Paul « Homeowner's Blog

Installing our Photovoltaic system, part III

By Paul, on December 21st, 2009

Constructing the mounting frame. I had my one “oops” moment in the project already, hopefully there will not be another one. It seems that when I laid out the position of the mounting frame, I was a little too close to the property line. In the end of October, the town that I live in [...]

Installing our Photovoltiac system, Part II

By Paul, on November 21st, 2009

Laying out the support frame. As mentioned before, the south facing roof on our house is taken up with the solar hot water system. The only mounting option for the photovoltaic system was to build a sun shade type support frame in the yard.

The first thing that was needed was the size of the [...]

Installing our Photovoltaic Solar System, Part I

By Paul, on November 11th, 2009

I have had a pretty good year with the solar business thus far. Therefore, I decided to roll some of this year’s profits into our own Photovoltaic (PV) system. This idea has been batted about before, including as a battery back up for the sump pumps, however, a few things have developed since then.

First [...]

Things to ponder

By Paul, on October 29th, 2009

I think Congressmen should wear uniforms like NASCAR drivers so we could identify their corporate sponsors.

Or have term limits.

Building a Boat Dock

By Paul, on August 21st, 2009

This is what I did on vacation:

I made a new dock for the cottage in Canada. The old dock was built about 20 or more years ago, nobody is really sure. It had a useful life but last winter the ice caused the dock part to become detached from the crib and fall in [...]

Edible landscaping

By Paul, on July 15th, 2009

We have spent some amount of time fixing up the yard. I think the worst of it was removing all the asphalt around the back of the house. What a terrible way to make a patio.

As a part of our long term goals for the house, landscaping is somewhere in the middle of the [...]

Every time I turn around, its raining

By Paul, on July 1st, 2009

No really. I found this precipitation overlay on the National Weather Service web site this morning. This is the June 2009 rainfall amounts:

June 2009 rainfall, National Weather Service

We quite near those pink zones in the middle of the graphic, which is 10+ inches of rain. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if [...]

Basement not flooding

By Paul, on June 19th, 2009

It is hard to take a picture of what is not there.

Since June 10th, we have received 5.38 inches of rain. That is quite a bit for a 9 day period. Our old basement would have looked like this:

flooded basement floor

That is a picture from two years ago before we had [...]

Strawberries!

By Paul, on June 14th, 2009

We’ve been getting about one of these per day:

fresh picked strawberries from the garden

I’d estimate that to be 3-4 pints of berries. We also loose about 2-3% to chipmunks, slugs, mold, etc. I throw those over the fence into the grass so the birds can eat them. We’ll be making some strawberry [...]

Degradable plastic bags

By Paul, on June 13th, 2009

I was reading something this morning about how the City of Philadelphia is considering baning plastic bags completely. It seems that those thin plastic bags you get from the grocery store are public enemy number 1 when it comes to the battle over the protection of the environment. It is truly fascinating to see the [...]

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