Homestead Upgrade: Solar Workshop & Live Worm Delivery!

In this busy-week update from Occupy the Land, Ernie finally consolidates every tool and supply into the shipping-container workshop, creating elbow room and rediscovering lost treasures. He builds a lightweight aluminum solar array and installs four 300Ah batteries for a massive 15kW 48V power station that can run welders, plasma cutters, and the stamp press simultaneously—no more electric bill, ever. Meanwhile, Donna adds live red wigglers from Uncle Jim’s Worm Farm (that miraculously survived days at the tiny local post office) to her thriving raised beds and continues sun-oven baking with perfect loaves of bread in 30–35 minutes. With the homestead now fully organized, powered up, and worm-boosted, we’re ready to integrate the dome roof, build the trommel, and welcome family for the cooler holidays on our greening Arizona desert oasis!

Transcript:

Welcome to occupy the land. Occupy the land, dawg. So another busy week here on the homestead. What I’ve been working on just a bunch of little things. And one huge thing. We had a bunch of stuff on one side of the the yard, the property over by the worked on that. We were initially, going to build over there.

Well, I moved everything to the other side where. And he has a shipping container that’s now going to be his workshop. So that took a couple of days, but we got everything really nice and organized and it’s all in one place. We can see what we have. And we also found a lot of things we were missing. So it’s kind of a good thing all the way around.

And we don’t even got to the storage trailer. And, no, but that’s really organized. Ernie can take you through that. It looks really nice. And there I there was no way I thought he was going to get all of that stuff, put away and then still have elbow room to work in there, but he’s done it. So I got more room to put stuff.

I got more stuff. You can buy more things. So just real quick, the other things that I did, I continued working on my garden. I got some worms from a worm farm in Pennsylvania, really close to where I used to live. So that’s kind of cool. And I have an Uncle German and the worm farm is called Uncle Jim’s Worm Farm, so this is kind of interesting.

I told him about it. So those are right next to him? Yeah. He lives in the town next to it. So anyway, I put those worm. They. I was afraid they wouldn’t really survive because I had to sit at the post office a couple days. That’s one thing. We have a we live in a really small town and it’s a very small, well, a very small post office for this whole big area.

And it has very limited hours. It’s like from 9 to 4. And then they have an hour for lunch Monday through Friday. They’re not open on the weekends. But yeah. Nice. And then the lobby is but not the window. So if you just happen to miss that time, a lot of your big packages or anything like that just has to sit there and so you can go in the next time.

So I was afraid those worms wouldn’t make it, but they did all come around and everything. So I put them in my garden and we’ll see how that goes. I also cleaned out some solar panels that our sun got for us a while back, and those will be used to power the shipping container. And then what have you been up to?

Well, one of the things what you see here is the solar array that I’m building out of this, aluminum square tubing. I got this stuff, a bunch of these, like, a hundred and something of these, and they’re really light. They’re two inch square tubing. I use them for everything. I everything. I mean, it is I’m going to try and go through as ma’am as possible.

Yeah. And we were watching a video last night about a couple they, they, they live, off grid and everything, but they have this barge that they built into just a home, just for the fun of it, I guess, for ambition, strike and strikes. And they had this, like 4 or $5000 window that they, they really wanted this window to go in their kitchen.

And it opened up and it was like they’re just like not paying that money so far. Just a couple 100 bucks, they take you through the 100, 500. I had to build that window. But we were thinking we could do the same thing. But using. Maybe they can also be heavy enough that stuff like this that we have sitting around now that we can find it.

And I got a workshop and a workshop, you know, the, the workshop came out good, but I want to build a concrete pad, and we have a bunch of video that we did in the last few days. So Randall put that and as we talk about it, but the workshop is done as much as you can in a shipping container.

It really works out well. I have the stamp press for doing the dome struts. That’s the only thing I need to get over and refurb and clean up and so on and put at the end. I have a place for that. And so then we’re getting close to integrating the dome and with the hyper Adobe bags, our prototype that we’re doing.

And then but I need power down here. And we have there was such a good deal on these batteries. They’re 12 volt 300 amp. And, they had a deal for form for $1,200. I would buy a 20% of that for that much, you know, two years ago. So I’m like, oh my goodness. And there’s a, YouTuber does a lot of solar stuff.

