Pictures!
So, after a dry-spell of posting — some progress photos! I used the big bobcat to clear our building lot and had to spend quite a bit of time building out our driveway. Two culverts, some mistakes and 350y³ (~276m³) of 4” (~10cm) road base later... We can now get a fully-loaded triaxle dump truck to drive all the way back to our building lot and be able to turn around and drive out. Yay!
I leveled the area where we eventually plan to put our workshop, and a bit more. In the back corner of that area, I constructed a temporary pad for the batteries and inverter to live on while we build everything out. I was able to use the pallet forks on the bobcat to bring the boxes down from the top of the drive way and put them pretty close where I wanted them on the pad, and then I got in touch with my “inner-egyptian” and used a log and a lever to do the fine movements of the batteries. The batteries are laid out with 1’ (~30cm) between the rows, and 6” (~15cm) between each battery in the rows. This makes everything line up nice and pretty.
Directly in front of that, I placed a 20’ x 12’ x 13’ (~6 x 3.5 x 4m) “Garage-In-A-Box” to act as a temporary workshop. (We’re not too worried about people stealing things because the site is remote, and we’ll be living in a wall tent you’d have to pass well up the driveway.) This will give us a place to charge / use tools as well as stage things that are destined for the house.
We also found a pretty good deal on two pallets of Hyundai 370w mono panels, 54 in total (one pallet pictured). They
barely fit onto the trailer — maybe an 1” (~2.5cm) of clearance! I hadn’t checked to see how big the pallets were before I’d ordered them, so this was a bit of luck that we were able to get both pallets on there. We’re a little ahead of ourselves by buying the panels now, but it was a
really good deal. We might pull out 6 or 9 of them to setup a small, temporary ground-mount array.