Big, bad storm

It's been a busy past few days with our projects moving forward nicely.

Yesterday morning we went to Study Butte to get our car inspected, picked up some hardware for our PV rack and headed back to the ranch. We stopped by the Grub Shack for some breakfast and ran into John Wells (http://thefieldlab.blogspot.com/) and were able to go see his place. John has some really successful projects going on. One of the most notable ones is the use of storage containers to make a courtyard space with an arched roof he built himself over the top of the four containers. In the open space John will make a garden/greenhouse.




We also finished our solar power pole-mount rack yesterday. It turned out great, and we're getting much more out of our array during optimal sun conditions. The photo above was taken after the storm, we are still lacking combiner
box and wire buried in conduit. We also upped the wire to 6 gauge, which lowers the voltage drop to the batteries. While I was tightening the last screw on the rack, we noticed a storm on the horizon so we picked up our tools and headed inside.

The storm progressed pretty quickly, and we experienced very high winds, lightning, and rain. The worst part was the large, ice-cube-sized hail which pelted us for almost an hour. The large hail seemed isolated (lucky us) but that seems to happen often out here. We found out after the storm calmed down, we went out with flashlights to assess the damage.

Two of our chickens died during the storm, and while it is impossible for us to know how, we have some suspects (primarily hail or panic). We were also very worried about our solar panels, but the most expensive 130 watt mono-crystalline panel made it through the hail just fine. We do have a panel with a plastic lens which earned a good-sized hole (right after we just patched it up).  The inverter and solar controller both stopped working, but thankfully the controller dried out and went back into service this morning, and the inverter finally decided to work just this hour (thus enabling our internet!).