His young man named Wil Prowse Pro see that? We learned a lot from and he endorses you. I mean you were cheaper, but he’s like, oh, these are built nice. He takes everything apart and so on. So I go score. Boom. Got it. Well, the thing is, is that it’s a lot of power. It’s 15kW that I have in here.

I was going to just do 1 or 2 batteries, but I have an extra inverters 48 volt. So I have to put them in series to get 48V. This is a good thing for you to know. Series in parallel on batteries. Think of it like a flashlight. When you put in the C cells, D cells, or Double A’s or whatever they have.

Now you put in to the flashlight and it goes positive, negative, positive, negative, positive, negative Stax. That ups the voltage for more than a half. Then the three. Do you know it’s a four and a half. You know, the six bulls. You put four batteries and that’s what you do. And you do series. Now when we put these solar panels there about I don’t know, it depends on them.

But say, you know, 20V apiece or something. You put them in series, it ups the voltage. The higher the voltage, the smaller the wire needs to be because you got high voltage, which is like, speed or pressure, you know, coming out the hose amps is more like a firehose. It’s a bigger it’s not as much pressure as fast, but the same amount of water comes out.

So if you do them in parallel, well, you have still 12 volt batteries. It’s 12 volt. It’s just a big battery. But if you put them in series, it goes from 12 to 20 4 or 36, 48. So I need all four of them to use that 48 volt, inverter. And I’m like, man, I could have split these up around the property or so, but they’re really cheap, so it doesn’t matter.

So what happens is I have to go 48 volt, which means I got to do all four of them, which means I got a big ass battery bank. So instead of having distributed stuff, you know, this garden is only about now 50 yards that way. And, so I could run some electrical line and gray PVC conduit. You know, I may or may not do that, but I tell you, I can run any equipment in here.

Welders, plasma cutters, the stand press, compressors all at the same time. I say. So it’s going to be it’s going to be nice. Now, these panels over here, they’re only about 200 watt panels. Now, the big ones that we got are like 535. They’re big and bifacial and all that. But these are free, my son or some company going out of business and they’re just giving away any just, oh my dad could use them.

So he got like 15. I’m like, oh yes, I can. So that, you know, took time to clean those. And then you face south about 28, 30 degrees or so of a, incline. And I’m going to build them, put them in here, and that’s I can do six of those panels that will handle you know, the charge controller will handle handle that much.

So that means I’m going to have full power out here that has, you know, electric bill here. I spit on your electric bill. So this is, a power station at the Far North property line, a property that we have here. Then, of course, we have the bus. Then we have another one at our 30ft dome pad that we have that be a community area.

So it looks like we’re going to have three power stations in addition to the big one that we have in the trailer here, the storage trailer that we have, I have got like 40kW in there I haven’t even touched. So what we’re going to be doing is we’ll have the house build, but we need electricity for because I got everything electrical because I knew that this was going to happen.

If you get, you know, gasoline engines or diesel and we have fuel cells, these big squares, we have 116 gallon and a 44 gallon that we take with us to put it back on Ontario. We just go and get fuel and and so it’s the big one. Well, that powers the tractor and all the generators and the boss and the other stuff that we use.

And then we have some gasoline that we get and five gallon cans that we do for the ATVs and the Ranger and stuff like that. But most of the equipment, everything I can. The trouble will be three phase 220, variable speed, reversible motor. Kind of. So running the trial, I’m getting ready to start building that. And I put a bunch of pictures and some video of the prototype.

We did, you know, a few summers ago up in Maine. Now, we left that one there with my friend Derek. Help me work on that and get that all going. And, and he gave me one of the motors that he got from used an auction and a closing car wash it. They use big motors that were running everything.

We used one for that one he cap and one he gave me, and I just left him the trommel. So we’re going to go ahead and reconstruct now. But that was just a prototype. Yeah. We need it to where we can put the gorilla cards underneath and three sections that we can get different grades of gravel. Now you see video of us taking the expanded metal and just put it on one of these aluminum frames that I just bolted on there.

