The year 2021 in review.

[kaveman]

I'm sitting here a little bored today and thinking back to exactly one year ago and wondering what advancements I've made in the year. I can think of three areas of note.

#1 Solar:

A year ago I had none and I still don't have anything up and running, but I have parts. Picked up three full pallets of takeoff panels cheap, 240W and 290w at $48 each. That's 75 panels in all and about 20kw,....more than twice what I could ever need. Turns out that's the easy/cheap part. After the panels I entertained myself by purchasing a bunch of inexpensive and fairly useless bits,.....800w and 1200w inverters and a bunch of cheap Chinesium charge controllers. They'd work in a Mad Max situation where you just wanted to throw out some panels and wire a bunch of salvaged car batteries together, but not really good for anything else. But a couple hundred bucks and in a pinch I'd have 'something', so why not?

Finally figured out what I needed for a 'real' system and started spending the money. What I wanted was a Growatt 8kw split phase inverter but when I was looking there were none available. I opted for the 6kw model just to have something in case all imports got cut off or the prices when ballistic. Picked that up in October and also grabbed a 6 into 1 combiner box while I was at it. Next slot to fill was storage. Ordered three 5kwh LiFePo server rack batteries(also back in October)and just picked them up this week from FedEx. It's not a lot of storage capacity but it's some and I can add more to it next time I have five grand to blow. Man, it was a lot easier spending $3600 on three truckloads of panels than it was spending $5k on batteries I could stick in the back of my car. Like I said, the panels were the easy part.

Signature Solar hits my inbox every day with end-of-year deals and they finally got me yesterday. They have the 8kw Growatt in stock for only $100 more than I paid for the 6kw so I'm upgrading before ever even opening the box on the 6kw. The 8kw will be here next week,....along with a couple more combiner boxes. WTH, might as well start assembling two complete systems.

 

[kaveman]

#2 Greenhouse

I also want to start growing food to augment what I have stored. I've watched a hundred videos and have collected half a dozen books on geothermal greenhouse design. Here too I'm mostly just collecting the bits I would need to build one. Greenhouse poly fabric seems to be getting scarce(it all comes from China, naturally). I've settled on a size,....25'x50',....and I would want to go double layer so I've purchased four sheets. Two sheets for the greenhouse and two sheets for replacement after 5 or 6yrs. I've bought a hundred DC fans and blowers of various sizes for inflating the two sheets of poly and for moving air. You take the hot air out of the greenhouse during the day and pump it into the ground for heat storage, pulling the heat back out at night. Doing that you can extend your growing season several months and if you're efficient enough you can actually grow greens all year long. The DC fans will probably be direct wired to solar panels,....when the sun's up they blow. I'll need separate fans and tubes pulling heat out of the ground at night and those will need battery storage to run. I'm also looking into storing heated water tanks under ground with solar panels driving electric heating elements direct,.....no electronics or batteries needed. Combining that with the geothermal might make it a 12mo/yr operation.

I want to work with the Mittleider system of growing. You can work with any growing medium, dirt, sand, sawdust, whatever. Doesn't matter,....you'll feed the plants weekly with everything they need to grow. You don't need any nutrients in the 'soil' at all. So that means you need to stock your fertilizers and fertilizers are getting expensive and they're gonna be hard to come by next year. I started calling around back in October to see what could be had and what it was going to cost. At that time, 40# bags were about $15/bag and nobody had what I wanted(19-19-19). I went into Big R to see what they had and the best fertilizer they had available was 13-13-13 which was the lowest grade you're supposed to use in the Mittleider system(13% nitrogen, 13% phosphorus, 13% potassium). I grabbed a few bags of fertilizer and a few bags of lime and called it a day. You're supposed to mix 25# of fertilizer with 4# of Epsom salt(magnesium sulfate)and the ten ounce packet of micro nutrients for a complete feed. Feed once a week. Anyway,.....

My next stop was at Walmart for some cat food and as I was walking from the pet section I literally tripped over a pallet of fertilizer in the aisle. 40# bags on sale for $5 each, but it was 10-10-10. Well, that's too low a level of the ingrediments says I, can't use that. Or can I? Turns out a 25# bag of 13-13-13 has exactly the same 'amount' of nitrogen/phosphorus/potassium as a 40# bag of 10-10-10. Instead of mixing 25# of 13 with 4 pounds of Epsom salt and 10oz of micro nutrient and spreading at 1/2oz per foot I can mix 40# of 10 with the same 4# of Epsom and 10oz of nutrient and spread at 3/4oz per foot and I get exactly the same 'stuff in the ground'. Bought 3/4 ton of fertilizer(more than ten yrs worth)and saved a couple hundred dollars.

And that was a good thing to save because the micro nutrients are kinda spendy. Each 10oz packet is $7-8 but a couple hundred spent there gets me another ten years worth of feed. Today I did Epsom salt,....laid in over a hundred pounds,....and had to go to four stores to do it. Walmart's got the best deal at $5 per 8# bag but I found something online at Walgreens that beats it, although I don't know how they do it. Epsom salt at Walgreens is $3.99 for the three pound bag but only $2.99 for the six pound bag,....and the six pound bags are buy one, get the second 50% off. That doesn't make any sense and the stores are hit-and-miss for quantity, but so far that's been the deal. I order online. Try to put 12 in the cart and it always reduces my order to 8 bags(if the store even has 8 bags), but so far that's been working. I have over ten yrs worth of Magnesium feed at about 40 cents a pound. It's over a buck a pound buying in 50# sacks so I really don't understand how they're selling it so cheap. Bet that deal doesn't last.

Also just received a $250 order for heirloom seed. Probably got way more than I need but since I don't really know what I need I shot high on quantity. Makes sense when 10 ounces of seed only costs about twice as much as 1 ounce of seed. Sometimes I just bought several pounds when the price structure said to. I can share what I don't need, or eat a lot of it as sprouts.

 

[kaveman]

#3 Food Storage:

Nothing really new here, just more of the same. I've always put food back but I really started getting serious about it in 2020. 2021 just continues along the same line. Spending about a hundred bucks per week for the last two yrs and shopping pretty well. Every dollar or two represents an entire day's worth of food so it adds up quick. I'm running out of buckets again. My target for pretty much everything has been ten years worth and I'm there.

#4 would be Security, but I didn't do security this year. I got more security than I know what to do with. I made about $30k worth of security go away this year to pay for all the other stuff and I still have more than I know what to do with.