All Energies

Adventures

2010-07-27T03:16:07Z

Well, we finally got some hands-on experience with large concrete pours, and at the hands of masonry masters P+R. 1^st Biggest Lesson: prepare everything in advance, even the little rut under the concrete mixer so the wheelbarrow can fit easier. 2^nd Biggest Lesson: get more gravel/sand than you think you will use, then go get some more.

The magic ratio? One shovel Portland per five shovels aggregate (no magic really, just a veteran's experience). Mixer maxes out at ~25 shovel-loads, so that means 20 of aggregate and five of cement. Three giant coffee containers of water at first, then season to taste. Too wet makes the concrete weak, but too dry makes it weak also. Is your gravel full of sand or dirt? Sand is better, so pour a shovel-load from arm height and watch for a dust cloud. The smaller the dust cloud, the less dirt.

Also spent a large chunk of time working on our solar gig. Welding is always fun, though hard on your skin and clothing. The rack turned out very nice, though sometimes it felt like every weld was a battle (against wind, or inexperience [mine, not Casey's], or indecision). Personally, my biggest dilemma was how high to mount it! Our client is not over-large in stature, but she does have horses, and horses will rub against anything if they feel like it. We opted to make it easier for the client to use, instead of so high that the horses wouldn't bump it. Perhaps the equines will leave it alone, anyway.

This friendly little snake was found in the barn, and I couldn't resist the chance to hold him/her. Anyone know what kind it is? Some kind of garter snake, to be sure, but there are so many kinds!

We got a little bit of rain off Saturday's storm, which means a few extra gallons in the tank thanks to our new gutters. No real flooding, thankfully.

Sprocket got his first real swimming lesson this weekend, too. He can swim just fine, and he even has webbed toes, but he was still scared and wheezy after one go around the pool. Once he let me buoy him up, he chilled out and treaded water. It was fun for all of us, though the skinniest among us found the water too cold and got out after just a minute! We thought the cooler temperatures were wonderful! One thousand times better than in NY, where the water flows from mountain springs year-long, and at a constant 45 degrees Fahrenheit!

Swimming truly is medicinal, and perhaps more-so in the desert. We all felt invigorated, and the water-wary pooch lost his persistent aches and spent the rest of the day running laps around the rest of us.

Early in the week, we got to show our neighbor around the homestead. We love to show off our place, mostly because the views are amazing! At least once a day, the raw beauty of this place takes my breath away.

The past week has left us a little tired and a little sunburned, but overall very satisfied with our accomplishments, small and large.

Cluck cluck

2010-07-19T02:28:08Z

Making your own power

2010-07-17T17:04:05Z

After starting this off the grid project about a year ago, we have learned quite a bit about the actual workings of a good system. Nearly everything you buy is going to be overrated; solar panels and wind generators are rated at peak watts, which when used in conjunction with batteries at ~13 volts is unattainable. We have just gotten accustomed to looking through the performance data and deducing a more accurate rating from that.

Yesterday we picked up two 105 lbs, 12 volt AGM 165 AH batteries from Ron for a solar job we have. Personally, we would love to use these type of batteries in our system when ever possible. Making good 12 volt connections can be difficult, and we have found that many fuse holders have high resistance. Automotive style DC outlets are good for about 2 amps -- if you're not careful it's easy to waste power.

We are making good progress on our house; the bathroom addition is almost all dug out (over 24 wheelbarrow loads so far) and now we are gathering gravel to make concrete. We already bought about half the Portland cement -- seven 94 lbs bags. As for the inside, we just got a dozen space blankets to use as reflective heat and vapor barrier. We'll use these in addition to fiberglass insulation. These extra steps should make for a cool house in the summer and a warm house in the winter.

Six "strongly worded letters" that we sent to Toshiba Co. explaining our ordeal.

The most beautiful sunrise we have ever seen in either of our lives. If any other may surpass it, it will probably be another Terlingua sunrise.

Rendezvous

2010-07-09T03:01:43Z

Yesterday evening we meet up with a fan of our site Dave in Fort Stockton. Dave is also an alternative energy enthusiast. He has done a lot with wind and solar power, and has even built a vertical axis wind turbine. Dave gave us a set of wind turbine blades that are 8' feet in diameter -- these will make a very good wind turbine, we just need to decide on a generator and controller.

