Saturday 8/3- It’s the weekend, so in order to not get too far behind on writing, both Ramie & I spent the morning working on the blog. We have a system worked out so that both of us can work on different parts of it at the same time so we can maximize our ability to get everything drafted, edited, and finalized. Once we felt we had spent enough time on that, we tried to do some planning for the future of our laundry room. With the installation of the solar, we’d need to make room for the inverter & battery which take up a few cubic feet of space.
Plus, once we get the fridge repaired, that’s where the “beer fridge” will go too, granted the whole thing won’t be for beer, it’ll also make space for overflow of things that we don’t want in the kitchen fridge & the extra freezer space we’ve been wanting. When we originally bought our chest freezer we bought the smallest one that they had and it turns out that it’s smaller than we’d like. Prior to our original fridge crapping out, we were talking about selling the small freezer and buying a slightly larger one, but now that we have a spare fridge we don't need to do that. Unfortunately, now with all of this extra “stuff” that we want to put in the laundry room but wasn’t planned for when we built the house, it’s getting a little crowded.
As we were trying to figure out how to fit everything in there, we also brought our attention to the electrical panel. The layout and organization of the electrical system in this house leaves a lot to be desired.
The circuits that go back to the panel don’t make a whole lot of sense, and the labels for each breaker aren’t quite right either. We decided that before we could decide which of these circuits would be backed up through the future solar system, we actually had to figure out what each of these breakers controlled. The problem we’ll run into is that there just aren’t enough “slots” on the solar inverter, so we’ll have to be selective of what gets solar back up and what doesn’t. We started this project by turning on everything around the house, and, one by one, flipping each breaker off. I’d write down what turned off to keep track of which breaker controlled what, and then move on to the next one. Through this process we discovered that there are at least a handful of circuits that had only one random outlet that was barely ever used on them, and a different circuit that controlled all of the master bedroom, master bath & the dry room. Like, why would an outlet that’s just inside the front door in a place where we plug in a vacuum once in a while and never anything else, but then the next one down the line has a bunch of outlets that will be used for the dehumidifier in the dry room, plus everything that we power in our bedroom and bathroom. How does this make any sense?! At this point there really isn’t a whole lot that we can do to fix it, but at least now we know, and we’ll figure out how it affects other things down the line.
Sunday 8/4- After about 10 days of being sick, I finally have some energy today. Even though I am starting to feel a little bit better, I still have a stuffy head, cough, and plugged ears. This sickness has gone on long enough, I’m sick of being sick!!! When you’re still not at 100% and don’t have any plans, what do I do? I work on the blog, play in the garden, and spend some time relaxing. Of course, since it was so beautiful today, we spent about 2 hours in the pool, floating around too! 
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| Yes, this would be Ramie welding in shorts, a tank top, and sandals! |
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| All supports are completed |
Even though I worked for almost all of my regular “shift” today, I did take off work a little bit early to get into relaxation mode. I had a massage booked at 3 this afternoon and wanted to get as much stress off of my mind as I could before then so I could take full advantage of the relaxation. We booked through the same person that Ramie booked for me last year for my birthday. She's great at what she does, and what’s even better is that she comes to your house and you can do it in your own space. She brings her massage table, all of her lotions and potions, and even her own relaxing music to make it feel like you’re at a spa. It was such a relaxing massage and was exactly what I needed. I will say, it was an uneventful but relaxing birthday, and exactly what I wanted.
Friday 8/9- Today, I took off from work because why not make a long birthday weekend!? What did I do? Relaxing things like crocheting, listening to music, and things that didn’t take a lot of effort or brain power. Ramie took it mostly easy too and worked on fixing some more tools for Randall. 
She won’t get close to it, will barely walk past it, and growls at it from a distance. I had it tied to my desk chair, but she was so bothered by it that we had to push the chair into the guest room so she would play with us in the living room this evening.
Saturday 8/10- Even though I didn’t have a reason to be, I was awake early this morning, just like I always am. I think that Skye forgot about the balloon this morning because she walked past it without being bothered, but as soon as it moved as she walked past she got startled and ran away. It turns out that this balloon makes her so nervous that she wouldn’t even go back into the house and just stood at the back door and stared at it…
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| NO WAY! I'm not going in there! |
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| Look at that scary balloon! |
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| Mom and Dad, get it! |
So, we had to murder the balloon. After it was deflated we let her sniff it to know it was ok, but she still didn’t want to have anything to do with it.
As for the rest of the day, Ramie was almost finished with the supports so he worked on completing their construction, then painted them to help protect against rusting in the salt air and so that they might blend into the color of the roof a little bit better.
