diy solar

diy solar

Spain here...

So you can have a reference in a day like yesterday, or even last Sunday (we had perfect sunny and 20 ºC days) my installation produced nearly 20 kWh and as few as less than 2 kWh in a rainy / cloudy day last week.

Sorry for continuity lapse, been occupied with stuff - Christmas, New Year and prep for Spanish finca where we are now.

100FUEGOS, Feliz Año. Yesterday (Jan 2) was overcast. I’m interested in what your system produced.
 
We are out also but checking everything remotely everyday. Jan 2nd should have been a cloudy day because less than 8 kWh were produced.
 
Hola. Actually I’m in the UK but moving to Andalucía in Spain next year. Just bought an off-grid farm so going to need a good system. Looking forward to trading ideas with the folks on this board. Loving Will’s content and enthusiasm.
Sounds wonderful!
You've got a real fixer-upper on your hands!
Lovely part of the world - I'm jealous! We vacationed in the Algarve area of Portugall last March (lots of Brits there - the big English breakfast is the default) and this year we're going to Costa del Sol. But just to visit and hike. Nothing that ambitious.
 
Sounds wonderful!
You've got a real fixer-upper on your hands!
Lovely part of the world - I'm jealous! We vacationed in the Algarve area of Portugall last March (lots of Brits there - the big English breakfast is the default) and this year we're going to Costa del Sol. But just to visit and hike. Nothing that ambitious.
Thanks 45. Huelva is quite different to Algarve. It is undeveloped and the tourism that happens on the Costa de la Luz has a particularly Spanish bias. I like a big full English as much as the next man but part of the charm of this region is that it isn’t spoiled by tourism.

Re fixer-upper. The irony is that we could just move in and live there; it is a perfectly habitable dwelling. But we would not have bought it to live in in its current state. We want to turn a tired ordinary house into a palace but one sensitive to its location. That’s not to say that we won’t have a few fights with the planning officers at the Ayuntamiento, we have some challenging modernity in mind!
 
Sounds wonderful!
You've got a real fixer-upper on your hands!
Lovely part of the world - I'm jealous! We vacationed in the Algarve area of Portugall last March (lots of Brits there - the big English breakfast is the default) and this year we're going to Costa del Sol. But just to visit and hike. Nothing that ambitious.
Actually I see that you’re a North American. So I can be more honest with our affection for Huelva. We really, really don’t like the traditional Spanish resort populated by Brits. There are no Brits here and if you don’t speak Spanish then you need not apply. I am a proud Brit but believe that you are a guest in another country and should respect it for what and where it is, not try to change it to fit in with your parochial expectations. We are embracing the differences!
 
Hola. Actually I’m in the UK but moving to Andalucía in Spain next year. Just bought an off-grid farm so going to need a good system. Looking forward to trading ideas with the folks on this board. Loving Will’s content and enthusiasm.
Hola. Actually I’m in the UK but moving to Andalucía in Spain next year. Just bought an off-grid farm so going to need a good system. Looking forward to trading ideas with the folks on this board. Loving Will’s content and enthusiasm.


Hello,
I'm in San jose, Ca, just finised my 48v Off Grid system,
Here is my setup :
- 375w REC solar panel x 9 ( Total 3375 w )
- Midnite Classic 150 Charge controller
- Meritsun 48v/200AH Lifepo4 battery Powerwall ( Total 10Kwh )
- 48v/7000w/120v ac Reliable Inverter
It's been running very nice, power a whole home ( 1200 Sq ) all day and night
For the total price less than $9000 Usd, pretty good deal,
 
Anything new on this Senor?
Getting a vicarious thrill from following your ambitious plans and future implementation.
Been in Spain a week but just snowbirding - no comparison. I feel guilty! I'm such a slacker! LOL.
 
Anything new on this Senor?
Getting a vicarious thrill from following your ambitious plans and future implementation.
Been in Spain a week but just snowbirding - no comparison. I feel guilty! I'm such a slacker! LOL.

