Hello everyone. I'm new here. I'm off grid in Iowa, and I have followed this website for near a decade and always wanted to get in on the fun but could never really afford it. I love tinkering with things and have done a few jobs over the years that give me at least the basic skills needed(I built speakers and installed them among other things). I even designed a hybrid radial/axial DC motor concept that I really want to build eventually. I dream of a motor with no cogging and huge output potential.
So my girlfriend and I have been working with cats for about a decade now and we dreamed up our current charity startup venture; Recycling for Animal Rescue(RAR) years ago after being forced to survive exclusively off dumpster-diving for a couple of years. We tried to set up a cat sanctuary and get our recycling program going on a farm, but they turned out to be hard to work with and the site was too far out of town. Recently though(mid-June 2017), we found an amazing new location and a really awesome new landlord to work with.
The good news is that the new location is right in the middle of the city, and that it FEELS like a rural property because its in a former flood zone that the city tried a land grab on. Our landlord is one of the stubborn few that held on to his place and now we have a very special location in many ways to do our work. The bad news is that the city parks people want everyone in this area gone, and even go so far as to sit down the block in their vehicles and watch us with binoculars. They talked the power company into declaring our poles rotten(I have video of them struggling for over an hour with a whole team of people to remove just one of them). So we're right across the street from a 60 foot tall industrial power line circuit that feed a local food company, but we are forced to be off-grid.
We also ended up homeless this summer and our landlord for our charity project has been incredibly supportive and has installed a rainwater system on the property, brought out a generator for us to run, and installed a PEX system in the old house so we can have basic plumbing(the house is stripped bare right now though because of the flood 9 years ago). We have it running with a flowjet RV water pressure pump hooked up to a car battery via a quick connect accessories plug set I installed on it.
Our Harbor Freight 3500W generator died on us in mid-July. Our landlord got it after the flood 9 years ago, and put about 300 hours through it with no oil change and let it sit the whole time since then. He's normally the type to take care of things but a generator didn't seem important anymore at his new place so he just set it aside. It worked for us for about a week, but then the engine went haywire. One rod got bent and then I bent the other. The gaskets were all crappy and the spacing on the valve springs was all wrong. I've never done a small engine before. I had to learn pretty fast unfortunately. After about 8 days I had finally figured out how to tear it all down and I took parts from the old engine and merged them with a new engine that our landlord bought. I had to take the tapered crankshaft out of the original, and use the timing gear from the new engine, plus the end of the generator head was also the end of the engine; so I had to use the original back cover on the new engine, but the old timing gear had a tapered end on the shaft and the new one was squared off. So I had to carefully ream out the bottom of the bearing hole in the old engine housing to get it to seat properly and turn easily enough. It was so awesome to hear it all fire up successfully once completed. We've been using it for a few weeks since then now and we've even built a little generator shed to keep it quieter. Fortunately our neighbors are all too far away to be bothered by it even without the shed, but its nice to be able to have conversations in the yard again.
So because of our housing issues, we're in the process of building a tiny home. I picked up a storm-damaged Dutchmen 26B DSL and towed it over 150 miles with a Subaru Outback I had to do a lot of work to make able to pull a 26 foot trailer. We got it at the beginning of June and I had to learn how to use Sketchup really fast and I designed a totally new style of tiny home framing that is made of inexpensive materials but is much stronger than a regular frame and about half the weight of a Tumbleweed Home. We are still in the process of building it due to the immense workload we're under right now. The carriage garage and house have required a lot of work, the kitties are always a lot of work, we do our scrapping to raise funds, we've been repairing our cars as able, and building this tiny home, and taking care of our 3 year old son. I've never worked so hard in my life, and we've done some pretty hard jobs.
Power storage on the property and in our tiny home has been a big concern for us. We're going to definitely want a good polycrystaline/multijunction solar array on the roof of the tiny home and eventually on the cat sanctuary/workshop area. Even if we ever get past this issue of being denied grid access, we still will want to be as self-sufficient as possible. There is little chance we would be allowed to erect a windmill, but I do have a very unconventional turbine concept I would like to at least make a small version of since it would not look like a windmill. There's very limited micro-hydro potential from the pipes on the rainwater system, but I'm not sure that's worth the resources and time to install. We also have the gas generator to fall back on assuming it doesn't die again. I'd really like to get something with more HP like an old diesel truck engine so we could make some serious power.
Our landlord is rewiring the property. He was certified to do this on this property by the city before the threat of flooding in 2016, but when the water was coming he had service pulled temporarily to avoid problems. After the flood risk turned out to be no big deal, they wouldn't let him reconnect it because he doesn't live there and isn't an electrician. He is more than qualified for the work though because he worked with electrical systems in the air force and now works with medical electronics. His wiring is beautiful and all thicker than code requires, but we need an electrician to come down here and inspect the system, get a permit and then wait for the city to inspect. Honestly I want to tell the utilities to go F themselves, but our landlord really wants us to get on grid power. We're far too poor to get the power capacity up to a normal residential level yet though. We have no deep cycle batteries and only 4 starter batteries, 2 of which are in our cars and not working properly anymore. We have an Magnum Energy ME2012 charger/inverter which we got for fairly cheap off Craigslist with the remoter interface thrown in as well. Its modified sine, but it can still handle 2KW and does AC pass-through when plugged in to grid or generator. If we ever get any batteries to use with it we'll be a lot happier. I'd love to get some forklift/industrial nickel-iron batteries, but they seem cost-prohibitive. Maybe we'll pump water into a barrel up in the tree and reclaim it with micro-hydro later lol
Has anyone here used household(Romex type) wire to make inductors for generator motor windings? Could it be used with the sheathing still on it since it lacks resin coating? I have limited materials and extremely limited money to work with here. I do, however, have a massive number of hard drive magnets should I choose to liberate them from all these drives laying around. Unfortunately they are not aligned in the right direction for the motor I want to build, but maybe I can use a powerful electromagnet to reorient their field? I have tons of transformers and other stuff around here that I am sure I could turn into an electromagnet, but I'm not sure how practical that whole line of thinking really is.
Anyway, that's probably enough for now. I have a LOT more questions though. I'm going to be doing some extremely unconventional things here and this is certainly the right community for that!