We also stopped at the Fort Stockton chamber of commerce and saw a pretty good sized solar array and three Skystream wind turbines, two of them were humming away. An interesting addition in an oil town.

We have also completed or first on-site automotive repair with a happy customer, we just need a few more tools and we should be able to tackle just about any no-start.

We finally got a gutter on our roof for rain water catchment-- for one reason or another, that project kept getting postponed. We shouldn't miss a drop of rainwater with the very deep commercial gutter, which uses a PVC pipe connected to our 305 gallon tank. Now we need to get the house sided, whether that ends up being metal or stucco.

Rain: Not necessarily your friend

2010-07-05T23:00:51Z

Quite an eventful past few days. It's been rainy/cloudy for several days, so our batteries have been working hard. The roads have been washing out all over, and even the paved section of the Ranch Road has washed away at the West Corazon draw.

Embarrassingly, I got stuck Saturday on Lake Ament road, but GM Frank was nice enough to come pull us out. Only to get stuck again at White Mill Ranch road the next day, with our parade trailer in tow. Lucky for us, the very next vehicle was a Toyota truck and they happened to have a tow strap. We thought our chance to be in the parade was over, but we were saved by fellow ranchies.
We got to the Study Butte Mall in time to line up, and the parade went off without a hitch. There was quite a turn out this year and we had a lot of enthusiastic fans of our parade float. After the parade everyone went to Kathy's Kosmic Kowgirl Kafe for some food and time to socialize. We ran into our neighbor Terry and got to show him our gasifier. Our trip to Fort Stockton has been postponed til tomorrow or Wednesday.

Until next time

-Casey

Ups and Downs

2010-06-29T18:28:26Z

Hello dear readers!

I got a wonderful care package from my grandmother yesterday -- she must be psychic, I think. The box was crammed with white t-shirts (a commodity out here!) Neosporin and anti-itch cream (the mosquitoes are finally tapering off), along with lots of other goodies. I am so lucky to have such sweet and caring relatives!

Also we are very happy to have our first official customers! We hope that this is just a sign of wonderful things to come.

We also got another mono-crystalline solar panel, and our batteries are much happier. We will be testing out a set of composite carbon fiber blades on our wind turbine, and hope to see a power output improvement. In just a couple of days we will be headed out to meet Dave and family, some fans of the blog, who have a very interesting fiberglass turbine prop some eight feet in diameter. Expect our wind farm to grow very soon!

This past Saturday we had some neighbors over to pick up some chickens we sold them, though I'm sorry I forgot to bring out the camera. Tanyah and Tom brought along their three kids to join in the fun of catching and caging the fluff-nuggets (as I call them; their original nickname was the "chicken nuggets," but they have outgrown that moniker). It was a hot day, but it was fun to see the kids so excited over their new hens.

This upcoming Sunday there will be an Independence Day parade in Study Butte, and we are looking forward to joining the procession. We will need to give the truck a bath and spend the next couple of days working on our "float," but we are looking forward to a fun project. For any readers who want to attend, the parade starts at 6pm at the Study Butte Mall, and terminates at Kathy's Kosmic Kowgirl Kafe, on FM170. At the Kafe, the Terlingua Fire and Emergency Medical Services (TFEMS) volunteers will be selling food and drinks.

Now for the bad news. Casey's Toshiba Satellite L305 is broken AGAIN. The touch-pad isn't working, and there seems to be a hard drive failure also. As the main computer, it has all of our pictures on it and my web design software (and latest updates, though they can be recovered from the server). Just like the first time, the Customer Service from Toshiba is a painfully frustrating waste of time. This computer has turned out to be a total lemon, and we are stuck with it and it's problems. I reiterate from a previous post: DON'T BUY A TOSHIBA!

Also, unfortunately, our printer kicked the proverbial bucket last week. We have been giving hand-written estimates to our clients, which doesn't look very professional, but we don't have any other options at this point. We don't have the spare cash to fix or replace anything, so we'll keep trying to work out a solution.

There's always a silver lining, though, and we had to laugh when we saw the following label on the hard disk drive:

Rattle noise is normal? Really? They must have had to explain themselves a lot before they put that on the sticker. Now when people ask why it sounds like it's trying to achieve escape velocity, they can just point to the sticker.

What a company...

1oz Prevention > 1lb Cure

2010-06-25T16:35:55Z

Lesson of the Day: Coffee and sewing do not mix well. Jittery hands + sewing needle = pricked fingers.

