Our Solar Rack and Pole

Before I get to the pole...We've spent a lot of time working on plastering the exterior of the front wall lately. We are getting close to "good enough." Directly above is the tire wall portion and above and to the left is the can wall portion.  The sand that we used up to this point has been very course (it has bigger granuals of sand -- rocks, even).  For the plastering, though we will need to switch to a finer sand.  The layer shown here was done with the same sand and the cement cracked some as it cured.  It won't cause us any problems because we still have a couple of layers to do, but it definitely shows us why to use the finer sand! On the left is our can/wood-block/bottle wall ready for plastering.

As previously noted we get some very high winds. How do you keep $5000 worth of fragile solar panels from blowing away like out cisterns, our insulation, and our porta-potty? Mount them to a REALLY secure pole!  We bought a 10 foot piece of 6 inch diameter steel pipe and had two horizontal fingers welded to it - to keep it from turning inside the hole.  Then we proceded to dig a five foot deep, two foot diameter hole.  There is an auger attatchement for a bobcat that will dig that exact hole in a matter of minutes.  We didn't use it. 1.It's much more expensive than the tool you see here, and 2. every bobcat in the state of Colorado ahd been rented over Memorial Day weekend. This auger was 12" in diameter and with an extension, dug about 4' 10".  We had to dig three separate holes in the same spot to get the right diamter.  Once we got most of the dirt out of the hole, Ellen climbed down in to smooth the edges out and remove all of the loose dirt on the bottom.  By the time we were ready to set the pole in the hole, only Ellen's pony tail stuck up.  It was one deep hole. To sure things up we built a 4' tall rebar cage and placed it into the hole, around the pole and started added concrete.  This hole took 24  80 pound bags of concrete. If this pole ever moves, I'll be...well, I don't know what, but I'm sure I'll have bigger problems than this pole moving! I'm glad I paid attention in Geomemetry: after plotting all of the angles to make sure that the panels would never be shaded, we had to find out how much concrete we would need.  The volume of the hole is the area of the circle (pi r squared) times the height of the hole, minus the volume of the pole.

This was a fun job, and fairly easy and straight forward.  Our soil is mostly sand, though. On rocky ground, this job could be hateful. Once the concrete cured adequately, it was time to put up the solar modules.  We have ten 100 watt panels. The panels are wired right into the house via a piece of flexible conduit, and into our battery/inverter room.

Just a few more wiring connections and we'll be making our own power!

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