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| We had to take a little photo opportunity with Skye in the flowers, but she would not sit still |
After our hard work in the yard and in the sun, we had to hit the pool to cool off and relax. While floating around this afternoon the dreaded question that Ramie absolutely hates came up…
“What do you want for dinner?” Ramie usually has a sarcastic answer, and about 85% of the time he says pizza, so I never really expect much help with this question. Today, though, he said he wanted to try something else from the menu at the Mexican restaurant that we went to last night. It didn’t take too much discussion, and we determined that there was enough on the menu that we wanted to try that we would go there again for dinner tonight. This is so unlike us, to go out to eat 2 nights in a row, especially to the same restaurant, but it was so delicious that we made an exception. After dinner we both agreed that this Mexican restaurant is REALLY good, probably our new favorite, but the consensus was we both liked what we had last night better. I guest the first instinct on their menu was the right one!
Sunday 8/11- When we woke up this morning, we didn’t expect it to be anything more than just a lazy Sunday with zero plans, but since it was a really beautiful morning again, Ramie decided that he was going to mount the solar panel supports on the roof today. He needed my help anyway, so might as well do this when I wasn’t working! He needed me to lift them from the ground up to him when he was at the top of the ladder so he could set them on the roof, but once he had them up there he was on his own (if you've been reading for a while, you know how I feel about roofs and heights in general). He then spent the next couple of hours measuring, drilling and screwing them to the roof. I went back to work on painting the planter.
Wednesday 8/14- Recently Ramie got notice from the shipping company that we use to ship all of our online purchases through that we had 2 large boxes arrive. We knew that this would be the equipment for the solar system. Since these were large, heavy boxes, we knew that the shipping cost would be quite expensive. The company offered a discount on the price if you paid in cash, and that discount was worth while, so instead of paying electronically and having the regular delivery guy bring them from San Isidro to Uvita, Ramie asked Randall if he would be going to San Isidro soon. It turned out that he would be (he goes over there a lot to do the Dekra car inspections for people) and would make a quick stop to pay for and pick up these packages for us. When Randall dropped them off, Ramie realized that we only got the inverter and the smart home panel, and we were missing the battery. This is no good, because there isn’t a whole lot we can do with this equipment without a battery to store the power, so Ramie messaged the solar company to find out what was going on. It turns out that these batteries are on back-order until September. Yes, it sucks that we don't have all the components, but at the same time Ramie has a lot of work to get done before we can even use this, so it's not the end of the world that it's delayed a little bit longer. The smart home panel is the piece that we needed to keep going with the major part of the work, so at least he can keep moving forward with this project.
Thursday 8/15 & Friday 8/16- Ramie has spent a lot of time planning out the next steps for solar project and getting everything figured out. After getting the supports mounted last week, he had to install brackets and rails that would hold the solar panels in place and spent time working on that. Once all of that was in place, the next step would be to get the panels up there, but we would absolutely need help lifting the large panels onto the roof! There is no way that just he and I would be able to manage that, so it will wait until we have some friends available to help us.
In the meantime, some of the other things that Ramie needs to figure out include:
-How are we going to get the wires from the panels into the house?
-How are we going to ground the panels to the main electrical panel?
-Where is the best place to install the smart panel (which is like a sub panel)
And of course, after figuring out the “how”, he has to actually do these things.
Ramie spent a lot of time this week looking for the best route to run conduit for the solar wires that bring the power from the panels on the roof to the distribution panel in the house. The past two days he has spent a lot of time up on the roof removing roof panels, removing some of the ceiling in the laundry room near to where the panel will be located, and running the conduit. After all the conduit was installed, the next step was to start cutting open the wall in the laundry room where the Smart Panel will be mounted, right next to the main panel, as this will make it easier to move the circuits that we want to have powered by solar. Unfortunately, they do not build houses here in CR to the US standards. There is no such thing as 16” on center for the studs, there is actually no rhyme or reason to stud placement or cross bracing at all. Ramie had to remove some of the excess studs and re-brace the area that the panel would be secured to. By Friday evening, Ramie was super sore from all of the hard work. After he sat down for a few minutes before dinner and went to stand up again he realized just how sore his feet and back were and that he was walking like a crippled little old man (his words, not mine)... He took some Advil to take the edge off, but he could tell that he may have overworked himself this week.
