We do get some amazing weather here.
Right after this, the sky opened up. A few minutes later the sun came out. Still pouring though.
Weather
Written by karen on July 19th, 2011Getting a better idea of what this will really look like
Written by karen on July 14th, 2011In our on-going quest to see how much work we can plow through in a short period of time, we got the last of the i-joists up today. These were on the high part of the roof in the big room.
We did the ledgers and hangers all yesterday, so the process today was cut the i-joists to fit, hoist them onto the roof, go up on both ends (Brad on the short roof, me on the scaffolding), lower the i-joist into the hangers, repeat, repeat. Afterward, we nailed a ton of brackets.
It really isn’t until you get the roof on that you can tell what a room is going to be like.
We’ve looked at drawings, 3D models, etc. of our house, but today we really saw what it will be like. Wow.
Four walls
Written by karen on July 11th, 2011Monsoon season has officially arrived, though we haven’t gotten more than a couple very brief showers, not really enough to even soak the ground, but still promising. The good news is that the evenings have finally started cooling off. Yesterday, we had a remarkable 40 degree span in temperatures (about 110 in the afternoon and then in the 60s in the evening). This makes for much better sleeping; nights in the 90s weren’t doing much for me. We’ve also had some lovely evening shows of thunder and lightning. Disturbing to the cows, but beautiful to us.
This week we’ve been working hard and now have all our exterior walls framed — including the very high ones, which we weren’t sure we could put up by ourselves.
We did.
The process went something like this. Brad stood on the ground and heaved the wall up. (For one particularly wide section, we both heaved from the ground and propped the wall up on ladders.)
Then I stood on the scaffolding with a rope and pulled with all my might while Brad pushed the wall the rest of the way up. (For that particularly wide wall, we used two ropes.) The scaffolding was actually tied off to the truck so that it didn’t tip forward.
Initially, we didn’t put in all the window framing and headers in order to keep the weight as light as possible. Then we added them in place later.
Before extra framing
And the same wall segment after
Overall, it wasn’t as hard as we thought it would be. Most things aren’t.
Trouble on the solar horizon?
Written by brad on July 7th, 2011Our system has been running for a year and a half now without a single outage. I did finally order a generator. It’s not here yet, but it’s on its way. I was waiting for a reason to place the order; hoping not to cut the purchase too close – still hoping that. So, what prompted me to place the order? It was the second day ever that we failed to fully charge our battery bank.
The first day the batteries didn’t charge was not a surprise. It was a very cloudy day and the clouds started early. The second time was clear as a bell; there was not a cloud in sight. Hmmm. That’s odd. And a little scary to me. It’s summer. We’re are seeing some solar power production for 11 hours a day. The sweet spot is still before and after noon as always. How could this be?
I posted on a couple of forums that discuss solar power related topics asking what might cause this and got a lot of responses. Many were useful, some were not. One that said to ignore the problem unless I actually run out of power I marked as not useful despite his being something called a super-moderator. Most people suggested different things that might cause this loss in power: lose or broken wiring, bad solar panels, faulty solar charging unit, poor alignment to the sun, dust in the air and dirt on the panels.
Before I get on to the debugging section, a bit about the problems debugging the system. Well- it’s a system. There are many parts from different companies. Everything they do is somehow tied together. If there were a problem with the batteries it could cause this problem. The solar charging controller uses all available power when bulk charging, but uses less as the batteries get full. This looks like the panels are producing less power, but it’s actually less being used.
I started at what seemed like the beginning to me. I tighten everything that could be tightened. I took apart every cover and found them all. That didn’t help. I washed the panels in plain water with a mop. I realigned the panels to the sun. It was a tiny change and didn’t seem worthwhile, but I would do anything to track this down.
At this point I was feeling like I had looked at everything that I might be responsible for. It was time to consider that the solar panels are bad or the solar charging unit is bad. (The solar charging unit was the least likely to me.) Maybe something really strange like one of the DC breakers was bad.
I did a close inspection of the solar panels and saw nothing interesting or odd. The description I heard from someone with bad panels was that the damage was obvious.
