# My Off-Grid Power Plans



## Dogrotten (Nov 15, 2010)

This summer if all goes according to my well laid plans (lol) My Family and I will be moving out to our property and living in an RV while we build a house. I have been acquiring the tools that I think I will be needing, I have a John Deere 510 backhoe, an old international dozer, a C60 5 yard dump truck, and most recently a Woodmizer LT15 sawmill. My plan for power production is to start out with a generator/battery system - using the generator to charge the batteries thru an Outback VFX3524 inverter/charger, for batteries I am going to use the 6volt golf cart batteries in four groups of four wired in series-parallel (I've been buying these one a month from Sams Club). The house will be wired for both AC and DC. I will add solar and wind as time and finances permit also I will be converting the generator to run on wood gas. It all seems pretty straight forward to me so obviously I'm missing something. Any thoughts would be appreciated ty.


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## greene (Mar 23, 2012)

Sounds awesome, keep us updated.


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## Tirediron (Jul 12, 2010)

Have you got lots of oil for the generator, and simple things like gasket maker and spare belts if you are far from supplies? this should give you real "bug out" experience exept for the being invisible part. Build a decent outdoor kitchen/ clean up area as soon as you can RV living gets cramped fast.


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## Tex (Oct 31, 2008)

Since you are in Alaska, you might want to screen in an outdoor area to get outside, but still avoid bugs.


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## Dogrotten (Nov 15, 2010)

Moving out on the property is part of our prepping plan. The Wife and I both feel very strongly about things "not going right" with the country and the world and being in Alaska has its own special long term challenges - 90% to 95% of all the food eaten by Alaskans comes from "outside" so while I don't see Alaska as a target or politically fragile any disruption in the transportation system and were done for. So we've decided that a good secondary business for us is a farm. We are following the principles of sustainably grown not because of some misguided tree hugger notion about global warming/carbon footprint but because if the system falls apart fertilizers and other conventional farming supplies will be hard to get and if things do not fall apart the greenie tree hugger freaks pay a premium for naturally grown lol, My goal is to make the property provide 100% of everything we need, to me this means that if i need to buy parts/stuff the money will come from items sold from the farm. I will post pic and more as the project progresses.


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## Nadja (Jan 12, 2011)

Sounds pretty good so far. I wouldn't be to anxious to buy panels, as up there in the frozen north, you don't get much sunlight a lot of the year. The wind gennie may be great, depending on how steady your wind is. There is a guy building wind thingies up there that is supposed to be pretty good. You may want to check his out. He is : www.beawindhog.com


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## Dogrotten (Nov 15, 2010)

The problem with "Alaska" is that it is REALLY big. What I mean by that is in one state we have some of the rainiest places on Earth, the driest places on Earth, the snowiest, the windiest,........Where I live and will be building we get about 5 hours of day light in Dec and about 19 hours in June. I do get wind but I don't know the amount. The beawindhog guy is just up the road from me so sometime this summer I plan on visiting his shop.


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## ToddT58 (Apr 4, 2011)

What kind of generator? What kind of gasifier. I've been working with biomass gasification for about four years... easier said than done. It's easy to make gas that will burn but hard to make clean gas that won't ruin the valvetrain of the generator engine. One group I worked with ruined a brand new 20kw generator in less than 50 hours by not paying attention to temperatures (for thermal cracking of the tars) and filtration. It CAN be done. I suggest working the kinks out with a spare motor or something easy to rebuild.

Remember, you lose 35% - 50% of your horsepower on woodgas. The btu content just isn't there. One 25kw gasifier/generator set I know of uses the engine off of a 48kw unit. Instead of 1.9 to 2.2 liter engine, it uses a 4.2 liter motor.

It CAN be done but it isn't as easy as some websites might imply. Good luck and keep us posted!


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## LincTex (Apr 1, 2011)

Everything ToddT58 said. 

Practice on older engines first, and be prepared to ruin one or two. There is a pretty long learning curve with woodgas.


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## Dogrotten (Nov 15, 2010)

Thanks for all the input. I've got a four cyl ford engine that i,m going to practice with, it is a fairly common engine and if i can get it to run reliably it will provide all the charging capacity I will need.


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## Tex (Oct 31, 2008)

What about biodiesel? Are you so remote that you can't get enough leftover cooking grease somewhere? Diesel engines are much more flexible.


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## Dogrotten (Nov 15, 2010)

Ive looked into biodiesel, the thing is ive got lots of trees and for a stationary power plant wood gas seams to be the best answer. My goal is independence from outside sources so going out to find cooking oil is, to me, no different than buying diesel (cheaper but not really any different).


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