I want to share with you guys a really crappy situation we have been with our solar power system. This has been a continuing saga for months now, and it has greatly affected our off grid situation and my personal mental well being.
As an off-gridder and content creator, I have to make a choice. Do I post all the successes I have and pose like a badass super smart off grid person? Or do I share the blunders and mishaps along the way? Sharing failures takes a lot of guts, especially when I do something so blatantly stupid. But I think it's important to share the failures along with the successes, as it gives a better picture for others about the homesteading lifestyle.
I will start from the beginning, but also try to make this a shorter post, because I could write a whole chapter about what happened.
We purchased this property with no utilities on it, so we decided to do solar as our main form of electricity, we are in Arizona after all, and the sun is abundant.
We spent a TON of money on this system, around $15k after purchasing all the cabling, mounting hardware, backup battery system, panels, inverter, control panels, etc. For us, it is a lot of money, a whole lot.
We mounted the panels on our shipping container (which was also a whole lot of money) and all the equipment was housed inside the container. We placed all the heavy equipment on heavy duty metal racks, which also costed a WHOLE lot of money.
Get my drift? Stuff is really expensive! But that is not the point to this story.
As summer 2021 came along, our shipping container was getting really HOT. And we had to keep our temps down for the equipment to run properly. We had one of those spinning roof things to suck out the heat, but the Arizona sun just made it too hot in the container.
This is where things get REALLY STUPID.
We opened the door to our container for airflow. Now, shipping containers are waterproof and mouseproof when the door is CLOSED. Not when it is open...
The local mice decided that our container made a great home and they moved in, in droves. They literally crawled and pooped on every surface, all over the batteries and our totes, boxes, equipment, etc.
We worked on culling the population, but they just kept multiplying. I wasn't terribly worried about it until....
We went to our local bike night for a couple of hours. When we got home, we had no power, which was odd. We investigated our equipment and saw that our inverter had smoked! It could have really been a disastrous fire, but we got lucky.
We figured it was a manufacturing defect and it was still under warranty, so we crated it up and sent it to AIMS Power, after paying nearly $300 for freight costs.
I got an email from AIMS, assuming it would tell me how it was all their fault and they would repair it and send it back, covering all the freight costs.
That was a big NOPE! The reality is, the mice got into the inverter and peed on a couple of circuit boards. It caused these boards to fry and melted down our inverter. Case closed!
Also, so much dust and bugs, yuck!
We were in a pretty good shock from this, because the openings into the inverter are TINY. But mice have a way of getting into everything, and we had to learn the hard way.
AIMS Power will not work on an inverter that has mouse excrement in it, so it is up to us to repair the machine.
This is where things get really fun. The circuit boards that were fried have been sitting on a SLOW BOAT FROM CHINA for months.
The boat itself has been sitting off the port of California just waiting to be unloaded. So our off grid solar power system has been offline for close to half a year.
The silver lining is that we acquired our next door property that had a well and a power pole on it, and we got it for a steal - this will make for an excellent post. So we luckily have had power. If not, we would have been on generator power, or simply no power for that whole time.
Update! The boards have arrived!
After waiting for over FIVE months for the replacement boards, they have finally arrived. And they costed us over $900. Shipping the inverter to and fro costed us over $400. And our power bill added up to about $700 for those four months. So, the whole debacle ended up being a $2,000 mistake. The inverter itself totals to around $3,500 so it was worth the fix instead of buying a replacement.
Moral to the story. Mice can and will DESTROY things quickly, they can do so much damage within a very short amount of time. Do not underestimate mice. If you have a mouse problem, resolve it as quickly as you can. And do not assume that they will not get into something, because they will squeeze themselves into ANYTHING.
Also, don't be afraid to share failures, as we can all learn from your mistakes. Maybe this post will help someone out, maybe not.
Thanks for reading!
Sincerely, Regina Cal.
Very Update!
I should hope that someone in the Community may have the part you need and be able to send it to you?
That "Slow Boat from China" thing is Really a THING and might be more of the norm going forward. I think Radio Shacks should come back with support for a wider array of Solar Equipment to sell...
Yea it can be dangerous and set fires but hey, so be it!
HIVE!Regards
The part is very custom to the solar power company we get our supply from. Luckily, it arrived on Friday, and we were able to repair the unit, yay!
Well, if your mishap has taught me anything, it's that Arizona mice are marginally smarter than Pennsylvania mice. I once had mice make a nest inside my tractor once... a rather fatal mistake for said mice. No damage to my tractor's wiring, thankfully, but between the bifurcated, singed mice on the floor and the mass of fluff behind the engine, it was an absolute mess to clean up.
Always make sure that your traps are baited and set! BTW, if you're curious about dead mouse disposal, I suggest feeding them to chickens. You might not believe it, but a chicken can eat a mouse whole.