Next I started to test the panels as best I could. Each group of three panels are wired together (in series) and it’s not easy to test them individually. Still, I figured that testing each group would reveal something interesting. I mean, it’s unlikely that more than a few panels would be bad. This means one or two of the groups should show reduced power compared to the rest. I carefully turned off and on each breaker; measuring the power before and when it breaker was off. When I was done every group tested just the same. I tried this again except that this time I turned all the breakers off and then turned each one on and the off. Still no difference. The panels seem fine. Well that, or they are all equally bad.
Somewhere around this point in the debugging it hit me that it’s been really hot lately-much hotter than last year. I started to wonder if heat was playing a factor in this. A few people responded in the forums that high heat did reduce the effectiveness of solar panels.
I contacted Kyocera via email to ask about the problem. They were very helpful. And not just helpful, but they did not prejudge the situation or suggest they were not responsible. They asked me to test a few things. None of the tests found anything very interesting. The amount of power being produced was down to 1900 watts versus 2880, the all time high. I mentioned the extreme heat here to the Kyocera representative and they did some calculations. They were guessing a surface temperature of 150 F degrees based on the outside temperature. At 150F you can expect about a 25 percent loss in power. Assuming the power the panels are rated at: 2520 watts for the 12 panels, a 25 percent loss would put you at 1890. I’m seeing little better than that. More evidence that it’s the heat is that when I sprayed the panels with water from a hose the power output went up 200 watts in just a few minutes. And best of all was a cloudy day. The sun was behind the clouds for a good half-hour and then it returned strong. The panels had clearly cooled down because I saw 2500+ watts for awhile before it gradually began to drop.
So no, there is not trouble on the solar horizon. The only issue is that I had planned on having more power than I do. Still, this happens in summer and the days are longer. Plus, the generator is on its way. (Just got a call and it should be here tomorrow.) And frankly, I don’t think we’ve ever really taxed the batteries.
The battery voltage drops fast once the sun is down. Until it doesn’t that is. Then it goes slow. And I suspect, slower and slower and maybe slower than that. I’ve never been inclined to really test how long the batteries will last without sun. It seemed too dangerous as the sun would certainly not shine the next day if I ran it all the way down. Once the generator is up and running, it might be time to find out.
It’s meant for drinking, not swimming
Written by karen on July 5th, 2011I went out to water the garden this evening and look who showed up to take a dip in our animal watering hole.
This is our first turtle sighting of the year. And it hasn’t even rained yet.
Ebb and flow
Written by karen on July 2nd, 2011It’s weird how construction progresses. It seems like sometimes we work a lot and the progress is slow, and other times, things seem to leap ahead. That was today.
We got up at 5am to get some work in before the heat set in. By noon, we’d not only finished all the remaining parapet walls, but got the back half of the house’s i-joists (ceiling beams) in. Amazing.
To put up the i-joists, we first had to hang a 2×12 ledger board to which the hangers would attach. (Oh and before that, we had to move a gigantic stack of lumber. More fallout from the delivery without a bobtail.)
(Sorry about the misspelling in this photo; I’m too tired/lazy to fix it.)
On the other side of the ledger, a bracket attaches to each stud to make sure it can carry the weight of the roof. Each bracket has 12 nails in it, and they’re at very difficult-to-get-to angles. Perfect work for the palm nailer!
These are the long i-joists, running the whole width of the house, over our bedroom and the office/laundry.
Here’s the bedroom side. The high wall in the foreground is the back wall of the kitchen, which has (or will have, I guess) a high ceiling like the great room.
A chance of rain
Written by karen on June 29th, 2011It’s hard to believe that it’s almost the beginning of July, but here we are. I’ve been traveling a lot this month, which has meant not a lot of big work on the house, but I’m now home for a long stretch. With some big work projects completed, we are now full steam ahead on the house.
After two months, the fires are now finally safely far from us, though our thoughts are with those who are now affected by them. The firefighters’ camp has moved north. It was strange to see them all cleared out in just 24 hours.
