New DIY Solar from Westinghouse

Andrew Burger at CleanTechnica blog reported Monday [September 26, 2011] that Westinghouse Solar has introduced new plug-and-play solar panel kits for do-it-yourselfers, which can be purchased off the shelf at Lowe’s. These kits come with built-in AC inverters, brackets, roof flashings and panel splices, connecting easily to each other. Each panel is rated at 235 watts, making the basic 4-panel kit (~$1500) come in at just under a kilowatt.

Homesteaders are nothing if not do-it-yourselfers, and most of us would dearly love to be supplying our own power. Maybe even selling clean green energy back to the electric company by generating more than we normally need! And since we tend to live out in the boonies… er, countryside, we are often last in line to get our outages taken care of after storms or other problems cut electricity. It would be great to have alternative on-site sources for at least some electrical demands when the commercial power’s out, preferably not a gasoline generator that uses petroleum, contributes to global climate change, and is loud enough to be a public nuisance.

The price of solar panels has been coming down steadily over the past few years, as more companies get into producing the materials for them, and with China investing heavily to develop their domestic industry. There are still state and federal rebates and incentives available in the U.S. to help cover the cost of going solar, so now would be a good time to buy. Those rebates and incentives won’t last long once the price comes down to honestly competitive.

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Do It Yourself – Discouraging Words

I was somewhat surprised on one of my web surfing jaunts to see a blog dedicated to ways of saving money weigh in against the notion of doing odd jobs and building projects yourself. Because for my homestead – and very likely yours as well – if we didn’t do our own odd jobs and building projects, then no needful jobs or building projects would ever get done. So I’ll take the opportunity presented to offer a rebuttal to some of the objections logged in the Money Bucket blog.

The article is Saving Money – Or Not – With DIY Projects, and it’s worth a read if you’re genuinely unsure of whether or not you’ve got the ability to tackle a project on your own. Of course for big projects it’s very important to understand going in exactly what will be necessary – time, tools, materials and a certain degree of skill. Homesteaders already know about budgeting their time toward the “work in progress” that describes our way of life, as there are always a dozen or more projects and repairs that need doing. Most of us, if we’ve been living this way for some years, have amassed more tools than many city-folk even know exist. In fact, for most projects the primary concern is coming up with the money to purchase the materials, and making sure we’ve got every little nut, bolt, pipe, sealant and extraneous parts before we start.

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Human Pedal-Powered Power

As part of our plan to revamp our water supply system to get rid of the energy-sucking 220 pump and replace it with a ram jet, and concurrently installing geothermal collectors to supply a steady supply of cool air in summer and warmer air in winter, I’ve been checking into other ways of cutting our grid energy use. It will be years before we’re in a position to purchase solar panels or a wind generator to get the homestead off the grid entirely, so every little bit of electricity we don’t use from Duke Energy helps our bottom line.

A friend in Arizona long known for his bicycling prowess sent me a link to David Butcher’s Pedal Powered Generator website, which is chock full of information about getting a little exercise while charging up some batteries used to operate things like LED lights, computers, televisions, electric motors on your assisted transportation (Moped), even a washing machine. Though that last takes some real muscles for the spin cycle. I’ve often thought that as I’m sitting here at my desk surfing around on the internet I should be pedaling a stationary bike to power the machinery that lets me do that.

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Inventing a Geothermal System

As plans for the new water system move forward, we find ourselves in sudden possession of quite a lot of high-end good-sized PVC piping of various lengths, assorted odd couplings, some strips and scraps of new carpeting (good for insulation of trenches), and a surprising amount of aluminum ductwork. Salvaged from various places. Not being content to leave what look to be perfectly good but not immediately needed lengths of such pipe and ducting behind, we’ve been rescuing as much as we can get from the dumpster-side repository at the contracting facility next door to hubby’s day job.

Some of these lengths of thick-walled new pipe are 3 or 4 inches in diameter, so I’ve been considering how we could use them as we head into this major project, other than as the ‘head’ flow from the new spring to the ram jet in the pumphouse. Given as it’s nearly July, I have also been scouting around for some form of air conditioning that doesn’t require an air-tight home and way more not-cheap electricity than we care to use. We only need it occasionally during the hottest hot-spells of summer and only at times when it’s inconvenient to spend the afternoon in the basement, out under the shade trees, or down at the swimming hole. As part of that research, I’ve been looking at geothermal engineering concepts and technology as well as at modern iterations of good old evaporative cooler (a.k.a. “Swamp Cooler”). Which looks great and works well in places like Arizona, but is not so great here in the southern Appalachians where it’s around 85-90% humidity all the time. Geothermal still looks good, so…

A Do-It-Yourself heat pump! But without the compressor/heat element assist. This could work.

