed

Looking across our property at night through the mist of a very low-lying cloud is the beckoning rectangular shaped glow that is our nearly-assembled ShelterLogic 12′ X 30′ snow-load rated shed.

Almost a month after receiving it, it’s up and we’re down to the last touches like installing the anchors that will keep it from blowing away. It’s supposed to take three people about three-and-a-half hours to assemble.

It took us a little longer.

The instructions were all in pictures but our strategy was to jump in as far ahead as possible until we made a crucial mistake then back up and start at the beginning.

Fourth time’s a charm.

We’ve needed a real shed since we moved here. Our old one is constructed of pallets – the roof being a lattice-work of beams haphazardly nailed together with a tarp on top. The parts of the tarp that lay over the openings would fill with rain and snow and sag heavily.

We had to keep it cleared off but it got overloaded once or twice with what was probably tons of snow. Surprisingly, it held while some neighbor’s professionally built structures caved in.

Our antiques, bikes, cleaning supplies, tools – all of it has been going into the shed and suddenly I’m thinking we should have gotten a bigger one.

DIY Solar – A Poem

Bought a freakin’ solar kit

Thought it’d really be a hit

Catch the sun rays from the sky

Found out different tell you why

First you have to wire it right

Clamp them hard and do it tight

If you don’t they break in two

When you strike them with your shoe

Get it all set up and goin’

Plug it in and nothin’s showin’

Check it all with a volt meter

Skip a wire and you’re a cheater

And when you still don’t get power

Throw a wrench go take a shower

Next day when you’re at it still

Find out your controller’s ill

Then redo it put together

Hope that rain’s not in the weather

Find out that your cable’s wrong

Wow this’ now taking too long

All I want is my TV

Tools all over skinned my knee

Cables came redid them all

Will my power come on at all

No of course not that’s too easy

Batteries fried and I’m uneasy

Check the RV for the problem

Breakers sockets test all of ’em

Turns out that we’ll be just fine

Only use it at night time

What to do now what is next

Send the comp’ny email text

Hit the troubleshooting checklist

At the bottom and now I’m pissed

What the fuck did I do wrong

That I can’t turn my lights on

Feel so mad like I’ve been jerked

Bought a gas gen cause it works!

 

 

 

 

 

 

HUGE Industry-Wide Problems With Solar

It’s been a couple of months since we bought our solar power system and we’ve noticed a big problem that seems to run across the DIY industry: the kits don’t have a built-in low voltage disconnect (LVD) for the AC part of the set up.

Solar kits run both AC and DC loads. The AC is the one you would use for your home. It’s strong enough to run the big appliances. The DC is stuff you run right off of your batteries like when you go camping.

With batteries, if you deplete them too much, they become damaged and their lifespan is shortened significantly.

Our solar power kit came with charge controllers that have a low voltage disconnect (LVD). It cuts the draw from the batteries at a certain voltage to protect the battery but ours only turns off the DC load – the part we don’t use.

The inverter that came with our solar kit turns off the load at 10.5 volts – way too late.

Because we thought everything was being monitored, our batteries ran well below fifty percent many times. We wonder if they’re ruined.

I bought a generic LVD from another company and installed it but it stopped working, possibly because it couldn’t handle the amount of amps going through it. I was warned that might happen.

We had to remove the relay so the inverter would work again but now we are back to square one. One option we have is to buy an inverter that is programmable but they’re super expensive.  We now have no way to monitor the batteries but we kind of don’t care. I’m tired of messing with this stuff for now. I need a break so we’re back to using the gas generators until everything is running smoothly.

Here’s another thing to be aware of if you live in an RV: when you’re adding up how many watts the various appliances use per hour, don’t forget  you’re charging the RV batteries also.

I had a ball trying to figure out how many watts it takes per hour to charge fifty percent of two batteries. I’d share the formula but I lost the paper with my notes on it.

The solar kits come with a battery thermometer that plugs into the charge controller. The temperature probe gets taped onto the side of the battery to let the charge controller know how much energy to use to charge the battery, depending on whether it’s super cold or hot. They’re not mandatory but they make charging more efficient.

There are a lot of variables that impact the functioning of a solar power system. If one part isn’t running or working well, there goes the whole thing until you track down the problem.

I believe a low voltage disconnect is the most important part by far. Batteries are expensive. Every DIY kid should have one built into the AC part of the system.

I love having solar but the truth is it’s been a huge pain in the but to set up properly.

This poem says it all:  Rant Poem On DIY Solar