Long time no update. Family life has been busy… wedding… birthdays…

So what have we been doing with the cabin…

Almost finished the upstairs drywall. We were short one piece. Then we will put up the half wall on the kids side and the full wall on our side.

We also wired the last of the downstairs lights, wired in two more batteries into the solar battery bank, and put the first coat of sealer on the front porch.

We also spent our First vacation at the cabin

We also are starting to think about winter. We setup the tractor to use the brush hog so we could get at some cherry and maple we cut up last year. We should be getting the wood stove in sometime in the next couple of weeks and putting more firewood up.

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So we went down again today and accomplished a couple of things.

1) Hooked up the power to the first floor. I ran into a small problem with the inverter. It has two AC out breakers and hookups. The second one was only putting out 90 volts… not sure what the problem was. I ended up wiring both planes of the panel to the one AC output on the inverter that is putting out 120 volts… I will look more into this.
2) Installed 2 2 x 8’s to extend the one bedroom an extra two feet.
3) while picking up the 2 x 8’s we loaded the truck up with sawdust from the mill to put on the road back which is a bit wet… maybe after 50 more loads the road will stay dry
4) Put up more drywall

some notes on the solar performance :

Mac watts 256 / Mac VOC 60.8 / Max Bat 15 – so far we have generated 1 kilowatt that went into the batteries and they are currently full.

On the day when we generated the most power we generated 19 ah / .2 kwh
7.6 Vp / 7.7 Ap / .11Kwp
Max Battery 14.6
Lowest Battery 12.6

We have not used to much power yet so I expect once we do for my numbers to go up when we use more of the battery capacity up.

Also need to build the battery box. (each battery is 10” x 7” x 12” (h) – this is more for me so I remember the dimensions 🙂

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So as you can see we got the solar system up and running. Nothing more fun the working in 90 degree temps with 95% humidity 🙂

You can read more about the solar system here : Solar Power Plan

We also did more drywall… love that drywall

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My two 180 watt Evergreen solar panels, charge controller, and two hundred amp fuse came in the week. I had the inverter and main panel wired up a while ago and will get some pictures up soon. I wired up the charge controller, panel and batteries to test them out. Here is some basics about this side of the solar setup ( I will do the same for the AC side later along with drawing up a plan) :

parts :

• 2 Evergreen 180 watt Spruce Line (blemish) panels from Sun Electronics for $540 each (Datasheet)
• Outback FX-80 charge controller purchased from Sun Electronics for $575 (manual)
• 2 100 amp DC breakers purchased from auto zone for about $28 each
• Bus bars used for negative bus and ground bus (system was not grounded for this initial testing)
• 2 Everyready 6v 200 amp batteries wired for 12v purchased from Sams club for $75 each

notes :

I used Dual 6 gauge for the battery positive, negative and PV positive, negative as I had some laying around. I plan to put each breaker and the negative and ground buses into a housing when finished along with putting the wire into conduit.

I wired the two panels in series to bring the voltage up and using the charge controller MPPT feature to bring the voltage back down to 12v to charge the batteries. This will allow me to put the panels the 40 or so feet away I want to without buying huge wire.

The DC breaker on the left disconnects the panels and the breaker on the right disconnects the batteries.

For testing I just wired the panels to the charge controller with the 12ga romex I had. The plan is to use 6 gauge in the final system.

I had topped the batteries off a couple of days ago so there was not much to do. I will try and drain the batteries a bit and see what type of numbers I get. Also for this initial testing it was a very cloudy day with no direct sun light and the panels where also under my patio roof

Right now I have 360 watt system. When I finish building this I would like to get to about 1080 in 2 3 x180 series.

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Stairs stairs stairs… we have stairs… Mose and his son David (not to be mistaken with Mose’s Brother David and his son Mose 🙂 ) came over today and built us a stair case and catwalk (catwalk to pictured)… Grand total for two people working 7 hours and all materials (minus flooring OSB and fasteners which we had) was about $250… The stairs looked so nice… I need to find some other things that need building.

Also today we did more drywall… something I noticed while doing this is due to the shape of the building and the gussets We have seven separate angles to drywall… fun fun fun… If I had to do it again I would have cut the gussets to the roof rafters and saved two angles in the drywall…

Also my charge controller, a Outback mx-80, showed up today along with my 200 amp dc fuse…. hopefully my panels will be here tomorrow.

Stopped my the stainless steel guy and my chimney should be done this weekend. Another Amish shop is doing it. Soup to nuts for less then $400… all custom made.

So far I have not taken any pics of any Amish… but today their horse was tied up and I could not help myself… I am pretty sure they do not mind as they liked my camera when I showed the the pictures on the LCD.

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