This year will not be like the last: I filed my taxes electronically, and I got my refund already! So, what does a homesteader do with his tax return? Solar panels!!
http://www.sunelec.com/ has some of the best prices on solar that I've seen yet, the panels that I ordered were $1.19/watt USD. Never in history have solar panels been that cheap! In Canada, the cheapest panels I've seen are about $3/watt, although there wouldn't be any shipping.
Even with shipping at $700, I'm still getting 1280 watts of solar lovin', along with a top quality charge controller (Outback, of course) and a combiner box. The charge controller will take the very high voltage from the panels, topping at 71 volts, and step it down to 24. I can still add another 400-500 watts to the system in the future without adding more charge controllers.
I've decided to put the panels on the ground level, on a movable, tiltable platform since I may need to move them in the future. Not to mention, the ground is still frozen solid, so digging posts isn't an option...
Which brings me to my next question;
Where the H-E double hockey sticks is spring?? We're still getting temps overnight around -25C, and daytime is running about -10C or less! I guess no spring for us this year. We should be getting above freezing temps in the daytime by this point. It's supposed to warm up in a few days. We'll see if that actually happens. As I recall, by this time last year, we had no snow, and I could already feel the soil warming up. I haven't actually seen soil yet, so we're a bit behind...
Which is why I need a greenhouse!! Lucky for me, I already dug the pit last fall, so I just need a bit of plastic, some framing, and a couple of warm weeks so I can shape the soil a bit. I've started window shopping for garden goodies, and I might have a bead on a garden tractor for $300! Propane powered, not that I care. It could be powered by unicorn feathers, and I would find a way to run it.
I haven't had a lot of pics, because of the difficulty of uploading from the iPhone (might want to work on that a bit, APPLE!) but here's a few.
This is one of the many bizzare snowdrifts that we've accumulated this year. Definitely a smaller one, some of the big ones are 5 feet tall, and unfortunately, just outside the door!
This was once a wind turbine rectifier, now a smoking melted heap of Chinese crapola. I'm making a new one from better parts. I might salvage the heating coils from this, I do need a diversion load. The wind was 80 kph, I honestly thought the turbine was going to explode, but I shorted the wires, as you can see at the bottom, and she stopped.
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