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| Our laundry room is a mess |
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| The messy panel, the partial stud and conduit that need to be moved. |
It turns out that I’m getting important enough at work that the boss has asked me to be in charge of starting the hiring process of a new admin person to add to the firm. Before we can add a new addition to the team, we have to get the company set up with a phone system, and it turns out that I’m going to be in charge of that too. I’m mostly ok with all of this extra responsibility, but since I’m also the main person getting the actual work done, things might be a little bit crazy for the foreseeable future. At least he pays me a decent rate!
Saturday 8/17- Bright and early this morning at 6:45am Ramie went to pick up Geoff, (he doesn't have his truck yet after he returned from Canada) and returned home with him at 7am. Just before Ramie and Geoff got here, Randall also arrived. What’s going on at our house this early on a random Saturday morning? This morning we’d be making a team effort to lift the solar panels onto the roof so that Ramie can finish the installation of the roof part of this project. The plan is for me and Geoff to be on the ground to hook the panels up to some straps and give them a boost so that Ramie and Randall, who were up on the roof, could pull them up. Each panel isn’t that heavy, they only weigh about 48 lbs. each, but they are 6.5 feet long and 3.5 feet wide. One by one, we lifted the panels up and the guys on the roof carefully placed them on the rails where they would be mounted. It was still early enough that the roof had dew on it, and Randall was not prepared with the proper footwear. Yes, he was on the roof in flip flops! Thankfully, all went well and after everyone was on the ground, we had coffee and fresh banana muffins that I threw together very early this morning.
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| The solar panels sitting in place, but still need to be anchored down. |
Everyone left by around 8:30, and it was time to get working on the next steps with those panels that are now up on the roof. Ramie grabbed the clamps and headed back up to clamp all the panels to the rails so they were secure. That didn’t take too long, and since it was still early he asked if I wanted to help him pull the ground wire that had to be ran back to the panel in the house. We didn’t think that this would be a difficult process because also up on the roof is our solar water heater equipped with an electric back up, and we planned to use the same conduit that those wires were running through to get the new ground wire into the house as well. While getting solar electricity into our house would be new for us, using solar for our daily lives isn’t completely new to us. Even though we have that electric backup option on our water heater, we have never used it and have had the breaker turned off the whole time we’ve lived in our house. It's been 2 years and we rely only on the sun to heat our water and it works fantastic, so much so that you can easily get 3rd degree burns on your skin if you turn the tap on too hot.
Ok, back to wires… since the water heater has electricity, that means we have a conduit from the roof to the electrical panel. This would clearly be the easiest option to get the ground wire to the panel, right? It turns out that the original electricians pulled a sheathed cable, similar to Romex, through the conduit instead of individual wires. This cable that they installed takes up the majority of the conduit with just the insulation jacket, so we’d have to replace that cable with individual wires. Ramie bought 10 meters of individual wire thinking that would be plenty. He would just attach all of the new wires to 1 end of the cable, pull out the sheathed wire, and as we pull that out we will pull the new wire in, along with the new ground wire for the solar panels. Easy Peasy, right?! Boy, were we wrong! As we tried to get these wires started, we pulled from one side as hard as we could and it would not budge, so we tried pulling it the other way, pulling as hard as we could, and still nothing, not even an inch. Ok, fine, Ramie has a fish tape so we tried to push that through instead of just pulling on the cable. He was able to get it in a long way, but eventually he could not push it anymore. He then tried from the opposite side and ran into the same thing. At this point, after fighting with these damn wires for a couple of hours, Ramie was getting frustrated and we gave up this struggle. He took a break to step back and think about what other options we had. Since pulling this wire was not an option right now, Ramie continued working on getting the wall ready for the new panel to be installed. I spent the rest of the day working on the blog.
Just before dark, Ramie had an idea. He noticed that the original electricians had a hell of a time pulling that wire into the panel based on all of the marks that he saw on the conduit. He mentioned to me that they should have used wire lube to pull it in, and my natural reaction to a comment like that is to ask if they even have that here. He just laughed. I don't know, maybe they do but these guys certainly didn't use it. Ramie doesn’t have wire lube either but he does have WD40, which could just be the next best thing. He grabbed his trusty can and sprayed down into the conduit for what seemed like forever… there was a lot of oil draining down that piece of pipe! We’d let that sit and drain down the conduit overnight, and we might have some better luck with it in the morning.
