Ebay is chocked full of 220v inverters. These are NOT intended for the North American market. There are two things going on with them. Even if they say 60hz, they should be avoided except for something like running a well pump or other 240v device.

1)the european neutral wire is connected to one end of the 220v feed whereas the North American split phase places the neutral in the middle so there's two 110v legs. So, grounding wrong. Some inverters can be modified to remove the neutral/ground bond to "fix" this... but it's still not right even when you "fix" it.

2)Some youtubers tell you that you can use an autotransformer to convert that 240v only inverter to split phase 110/220... Here's the risk... if the autotransformer pops it's breaker or otherwise malfunctions, you just put 240v into every 120v appliance you own. How much does your fridge cost? You just bought a new one if this happens. Now imagine that for everything in your house with a 120v plug. Not worth it.

Remember kids, it's not that something works, it's how it works when something is sideways. Don't let one mistake cause you to make 10 more. Do it right the first time. Parts and new appliances may not be available when things are really sideways.

If you see an inverter that is priced too low, it is likely a modified sine wave.... it will not make clean power and will make motors run hot or poorly. Avoid it. Find an inverter that makes pure sine wave.

If you see a solar charge controller that is too cheap it is a PWM type. MPPT controllers are 30% more efficient from the start... but even the cheap ones of those dont' work well... spend more than $100 and avoid the ones that are $20 with a usb plug port on them for your phone. They are a waste of money.

The one in the image here is an example of what NOT to buy.

Let me add to the autotransformer post... if you want to balance the legs of an existing split phase inverter, the autotransformer is the tool you need. Let's say you occasionally run more on one of the 120v legs than the inverter can make. The auto transformer will "borrow" power from the other 120v leg. Perfect.... and if the autotransformer malfuctions when paired with a spilt phase 120/240 inverter, no harm... it just doesn't balance the loads for you.

An example of needing to balance 120v legs.... the solark inverter claims to be 9kw... but it's really 4.5kw on each of two 120v legs. If you pull 4.6 kw out of it for a blink, it will trip and shut off. But if you hook up an autotransformer it won't trip because it'll "borrow" the excess from the other leg.

Do you need permission from your utility to install solar? No! You only need permission if you want to back feed the grid. Backfeeding requires more expensive inverters called Hybrid. But the cheap and simple Growatts and EG4s don't have an option to back feed. You can program them for Solar, Battery or Utility priority. This means that they will make a best effort to run your house off solar and battery and if those don't work, they will run your house off the grid. If you can avoid using grid power during on peak hours you might save a fair amount of money.
One of my neighbors' electric bill was $330-350 a month and he was able to lower it to $100.26 by changing the time he allowed his inverter to use the grid and also by limting the amount of amps it pulled from the grid. By doing this he was able to avoid peak demand charges and also avoid peak use hours from 5-9pm.

To follow up with this... these inverters have generator start signals that can be programmed to start /stop a generator at XX state of charge and shut it off at YY SoC. So you can add a water heater timer inline with your utility feed to prevent the inverter from charging during peak hours. Or you can repurpose the generator start signal to operate a contactor to bypass around the water heater timer to permit charging when absolutely necessary to keep your battery from dying.

Just being creative.

https://youtu.be/gHFkE0agV6k

This is an excellent idea. When we did our first solar system, we just looked at our power bill for two years and determine how much solar we needed. After we got the system in and started monitoring power usage, we realized there were lights on in the basement that we never installed a power switch for . We honestly never thought about how much power those lights drew day in and day out.

Also, our air conditioner has two breakers. It has one breaker for the inside air handler and one for the outside compressor unit. With a 220 V circuit you only need to use one wire to measure power draw. Some thing I did was run one wire from each of those breakers through one current transformer, so that the two units combined showed up as one input on our power meter . You can do the same thing for other individual circuits in your house… Combine several rooms into one input on this device.

Just for general information, the reason old refrigerators use more power than new refrigerators is because of the defrost circuit. In case you didn’t know your fridge has a heater inside it and about once a day turns the heater on to defrost any ice that is formed. The question is how long does this heater run.? In older fridges it runs longer because it’s on a timer. In newer fridges, there’s some intelligence as to how long it runs. So with an older fridge it turns out that over half the energy usage is just running that heater for 20 minutes. This gets to be very important when you’re trying to size your batteries and number of solar panels.

If you want to do a little surgery on your fridge, you can disable that heater and defrost the fridge by hand like they did back in the really old days.

