I have some personal news to share. We're moving! As some of you already know, we have been working on a formerly abandoned homestead site, completely off-grid, with a small log cabin in the woods, for years now, trying to make it livable again. We are finally at the point where we can make this happen in the coming months. We are tentatively planning this for the summer.
For the first time in my life, really, I will no longer be an active chemist. The push and pull of going back into the office, where I am not needed, has reached a boiling point for me. I am resigning from the company I helped start and build and moving onto the next thing in my life as a forest farmer, dad and homeschool parent. Wish me luck. I've done one thing for the last 30+ years and now I'm going cold turkey away from it, to something pretty much the opposite.
I think I will be posting some about our successes and failures with the new adventure. Don't expect any pictures of us or anything. I have never found a picture of myself on the internet and there's not one of either of my boys. We're pretty private people, but, hopefully there'll be lots of nature photos along our trails and pictures of our soon-to-be plant based foods.
This year I am hoping to get some good information from the brilliant minds of Mastodon about a lot of things, including:
#Greenhouse gardening. We have an ~800 sq ft, completely empty greenhouse. It has a large built in fan on one end, but no power. We have some solar panels on a hillside near it that are decades old, but still functional, that we are planning on repurposing to power the greenhouse along with the EcoFlow solar generators that we previously used to power the cabin before getting our permanent power up and running. Depending on how power hungry the motor is, we may need to add onto that. We'll see! I honestly don't know how many hours a day we'll need use the fans, for instance.
It's a blank slate, though. Zone 7b under the latest USDA map. Concrete floor. Otherwise completely empty. We have lots of thoughts about how best to use it, both to feed the family and have some left over. In the short term we would like to can and jar excess food, but we have plans to donate to the local community in the long term.
We have a year-round running spring at an appropriate elevation above it, but it would be quite the chore to collect and get that water to the greenhouse. We also have a year-round creek below it that we could conceivably pump water up from. We also have two boys who may end up running a lot of water around manually in the short term.
#HomeAssistant - I want our #Victron equipment to talk to our HomeKit in the end. While I don't intend to expand our HomeAssistant usage dramatically beyond that, I know that's how these things start and next thing you know you have 100 devices. It would be pretty cool to have greenhouse monitoring equipment as well.
Do I start a setup with something simple like the HomeAssistant Yellow if I don't want to spend a ton of time on this part of the plan?
It might be possible to get this to communicate to our new Rheem heat pump hot water heater, too, but that's the extent of our current HomeAssistant thoughts.
#ForestFarming - We have some endangered native plants, as well as some cash crops growing both natively and intentionally planted in the forest as some test plots. Think ramps, ginseng, etc. but we are forest farming noobs.
We also have some test mushrooms going in log plugs that we intend to expand as we learn what works and what doesn't.
#LIDAR and #GIS - The state we are moving to has pretty decent LIDAR data of our property. I've played around with it quite a bit and made some fun maps. I was even able to find some hidden old logging roads that haven't been used in 100 years. I don't even know what I don't know in this area, but I'm planning to keep playing with it for data for the forest farming, running water from springs, etc.
I'm sure I'll add to this in a thread as we go and more things come up. It's all, honestly, terrifying and exhilarating at the same time at the moment, particularly for our boys who will be leaving the only home they've ever known this summer.
Also, wish me luck on my first ever public toot, I believe. I block and mute a lot of people anyway, so at least I know where those buttons are up front :)
#victron (Hersteller für Wechselrichter für Solaranlagen usw.) ist augenscheinlich gar nicht ganz scheiße bzgl. Open Source.
Damit meine ich eigentlich nicht die eigentliche Steuerungssoftware eines Wechselrichters bspw., die ist Closed Source (iwo verständlich).
Aber man bekommt einfach SSH Zugang zum Raspberry Pi, der im Wechselrichter sitzt und es gibt verschiedene APIs, alles beschrieben. Node Red, Modbus TCP, MQTT, CLI... gefällt mir.
My Home Assistant Dashboard alerts if my Victron Solar System last fully charged the Battery more than a week ago
About two months ago we got woken in the middle of the night to the UPS system alarm screaming, and pitch darkness. The UPS keeps the Internet router alive, with the main solar system powering that. This should not happen as my solar system runs on a Lithium ...continues
This moment, it's the first time since mid of March that our house needs to pull its power from the grid.
We've been (theoretically) independent from the grid ever since but this week's bad weather with almost no sunshine causes our 30kWh #BYD battery down to its current 20% minimum SOC.
Actually, that's much better than I was hoping for. 👍
Does somebody know why my #Victron did consume power from the grid instead of using more #energy from the 30kWh #battery which had enough capacity above minimum #SOC to cover all of today's usage? 🤔