Sunday 8/18- No matter how frustrated we are about it, we have no choice but to get back at it with that damn wire! Ramie got the ladder back out and was going to try to pull from the outside again. He grabbed a hold of it and gave it a tug, and it gave way, but was that just slack in it after messing around yesterday? He got another grip on the cable and he pulled it about another 6” in. I yelled up to him from the panel that it was moving from my end too! HOLY CRAP, the WD40 worked! Ramie was relieved! He came in and taped the new wires to the old cable and went back out to pull everything through. As he was pulling and pulling I yelled out to him to slow down, I only had about a meter of wire left, and the only response that I heard were swear words… Since the new ground wire was longer than the new water heater wires that he was pulling, Ramie wanted to pull to see how much short he was, and kept pulling. The new wires that he wanted to run for the water heater ended up being about 2 meters (6ish feet for all of you imperial measurers out there). Ramie originally figured that the wire was routed to go up from the panel, through the ceiling, and to the water heater on the roof, not down under the house and then all of the way up to the roof. I mean… which one actually makes sense? We had no way of knowing that this wire to the roof actually went under the slab of the house. Of course we had to pull everything back in to its original configuration and then see if he could figure out a different way to get that ground wire from the panel to the roof. It took a little more time but we got it. Ramie terminated everything and we closed the panel.
Since that didn't take too long, Ramie wanted to try to pull the two cables that we needed for the DC power from the solar panels through the new conduit that he ran earlier this week. (for everyone that doesn’t know much about electricity, AC & DC power should not be ran through the same conduit, this is why we needed to run separate conduit, different from where the water heater wires are.) Of course, just like everything else, it didn’t go as smoothly as one would hope, and we had to use the WD40 on these as well. Finally, all of the wiring was pulled from inside the laundry room to the roof and Ramie was finally able to close up the ceiling and roof again.
Tuesday 8/20- In order to keep moving forward on this solar project, Ramie had to try to hunt down some parts so that he could tie the two panels together.
Later this afternoon Ramie also got a message that the green turtles from the nest that he and his team found in June have hatched. Oscar and Cycy (organizers from the turtle reserve) reached out to Ramie to ask if he would like to join in the first public release of the season. Of course he would, these were his baby Greens! Ramie then reached out to Val and Marshall to see if they were available to come along. I even went with to help. Its good that we had plenty of volunteers because it turned out to be to be a large turnout. Thankfully the spectators more or less obeyed the rule of staying outside of the circle in the sand where the turtles were being released. There are always a few that find their way inside of the circle, but at least they stayed behind where the turtles were crawling. Back a few years ago the public got themselves in trouble by crowding the release too much, and for a while they even stopped all public releases all together because people were endangering the baby turtles. These volunteers and the reserve are serious about this stuff!
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| We had to stay after the release to have a few beers and watch the sunset |
Thursday 8/22- If you guessed that today Ramie would be working on solar installation, again you would be correct! Today he installed the small pieces of plyrock to patch what he had to cut out and then started mudding it. We have to make this look all pretty again, we aren’t going to leave it all cut open and half-finished looking! It turns out that the mud they use here is very different from the mud they sell in the US. Ramie described it as super runny and wet, and thinks that it is going to take a lot of small coats to fill in the gaps, screw holes, etc. Of course, just what he needs, more work!
Ramie got the call again today that it was time for a 2nd turtle release. This one wouldn’t be announced to the public, though, so it was a much easier release. These were Hawksbills that Ramie and his team found on the same day as the Green turtles that we released earlier this week. There were also 4 Greens from the last nest that were slow hatchers, so they would be released with today’s Hawksbills. Ramie asked Val and Marshall to join him at the release, and another volunteer who missed the prior release also joined them. I didn’t go with for this one. During these non-public releases, there is often a small gathering of people who just happened to be at the beach that gather to watch the babies swim away, and there were a few people today for this reason. It’s much easier to keep a dozen people back than it is to keep 50-60 people or more back.
Friday 8/23- Back at it again this morning, Ramie applied one more coat of mud, and then walked away to let it dry. He sanded everything late in the afternoon and as he was getting ready to paint the wall he realized that we don't have any of that color paint left. I guess painting will have to wait for another day. Since there was so much dust in the laundry room from all of the plyrock work and sanding, he then spent quite a bit of time removing everything from the open pantry shelves that we have installed in the laundry room and wiping everything down. OMG there is just so much dust! Once this is all done, we will do a deep clean, but that is a project for another time.
Now that the smart panel is installed, the next step will be to move the circuits from the main panel to the smart panel. This step is going to have to wait for a couple of reasons, though. First, we don't have the battery yet, so we can’t finish yet anyway. Also, if we move them now, we won’t be able to power them anyway because we are going to buy the new breakers for the panel in the US because they are less expensive there. Does that mean that we’re done with solar projects for a while? I think so!
Pura Vida!
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