Chest freezers don’t have a defrost circuit, and because you open the top of them all the cold air doesn’t spill out every time you open the door. It’s very easy to add a $15 ink bird thermostat from Amazon or eBay to power a chest freezer and converted into a refrigerator. It’ll be much more energy efficient than a refrigerator with a defrost circuit.

Be extremely careful when you decide you want to drill a hole in the side of the chest freezer to run the temperature sensor inside… the wall of the freezer is lined with wraps of tubing for the Freon.

Gardening tasks in February

https://youtu.be/VjgD9xLhvEE

There is presently a story in the news about an HEB grocery store throwing out food and people dumpster diving for it. It's the 3rd day of a power outage there and a winter storm so it's not like the food was sitting out in the summer.... Shame on the store for not giving it away.

I personally experienced Hugo in 1989 and the grocery stores knew there would be no power for weeks so they freely gave away all their meat. In the first 3-4 days we ate really well and we worked really hard clearing the roads.

On the other hand, watch and learn... Katrina was a great example of how society will behave when infrastructure falls apart.

Now let me ask you... why is it when you see flooding or other natural disasters you also see rednecks with boats and ATVs out helping... but in black areas all you see is chaos and looting? The epitome of nonsensical looting was people stealing big screen TVs in New Orleans after Katrina.

Reasonable advice in this book. Be mindful of weight. Have paper maps. Have a destination in mind. Do a trial run before you need to. Observe things like if you can be seen from a place people are likely to congregate along your intended route.

If you are shopping for solar panels and find a really good deal check the specs carefully. Some panels put out 200v-300v and 1amp. This makes 300w but you end up putting them in parallel which requires combiner boxes. So you end up with about 7-10 panels in parallel each with a breaker or fuse. This is NOT what you want.

The panels you are looking for will put out 35-50 volts at 8-10amp. You can create a string of them that makes 150v-600v depending on your inverter specs and don't need to fool with combiner boxes. This is the customary setup.

Please listen to this man. He was murdered by the US government for daring to challenge the constitutional overreach of the federal government.

We can CONFIRM now that Tractor Supply's brand of chicken feed, Producer's Pride 16% Layer Feed Mini Pellets, contains about TWICE the glyphosate of any other brand we tested. The next highest brand was Purina Layena Layer Crumbles. But the Tractor Supply brand had twice the level. We will release actual numbers this week, in a video. Watch for details at NaturalNews.com and my daily podcast at Brighteon.com, HR Report channel, which is: https://www.brighteon.com/channels/hrreport

For discussion. Are you and your spouse on the same sheet of music? Are you prepping and fretting over what you have while your spouse is in denial or simply not on board?

My wife and I grew up poor but our families seemed to never be without. As we became adults we always considered a two week power outage after a hurricane to be the target for preps. When Covid cranked up she looked at me one night and said “I ain’t getting on any damn fema train” and it was ON. Our preps stepped up a notch. Our goal now is to survive a poor crop season and have a sustainable plan for rabbits chickens and goats.

What’s your goal for prepping? Is your spouse on board?

Crossing fingers my chickens don’t get bird flu.

For those interested in learning more about micro hydro generation, here is a very complete playlist.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEZ2hvCDKUpEvvgEy_b5C6UnYNslaYcik

The flow is limited by the water velocity in the pipe, the higher the water speed in the pipe, the greater the hydraulic losses, so the rule is always to keep the water flowing at a maximum of 1 meter per second.
So just for you to understand better, let's take 1 meter of the 100mm pipe, within that 1 meter we have 7.8 liters in volume, that is, the 100mm pipe can supply 7.8 liters per second at a given pipe length and unevenness.
My tubing is 75mm, that is 3.6 liters per second, even if I use two 75mm tubing they are still not equivalent to 100mm.
And the length and unevenness directly affect the losses due to turbulence inside the pipeline.

In my case here, the largest difference in level and the shortest length of pipe are 240 meters and there is a 34-meter difference in level, and the rest of the land is 15 meters longer but 260 meters long, which makes it unfeasible to take advantage of this difference in level from the beginning of the project. terrain because to have a flow of 7.8 liters per second in 500 meters of length and 49 meters of unevenness I would have to use a 150mm pipe and I would still lose a few meters of useful fall leaving me with only 45 useful meters.
but 500 meters of 150mm piping would cost the same price as a solar plant which would generate more energy than the hydro system.

Finally finished the well cap for our SimplePump. I’m going to use a pitless adapter down the well case. There’s not room in our 4” well bore for both the electric pump and hand pump so when the hand pump is installed we don’t have a need for wire to get in/out. I’ve already modified a pitless adapter to allow the hand pump to work with the one that’s already in the well case for the electric pump.