Stupid Mistake of the Day: ALWAYS shake out your clothes (and shoes) before donning. Especially if they just came in off the clothesline (extra especially if they fell off the clothesline and had been laying in the grass).

Scorpion in my pants. Yep, in my pants. Stung my leg, but at least no worse than a bee sting. As you can see, he/she paid dearly for trying to live in my jeans.

Ranch Drama? SNAFU, of course...

2010-06-21T16:00:37Z

Well, life in the desert is never boring. Although, sometimes I get the impression that people are wont to make their own live-action soap operas out of thin air. I had applied for a job at the Ranch as a their bookkeeper, but apparently only CPAs qualify (I'd be interested to find out how many of the past bookkeepers had a certificate, but we all know how that would turn out). Right now the Treasurer's wife is doing the bookkeeping (she is a certified public accountant, and a very savvy lady to boot) on a volunteer basis, and they probably won't hire a replacement until she can't or won't do it any longer. C'est la vie. Eso es la vida.

Our friends Phil and Regina are also in trouble for trying to help their neighbors get water. Imagine that, trying to buy water in the desert -- how silly! They paid for their troubles, but The Powers That Be are still setting their sights. No good deed goes unpunished...

On Saturday we did a field check for our neighbor and are writing her up an estimate. She already has plenty of solar panels, but some unscrupulous (I assume) person told her that they were all broken. Solar panel don't just stop working all of a sudden unless there is serious, visible damage! The panels were all FINE, and put out plenty of power. We will draw up a plan for mounting and wiring them for her, and we hope that she will be pleased with our work. We certainly will work very hard to get her set up with all the power she needs in a neat and efficient way!

We had some more rain on Friday, and it threatened last night, but the thunderhead skirted us to the west. I'll have to check John Wells' blog to see if he got any rain off that storm. It did give us a beautiful photo op, and I'll post the pics of the distant rain at sunset soon! I forgot to bring my camera with me today.

Thanks for reading!

3rd Thursday = Potluck

2010-06-18T03:12:03Z

We got our fair share of rain this week: 1.35" Monday night and 2.25" Tuesday evening. Tuesday we happened to be in Study Butte running errands when on our way home it started to rain hard so we waited it out at Phil and Regina's. When the rain stopped we attempted to drive home, but we happened to be driving the car, and all the roads had washed out pretty badly. I attempted to drive home (not taking Sara's advice to wait until morning), went through some deep water and did some bumper and oil pan damage. After making it through several washouts we came to the East Corazones Draw, which had several feet of fast moving water. We helped some people with 4x4 trucks cross, and then we turned around and spent the night at our friends' house. We got a ride up to our place Wednesday morning and almost everything was OK.

Today I did some work at the ranch and came home to help get ready for the monthly potluck dinner. The potluck was fun; we got to see our friends and meet some new people. I talked to Dean about gasification and he knew quite a bit about the history, including the WWII-era coal-powered Volkswagens.

So that's it for today, thanks for reading.

Sunday

2010-06-14T02:43:56Z

Today we had our friends Phil and Regina; Rusty and his daughter Bailey stop by to see our place. Good south Brewster county visiting, talking about solar panels, good wind turbine locations, and wire sizes. We also walked to the top of our mountain (which we need to do more often) and got to see a good birds-eye view of the homestead.

Some very interesting AllEnergies fans have gotten in touch with us, including a family of blacksmiths who make some durable yurts. Their website is www.mountainwindyurts.com and we are going meet up with them in a few weeks to exchange some ideas. They have a wind turbine propeller eight feet in diameter and they are offering us the fiberglass wind turbine prop, which will give us the opportunity to make an awesome new turbine. We're aiming for a permanent magnet, 3 phase generator with a 30 foot tower and a diversion load.

Tomorrow we'll be busy down at the Ranch lodge, but we'll update again soon.

Sunny and electrifying

2010-06-11T02:58:49Z

The permanent stairs to the house were completed five days ago, and what an improvement that made over our rickety, too-low, temporary stairs. I got the utility section of the house closer to ship-shape by adding a door, wiring in the new DC fuse box, and adding a piece of flex hose on our water pump (much quieter now).

The gasifier is finally receiving some attention and I am replacing the reduction zone with a much larger stainless steel one. When the gasifier gets reassembled we are going to test the local greasewood and see how that works. We are also planning to do some local alternative energy demonstrations and have the mobile gasifier included. So if anyone following the blog can give a recommendation on places in Study Butte or Alpine, please speak up.

