D Nikolls

I agree with David, great progress.

I like the choices to keep the old battery, and to DIY the bus bars. Looking good.

Denny Johnson wrote:

D Nikolls wrote:Nice. That driveway sounds very expensive, knowing what I put into one built from clay and pit-run! This looks like a really great start for someone.

Thanks — you know exactly what goes into it. Ours was done by Setterman Gravel out of Fifield: road fabric, proper base, and finish material over 1,200 ft. Clay and pit-run take real sweat equity; respect for doing it yourself.

Good stuff, and a good investment given skyrocketing prices!

I was fortunate that digging out the clay got me a pond, and pit run can be sourced 1km away. I excavated down to hardpan, ditched aggressively, and skipped the fabric/rock. It's held up well and I enjoyed running the machines, but I shudder to think what it would cost me to do now, just a few short years later!

Nice. That driveway sounds very expensive, knowing what I put into one built from clay and pit-run! This looks like a really great start for someone.

Kevin Stanton wrote:

John C Daley wrote:
That video seems to stop land from water logging, rather that shifting large volumes of water.
Where will the channels drain too, a dam, a river bed?

With approval to discharge after absorbing "hard hits of rain" the river it came from, and/or flow in/flow out similar to what Stamets did with the Ecoli issue on his facility.

D Nikolls wrote:If you want shallow swales rather than normal ditches, what's the problem with a dozer with tilt/angle gle blade?

Depending on the soil/terrain a grade might also do fine..

But realistically if you expect to have much impact on 10k acres you will probably own or hire all the above machines for the appropriate areas..

Given the area in question, using normal ditches with occasional fords/culverts seems pretty reasonable too.

The goal is with overflow flowing back into the field (if the state says they have too much water, tell them to send it my way [the el nino surplus]), so I don't really want berms.

The terrain: rejection of data centers on federal lands after site was being developed.

I was thinking sluice board system (saves money)

Highway ditches near me are giant ravines you're going to feel when driving through.

A fjord in a desert/savanah?

Robert Ray wrote:What is the budget for this project?

pending: BLM/Army Core of engineers/Billionaire workers/budget/approval

Not a fjord. A ford. Ie a bit of ditch with much broader shallower slopes so you can readily drive through, while keeping the bulk of the ditch more ditch shaped for ease of sluice board control and minimization of the area consumed by said ditch.

Ditch or swale, if you want no berms after ditching/swaling you need to spread the material dug out of said ditches or swales.. it has to go somewhere! A dozer could do a double sloped ditch in 2 passes, and then a dozer, grader, or a big tractor with a spiffy grading attachment comes along and spreads the spoil generated by the dozer nice and flat..

There's no free lunch method that I know of. Maybe you could get a v-shaped ditching attachment built that avoids the problem of diving, and add adjustable spreading blades to spread/flatten the spoil, and do it all in one pass, dragging it with a D9 or some such.. sounds to me like a copper plated bitch to control, and bloody expensive. Meanwhile you could hire some competent dozer operators and throw em in smaller dozers with a grader to do the spoil spreading, and they ought to be away to the races..

Worked great for me.. I used a dating site, and married the first person who led with interest in my garden. The fact that she was also gardening surely helped. The 10k kilometres between said gardens didnt end up being a significant problem.

If you want shallow swales rather than normal ditches, what's the problem with a dozer with tilt/angle gle blade?

Depending on the soil/terrain a grade might also do fine..

But realistically if you expect to have much impact on 10k acres you will probably own or hire all the above machines for the appropriate areas..

Given the area in question, using normal ditches with occasional fords/culverts seems pretty reasonable too.

That comes out to around 1000 gallons per minute if these ditches are running 24/7.

If I was putting in a bunch of ditches for that sort of flow, I would buy or have made a v-bucket for an excavator. A bit of googling suggests around an 18" flat bottom, and then slope the sides at 45*. Make it as big as your excacator can easily handle, no need to go full depth but the flexibility is good. Google thinks 1.2 feet deep is a minimum ditches depth for a shallow slope ditch to handle this flow..

I've done a ditch that handles maybe 2-3x this much water in storms with a 50" cleanup bucket on a 150 size excavator, from the side, eyeballing for slope; it works fine, but the ditch shape is not as good as a v-bucket would give you, and it takes more care to achieve an acceptable shape. You can also just dig an overly wide square-sided ditch and let the sides slump; again the v-bucket will do a better job.

