Moving Solar Panels to Our Island Homestead
Today we are moving our solar panels to the island. Well… we are trying to, but it seems we are running into trouble! These solar panels are HUGE and really heavy, and moving them is proving to be fraught with several challenges.
Table of Contents
- Cracked ribs for Ryan
- Tippy load of panels!
- Checking trailer wheels before the long trip north
- Spring thaw leaves the barge on shore!!
- Pepper saves the day!
- Oops… another delay!
- Makeshift shelving for the kitchen!
- All in all… a productive day!
Cracked ribs for Ryan
We had a little issue where the solar panels were standing up. We have 30 of them, and Ryan was starting to move them from one side into the crate that he built. The solar panels came down, hitting him. Ryan went flying, and they all came tumbling down. I was inside and didn’t hear a single thing until I got this picture by text message…
Tippy load of panels!
There are 30 x 550 watt solar panels in this box, and we need to somehow put it onto the trailer so we can transport them to the island. We’re talking about 3,000 lbs of solar panels here, which is a bit more than I wanted to lift with my sore ribs. So I thought I’d build a crate and just load them all onto the trailer in one go with the help of a rented forklift. The crate serves to keep the weather off the solar panels during transport, but not much more. It’s pretty flimsy.
Checking trailer wheels before the long trip north
We’re doing a little bit of maintenance on the wheels before we take it on another long trip. We’re going to be driving about 9 hours today, and we just want to make sure that this load is safe, that the tires are in good condition. It had a bit of an overhaul, so it should be in good shape. But with us, you never know, do you really?
Spring thaw leaves the barge on shore!!
Earlier in the week, we were sent these pictures and then we got to see for ourselves that our barge is completely grounded. Yikes! I mean, it’s literally sitting on the shore. Not only that, our large load is unprotected miles away at the boat ramp. Suffice it to say, this was weighing heavily on our minds.
Pepper saves the day!
We now have complete peace of mind knowing that Pepper can get us out of pretty much any trouble that we can imagine. The Kubota SVL 75-3… BEST PURCHASE EVER! It took about 90 seconds for Pepper to push us off into the lake, and now we’re on our way to go and get all of our stuff to bring back to Bird Island.
Oops… another delay!
So we just realized that we didn’t put the forks on Pepper, so we had to turn around and come back. Now we’re having a lot of trouble trying to get the hydraulics on. While Ryan was strugging with that, he locked himself out of Pepper’s cab! So now I’m just heading back to the cabin and I’m going to see if I can find a key.
Makeshift shelving for the kitchen!
Ryan started putting up shelves for me all across there, just so that we could get things off the ground and out of the bins. We decided to do two levels. It’s going to make a huge difference in that tiny, tiny cabin because we do not have space in there. It’s really like a bedroom more than a full on cabin… I mean, it’s tiny.
All in all… a productive day!
We’ve had a real productive day today. We got all of our bins, got all of our food. Ryan made me two sets of shelves and installed them along the entire depth of the cabin wall. So all of our food, all of our little things are up and away. We’re so glad to be back and settled.
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Sources
Today we are moving our solar panels to the island. Well… we are trying to, but it seems we are running into trouble! These solar panels are HUGE and really heavy, and moving them is proving to be fraught with several challenges.
Primary Keyphrase: Moving solar panels
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Blogs reviewed for inspiration: Blog Title 1, Blog Title 2, Blog Title 3.