Among the updates to the website we added a "Services We Offer" page. The page describes our local services and also talks about our over-the-phone and via email consulting and design. I know there are a lot of people our there who are capable of doing something but just need a little extra guidance.

I'm over my self-imposed time limit on internet usage, so that's all for now. We'll try to get another update posted soon, because we have much more to tell y'all! Thanks for reading.

Welcome to June

2010-06-04T14:33:03Z

Good morning, everyone! We have been busy with more than just the homestead lately. We are volunteering our help to the Ranch, which has been fun and educational. The office is staffed with very nice people now. Andrea and Dianna are two of the sweetest people I've ever met, and Frank, the new Ranch manager, is working hard to get the place back on track. The POATRI treasurer Marbert has been busting his hump, volunteering in the office and showing Frank the ropes. We are happy to have the facilities open again, and we hope that the upswing of improvements will continue!
The chickens are getting fat, and soon we'll start free ranging them. This will also make it a lot easier to work on the coop, which needs work before the hens can start laying and also to have them well-protected when winter weather returns. Right now it is just a four post structure wrapped in chicken wire that is buried a foot into the ground. Unfortunately, the portland cement we used in the adobe that anchors the posts must have been bad, because everything we used it in just crumbles away. I will eventually dig out the corners and re-concrete the posts, and probably use that opportunity to start pouring adobe footings for the walls. Eventually the coop will have three, probably slip-formed, adobe walls with chicken wire and rebar for support
We also got to visit our buddy Rusty up on Jack Eden Mesa, and after the tour of his adobe and other projects, we got to meet his daughters Bailey and Ayrton, and Bailey's friend Ryan. Rusty and his family did a beautiful job on their adobe hideaway, and you can check out his photos here: Rusty's Blog. We are hoping the group will come by our place if they get a chance, and we'll be sure to take lots of pictures to remember one of our first groups of visitors! Today Casey and I are in dire need of a trip to Alpine, and while we hate to leave our house, we must get food for ourselves and the animals. No one wants to visit a house of skeletons, anyway!

Open for Business

2010-05-29T01:35:47Z

Since we have accomplished many pressing jobs for our own homestead, we have decided that it's time to officially open for business in Brewster County, Texas. Here is what we are offering:

    -Solar Electric
    -Solar hot-water
    -Wind power
    -Off-grid Homes
    -On-site vehicle and tractor repair
    -Backup Power Systems
    -Website design & management
    -Computer Repair

We design and build wind power systems, solar hotwater, solar electric, bio-fueled generators, and low power refrigeration. Our systems fit your needs and budget!

Free Estimates - Honest & Reliable - Experienced Techs

Contact us at:   Casey@allenergies.net
                          Sara@allenergies.net

For people considering our services, please understand that we have been practicing these technical trades our entire lives. We live off the grid and most of our friends do also-- we know what works and what does not. And for those of you living out of our service area, we also offer technical consultation and research & design via email or phone. Please send us an email for our phone number or more details.

__________________________________________________________________

In other news, during our trip to Alpine on Thursday we bought some very usable warped lumber in the discount pile a McCoy's which will go toward making our stairs. I started installing our AC outlets, and would have had the new DC fuse panel in, except I was missing a fine thread 3/16" bolt for the positive terminal. I guess someone forgot to drop one in the box.

Well, that's it; I hope nobody minded the shameless self-promotion.

Big, bad storm

2010-05-26T19:21:16Z

It's been a busy past few days with our projects moving forward nicely.

Yesterday morning we went to Study Butte to get our car inspected, picked up some hardware for our PV rack and headed back to the ranch. We stopped by the Grub Shack for some breakfast and ran into John Wells (http://thefieldlab.blogspot.com/) and were able to go see his place. John has some really successful projects going on. One of the most notable ones is the use of storage containers to make a courtyard space with an arched roof he built himself over the top of the four containers. In the open space John will make a garden/greenhouse.

We also finished our solar power pole-mount rack yesterday. It turned out great, and we're getting much more out of our array during optimal sun conditions. The photo above was taken after the storm, we are still lacking combiner box and wire buried in conduit. We also upped the wire to 6 gauge, which lowers the voltage drop to the batteries. While I was tightening the last screw on the rack, we noticed a storm on the horizon so we picked up our tools and headed inside.