In my soil the 150 was a great size for this, a 120 would have been plenty good, and my 3.3 ton mini can do the same job, slowly. If our heavy clay hardpan was close enough to the surface to hit while ditching, the 150 would be frustratingly slow and the mini absolutely futile. If I had to ditch in the hardpan I would consider a 200 to be absolute minimum.. so, consider your ground before investing in that bucket.

John Weiland wrote:

Chandrapal Mehula wrote: ....3. Stop at the BMS or inverter low-voltage cutoff, or at about 2.9 to 3.0 V per cell if you are watching individual cells. Don't push below that..

Thanks for all of the excellent and helpful responses.  One question about the statement clipped above:  Won't the BMS automatically stop discharging at the low voltage cutoff? In other words, won't this prohibit me from pushing discharge below that voltage limit even if I wanted to?  Thanks!....

A correctly functioning BMS will, yes. Relying on the inverter alone might let you draw one weaker cell way too low, though.

Phil Stevens wrote:I'd put the ball design in the category of "cost effective, works great if you make it a monthly or quarterly habit to check the drain and blow it out if it's got schmutz in it" and also add the caveat that one reason they're popular here is the mild climate. In most of the North Island it just doesn't get cold enough to freeze one of these things...and if it's full of water on a night that is that cold, the rain stopped a long time ago and you should have checked the drain. Another motivating factor for keeping on top of this is that a blocked drain means it's not diverting and you're getting bird poop, pollen, and who knows what in your tanks.

Rainwater harvesting is not a set and forget system, in my experience. Gutters need to be cleared, screens washed, valves inspected, and tanks vacuumed out from time to time. If you're used to outsourcing all the operational overhead to the municipal water works, then providing your own supply requires a shift in mindset and a reasonable maintenance schedule.

I agree that they are usable, but I wouldn't use them again in most circumstances. I would invest the money in another storage tank, and set up the collection to be manually switched between a dirty tank, clean tanks, and discharge. In the dry season if tanks are low, I would rather collect all the water. In the wet season I don't see any need for a first flush unless it has been dry for a while, plus missing the occasional bit of water in the wet season is not a problem.

I think, in my current climate, that this would be more effective than the ball style. If the Graf/Wisy style works well, it should be very low maintenance while providing some degree of automatic first flush.. we will see.



Some aspects of off grid living involve more labour.. but not all such labour is necessary. For example, I heat with wood, in a good stove with a perfectly straight insulated doublewall chimney.

A friend uses an older and much more affordable stove, and a terrifying arrangement of single wall pipe, including a long run of nearly horizontal pipe, to avoid going out the roof.

Not only does this stove eat a lot more wood, he needs to clean that flue every week or two, or burn the place down. It works, but the extra labour is due to the design choices, not inherent to wood heating.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:

dan brier wrote:... I think what i care about most is long slow and efficient burns.

From what i’ve researched so far:
- burn time seems to be the big factor. You want something that burns atleast 8 hours so you don’t have to get up in the middle of the night. ...

I love wood stoves. But realistically, I don't think you're going to get an 8-hour efficient burn from a wood stove that fits in a small space. There are only so many BTUs in a piece of wood, even in the really dense stuff like oak.

The only true 8+ hour burn I have ever seen with solid fuel was a coal-fired chick brooder stove. My father would bank an active fire with huge lumps of solid coal and damp it way down for the night. Never lost a brood. Peep peep peep!

We could get coals at 9 hours in the Jotul 602 with careful management and decent wood..  but we did this maybe 3x in 3 years of full-time living in the tinyhouse with it. It was rarely cold enough to aim for this, just too much heat. The tinyhouse would be cool in the morning with a modest evening fire.. in cold weather we would run a morning fire and an evening fire.

I really don't think a non-catalytic stove small enought to work in a tinyhouse will do a longer burn without putting out way too much heat. The catalytic version of the 602 ought to be better at low/slow burning..  I don't know of a similarly small catalytic stove that's really aimed at long burn times. Might be something better I've never heard of, but I don't trust catalysts not to clog on alder ash, so not too informed on options.