Make power go

 Alright, so we can get internet, but we have to have someplace to put internet.

Problem is, the internet is only physically available in the furthest possible place on our land away from where we spend our time.  

But it's really good internet (better than we have in the city, in fact).

Enter, Cafe Telco, nee Telco Shack:

Doesn't have to be anything fancy--it's just to hold some batteries and a router and a few other pieces of miscellany.  So the weekend of Halloween, Mrs. Shackleford and I loaded up a bunch of plywood and 2x4s in the truck and drove out to the homestead to put up a 4x8 shack. 

Luckily, something small like this goes together quickly, so in the first day I was able to get the shack built out, and then had the second day to wire it up:

Those solar panels there are 100 watts each, at 12v.  They're joined in series and parallel to bring them up to 24v total, like this:

This isn't my first solar setup, so I was feeling pretty confident about the design. The 24v charge controller that I got will let me run up to 40 amps through it, and since each of those panels can only do 100 watts maximum, that means they're going to max out at about 8 amps, so the idea behind running the panels this way is that I'm currently at half my maximum input, and I can add another two pairs of panels before I max out my charge controller.

Obviously, because I was feeling pretty confident, I had to fuck up on the batteries.

When I was first setting this up, I just had two little 35 amp batteries--those little black fellas there.  I think they're golf cart batteries, actually.

Problem is, I've set up a BUNCH of 12v solar systems, and this was my first time doing a 24v system, so let me show you first what I needed to do.  This is pretty simple:

Right? Nothing fancy, just a simple series circuit with my two batteries. 

Here's what my dumb-ass did because I was in autopilot and wasn't thinking while I worked:

Whoops! That's a bomb.

So after briefly melting one of the battery terminals all to shit--see the end-result below--I corrected my mistake and radioed Mrs. Shackleford to have a good laugh about how I nearly done blowed myself up. 

See that melted terminal in the back, kids? If you ever want to discover how quickly you can move, just accidentally make an explosive arc-welder while miles away from any possibility of help or rescue. 

Good news is that nobody was hurt except for my pride (and possibly my retinas), and the Telco Shack was born. 

The next weekend, the co-op sent out a technician who did a bang-up job wiring the Telco Shack with gigabit fiber!

Hot diggity, we can work from the woods now!