In this episode of Occupy the Land, we take you through our Arizona desert homestead as we prepare for monsoons and advance our off-grid dome build! We showcase our sand pond project to capture monsoon water, repurpose pallets for storage, and plan a man-lift using an IBC tote for dome construction. From managing solar panels and charge controllers to organizing shade cloths and water pumps, join us as we experiment with water systems, handle septic maintenance, and share how we keep cool and powered up in the desert heat!

Here’s the transcript:

Now, this is a north view from the property and we’re near the corner. When you go down, you’ll see that white steak down there. That’s the northeast corner of the property. Now, this is the road that goes on the east side. And, a lot of the drainage of the water will hit up against that and then goes down to our sand pond that were created to store a bunch of the monsoon water.

And that’s. You know what I mean? If I focused on it, you know, it could be done in a year, but it’s a multi-year project and you need to because you got to understand exactly how the water works here. And I think I got it down. You know, we get a nice little flood and I can see what’s up.

Now, what we’ve done here, these are, a bunch of pallets that I got when, we went to the auction last year getting a lot of stuff. And they were very handy dandy in us putting a lot of stuff storing on and covering them with tarps and getting them up out off the ground. But now with the storage container and so on, we can start getting a lot of stuff in and we can use these for other things.

Now this IBC tote, what I like about it is that it’s on a pallet that I could put it on the forklift, on the tractor. Now, what I’m going to do is I’m going to cut out, you know, one of the ends of this and take this actual tank and put it in another cage. But I like this cage for this.

We’ll use it for something else. But the reason is, is that you can make a man lift out of it. I, you know, pick it up with the forklift. You can stand in there and get high inside and working on the dome and so on. And we have the opening to one of the workshop domes where the tractor can actually fit in it.

So that’s going to make a lot of things easier. And some of these pallets are, you know, solid. And that makes it easier for other things. You know, this aluminum tubing I got like another 100 of these for doing all kinds of stuff. We’re going to be putting up post, you know, for putting up triangle, you know shade cloths that we have and this and we use them here to make this solar rack.

You know. So this worked out really well. So we have only four panels that we were using for a long time. And then we added another for, for the bus. But it’s, power is not a thing. I mean, if you got enough storage and the cost of lithium ion phosphate batteries and everything now has gone down, now, we had a charge controller fire that, just the wrong size of had too much power on another four panels that we have, you know, up near there.

So that kind of changed where we’re going to be doing the fact that you can have a fire and then a little fire turns into another fire of a fire. It’s a tank. So we wanted to make sure that we did it in such a way that the, power utilities are separate from living areas, just out of precaution for a lifetime.

I don’t got to worry about it. Now, this is the control panel that I used to have on my studio at our home, and I wanted to add a principle. I wanted to see if I could, power my studio and it just be totally off grid and separate from anything and just, you know, get to learn about it.

And, what these switches are, is, this on the right here, this cut off switch was just for us to be able to be on grid or off grid, on a grid, off grid. And we just flipped a switch and it was totally off grid. We could run generator, did solar, and so on. So this was already set up.

I took this and this is probably going to be for, the workshop area. Now these are earth bags or hyper Adobe bags and they’re just bags. You can see here that it’s just a open tube. And, you just fill it with dirt and, tamp them down, and that is you can. And we had ten of them.

Here’s nine we’ve only used probably not even half of one of the, first rolls to do some of the check dams to start. You know, quite a bit of the, foundation, the footer for the next dome that we’re working on now. But you can see we could build multiple houses. Now, this stuff, we put it in the shade here, but that’s one reason why I liked it, is that it’s not polyethylene, the white stuff, and so on.

That degrades in UV very fast. Within a month or so, it starts degrading. This stuff can sit out for years 3 or 4 years, and you can just keep building with it and you just stuff in wet dirt and make Adobe, or you do what’s called structured Adobe and you add, Portland cement to that, and it makes it a lot more durable so that it doesn’t, dissolve when it gets wet.