The storm progressed pretty quickly, and we experienced very high winds, lightning, and rain. The worst part was the large, ice-cube-sized hail which pelted us for almost an hour. The large hail seemed isolated (lucky us) but that seems to happen often out here. We found out after the storm calmed down, we went out with flashlights to assess the damage.

Two of our chickens died during the storm, and while it is impossible for us to know how, we have some suspects (primarily hail or panic). We were also very worried about our solar panels, but the most expensive 130 watt mono-crystalline panel made it through the hail just fine. We do have a panel with a plastic lens which earned a good-sized hole (right after we just patched it up). The inverter and solar controller both stopped working, but thankfully the controller dried out and went back into service this morning, and the inverter finally decided to work just this hour (thus enabling our internet!).

Sometimes we should just stay home...

2010-05-20T04:50:20Z

Well today was a day of extremes. We spent the majority of the day working on the homestead and made really good progress in many of our projects. I built the frame for the coop roof and test fitted a sheet of salvaged metal roofing. The roofing sheets are just barely too short, so we'll do some creative cutting with our extra piece to span the length.
Casey built most of the battery box out of scrap OSB and painted it. Not only does it look good, but it will provide a weatherproof shelter for the batteries, the inverter, the water pump, and the solar controller.
Casey also started plumbing the kitchen area, so I am very happy we now have running water in our sink and a drain through the floor. The drain empties into a bucket for now, but soon we will be filtering it and watering our garden with all our gray water.
Our wind turbine is up an running again, with new blades and a smaller hub. We spent a few hours whittling the blades to a better airfoil, and we can really tell the difference with noise output. It is much quieter, but it isn't putting out as much power as it did when it was still broken! We shortened this set of blades, but next time we will try lengthening them. For now, the PVC blades are a fun project and work well, but eventually we would really like some prefab carbon-fiber blades.

Our last project for the day was installing our last window. It is our only window on the southwest side and lets in a wonderful amount of light. The window also gives us a view of the wind turbine, so we will be able to monitor it from inside. Best of all, however, the window really opens up the kitchen corner and makes the area a lot more open-feeling.
But we probably should have patted ourselves on the back after that, because the day was really downhill after that.

After the window installation, we headed out to visit our neighbors Debby and Dennis. We picked up a nice loaner-panel from Ron via Dennis (18V, 7A mono-crystalline) and admired their clever PV array mount -- a re-purposed large satellite dish mount that can tilt and twist. On our way out, I volunteered to navigate to another neighbor's house, which was (in retrospect) a mistake. Everything was fine until I realized I had two different roads mixed up in my head and we had to turn around. We took the next familiar road, but it was very hilly and washed out in places from the heavy rain and hail. Let's just say the low-riding Suzuki did not appreciate the backwoods charm of the road....

After feeling really bad for taking the highway car out gallivanting on ranch roads, we made it to our destination. After visiting the neighbors for a few hours, Casey and I hit the road again (still rutted and washed out, but now in the dark at night) happy to be on our way home. After a couple miles, I asked Casey what the smell was. He didn't know. It got worse. I reached down to see what was on the floor and I felt a super-slippery liquid on my fingers and then Casey realized what the smell was: muriatic acid.

Apparently Phil had very generously loaned Casey the use of his gallon jug of muriatic acid, which he uses to clean stones (and, well, a lot of other things -- it's very useful stuff, but quite dangerous too). Casey was supposed to use the acid to clean the inside of copper tubing so that we could make our own battery cable terminals, and he thought the safest place to put it would be on the floor of the front seat with me, so that I could keep it from tipping over. Unluckily for us, this was well before our departure and Casey forgot to tell me. I didn't see it when I got into the car because I was saying goodnight to Phil and Gina, and the rutted roads took care of the rest. the jug tipped over and dribbled on the floor, turning part of the floor mat into a bubbling puddle of black goo. Yay.

Of course immediately after realizing what had happened, we pulled over and removed the bottle of acid and the carpet. We poured water from our drinking bottles over the spill and my hand to neutralize the acid, but we left it there on the side of the road. It is not littering, because we will go back and retrieve it tomorrow, but we were too tired and shaken up to deal with it on the side of the road in the middle of the night.

So like I said, the day was great until we left the house! We should have quit while we were still ahead, I suppose.

Thanks for reading!