I suppose Fall Gardening is still on some people’s minds. The Frozen North isn’t – at least yet. And the Southern states are not all atwitter about ice storms. But, give it time.
At our place, I have made a simple decision this year NOT to fire up the greenhouse heater system (Chinese diesel 8 KW) until January 15th. The reason? There wasn’t enough yield to make the use of burning money (for food) pencil out. Still, even on cool days, there’s enough solar gain for a quiet reading spot…
Now, at this point, this morning’s article is going to split in two directions. We’ll do the hydroponics in the house first and then the solar plans for 2025 next.
Planting Indoors
Our first batch of indoor hydroponic spinach done earlier this year was great. so much so that we loaded up on more 18 plant site machines and are working on both lettuce (foreground) and spinach (background) which seems not to be doing as well because I ran the water levels and lighting too high.
Looks like the Romaines will beat the spinach by a country mile. But therein lies the lesson. You see, these were part of our “survival seeds” and several years old.
Which means one of the winter projects will be going through and comparing not only the raw germination rate of old seed packs, but also looking at plant vigor compared with this year’s fresher seeds. There’s a lot of testing to do, but it should be instructive.
Already, though, doing a lot of hydroponic work (we have a big rDWC set up at the (almost) ready for spring plus a 90 plant lettuce and greens setup) it looks like the old seeds are germinating 50 percent, or less about the 4 or 5 year mark. I could extend that in the freezer, I suppose, but that’s a lower priority project than, oh, getting my sore tooth repaired, for example.
Troubleshootizing the spinach: The plants going off to yellow from green should have been my clue the water was too high. I’m a slow learner, though (just ask the boss).
The other problem was these were several year old seeds and it’s not just the germination rate. There’s this whole vigor thing too.
I’m also not sure if I didn’t “over-light and burn” a bit too. I hatched out the spinach with the lights right down on the moisture domes. The grow machine for the romaine was 6 inches up the whole time.
Color of light was different, as well. I hit the spinach with white full spectrum, but ran the romaine at yellow. There’s a good discussion at Bios about getting the light right: Grow Light Spectrum Explained: Ideal LED Spectrum for Plants. Figure for now, I will alternate days between the full spectrum white and the yellow because in Nature, sky is different every day so the plants can work it out.
Solar Plans
A week from tomorrow, our tax attorney/consigliere comes for a visit and one of the big questions will be “Should we add more panels?”
We have 30 online all the time now and we figure a reliable 6.5 kW or so. m Thing is, over this time of the year you can find some great deals on panels. For example, I’ve been looking at panels in the $100-$200 class.
Santan Solar – where we’ve bought two loads of recycled panels previously – has a deal going on New QCells 365W Solar Panel | SanTan Solar for $112 a throw. But that means only $1,120 for a ten pack pallet and some of that may be offset by the federal solar tax credit.
“The Residential Clean Energy Credit equals 30% of the costs of new, qualified clean energy property for your home installed anytime from 2022 through 2032″ says the IRS at Residential Clean Energy Credit | Internal Revenue Service.
I think everyone is clear that Donald Trump made a LOT of his money (prior to hawking sneakers and watches) by working the Tax Code. Since the credit is there – and the payback on our last batch of used panels is already past, maybe we should up system capacity next. So we will work on that.
How Solar Has Paid Off
We installed our system in back in 2008 and at that time, solar was hugely expensive compared with today. Our cost of panels and balance of system – no design costs or labor for me in it – was about $28,000. However, the latest panel upgrade came to only $800, roughly.
In 2023 I noticed that our summer solar bills had “gone Musk” on me, so I vowed to fix that and discuss it in a coming update of my popular book from our early days of downscaling (“How to Live on $10,000 a year, Or Less!”). We can still live on less than $20,000 and rather well, if we do say so. But, it’s a matter of not getting hooked on junk, status, or trying to keep up with anyone.
Here are some of our system highlights for the past couple of years.
Winter of 2023 was cold and even with the auxiliary propane, we still sucked down a gob of power. Try $500 worth in a month. Well, that wasn’t to be allowed to happen in summer, so at the Red Arrow above, I upgraded to new (used) panels and took down one rack of well-aged and getting inefficient panels.
I was just getting it all dialed in (by the blue arrow) when a lightning strike took out one of the big grid tied inverters. But after two boat units (a boat unit is $1,000) a new inverter was in and we were rolling out the kilowatts again.
By the yellow arrow, we were selling 8-10 kW per day and were it not for the “customer charge” ($20) looks like this month would come in right about $100. Remember, that’s HVAC for 2,400 SF of living space. Still, we could do better, but no point in OVER building because we only get about 5.5 -cents on the sell side while the utility charges 11 and change on the buy side.
You can also see (white trace here) that when we get down into cold nights, that heating bill pops right up with the heat pump running. It goes SpaceX when the aux resistance heating blends into it.
See? White line down, green line up. Welcome to real life.
Since we live on 30 acres of tall (and thick) southern pines, I have thought about buying one of the Harbor Fright gas sawmills. That way, I could cut my own wood for (wild man) projects around here, G2 who may come back in the Spring from the wilds of Washington might cut enough for a small home for himself. And the leftovers could go into another “add on room” where I’d put in a decent wood stove with a lot of thermal mass to it and some 24 volt fans pushing hot air around.
Not that we need more things to do. But, slowly and surely, the “workstations” idea is coming together so we can do all kinds of different and fun things without having to “pick up every time.” To me, it’s always best if you can work on something til you hit a milestone (or simply get too tired) and then leave everything where it is, so you can come back to it later.
Maybe not practical with power tools and really young children, but between us, our “oldest” is nearly to Social Security as Elaine rolls over 82 in Q2-25. Q1 is 76 for me…
The main workstation of importance is thus “Spa.” Which is where the red light machines and massages and what-not live. Makes a real difference in energy levels and general attitude when you wake up to a good foot massage, some light, and a cup of tea.
So I’m going to go do that again, now, while you figure out what’s on your agenda today. After breakfast, swapping out computers at the music studio workstation and moving software around is at the top of my list.
Write when you get rich,
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