Hi - sorry for much delayed response. Thanks for the interest.

Well due to the current shutdown of society, the economy, planet etc. unfortunately all plans are on hold. We're still 100% committed to the project, and in fact more plans have evolved since, but we probably need to factor in a delay of at least six months before we can realistically start work.

Right now we don't have any information about the situation on the ground in this part of Spain. We will be relying for a lot of the projects on suppliers that we researched in December. We have no idea if these businesses even still exist or will be sustainable.

We're confident that we will still be able to achieve our goals but there is a lot of uncertainty in the near term.
 
True - a lot has changed since then. The world is on hold, it seems.
We were in sunny Nerja but had to cut it short. We were never so happy to see that big red maple leaf on the plane that came to get us!
 
Happy to hear you still got to take your vacation and returned safely to the frozen northland. I love Canada and could live there, except for the weather. And your PM.

I was intending to set out a few of our plans re CLC (a non-Solar related topic) in a more appropriate place on the forum but there isn’t one that is not implicitly dedicated to electricity. As you’d expect on a forum dedicated to electricity. If I’m going to go off topic anywhere I’ll do it in my own hello to the forum thread. If Will, or anyone else, thinks it should go somewhere else then I’m all ears. And on that subject Will, how ‘bout a general off-grid section?
 
45, and Erik, I hope you have a pretty good idea now what CLC is and its properties. Quick summary, cellular lightweight concrete is regular concrete (more usually cement without additional material) within which air is entrained before placing and curing. It is different from ‘Aircrete’ in the production process and in that it is made on-site, on-demand and results in a product that can be poured rather than discrete blocks.

Air in concrete changes its properties; it makes it structurally weaker. But there are plenty of upsides and, with careful design and choosing appropriate application, we can mitigate this disadvantage. The upsides are 1. lightness, 2. insulation, 3. flowability and self levelling properties, 4. ease of production and 5. cost.

Concrete in any form is weak in tension which is why reinforced concrete is a thing. We can, to an extent, do the same thing with CLC. Same approach, embedding materials that resist tensile forces. But before I get into that let me take a moment to describe the applications for which I intend CLC to play a staring role in Spain.

I’m going to lay a new floor, build new walls, install a new roof, form underground chambers for various tanks (water & fuel oil) and trench over a mile of ground. In each case CLC will have a role to play, in fact it will become a core part of the construction materials I use in Spain.

The floor will incorporate heating (solar heated water circulating through a matrix of Pex-Al-Pex tubing embedded in screed). This will be laid over an insulating layer of CLC which itself will be poured over existing tiles which are solid and on good foundations. This application is therefore not structural and no reinforcement is needed. Low density CLC will not resist penetration from even modest point forces (think ladies in stilettos). But once covered in a layer of screed, tile cement and tiles could support a baby elephant. Wearing stilettos. You get a lot of these in western Andalucía.

The walls need to resist collapse from lateral forces (those pesky elephants again) and vertical loads exerted by the weight of the roof. I’ll reinforce these with steel rebar, weight in a wall panel is not a significant issue.

Roof panels will be supported on a truss but shear forces will be set up due to loading associated with their own weight acting on the panels between the points of support. This forces the upper surface into compression and the lower surface into tension. I’ll use regular AR e-cloth GRP cladding to form a structural composite sandwich construction and a chopped basalt fibre reinforcement of the CLC core to create these.

The underground chambers will be used to bury tanks. This is for aesthetic reasons, for insulation and for protection from long term degradation through heat cycling, UV light and animals (rodents, boar, deer etc.). An underground chamber needs to be more than a hole dug in the ground, it needs structure and support. Tanks will be Intermediate Bulk Containers (IBCs). These are 1000 litre high density polyethylene tanks, usually mounted in a galvanised tubular steel cage on a pallet. The ‘chambers’ will be dug (hello tractor my old friend) and walled with two other cornerstones of construction materials I intend to use, recycled pallet wood and fluted polypropylene laminate. The void between the outside of the chamber structure and the ground it is placed in will be filled with CLC. Similarly for trenches for pipes and wires.

