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Gurney Seeds. Grow your own food.

 

Links

This is a great resource for free articles and information: Article-library.network

Whatever information you want is here. Submit your article for free. Our purpose is to make an article-library. Net the biggest information source.

Northstar Energy Products. They manufacture portable residential solar generators. These things produce from 1,000 watts to 4800 watts. If you live in a power outage area, this may be the way to go. I'm going to try to see one in person for an episode of "This Old Shack".

45 LED floodlight (it's bright!)
If you're in the market for totally portable solar power, check out Powerenz. Their units use the same type and brand of gel batteries that I started out with; great equipment. They even make military grade equipment!
Northstar Energy Products. They manufacture portable residential solar generators. These things produce from 1,000 watts to 4800 watts. If you live in a power outage area, this may be the way to go. I'm going to try to see one in person for an episode of "This Old Shack".

Visit my other sites:

NEC grounding regulations (PDF file)

Own a small business? My wife has a book to help small businesses move.

I use a program called "Homer" from The National Renewable Energy Laboratory. This program allows you to input all data (and I mean every damn little bit of information including emissions, clouds, everything) about your system to help both design and maintain it. Homer can be downloaded at http://www.nrel.gov/homer

 

 

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Round the Bend Wizards

Northern Michigan Solar Cabin

Official home of "This Old Shack"

Learn about alternative energy, hybrid systems and watch pointless videos!

 Updated:06/25/2008

Welcome to our solar powered cabin, now with more pointless videos and photography. All power is provided by solar panels and a battery bank. Use the links at the left to learn more.  If you haveA photograph of our solar powered cabin. any questions, send me an email! I'm always happy to provide a convoluted answer to a simple question. At this site, you can learn from my real world experiences in solar energy production and how I produce power at our cabin in Northern Michigan. The cabin is located right on the 45th parallel near Gaylord, Michigan. Check out our photography site  which has some photos around the cabin in the nature and winter sections!

 

  Really great resources

 
Renewable Energy Access site

Member, Gasavers.org

 Weblog Commenting and Trackback by HaloScan.com
Green Trust is located in northern New York State and is a great resource for alternative energy options. Check them out. Say yes to Michigan!

 Free classifieds, lively discussion groups, meet people in your area, promote your business, network. Join Michigan's online forum today!

Alternative Energy Learning Resources
Peukerts formula explained Input your data for Peukerts formula Sierra Nevada Airstreams battery bank information.

Off the grid!

Latest Diary entry:

 Site news

Coming soon: Episodes 2 and 3 of the 2008 season of This Old Shack!

Well, I got tired of listening to the usual garbage about oil and food prices and why there're rising like a loaf of bread with too much yeast. Now I investigate and you get to read about it in my Energy Blog

Beer, alternative energy and the world's most arrogant man. All in This Old Shack episodes

Be sure to check out the earthquake/volcano page while you're here! 

 		 

6-22-08; Photographs of weather stations in Michigan.

6-21-08; Each entry in the energy blog now has a comment link for posting comments. The comments are courtesy of Halo.

Watch our latest lightning video, shot at the shack last week.

Oh baby, do we have a video for you! I'm a storm chaser and as luck would have it we had a major lightning storm here at the main house. Lightning hitting the street in front of us, transformers blowing up and our neighbors getting hit by lightning. Check it out!

If you've watched my Youtube trailer for the season premier of This Old Shack, you're probably saying, "Bill, what the heck happened to your hair?". Go here to find out more.

Don't ask me why, but I've recently become interested in studying earthquake/volcano activity around the world; ash plumes and such. I've added a page with RSS feeds and links to satellite imagery. 

And finally the data you've been looking for, excerpts from the NREL redbook!

The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has released their datasets for the climate. 

Carbon Dioxide map here. 

Spring weather outlook here.

 

northhouse.jpg (118099 bytes)
A lovely photo of the cabin in summer

But why?

There were several reasons for the switch:

  • Sprinkle of rain = power failure.

  • Giving a little back by not using so much.

  • Independent living.

Benefits:

  • Renewable power.
  • Learning about solar power.
  • Own stock in the solar panel company. :-)
  • I like batteries.
  • I can sit around smoking a cigar because I'm an energy mogul!

Drawbacks:

  • Maintenance.
  • Installation.
  • Bunch of black glass panels sitting around.

● Email Me ●

Plugs and ads

 

  

 

Watch This Old Shack here!

How I test

Look, using testing equipment is all well and good but those spec sheets don't mean squat if you can't run YOUR stuff for as long as you want to. So what I do (so you don't have to) is get the equipment (batteries, inverters, solar panels) and put what I run on it. Usually about 30-50 watts at 12 volts or a few amps draw. You know, turning lights on and off, running a computer (a laptop) and whatnot. 

Throughout the test, a digital meter is run on the bank and a hydrometer is used once an hour to determine whether the meter is reading the correct voltage. During the sunlight hours on the panels, there is another digital meter installed at the primary junction box (where the panels feed into the 10 gauge cables that feed to the charge controller) that measures panel voltage and amps. Here is the Excel file of one of the tests.

One of the things that I like the best about alternative energy is that you can make it as complicated or simple as you like. Some people, even though they use alternative energy simply don't have a good grasp on the entire substance that goes into the makeup of an engineered system that has been built from scratch.

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