I made that thing. And like, I have our, you know, and we just dump the soil that’s here. You’ll see me just dumping soil from here, and you get a lot of sand and gravel and that, that we needed for when we, for the concrete and for these post. So there’s the material is here and we just have to be able to process it.

Well, we finished this workshop and then now I’m going to go ahead and do a concrete pad to pull everything out. And then I we got to worry about shading this thing because even now you know it’s hot summer. It’s you know, you’re going to cook bread at home. And my daughter uses the sun oven. Your step over here, you’re in the shape there.

We have a son oven that we’ve had for years. It was a gift from a friend. We used to be an affiliate with them, and it’s called Sun Oven. And, you can bake a perfect loaf of bread. And how long? 30 to 35 minutes. I mean, you got a golden brown recently. And I usually use a bread machine, but I had to give that back to my daughter in law for using it for a while.

But once you have one, I do have one. But it’s packed away somewhere in there, and. And, it’s just not worth my time to go through and dig it out. So I’ve been doing it the old fashioned way, just doing it by hand and everything. And and I found a recipe that works really well. So, we’ve been enjoying that, and, the roast.

Yeah. I want to take to do that. It’s. Well, it’s actually sits there all day, but the thing with, slow cooking in a sun oven, as you don’t really have to babysit it too much, it just has to stay warm, like to 250 or something like that. And you can just rotate it every few hours and just enough to keep it warm.

And you could have your food cooked for you. So I’ve been actually doing that a lot lately. And I’ve got something I’m going to cook in there tomorrow the same way. You know, that’s one thing. When we first got it, we tested it out and we cooked a loaf of bread in like 45, 50 minutes in February. Yeah.

Well, it’s, you know, middle of November and it’s. Well, I think it’s up to 354. Oh, yeah, I had it up to about 400, but it’s a little more difficult when the sun is a little bit lower on the horizon. But if you catch it, just if you have something to cook all day or if you want to cook bread, you probably want to do it before midday because the sun is, is just a little higher and it’s easier to get it up to temperature.

But just for slow cooking stuff, you could just point it in the direction of the sun and it would just matter. Move it every now and then a few hours. Yeah, but that’s not like going out there every 15 minutes. Oh my gosh, do I how can you have to worry about keeping it up to a certain temperature here?

It’s just it’s just got to stay warm just like a slow cooker. But not only is it quality and convenient, there’s no power. There’s no power. And it was, I just it that was one thing when we were talking about moving out remotely and off grid is, man, I want power. We need to have power. Power. I want to make sure we got power.

So that is not been a thing. So we get everything is cordless, everything is battery pack. We have a battery, station where we put everything in and hook it up and boom. But we’ve been using the Ecoflow delta that we have. It’s about 1500 watts that it has, in storage, and it can put out about 15 to 1800 watts.

So it runs just about everything, or hauling that thing around all the time. Then we have other little ones. And so on that I’ll use the runner pumps for water and, you know, the garden and so on. Now she put up, a frame that we had a she just had delivered some chicken wire. We’re going to wrap it and that will become, the chicken coop, you know, and, we’ll, we’ll customize it.

We’ve had experience, we’ve done several different versions of the biggest thing. The biggest thing is the door I got, I got some quarter inch hardware clips, you know, it’s really small squares, but I don’t know what kind of predators we’re going to have out here for them. And I want to make it predator. Yeah, I want to make sure it’s hard enough for them to get in there.

So tomorrow or this week sometime what I have to do is dig a, I don’t know, maybe a foot trench around it just to sink that hardware cloth in it before I start putting it on the poles. But the biggest thing is just going to be creating the doors, and everything else is pretty easy. Yeah, you asked a very, I may have to ask you about how to do the doors, but if not, I’ll figure it out.

I’ll figure it out, I always do. Well, the, not only the all the stuff that we had around the property that we, you know, just moved here from storage and had and, you know, all she took all of that and took days to move it all back here to where I have some of the equipment for the tractor and put it all in one area.

So it’s cleaned up up there and it’s organized down here. So I’m going, oh, there’s that thing hanging out looking for that kind of stuff. So, so fortunately with the shelving and the pegboard and the tables, the work tables, everything I have, I have a place for everything. You know, I’m looking for my plumber’s tape. It’s like metal, you know, stripped down.