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The Wondrously Stupendous, Very Prestigious Cuisinart Bread Machine

During my year off from blogging one of the Big Projects for the homestead was a total kitchen make-over. We could afford it because my dearly loved Mother-in-Law died last April, after just a month in assisted living, at the ripe old age of 87. Turned out she had so much money in her checking account that even after expenses and splitting what was left with hubby’s brother, I could finally get a nice new kitchen to go with the dining furniture she also left to us.

For eighteen long years the kitchen has been separated from the main living space with a bar, even though the front door enters the kitchen rather than the living room. That bar has been variously attached to the right and left sides of the kitchen (thus changing the traffic pattern), and for the past six years it simply floated in the middle, topped with a piece of plywood painted for paper-flip football, mini-table tennis and various other games. Never managed to have four actually stable, matching bar stools at any given time, but our annual visitors were encouraged to buy or build their own, which would be exclusive to them whenever they were in-house. Some of them are pretty amazing, but of course none of them ever matched. And that front door, just so you know, was a hollow closet door that never actually closed or locked, we used to brace it against wind and possible night intruders with a bucket full of dirt.

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Tools: Get The Best, Even Used

Having posted with pride about our new honest-to-hillbilly deck, I thought this might be a good time to talk a bit more about the many tools a homesteader needs in order to keep the place in order, do the gardening and landscaping, renovate and repair home and outbuildings. I can do this because during the deck project we had a total of 4 hammers on hand, and two of them ended up without handles before we were done. Frustrating.

The very best thing you can do, of course, is to purchase the absolute, best quality, longest-lasting tools – any tool – you can possibly afford. Yet in today’s economy, getting the best quality tools is often beyond the means of those of us trying hard just to make things work. Here at my homestead we’ve got a shed chock full of old chain saws, string trimmers, handle-less shovels, pitchforks, axes, mauls, sledgehammers, pruners, etc., not to mention a whole collection of broken hammers, screwdrivers, various saws and power tools bought cheap over the years and which didn’t last long enough to get to the second job.

Worse, I’ve an energetic daughter and some grandchildren who work hard on occasion, but can’t ever manage to put the tools back where they belong. Which means I find rusted things all over the place, often with wooden handles that long since rotted into compost. It’s extremely frustrating, and having to replace the tools every time you start a project is a regular pain in the ass. Not to mention expensive.

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An Honest-to-Hillbilly Deck

In preparation for the annual Independence Day celebration, last week was a regular beehive of energetic engineering to finish the deck in time for the fireworks. I of course appointed myself straw boss for the project, and imported day labor …er, an old friend… to do the actual work. My observations confirmed the efficacy of “hillbilly engineering” to the point that it loses a bit of its epithet-like undertones, and makes me confident enough to go ahead and advise that you don’t have to be a licensed general contractor to get things done around the homestead!

There was a deck there previously, installed by visitors from Florida a decade ago while we were out. We’d already sunk the support poles (a few salvaged 4x4s and some sturdy tree limbs) in concrete and installed the joists – salvaged 2×8′s left over from when we had to replace the foundation beams (another saga…). We’d scarfed some thick tongue-and-groove planking for the deck surface from the Children’s Home where hubby worked as a fundraiser at the time, left over from some projects there. We had planned to put those visitors to work, but we’d also planned to make a real deck with spaces between the boards so the water could drain off, and those visitors just went ahead and grooved the tongues anyway. Which of course meant that the deck was doomed to rot in record time, which of course it did.

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Paint-On and Print-Out Solar Cells

Great news this week on ScienceDaily, picked up by Nanotechnology News and other outlets that researchers from Swansea University have developed a paint coating for steel buildings that will generate electricity even in low light situations.

Note that this isn’t solar panels on the roof, but the enameled coating on the siding itself. Meaning that metal buildings – including garages, barns, equipment sheds, airport hangars, outlying megachurches and community buildings could all be generating electricity (some from the infrared spectrum current solar cells cannot capture) while they’re just sitting there enclosing space. Put a few regular panels on the roof too and it could be generating more than it uses on a regular basis.

But when I went looking at just how innovative this development is in the overall scheme of things keeping affordable alternative energy options safely insulated from regular people who might just put them to work, I found that the idea isn’t all that new, and isn’t anywhere close to being marketed to consumers of things like metal buildings (commercial or residential). Why do you suppose that is, given the sheer amount of money being funneled into research and development, as well as into actual production?

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Housing: Buying, Building or Making Do

Part 1: The Pros and Cons

Wise Living Journal blog is oriented toward people who have chosen to live closer to the land than most do these days, and who are willing to take responsibility for as much of their lives and life choices as is possible in this modern world. This generally means those living off the edges of crowded cities or suburbs, or those lucky enough to have found a bit of countryside to call their own.

I’ve covered the basic homestead tool kit, started talking about some basic home repairs and maintenance jobs the homesteader can do for him or herself much cheaper than they can hire someone else to do. I’ve talked a bit about planning yard and garden space to make the most of your surroundings. And these subjects will come up again and again, as there is plenty to cover. But this sub-series is about housing itself.

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