Hiding the Brickwork.

With the doorway bricked up its time to render to hole to make it all neat. I am not that good at rendering, I never seem to get it level or smooth but this time it seems to have gone well.

I used two coats, the first the standard sand and cement mortar (I would like to point out at this time, that the standard building sand on the canaries is black and made from crushed volcanic rock. So it is not very fine). The top coat was Morsec (premixed dry morter, tha comes in 25 kg bags. it comes in two types, that I know of, normal and white top coat. I like using the white one). This works very well in thin coats. The result on the door opening is shown below.

Now the wall can be painted.

I think the final result was quit good.

With the last of the Morsec, I finished off the roofs of the solar power huts. That is all the structural work done on the huts now finally the walls can be painted.

Back of the huts, showing added white Morsec.

Front of huts.

Let There Be Power

After a months on and off work the new solar power system is finished. Below you can see the power control hut with the change controller and isolation boxes. The main battery Isolation box is open showing the wiring to the fuses, isolators and current monitors.

Solar power Hut

The Current monitors are home made units based on a signal chip current measurement ic ( ACS754SCB-100-PFF ) . One of the units are shown below. It consists of the IC mounted on a peace of veroboard with the line contacts solders into two connecters that I removed from some fuse holders that we brought by mistake. (As normal on this island you can buy a car audio fuse holder that no one sells fuses for). All of this is mounted on a home made Perspex mounting panel.

Home made current monitor unit.

The last thing that we  done is mount the current solar panels on our adjustable panel mounts and connected them to the power hut. Panels mounted on adjustable mounts

Wiring starts

The solar power huts are now ready to except the components. It´s only taken 8 months to get things to this point after the make shift set up was washed out in the storm. The first parts to go in are the new (we have had it for 3 years) charge controller with the panel isolating switch and fuse box (see image below).

I will admit that as it is a 45 Amp controller and we only have 2 60W panels at the moment it is a bit like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but once we have some more spare cash we can get a few more panels and not have to worry about the controller.

The solar charge controller finally in its hut.

Battery Box fail…….

There I was happily pottering around the house when I heard this sudden crash and thud from somewhere around the house. “Now what has fallen down!!” After 10 minutes of hunting I could not find a thing that had fallen..

Well about a hour later I was hanging up the washing and spotted the following:

What seems to have happened is that the plastic in the storage box that we used to cover the battery 3 years ago has degraded to the consistency of prawn crackers and finally collapsed.

What´s Behind the Red Door

Finally after 3 months work the solar power huts are now watertight (well mostly, still need to do a bit of rendering) with the fiting of the doors.

These doors are home made out of ply (was suppose to be marine ply but I have my doubts) with air vents at the bottom.

The main problem was the hinges, I wanted nice rustic hinges for the doors that fit on the face, but could not get any that fitted onto the frames as that part was too big so had to cut them down…. which task took quite a bit of sawing with a hacksaw and some black enamel paint to stop them rusting.

The battery huts doors were fitted first about a week ago. and then today we finally fitted the power hut doors. Hurray!!!!!

They seem to look quit good… Now all I have to do is get all the bits inside them…

Wiring a Power Station

I do wonder if this may be overkill but it has to handle up to 100 Amps and its better be safe than sorry.

I have started to layout the main solar power switch box. This box provides for the main isolation switches, fuses and some electronics to measure the current flowing in one of three locations, into or out of the battery, into the house 12v supply  and to the inverter that will provide 240v to the house.  Each of these circuits can also be isolated in this box.

          

Front and rear of main switch box panel

There is a second box that provides isolation for the solar panels. see Danger Electric Shock Risk for the layout of the full power panel.

You’ve Been Framed

Before the doors can be fitted to the huts on the roof we needed to make and fit some door frames

Before the door frame could be fitted the back plate which will mount all the electronics needed to be fitted as once the frame is in there is no way we would be able to get it trough the hole.

An then once fitted and the render applied up to the edges they were given a coat of paint which will match the rest of the wood work on the house (Once we paint the house this summer).

Danger Electric Shock Risk

After water got into the previous electrical systems for the solar panels we are taking no chances with the new system.  So as well as building nice brick built houses on the roof for the electronics and batteries to sit in we are building a nicely laid out panel which everything sits on.

The black thing in the top left is the heat sink for the charge controller which will take the current from the panels and feeds it to the batteries. Underneath that is a switch and fuse to isolate the panels. In the centre is the main box which will contain all the fuses and switches to isolate the batteries and the supply to the house. The blue box on the right hand side is the 750w inverter that will provide the 240v for the lighting and other low wattage things for the house. We can’t use the inverter just yet until we up the battery capacity but we need to plan the space in advance.

A Small Construction Job

With the solar power down we need to get the small huts on the roof finished so that the final solar power system can be installed. Talk of procrastination, I  have been working on these on and off for two years.

Well we have the structures mostly finished and roofed but they still need to be rendered and doors added before the electronics and Batteries can be installed. Well the first stage is almost done .. the rendering, this has had to be done in three stages:

First: Attach a plastic mesh to the wall, this helps the render to stick.Second: first coat of render. Ok I had intended to only do one coat but just did not have enough.And finally the top coat: I actually think it looks quite good.

Power from the Sun, and too much smoke

A lot done today, Solar panel is up, its a bit of a Heath Robinson affair but seems to function well, I am not sure of the state of the battery that we have borrowed from Carlos but it seems to be holding up well. We have to carry the battery down from the roof each morning and back up in the evening but we can now charge it here
We also set up the weather station, no connection to a computer at the moment - that will have to wait until we have mains power (our little 60W panel works well but does not do wonders).

We had one minor problem tonight, cooking dinner on the fire ended up filling the house with smoke. It seems that cooking on an open cooking fire is not as simple as it seems. ( first we could not get it started now when it is going it fills the place with smoke. Have we done the right this in coming here? In a way I want to go home...