Interesting. Luckily your tractor remained intact! We were surprised to only find one mouse carcass, I thought there would be dozens. Lesson learned: it only takes ONE.
chickens are like velociraptors around mice... seen it a few times!
HIVE!Regards for the post AND this comment!
Well, to answer your first question, I would expect nothing less from a badass super smart off grid person than to share their worst failures, and most stupid mistakes! There's no shame in admitting to them, and it may be highly valuable info for other aspiring badass super smart off grid people.
As for mice, believe me, it could get worse... or let's say smaller! Have you heard of the damage bedbugs (as well as probably many other kinds of insects) can cause to electronics? So even if you manage to make a place entirely mouse-proof, other critters might still be able to get in. So what solution can I suggest? Hermetically sealing off a place can be super hard to impossible, which means you won't get around monitoring carefully and regularly. (Even then you could miss things, which is likely what may have happened.)
As for the shipping container, those things can be amazing (I'm a big fan of them), but they also heat up quite fast. Have you thought about berming them up? Of course, that involves moving a bit of dirt around, but it makes a world of a difference, especially if you dig in the southern side. Another option would be letting plants cover the thing, but that may not be entirely viable in your climate (scorching days and freezing nights I guess), and in any case it takes time for them to grow.
Anyway, thanx for sharing!
Thank you for the very nice comment!
There were a lot of moths in the inverter, and the guy that works for the solar company told me that one of his customer's boards got fried because a spider crawled over it and made a connection and POOF! $500 board fried!!! I didn't know about the bedbugs, those things are so nasty.
We did elastomeric the roof which helped, but I think we need to elastomeric the southern exposure side, as lots of heat comes thru that. An earthbag berm is actually a really good idea.
No plants for us, although we don't get past the low 90s (AZ mountains) the water is the issue. Good thought.
Hope all is well for you!
Well, I'm glad you liked it! 😜
Yes, bugs are such an issue. I've been reading a lot of Paul Stamets lately, making me envision some mean fungal defense. For our theater building in Mazunte it's actually the termites that pose the greatest problem, and some fungi are super effective in combating them. So I'm sure some other ones could be just as effective in protecting your electronics. However, I'm also a bit afraid of causing too much disruption to their society, which I don't want to do. Maybe regular maintenance (meaning cleaning the equipment inside and out) is the best technique after all... 😞
Definitely going to be opening up the inverter and cleaning it out once a month. The shipping container should technically be bug free if we keep it all closed up. That is fascinating about the fungus method, I am going to check that out! It may make for a good post if you want to write about it 😉
Well, I can only write what I've read: There are certain fungi (sold online as a natural insecticide) who not only kills individual specimen of a certain species (say termites), but it infects, kills, and decomposes their whole hive. Not much of a post, if you ask me, unless I combine it with some personal experience in practice. But like I said, as "natural" as this whole approach seems, for me it's just switching from chemical to biological warfare, making me worry that its collateral damage will come back to bite us in the ass.
For me learning from the mistakes of others is gold. This was a very valuable post for me, so I appreciate you sharing it.
I am glad you found my post helpful!
At this point, I wonder whether a cheap little window-mount AC unit through the wall might pay for itself despite the energy drain.
We did try the small AC and even cut a hole in the side of the connex for it, but it just couldn't keep up. We are going to coat the side with elastomeric, already did the roof. And maybe berm it up as stortebaker recommended.
First off bury it. You don't even have to bury that shipping container very deep however the ground is your best insulation right off the bat so dig a trench and move that shipping container in there. You cannot just bury it.
I would definitely use a stepped trench and then carefully stacked stone around and build up walls. Getting some material to shore up the roof and then place at least a foot of dirt over the top. And I would definitely use a lot of biochar and amendments to the soil and turn the sun facing side into a garden which will help to keep the soil cool. You could always use the rocks and slowly start building rock walls and having the rocks support each other instead of pressing against the container. Definitely would be an excellent place to start hiding all those rocks that you're pulling out of garden areas and other places.
As to the mice problem!!!! Well actually you really should look into this opportunity. Especially if you have this kind of numbers putting up some traps and starting to farm these mice..... Yep mice are excellent pet food! And barn cats!!!! Lots and lots of barn cats.
Just whatever you do do not use poisons and look into the resetting traps!
By the way all those mice can be ground up and used as fish food for an aquaponics system. As well as black soldier fly larvae maggots!
Have you thought about running a small greenhouse with aquaponics?
Just like anything life has its own issues and nothing runs perfect.
However with a couple of modifications you are doing amazingly well and congratulations on getting the power back going!!!!
Merry Christmas happy holidays and I know with your positive attitude as well as tenacity you will achieve success.