Clearing and Preparing Our Ground-Mounted Solar Site
Preparing a site for ground-Mounted residential solar Panels
STARTING FRESH
This isn’t the sexiest part of the process, but…Clearing our disheveled North Field to make room for ground-mounted solar panels involved a few fun steps:
trimming and removing overgrown plantings past their prime
removing/repairing sections of an old 3-rail wooden fence
removing/salvaging the 50-year-old passive solar panels and wooden rack that were on site when we moved in.
removing a dozen small invasive trees
digging a 50 ft trench for the solar wire conduit, and
(The area in front of the new panels will eventually become raised garden beds, but one step at a time).
WORKING WITH FRIENDS
A bunch of great friends helped with each of these jobs (including some serious elbow grease from my son, Jack). As we practice social distancing and schools close down, I'm feeling enormous gratitude for my community, and specifically these extraordinary men who've freely given their time and expertise to teach me and Jack about trees, power tools and electricity over the last couple months as we prepped our solar site.
Big gratitude to Ben Heltzel and Brennan Schmidt for helping us fell and clear some invasive ailanthus trees, and to Peter Rausse for teaching us about electricity and native flora.
Ben is an experienced tree expert and now a nurse at UVa and a dozen other things that I highly respect. A few years ago when I got brave enough to first use the chainsaw I received as a house-warming gift, Ben came over to explain how to use it. We were taking down a dozen trees, and I remember going to Lowe's and getting all kitted out with a helmet and ear protectors and safety orange vest and thick Husqvarna chainsaw safety chaps and Ben showed up in, like, cargo shorts. "What are you wearing?" I asked. "What are YOU wearing?" he responded. Ben is awesome.
Brennan is a chef and master baker of sourdough excellence and former UVa defensive tackle who later played for the NFL Europe Rhein Fire. He's also a forestry, permaculture and silvopasture student/practitioner. We've been exploring my forest and he patiently explains to me how ecosystems work and develop, which trees are good, which are diseased, and how to be a steward of my land. He's also a great dad and plays a mean harmonica. Brennan is awesome.
Peter is wildly talented in photography, ceramics, wood, metal and stone. He grew up in Italian and American farms and vineyards (his father is Gabrielle Rausse, the "father of Virginia wine" who basically taught this region how to grow grapes) so Peter knows so much about so much in the natural/machine world. He often sends me obscure websites about solar batteries or craigslist ads for mini-trucks I should buy for Thunderbird Disco. Peter is awesome.
TRIMMING and REMOVING OVERGROWN PLANTINGS
Our first step was just to figure out what the hell was going on. Everything was overgrown and disheveled, and we started by cutting the long ornamental grasses close to the soil.
These bastards (maiden grass) are very unruly, and the stalks can be sharp in a paper-cut sort of way. While it’s probably not the smartest idea, I went in underneath, gave each one a big bear hug, and then wrapped it with duct-tape a couple times. Then used a hedge trimmer to cut them down, keeping the long grasses bundled together. This way I could carry each bundle out to the woods in a more manageable way (and yes, unwrapped the tape and disposed of it).
Trimming all the growth is helpful just to see what you’re working with, and then I used a trenching shovel like this to slice through the entrenched root systems, working my way around the base of each plant.
REMOVING THE FENCE
Next, Jack and I removed a section of fence that was going to be in the way of the new solar panels, salvaging any of the cedar planks and posts that still had life in them. This was the moment I realized my drill wasn’t a good drill, and that I needed a better drill/driver.
REMOVING PASSIVE SOLAR PANELS
Before taking down trees we had to get rid of a nonoperational solar water heating system from the 1970s that the previous owners installed. With some supervision from me and Ben, Jack did the demo work on the wooden rack (see below).
Solar thermal heating is an old technology—picture a metal tank painted black and filled with water, the sun passively heating it—and is very different from modern solar photovoltaic (PV) systems that generate electricity.
Our old passive system was basically a simple glass-topped insulation box with a flat solar absorber make of black sheet metal. Peel that back, and underneath is a set of copper heat exchanger pipes, also painted black. The water ran through these pipes, got heated by the sun, and was then stored in a hot water storage tank in our basement (We swapped out the old broken one for a new hybrid water heater when we moved in).
While Reynolds Contracting was on site with an excavator doing the stump/root removal and regrading work, I traded them the copper from the passive solar system in exchange for a 50-foot trench they dug from the future solar site to my studio (not exactly sure what salvaged copper pipe was worth at the time, but once the pandemic hit it was up past $5/foot, so they probably got the better end of the deal here, but hey, everyone’s happy!). By digging this trench, we could run electrical conduit from the panels to my studio (already wired) and then patch into a junction box and run wire from the studio to the house through the pre-installed conduit. This saved us some $.
SAFETY FIRST
The biggest help was Jack's labor, though. If you watch till the end, you'll see that Ben and I got so fired up about seeing Jack finish sledgehammering that board, that we completely overlooked the fact that it was going to fall directly on his foot as soon as it popped loose. He walked it off like a champ and was fine a minute later—hopefully retaining a sense of accomplishment—but it reminded me that this work is serious and potentially dangerous, and that taking better safety precautions (especially with a 5-year-old) needs to be a higher priority.
We finished off the day with Ben giving Jack a tutorial in creating an electric fence for a chicken coop, which was adorbs.