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.

One of the agravating things about our english system of measurement is that it's a PITA to figure out pilot drill sizes for tapping holes.

Here's the easy way. You have a 3/8-16 bolt and need to know the drill size. Take the 16 threads per inch and invert it... 1/16. now take 3/8 minus 1/16. that's 6/16 - 1/16 = 5/16... there's your drill size.

Let's do that again.... 1/4-20 .... in that is 0.25 - (1/20th) = .20" . The correct answer is actually 0.2050 but it's close enough.

Backfeeding your house from a generator or solar inverter. You can either create a subpanel with your critical loads on it and feed that from the generator or solar, or you can install a generator interlock on your main panel. Just use the top left or top right breaker to feed in and this interlock "gate" will prevent you from having the main breaker and your generator on at the same time. I use this method to feed my entire house from my 12kw worth of inverters. In my case, I have enough batteries and inverters to run everything, but most people won't.

My advice is to mark all the breakers with a sharpie that need to be on when running on emergency power. Be sure to find all the breakers for the fridge and freezer as well as other comfort items like ceiling fans and room lights.

There are many types of generator lockouts available. And these are much cheaper than a 200amp transfer switch.

Note on the water heater: it is advisable to swap the heater elements out with 1500w 240v heater elements if you are running them off inverter power. That way you still have 10.5kw remaining for other loads in the house.

Additional note... You may find that some inverters don't have enough surge capacity to start a heat pump. Solark might not, and the transformerless inverters like growatt and EG4 probably won't either. Inverters with transformers that weigh 150lbs like Schneider or Sunny Island will absolutely start a heat pump.

https://youtu.be/-Ez4cbuy7IQ

These inverters are rated for 6.8kw each. This guy ran two in parallel at 17kw and still started a 5hp air compressor.

And two of them pull 37watts at idle.

Seriously worth considering if you want to run your whole house.

Quick reference chart.

When you work on batteries be damned sure to tape your wrenches. Wrap wrenches in electric tape and the shank of your screwdriver too.