I hope that might be interest to someone in the off-grid community. I’d be delighted to expand on how CLC is made, basalt reinforcement, fluted polypropylene laminate and issues with it, making CLC panels and DIY floor levelling using CLC.
 
Ugh, very ambitious! Sounds like you're preparing for the apocalypse!
One mile of trench?
I know what you can call it: Alhambra West.
 
I am definitely going to be labeled "naive", and a property developer friend I have known for 40+ years (giving away my age) must have told me at least twenty times that I am underestimating the time it will take to do this stuff. I know. Some of it is experimental. Some won't work. I'll have to do some of it twice. Or more than twice, to get it right. It will take a long time. But provided we are comfortable, safe, happy, it doesn't matter. I am lucky to be supported by a strong, practical, technically knowledgable, hands-on wife. What my property developer friend cannot wrap his head around is that the journey is as important if not more than the destination. We will prioritise work needed to get us to base camp, and this might take six months of difficult living. But then we can spend twenty years tinkering with our project. And having fun.

> "Sounds like you're preparing for the apocalypse!"

I should point out that we are not 'preppers', tin foil hat people or conspiracy theorists. We didn't choose this place because it was off-grid. We chose it because it was beautiful and, in rural Spain, well, typically it's off-grid. I actually run a global wireless technology business with clients in the US, Europe and Asia and I will continue to run this business. So I'm quite normal! :cool:

45, you know we've been to Granada but never visited the Alhambra - it's on our list for sure but we just didn't get around to it - most of our time in Spain has been road trip. I do remember a truly spectacular meal in Granada though, ¡fantastico!

Yeah, the trench. We have two wells on the property. The one that services the house is, in my view and I am no expert on wells, in the wrong place. It's also not deep enough. In any case, the pump makes a buzzing noise but other than that it is lifeless. In the near term I'm going to extract water from the lake, actually only about 50 metres from the well but about ten metres lower elevation. There's a whole lot of water treatment planned, exciting (your mileage may...etc.) stuff to come if anyone is interested: hydrogen peroxide, aluminium sulphate, O3, nano-bubbles, Venturi injection, reverse osmosis, activated carbon, 254nm UV-C irradiation etc. If you think lake water won't work think again - we can turn raw sewage laced with a combo of Novichok and anthrax into sweet, sweet amber nectar. :) In reality we will turn water that has no heavy metals, human derived pathogens, agricultural runoff, industrial effluent etc. into pure H2O, better that we have in our nice, developed world, municipal supplies. No chlorine, no fluoride. My treatment regime will be serious overkill but, well, I've already bought and fabricated technologies, silly not to deploy them.

The pipe needs to be a mile long because I want to get the water to an elevation where it will have sufficient head to power the entire house supply. I have bought 15mm tube to supply the treatment and storage and 50mm to bring the treated water back to the house under gravity. Plenty of flow and pressure.

I know that there are always alternative ways to do things, and I'm not married to any particular plan - always willing to listen and learn from those with experience - but I'll set out my approach here for your interest (or not!)
 
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I am definitely going to be labeled "naive", and a property developer friend I have known for 40+ years (giving away my age) must have told me at least twenty times that I am underestimating the time it will take to do this stuff.
I'm with him: the only way I'd take on all that is to hire a really good General Contractor and pay him a fortune to manage all the details and the trades. Forget about the DIY.
If you want my advice (and there's no reason to believe you would) you should switch to decaf, sit down and take a deep breath. I'm a great believer in the KISS theory - plus I've noticed that as a general rule things in life tend to always get more complicated all by themselves!
And there's always that elusive work-life balance thing. Imagine yourself so busy tilting at this windmill you don't have time to live.
Your wife must be terrified. Either that or she figures at least it'll keep you busy .. LOL
 
