Is your refrigerator running?

Mine is.

MY REFRIGERATOR IS RUNNING. I still haven't fully grasped the concept of owning a refrigerator. I have lived out of a cooler for about two years now, and that is over, over, over. R.I.P. It's over. I had a bad falling out with Coleman.

In the past month and a half, we have done quite a bit. The house building never seizes to stop. We installed our stove! That was exciting. If you live off grid, you can only have one brand of stove, and I love it. I bought the ridiculous huge one, and haven't regretted it yet for a second. It is a Peerless, and it uses almost NO power, just propane. It only uses 2 watts to light the flame. This is important, for people who have "limited" power. I'll get to that.

The stove has six burners, a griddle, and a gigantic amazing oven that has so far made beautiful quiches, cookies, breads, pies, and more. I am in love. But it's ugly, we're going to have it painted at an auto body shop!

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

I hate to admit that the six burners are most awesome because: You can keep so many dirty dishes on them! It came with a griddle for the middle burners which is pretty awesome. You can make six pancakes at once! So, first was the stove.. Then hell broke loose when we moved onto our next task: Power.

I'm going to try to keep this a short update. One without too many details. I've been so stressed out with solar power, wires, thousands of dollars being spent, thousands of hours being burnt out, and the never ending project we found ourselves knee deep in. This has probably been the most insane month of work we've had yet.

Now it's over. Mission accomplished. We have power. We are going to go to a museum on Friday. I swear. And maybe I'll have time to get my camera fixed this month!

We now have enough solar power to do basically what we want, when we want, and run our refrigerator off of it, too.

Phew.

We started with our panels: We installed four 240 watt Canadian Solar panels onto our roof using an Albuquerque companies "professional installation materials." This company called DPW and they are totally rad. You can go visit them, they know everything and extremely helpful. This was the easiest part of our project, getting these huge, heavy things up onto the roof. (I'm not saying that this was easy, just the easiest thing we did in the past month).

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

Each of these panels is about 50 pounds. They are about 3 x 5 feet. They have been working awesomely! They get an incredible amount of power in cloudy weather, and they are about $1.20 a watt. We bought them at Affordable Solar in Albuquerque. The people there know next too nothing, but the equipment they sell is the cheapest. Recommended only if you know what you want before you show up.

We had to build a completely enclosed structure with a completely sealed box to put our four L16 fork lift batteries. Here's the batteries before we installed them:

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

We then started digging. And building. Same old thing we do when we have to build just about anything at this point. I somehow managed to be too stressed out to document very much of this. And it really happened pretty fast. Picture nothing here, because that's what what there, and then this, our new UTILITY CLOSET!

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

An adobed structure, that will soon be decorated to resemble a rustic cottage. We built this closet to hold our solar equipment, and our water set up. Right now it's only holding the solar stuff, because, well, the water stuff has yet to be installed.

On the outside of the "cottage" cabin, drum roll please... the FRIDGE!

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

It's only been plugged in for a day, but it's amazing so far!! It uses what seems like no power at all, though it does use a some. For a fridge it's incredible! This Hotpoint (model HTH18GBC) is totally huge and quiet enough. It's ugly, as almost every fridge I've ever seen is ugly, but we'll paint it.

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

Ice cubes! What a revelation!

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

Cold food! That's not in a cooler! That's not 40 feet from the house, outside, in a blizzard!!!

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

Buying all our solar stuff, inverter, batteries, charge controller, cables, wires, etc, etc, etc, around 6k.

Making this salad for lunch without having to go to the cooler once? Priceless.

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

My operating cost? $0/year. The only thing we'll for sure have to replace is the batteries, once every 10 years or so. Knock on wood we don't have too many mechanical failures. We'll see. It'll be worth the price. I can't believe I lived so long without a refrigerator.

After a gazillion hours of research...

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

We built a little closet...

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

Put together a few crazy pieces of machinery...

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

Hooked them up to solar panels...

And feel like kings.

I wish this was over, but we still need to wire the whole house:

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

Wish us luck. I'll write more soon, I swear.