Just as the fire updates stopped coming, we began getting warnings of impending flooding. It’s a little hard to think about that since we haven’t had rain since last year, but the big monsoons are due any day now. In fact, I am writing this on a plane going back home and heard from Brad yesterday that we got our first sprinkle of rain. (I was in Philadelphia, and it rained there, as it often does. I had an overwhelming urge to run into the middle of the street and dance in the rain.)
The weather has been extraordinarily hot at home, hotter than it ever got last year. It has been between 105 and 110, and even the evenings have not been as pleasantly cool as they usually are.
The garden is thriving in the heat, except for the eggplants. The more I read about them, the more I think they don’t thrive in any conditions we are likely to have; they seem to be very sensitive to heat, cold, wind, and other variations. Ours are doing ok, but not exactly thriving. The tomatoes, on the other hand, are going crazy. At last count, there were over 50 fruits. I think we will be canning sauce and salsa soon. Brad has put in another bed for more garlic, and I look forward to having an even bigger and better garden every year.
The deer around the house each evening are getting more numerous and less shy, especially as it is so hot and dry, and we have water for them. Brad has won the latest round of battles with the bees in the front tree, but the war remains in question. (Any suggestions on getting bees out of a tree are welcome.) We have not seen even one rattlesnake this year. In fact, my only snake sighting was a very small garter snake that was nearly on top of my shoe one morning we went walking. Both the snake and I were quite startled by each other.
When the first rain comes, we will anxiously scout about for all the wildlife that seems to appear at that prompting. velvet mites, our lovely turtles, frogs, and whatever else might spring from the ground. It’s an exciting time that first rain!
Garden update
Written by karen on June 12th, 2011Things are growing like crazy in this heat.
Brad harvested his garlic. (This is only about a third of it.)
We’ve been eating lots of peas.
The tomato plants have about 20 small green tomatoes growing.
And there are 5 or so little eggplants.
We’ve planted beans and cucumbers, which are growing great, and melons and winter squash, which aren’t up yet. We’re still cutting lettuce and wondering if it will ever stop growing or get bitter.
My little pony wall
Written by karen on June 7th, 2011
Big milestone
Written by karen on June 3rd, 2011We have spent the better part of a week working on this, and the vertical vigas and glulam are now in place. (A glulam, for the uninitiated, is a long structural timber made of several layers of wood that are laminated together – the crossbeam in this photo. Vigas are wood beams made of a single piece of wood-the round vertical beams in this photo.)
The hardest part of all of this was that the vigas and the glulam are all extremely heavy. After we moved the vigas, Brad drilled holes in the bottom of each one and epoxied in a long bolt.
A metal plate that was part of the mounting kit went on the bottom.
We then drilled holes in the slab into which the other end of the bolt would be epoxied.
It was difficult to get the viga lined up with the hole, and we wanted to do a “trial run” first (sans epoxy) to make sure the placement was right. Once you epoxy them in, that’s where they’ll be forever.
The next step was moving the glulam up to the roof. It was heavier than the vigas, so we used the truck to move it and got a lot of exercise hoisting it up.
Then we cut out notches where the glulam would sit in the viga. We used a chainsaw for this, another new experience. I thought I’d really like chainsawing, but as it turned out, we both hated it.
The final work was done with a chisel and grinder. The grinder was really useful for this.
On one end, we built a little stack of 2x6s for the end of the glulam to sit on while we seated the other end. (Note the rope. It was very windy the whole time we were doing this, making it all the more difficult. You wouldn’t think a gust of wind could blow over a piece of wood that weighs several hundred pounds, but it can and did.)
After trying to seat the glulam in place, it didn’t quite fit. Not only does the notch have to be the right size, but how square it is (how parallel all the parts are down the line) makes a big difference. So we went through this a few times…trying it, grinding, and trying it again.
Eventually, the clerestory windows will sit above the glulam, and the room in front of it will have a high ceiling with vigas in the ceiling. Building the pony wall for those windows is the next task.
