Homesteading Aspect Oddball Thread

I take pride in my car so when I got home to check out the car the I had lent to my Dad had gotten this bad I was a little annoyed but part of me was happy cause I got to work on my car!

4.5 hours of work so maybe a two pointer? Let's see!

When you've got a homestead oddball things crop up.  I never would have anticipated this one.  The other day after the first real snow of the season I went to clear off my solar panel array.  I immediately noticed an odd thing.  The upper right section of the array seemed to bounce a bit as I cleared the snow.  Hmm... I don't think it ever did that before?  Investigating further I see that mounting grid has come off two of the 5 back upright poles!!  The only thing I can figure is that a mighty strong wind gust came along sometime since last winter and managed to lift that corner up and off the poles.  That or I have some mighty industrious and clever squirrels.

So the challenge for me was how to get the caps remounted on the poles without disassembling the whole solar array?  My solution in the end was a combination of long 2x4's, ladders, and ratchet straps, not to mention some serious lever action to lift the whole thing up.  Then carefully let everything back down in a controlled manner so the parts all line up and fit in place.  

Overall I probably spent 3 to 4 hours on it, but I was also working alone and suffering from some crippling back pain at the time.  Were I in good shape (as I thankfully am now) it would probably be more like an hour or two to trouble shoot, gather the tools, get the job done, and clean up.

Here are the photos.  I didn't think to grab a fully "before" shot, but I'll start with one where you can still clearly see one of the caps off its pole.

After struggling with this and seeing the tremendous amount of weight which I could barely lift even with serious leverage I gotta say that was one wicked fierce gust of wind that lifted these off the poles!!  I was told this was rated for wind over 100mph.  I wonder if I got a gust exceeding that!  Thankfully nothing was broken by the wind or my torquing things around to reset it.

edited to fix some incorrect photo files.

I built a deer fence two years ago.  I helped harvest and peel the cedar trees but don't have pics so that part doesn't count towards this effort.  

Tasks included are:
- dug post holes
- installed 16 tall posts
- invented a way to put a top rail on them that wouldn't collect water
- invented a way to splice them that wouldn't collect water
- cut joints and assembled the top rails on the N and E sides so the tree branches wouldn't rest on the fence
- attached concrete remesh as the lower fence
- strung two high wires on the S and SE side along with an intermediate one on the N and E sides

I did build a gate for it but I'll submit that elsewhere...

So far it's worked great.  Chickens can get through and the deer haven't made it in.

I finally got sick of my "Add a Door" chicken door mechanism that I installed 5 years ago.  It jams and has a problem about every 3 months.  Just often enough that it will happen when we're on a trip.  

So I bought a Pullet Shut door and put that in.  I installed one for some friends years ago and they love it.  The version I got is solar powered and light sensitive for opening and closing.  I just needed to run the wires in a subtle way which was tricky in my coop.  Both the inside and outside are sheathed and since it's pallet construction, the side I needed to remove them from was under the adjoining side.  So the wall to my left was holding on the boards I wanted to pop off.  I ended up surface mounting the wires inside the coop and running them out the eave to the solar panel.