Now, the one thing that we’re doing is that we, just made, like, cement. That was just sand and gravel and a little bit of Portland and, made a little bit of clay, but we put it in there and it just concrete now. So with concrete footers, it’s not going anywhere. Now, these control, combiner boxes here is how we, you know, we have off switches that we can turn off the panels when we’re working on stuff so we don’t die because you’re dealing with very high, power demands, and, you know, you can just, you know, turn off the off switch.

That’s a, lightning arrestor there. And then you got breakers and combiners and so on. So this is a, you know, necessary for, safety and to make sure that you can, turn off the power if you’re working on something because, DC power, Super Volt, you know, coming out a couple hundred volts and you’re dead.

So you got to be very careful with that. If I now this we’ve had, you know, for year we got a couple of these. They are, hot water heaters and it really made for horse stalls, you know, for, like, hosing down your horses or whatever, and them not being cold, but, you know, for camping or whatever you just hook up a, five gallon propane, you got hot water wherever you want.

Now, this was an outdoor shower that Donna, she really likes the outdoor shower. We started disassembling a lot of stuff, cleaning it up and organizing the play, putting it in storage to kind of, you know, get to the next phase of the build here. Now, this is a, water, trough for, horses or cows, and the cows are lower and the horses are higher.

Now, this is part of an aquaponic system that we had that we still have the pieces for, and we may do that later when we get to that stage. Now these are just donated extra solar panels that were, business that was moving, doing something my son had access to just got me a bunch. So these are panels that I’m going to be using for the, shipping container workshop over there for powering that.

And, so we got panels enough for doing that. And then, this is for a septic leach field line. Now, we’ve already installed our, septic over by the bus, and we didn’t, double it out because we we’re doing an experiment. We wanted to try it for a couple of years and see how it works. We’ll dig it back up and evaluate it and look at what is really needed, because we really don’t use that much water.

So that’s what just back here by the solar panel. Now this is a lot it generate. These are 535 watt bifacial kick butt, you know, panels. And and then, you know, the grounding rod goes down in and so on. Now we did have the solar lines going to the bus buried, and I had to undo them because I was checking different things.

We thought we had a short and kind of, you know, so those would get buried back again. Now this is our trash. You know, Donna just puts all the cardboard boxes, everything in the winter. We burn them. Now, there’s a lot of there’s just gets burnt. But, we have our big dump trailer and she’s about due to fill it up, and then she takes it to a landfill that is probably about 35 miles away.

And they just let you dump it, you know? So I’m good with that. Now, we did have a lot of stuff underneath here that we’re starting to organize and, and getting the storage now we’re going to be doing, a lot of shading on, various work areas and everything. And that’s what these are. They’re just big 20 by 20 by 20 or, you know, 12 by 12 by 14 or something.

Triangle pieces. A friend of mine, started using them for shade, and they work awesome. And I thought they’d be a lot more expensive. Even these big ones are only, like, $40 or something, so for 100 bucks, you know, different sizes, you can really improve your life. Now, the pool has been here for God a couple of months, and it really takes care of itself.

It doesn’t take a whole lot of chemicals. You know, Donna takes care of it. She has to, you know, put a I b c tote full of water in it every week or so. But, it’s really nice. And but now it’s it seems kind of cool. Usually it’s hot. I mean, it’s like minimum 85 degrees to almost 90.

I mean, you know, it’s like taking a bath, you know, Donna really likes that. But, you know, I just come out and, you know, we have, you know, her homemade soap and, I just take a cup and pour it over me and, take a bath, rinse off, and then just soak in the pool. Kind of like a Japanese bath.

Now, these here, show these. They’re called yuppies. And I think I bought these for $135 each. Only they have, I think, like 600W of power. And they put out, like, 600W. You know, they’re less than a kilowatt of storage, but they run just about everything, you know, except you. When you start getting up into 1500 watts, for, heavy drills or big pumps or, but little pumps and, you know, hand drills and, you know, circular saws that you still have this AC we can just carry these.

Right. Well, it charges the battery for our dump trailer. I just plug in normally you plug it into a household, outlet to charge the battery, I guess. Got marine battery in there, 12 volt lead acid. But, we just put this and plug it in, and I’ve never had to plug in the, dump trailer, you know, so it does really well, and I.

