My rainwater collection begins with a first-flush and debris removal tank, but it is not ideal; all the water flows through it and in a big rain it can stay stirred up. So it has debris and because it is necessarily open to the roof this means some bugs in there. The outlet to the storage tank is wrapped with three layers of window-screen cloth, but the overflow is open to the drain. Frogs (cute little coqui tree-frogs) come up the drain and inhabit the tank. The storage tank overflow ties into the first flush overflow, so once in a while there is a tree frog in the first storage tank. There are no bugs in that tank so the frog will die if I fail to capture it (which they are very wily).

How can I keep a frog from climbing up the pipe while being sure I do not obstruct water going down the pipe?

At Laguna Cartagena, near Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico (red bird with black chest and mask, perched on green leaves, lit by sunrise)

This is a video of my off-grid house in the Dominican Republic, which is featured in this community's title background. It is for sale, so buy it and you can be famous! lolz https://drive.google.com/file/d/16s22L6fgJRtxPQ-a6_aEWy8QJsgsWexN/view?usp=sharing

These EG4 batteries from Signature Solar look like a pretty good deal to me; $265/kWh according to their calculation. I paid a little over $500/kWh for some 12V form-factor lithium batteries at the start of the year and thought those were a reasonable price.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/2196737

Like many of you, birds are very special to me. I connect with them like I don’t any other living creature, save my wife and kids. I photograph them. I’ve covered my body in nothing but bird tattoos.

To see that a THIRD of them have disappeared is like a knife to the heart.

Today's adventure: a couple of rainy days caused low battery levels, but not too low I thought - still 30% or so; these are lithium batteries and can deep cycle. They are "smart" batteries and if one is full in series, none can charge further - so they should all be at the same charge level all the time. But a couple had gotten out of step somehow and when they reached zero everything shut down.

How to bootstrap it? With no battery output (since a zero battery turned itself off and would not let the battery bank show any voltage!) - there is no way to activate the inverter and let street power run the battery charger. With no battery power, there is no way to turn on the MPPT controller and charge the batteries!

I could rearrange the banks to put four batteries with remaining charge in series because I have an 8-battery system, and get things restarted; but if there had been only four like when I first installed the system - I'd be in trouble.

Another thing that happened. Before I figured out the battery problem, I was trying to switch back to street-power. Because power from the street comes to the inverter first and then the inverter powers the distribution panel, when the batteries are down, I cannot get street power to the distribution panel. I could install a manual bypass, but it is not a commonly needed item and it is a large amp switch. So I removed the inputs and outputs at the inverter and bypassed manually. That worked fine. But in the process of disconnecting or reconnecting, I must have loosened the neutral connection to the inverter. So when the inverter was working again and I checked voltage, I only checked across the two hot legs - yay, 240V. I did not check that each leg was 120v from neutral! They were not: one leg was at zero and the other was at 240. I found this discrepancy fairly quickly after only destroying an outlet strip, the oven control electronics from a very old stove we were wanting to replace, and the controls of an old Sharp microwave oven with the 4, 7, 9 and Clear buttons not working. Woohoo we have a new stove out of the deal!

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/611077

I have been thinking on how to claim every energy that comes on my plot. Technology goes more and more into harvesting the smaller left over energy. Ive seen examples in the Netherlands where startups try to get energy from a chip (I have been thinking on how to claim every energy that comes on my plot. Technology goes more and more into harvesting the smaller left over energy. Ive seen examples in the Netherlands where startups try to get energy from a chip (http://www.nowi-energy.com, https://memsys.nl) and a transparent solar panel layer on windows etc. Here in Lithuania sometimes the whole day has an overcast sky and that is the solar energy that we are getting. I know that with heavy overcast days a standard solar panels output can be as low as 10%. So a 5kWp can generate instead of 3.75kW produce only a meager 370W. My question to you, arent there other solar technologies that are adjusted to this overcast circumstances? So to gain more efficiency from diffuse lighting or from frequencies that can pierce the clouds more (like infrared spectrum)?

Some sunday morning pondering....

I like birdwatching, but I am not a guru on this topic - only creating this community as a gathering place until the serious folks find it (or start a community elsewhere). I am on the watch for them, and today I found @birds@moresci.sale instead - which looks like a good user-to-follow for anyone here (it is a bot).

male (yellowish beneath) and females (greenish beneath) eating berries of a euphorbia colonizing a dead tree. Photo link from iNaturalist.org

Chlorophonia musica ssp. musica Dominican Republic

American Kestrel

Falco sparverius

Altamira, Dominican Republic

Oct. 2018

birds are the canaries in the coal-mine of life. amirite? My wife takes all our bird pictures and posts them on iNaturalist and eBird, but sometimes I obtain a copy of a nice shot and will post it here. We've been birding since about 1985 - off and on; not that we go to the ends of the Earth just to add a life-lister, but if we're AT the end of the Earth, then we'll look around a little while we're there.