But I know we got we have wood everywhere. Yeah, we got 2 or 3. I can’t find one now, so when I find it, when I got a place for it. So, the angle that we do on these, you just. Well, I don’t have to show you how to speed squares, but you get the angle right for these and for Arizona, and it kind of goes by your latitudes.

And, so it’s 28 to 33 degrees. We’ll give you the best year round, production temperature. Then you go, all right, what am I using more during the winter time? Do I want to emphasize it a little, you know, flatter for summer power? Yeah. Now for the house or the bus or something like that. Because you’re running, evaporative coolers and air conditioners and all that kind of stuff.

You probably want to lean a little bit more towards summer angle, you know? So that’s one thing that we’re learning. And that’s one thing you did this week was we were having issues with getting enough power. I don’t know if something went out charge control or something. And we were having to run a generator for like a week there just to keep the electricity on in the bus.

But you, you and Bob were working on it and all of a sudden we got 100% by, 000. That was our gives a lot security. That’s one thing. When you have these inverters, these all inclusive inverters don’t have the charge controller and the inverter and, you know, everything is all in one thing. It’s a plug and play us to make it simple.

But if the charge controller goes out or does the work. So we have you, can buy them separately and we have one that we like, and I have one because one charge controller went out and the other one fine behind it. Only reason we had to wait a few days because I just didn’t have time. Yeah, I just got a lot.

We just wanted to generally charge the battery and then we’ll worry about it Friday. So that’s what we did. My friend Bob came over, he was working on some other stuff for me. And you know, while you’re out there, the men are working. You know, you get stuff done. So we got that taking care of some our powered up powered up.

And then, and when we don’t have to run coolers or air conditioners or whether shakers in the window of the bus, you know, for night sleeping. So we’re not a billion degrees. And, so now we got more power, and we know what do it. Well, that was just the bus count here and a bunch of the other stuff that we have.

So we’re going to be able to power that, that that’s that’s taken care of. We had a neighbor, we, use IBC totes and trailers that we go and get our water. And all of our neighbors that we helped dig is septic, septic tank with the tractor. He was wondering what we did for water. We told him, and he’s closer.

He’s like five minutes away, you know, from where that pump is. And the farmer, he just goes. Now it’s quality water. 500 bucks a year. Can get all you want. Oh, man, I made his day. He was. That changed everything for him. And, we don’t really use that much, but we’re going to get to. And that’s why we spent so much time.

You’ll see. One of the first preparations for building up the berm to retain all this water that comes here. So that’s one of the little pieces of video you’ll see. And you do the line. Then we start taking the sand out of the sand pond, which is where all the water goes, and we’ll use it as a manmade aquifer.

But, we take all that soil there in our dump trailer, and then we just go back and forth dumping it because it tilts and it just kind of lays a layer and we just keep layering it. We’ve done that many times and it’ll take us out or may loads. It takes 1012 whatever. And we’ll build this up and that will protect this area from getting flooded now.

Still runs down, goes to the bottom of the property and over to the sand dam. So we’re not losing the water. I just don’t. And we raised the, shipping container on the platform because the trailer is on wheels, you know, it’s a semi like a Mayflower moving thing. It has a lot of extra storage on it. And, yeah, that was cool.

I’m glad we got that. But the, shipping container we raised up so it didn’t flood. I don’t want it to flood. And then we’re going to do a concrete pad out in front of it. Now, some of the other things that we were doing, we did another layer on the dome and put in a lot of the electrical, but we’re about ready.

I think we’re we decided we’re going to start putting the hurricane straps down. What it is, is like a mule tape that you, put over the hyper Adobe bags and you put like 3 or 4 layers on top of that. Then you wrap it over whatever your roof structure is going to be. So it ties it all into one monolithic thing.

Well, at the top of the next few layers, we’re going to put the dome on there. We’re going to do probably a six inch deep, bond beam of concrete around that and have that pull. It’s not going anywhere. Now we’re way over engineering this. We got hurricanes here, now we get plenty. We get a lot of when we get in that.