I like having these. We have the eco flow delta two. I think it is. That’s 1500 watts and pump out by 1800 watts. So you can do a lot bigger stuff. Now I just took a oh barrel. That was out here in the desert, I found and, cut it down, put some holes in the bottom. And that works really well.

Of course, it’s too hot to back fires now, but normally we just, you know, burn all the cardboard and everything in here. And then just from cleaning up, the trees and the ironwood, mesquite and whatever, out here in the desert, the branches off like those trees and so on, you know, we’ll take this and do a pile.

And, that’s been our firewood. Now, we had, a covering over this, but the wind out here is so much it just blows it off. And the. You’ve just beat the crap out of any of this line. What we’re going to start doing is you get this cheap chain link fence, chain link, you know, it’s just like dog chains or something.

You can get it at, Tractor Supply, the small gauge chains. And I’m thinking we’re just going to go everything chain, even though it may be a little bit more money. You know, now that you’ve just kicked a living crap out of everything. That is the one thing here in Arizona you need to get stuff under shade. Just the damage that it does on tires, on anything, plastic, on tarps and everything.

It’ll just kick the crap out of it. Now, this is a mixer that we have, just as backup for when we have areas that we can’t get to for different backup of, you know, we’re doing stuff now, this is the, expansion foam, you know, for, us doing the cement floor and so on. Now, we haven’t used this, but we like having it around.

Like when the tractor has gone. Now we have to have something. We’ll do that. Now. What Donna’s doing over here is how our water system works. Now we have the septic that we buried. Tanks here in Leach Field goes out towards the, solar panels. So we have Yang Hurley see the screen. So we have, you know, down below there.

Well, that’s what she’s doing. So we get the watch. So she’s.

Puts the, septic hose, that thing, you know, built in there, and make sure it’s down over the crapper. And then, the gray and black tanks over there, and she’s opening them.

The help is all good. So then it start. Here goes.

So how often do you have to do the tanks? About every two weeks. Two and a half weeks. A lot of they like the laundry water. They. When we do the washer. Loads. I just run it outside to the foliage. So that kind of cuts down a lot because that does take a lot of water.

So I’d say and a lot of the times we just take outdoor showers anyway, so we’re not really running a lot of water inside. So right now about every two weeks. 2 or 3 weeks. Yeah. It’s it’s it’s nice out here and it cools you off. And it’s just the nights are really nice. It’s nicer outside at night than it is in the bus.

So a lot of times we spend it outside. Yeah. I was really dreading this summer after last summer, you know, out here by myself. And we didn’t have the air conditioner and we didn’t have, you know, the we had the evap. I think we had the about the evaporative cooling, you know, but it was just getting. Oh, man.

So this is, a water tank that she put a black covering on so it doesn’t grow anything. And then this, you know, Harbor Freight Pump man has been working great. This thing, you know, will empty one of these tanks. And how long there’s. Well, it’ll empty maybe in about 20 minutes. 15 to 20 minutes. It’s like a three quarter horsepower.

And it’s pretty fast. And the only reason I don’t like using it is it’s really bulky and really heavy. You got to prime it every time, and sometimes it’ll work and sometimes it won’t. Prime minutes. They have to keep doing it. And then this one we got, it’s a battery powered one. And I really like it because it’s very light.

It can you can plug it in or it runs on a on a battery. The power batteries that we already have, and you don’t have to prime it. It just you turn it on and it goes. And the only problem with that is that it it you can’t run it long term like, you know, for 20 minutes, like we do with these bigger pumps.

It’ll just get too hot and it’ll shut off. And then we have to wait till it’ll do. Probably five minutes or something. So we’re just kind of new with that one. But I like this one. And then we have another smaller one we use sometimes. But it’ll take a longer time to get into the bus. All right.

So we’re experimenting with all these different. Yeah. The littler pump works on those little whoopee battery packs. So that’s convenient. But then the fact that, we didn’t have water down to the, shipping container over there, and I needed to get a tank over, and I didn’t have the, a hitch. I was missing a hitch that I needed to be able to take the big water tank here, over there.

Whatever. So I use that little that little pump and a five gallon buckets I put in the bucket in the trailer of the tractor took over there and and it freaking worked, you know? So it’s just, you know, you make do. But we’re finding out, you know, what it is that we need

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