Haha 45. Wise words indeed. You are, of course, completely right. The only sensible way forward is for us to employ professionals who know what they are doing. But here's the thing. We have worked hard all our lives to build up some kind of retirement fund. Well, maybe not all our lives, there might have been a bit of fun along the way. Perhaps. But we are retiring early (early fifties) and I do not intend for my business to continue to support us into this period, I intend for us to embark on the next chapter! That means that we need to be careful how we spend. We have three options (other than to continue to live comfortably in the the UK for the rest of our lives - kill me now). We could buy a nice villa, perfect condition, pool, near a beach, couple of acres. I am yawning already. We could buy the property we are buying and give $1m to architects, designers and builders to transform it. Boring and will lead to us needing to eat grass for the rest of our lives. Or we could live in it as it is, swapping a beautiful home in the UK for a crap falling down concrete monstrosity in a barren bit of Spanish rock.

No the reason, the only reason, that we are investing the rest of our lives in this experience is because it is an absolute adventure and a blank canvas. Reality is, excuse the confidence, that I'm an intelligent 'scientist', reasonably competent with a hammer, strong and fearless. I'm not afraid to fail, it really doesn't matter, it is just a learning experience. Seriously, that's not some BS management workshop soundbite. What does it matter if something doesn't work really? I'll do it again. And again until I get it right, I learn fast. Spesh if it's something I don't want to do again!

I'm with you, even if you're with my friend. I believe in KISS. It might not sound like it but in my mind I do know what I'm doing. This all sounds daunting but break it down into individual projects, it ain't no big thing. People achieve far more every day that I'm asking of myself.

The mould is only broken when we choose to do something different. We don't want ordinary. We want extraordinary. My property developer friend runs a business. He can't afford to take risks so like every other journeyman, he does what everyone else has always done. Solid, reliable ordinariness. Pah. We live in the 21st century - material and process innovations happen all the time. If you're open to explore the frontier of new opportunity then a world awaits you - seriously, a world away from what a traditional craftsman will tell you is possible. I don't need to concern myself with not being paid or being sued when it all goes tits up. It's on me. Do it again, properly, or at least more betterer.

Am I disparaging craftsmen and trades that have decades of experience and credentials - not in the least. I take every single opportunity to learn from these people - we need to keep these skills alive for the next generations. 95% of what I do will rely on these skills. I might not have them down right now but I'm pretty competent. 80%.

If I had to drag my wife of 26 years along with me on this journey then we wouldn't even be embarking on it. We have been searching for our Shangri-La for more than ten years and when we found this property in January 2018 we knew that we had found it. It was a joint decision, it could not work otherwise. Since that time we have talked in detail about every aspect of the work for two years. She is completely onboard.

Re she - she can handle a wrench, drive a tractor, weld etc. Don't worry 'bout her.

Here is the love of my life, isn't she gorgeous? Everything I ever wanted. Just a bit annoying that some random woman got in the way when I took the photo. We bought this in December when I started posting here.

1590429988592.png
 
Hi - sorry for much delayed response. Thanks for the interest.

Well due to the current shutdown of society, the economy, planet etc. unfortunately all plans are on hold. We're still 100% committed to the project, and in fact more plans have evolved since, but we probably need to factor in a delay of at least six months before we can realistically start work.

Right now we don't have any information about the situation on the ground in this part of Spain. We will be relying for a lot of the projects on suppliers that we researched in December. We have no idea if these businesses even still exist or will be sustainable.

We're confident that we will still be able to achieve our goals but there is a lot of uncertainty in the near term.

Good to hear from you. Everything is sloooooooooooooooooooooooooowly comming back to normal in here, Spain, but I believe it will not be until the end of June that our lives will be somewhat similar to what it used to be.
 
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