When do you know? No. It’s been windy all the rest. The whole year has been windy except now. So it’s actually kind of nice. So things aren’t blowing all over the place now that we have everything covered. It’s not windy, but I got a wind. Got my friend Bob. You got a windmill. And how much does it do?

Wow. Oh, yeah. You know, it’s rated for 1500 watts, but that’s when it’s like hurricane. But, generally you got some wind is turning. You get like 200, water out of it. Well, 24 hours or 200W is like you’re getting some real power, then, you know. Well, it was really a, you know, mental brain damage protection. I mean, it’s always blowing and you’re just real, you know, it’s, you know, it’s frustrating.

But when you’re making power that mitigates that, you know, it’s it’s kind of cool. So we have one that I got and we’re going to go ahead and probably put it back here. You know, I wanted to be far enough away. So this doesn’t break the wind and have it high enough. So we’ll put it out around here somewhere and run the wiring in with the wires from the solar panels.

The benefit of that is that it produces power at night. Now we may I don’t know, we don’t really need it, you know, but yeah, but, we’ll say it’s cool. So we’ll go ahead and put that up. That’ll be fun. And then, what are some of the other things that we were doing? You know, part of it just clean up now and you’ll see in the video a lot of things that we were doing this week and, that would give you an explanation of what keeps us busy.

And we’re always busy. And there’s, we use the internet. I mean, we we shop and then go pick it up or it’s at one of our kids house. Get excuse to go visit. They go. Yeah. Got a box. And it was a heavy box. Oh, my God, I have a heavy bag. Yeah, Bob, which is about getting heavy boxes.

Do you know. But, so we go and get all our stuff from that. And then how often do we go get supplies? Every two weeks or something more about every two weeks. Well, we go into Tonopah about a couple times a week, depending on what we’ve ordered. So it’s not so. And it’s like I said, it’s a small post office.

And if we have a couple of large boxes there, it takes up quite a bit of room in their in their mail room. It’s been about a month. They call a second call us and they were nice about they say, hey, can you do you think you can come in in the next couple of days and pick up your thing so we can walk?

But the, and it’s a small post office, but the, it’s probably the size of, about half the size of a convenience store. Yeah. No, it’s not real big, but the, the main thing is the retention of the water. We have not gotten Lane. We only have one really good rain. In the year and a half, we’ve been here.

I saw some rain on the schedule for this week, but. Yeah. Liars. So what we’re going to do is, the next time it rains, we’ll get a lot of video and show you the flow because we had enough, you know, little rains and rain, and we know where things are going. We just need confirmation that we’re in the right place and what we need to shore up and everything.

I like my tractor, man. We could not do this without the tractor. I like your tractor too. Yeah, there. There’s a lot of uses to track all of a sudden. But our daughter going with the tractor, moving stuff, it’s heavy stuff to me. Yeah, whatever does it with ease. You didn’t ask me holding it so I don’t have to ask for permission.

Nope nope nope nope nope. Do I have to have permission to drive your Ranger? No I don’t, you can use it. So, we have yet to go exploring. Now we have some electric bikes that we, that are coming, and that’s something that we had planned on getting a long time. There was like, for $750, you get two of them, you know, for, their 750 watt.

It’s, it’s enough to go to and around here. We haven’t done any exploring because when you take these ATVs, it really kind of messes up the desert. And I just didn’t want to do that. You know, they have tracked all over the place. I’m just not into that. But a wide tire, electric bicycles. I’m like, oh no, I’ve done mountain bikes and so on.

But that’s like work. I’m old man, you know. So getting the electric bikes, we’re going to go start doing a lot more exploring and we’ll share that with you and a lot of the photos and the animals there. And we have tracks all we had. Yeah. One big bobcat or probably wouldn’t a mountain lion. But it was definitely a cat.

And that was pretty big. So there is stuff out here we’re thinking of getting, we’ll be getting cats just from ours. Yeah. They’re outside. Yeah. I want to. I’m not a cat, but we’ll see how they survive, you know? But, I do want to get a dog, so we’ll be working on that. Which means we got to start putting up the fence and so on.

So now, what are some of the other things that we just been getting everything cleaned up and organized for the next wave. You know, we got to start putting the dome on. I got to get the stamp press ready for the integration, and you got to do custom struts and all that kind of stuff. So it’s been, I’ve been doing a lot of shows.

I’m going to be speaking in February at a Norco. Poco on this. You know, they asked me to talk about Occupy the Land, and I’ve emceed that event a couple times and spoken before. And so, so I know these guys and I just we don’t really have to travel anywhere. You want to leave the land, we need to be here doing stuff.

But we’ll we’ll go do that because we want to. That was a whole point, was to be able to inspire people to do this. You know, today I had Alex Newman on the show talking about, you know, a lot of things. He’s going down to Brazil for there environmental. We’re going to do your thing. And, we explained to him that this was our solution.

Now, the political thing is just not, you know, it’s just not. So this is one thing that we’ve been not just for our family, but for everyone to understand. You can insulate yourself from a lot of the crap that’s coming. If you’re more self-sustaining, you know, and especially if we, you know, we did homeschool our children early on until they went to a private school when they got a little older.

But, yeah, get them out of the mandatory youth indoctrination camp. So there’s just no combating that. You just got. It’s just overwhelming. They get your kids minds for so many hours a day, and we bypass that. You know, we didn’t have near the problems and a lot of our friends have. So I am certainly the advocate for that.

So that’s what we’re doing. You’ll see some of the video we’ll just show, you know, quickies on the stuff there and the trouble because the trouble, you know, we just did a prototype just from junk metal that was laying around my friends. And we’re there helping for the summer, and, and, we built this drive on. I’m going.

Yeah. I always knew I needed that, and one of the reasons why we chose this property is it had exactly the type of material that we can process to get all the stuff that we want because we live, so far from you know, paved road that. And just for that, any rock place or material place that’s $600.

Drive out there and deliver your stuff for $200 worth of stuff, you know? So it’s just we have to do it ourselves. So we have a lot of trailers, you know, we have a three quarter ton vehicle we really need to get, you know, for pulling that tractor around. We’re going to be helping people and doing stuff. And, so we’re shopping for that.

Donna picks up the, one of my sons are, you know, got that no one was saying I got I’m not taking responsibility for that. So Donna will get what she wants. You always wanted a big diesel truck. We had an old one we did have, but. But, yeah, it wasn’t very comfortable. Was it? Nice? And Donna’s real estate.

Well, you’re a real estate agent. It wasn’t like. Oh, get in my beater. Let’s go. Oh, we end in Desert One for my highway. Got it. Well, for us, but not for, you know, taking clients around. So this is where we’re at. We’re getting far more organized. But it was such a long haul for us to get the infrastructure in place and to get the drainage and get the roads and get it graveled and sand.

So you didn’t sink and get stuck and everything. So it’s comfortable and fun out here now. So now we’re looking for we’re at the point that Donna wanted to clean up so our family can come out for the holidays and in-laws and so on. Everybody wants to come by now, it’s not a billion degrees. I mean, it’s still, you know, reaching 90, still pretty warm.

Oh, yeah. The pool temperatures. What’d you say was 78? Yeah. No, I hope you don’t get hammered, you know, and I go, well, hell, a couple days ago, I’m going. I mean, it’s hot, but I almost there. But by the end of the day, it started cooling down, you know? Never mind. So that’s what it’s going. I just give you a little bit of an update, and we’ve had, drone aerial views to kind of give you a lay of the land of the 18 acres and what we’re doing and how it goes, it doesn’t really show you the flow.

We’ll have to do some animation or you know, some drawings on, you know, doing Photoshop and everything. We’re just so busy. I mean, we’re doing the site, you know, we’re doing the show, we’re doing, you know, themes. Phoenix that we have Pilots Without Borders, Occupy the Land, the radio show, and we have responsibilities for that. And then every other waking moment that we have, we’re out on the land, but we’re here on the land.

When I was doing that before, about 25 miles away, it was it was, it was effort, you know, to get out here really early and work until there’s beef jerky and then, you know, you go back. But now we just walk out, we’re comfortable and we’re enjoying it. So I, you know, any final word you want to share is airspace.

Homestead Upgrade: Solar Workshop & Live Worm Delivery!https://t.co/dTkeJGd4Au

— occupytheland (@occupy_the_land) November 21, 2025