Flash Flood Jackpot: Sand Pond Overflow & Green Explosion!
In this thrilling episode of Occupy the Land, a modest
In this episode of Occupy the Land, Ernie builds a compact, mobile 6×8 battery shed on a pallet platform behind the shipping-container workshop to house four massive 300Ah batteries, inverters, and charge controllers—delivering a full 15kW of 120/240V power for the entire back-of-property zone. Designed to be forklift-movable and wind-resistant, the shed keeps critical electronics safe from potential fires and desert elements while feeding the workshop and future projects. With the tractor busy elsewhere, we level the site, add a wooden floor, and plan shelving, all while prepping for a second shipping container and a 30×60 covered workspace between them. Cooler weather and greening desert signal it’s time to push hard on power independence and homestead expansion!
Transcript:
Welcome to occupy the land. Occupy the land board. What we’re doing is at the back of the shipping container. We got a, pallet as a platform for the shed. Now it’s only, you know, like a six by eight. But this is what we’re going to put all the batteries, inverters and everything in, and then power this whole part of the property back here with 15 kW, and I get 120 and 242.
So we want to get everything out of the shipping container. And just in case, you know, things happen, you know, be out here. But, where have these pallets that we got down here? What I’m going to do is I got them almost level, but I’m going to rake dirt into it and created a good base here and then shimmy it up with the level and make sure we get it level.
Then I’m going to cut, some board to put in the bottom of this storage shed. And then we’ll order this out because I the winds are crazy out here. So I just want to make sure it ain’t going nowhere. So we’re going to go ahead and do that. Then I’ll show you. We’ll put in the shelving unit that we have here, and then the batteries and inverter and charge like our stuff, and then we’ll run it into the shipping container.
But it’ll be a hub for a bunch of stuff down here. But, one thing is, I’d like to keep it to where it can be mobile. We may put the entire unit to where I can just transfer to put it on a pallet. Eventually we either have another one or use that one that we can put on a pallet and just move it around the forklift and take it wherever we’re doing, you know, long days of traveling and that kind of thing.
So what we’re going to go ahead and do is flatten this out, get the level. It’s pretty level. But I’m gonna go ahead and get it to level and then we’ll put this back on it. But you can just lift this out I mean this is not that heavy. You know? I can just move it around. I moved over by myself.
So we’ll put that over there, and then we’ll get all the weight and everything down, and we’ll start building that out. Now, I took out the, post that we had for the solar panels, but, because it was sticking out and the building that we’re going to do, we decided we’re going to put another shipping container over there and a building in between here.
It was in the way. So I’m going to be moving those out. So we’ll go ahead and write this down. Get it all level. Put that back on it. Then we’ll go ahead. Put the floor in, bring the shelving unit in and start hooking up the battery system. So that’s what we’re doing. Hey.
Now this is going to go on the back of this shipping container. But we wanted it leveled. And make sure that we had a stable foundation and did get wet and so on. Now this the wood floor will not coming direct contact with the soil. So it’ll, it’ll settle even more. Now, this is moist, and we kind of have we packed it.
So it’s almost like a concrete pad anyway. And, this could be permanent, you know, semi-permanent. I can move it pretty quickly, but we need to get this going. I think it’s going to work out well. So we’re going to go ahead and take and just lift this up and put it on there, and then we’ll start finishing it out.
But, Well I could probably do it here on a hinges, so. Oh, man. Lee, I am all right.
Pretty man. Lee boom! All right, now we got to get an exact. But you get the idea. We’re going to go ahead, put a wood floor in there, then. We’ll go ahead and get the doors on and so on, and then we’ll start bringing out the shelving, the batteries and get that all hooked up. And that’ll be a thing.
We’ll share that with you, too.
Now on the utility side here we have the septic that goes there. And leach field kind of runs that way. And, the utilities for the bus, we have our water tanks and so on in there. And that’s what, is filled up from this. And we have our septic and so on. And it’s just a white and black water tanks goes out.
Boom. That’s taken care of. Now we have the battery compartment here, and the solar array comes in to here. And we have like 13kW of batteries. And then we have a generator under there. Now the solar lines come in. We had them dug in and then we needed just rip them up, you know, because we were checking, to get we weren’t getting the maximum amount of solar from that, and we had to track it down, and, we got that taken care of, but I’m going to go ahead and rebury these.
But what I wanted to show you, I just take the front bucket and just kind of flip it up and, you know, just to make it so it’s not too much of a hassle digging this, but I can’t get the tractor back here because of the solar panels. But I wanted to show you, you know, just how once this gets moist, how easy it is to dig.
I mean, it’s just, you know, boom, boom and it’s just soft soil and. Yeah, water and stuff grows like, here is grass. Now, Arizona used to be lots of grass. And that’s why they, on our state seal for Arizona. It is mining, agriculture.
And cattle. And what they did is they just released. We’re still in open range out here. The cattle come out in the winter range. All this grass comes up and there’s a lot of places that they the mesquite beans on trees that they do. So Arizona used to be a lot greener. We’re finding that out. You go through historical records and so on.
And whenever they start, any of those are boxes of all the crap we’ve been getting ready to take that to the to the dump. Now, this is, soil that really allows for a lot of growth. This is just like a week and a half that had done this. Now, that’s why we’re going to green the desert by retaining all this water on the property.
And you’re going to see this is going to pop green really fast. Now what Donna is going to do, she likes having green around the bus and she got this cheap, artificial grass to up. This stuff is now real. Dan, you’re still walking on rocks. So what we’re going to do is, we did this before when we first got here, but we tried wood chips and we tried all kinds of stuff.
And the wood chips, you get some of the thorns from some of the bushes. You know, I don’t like it. So what we’re going to do is they have astroturf when they replace soccer fields and, you know, putting greens or, football fields and athletic stuff. They have all of that grass. Now, our oldest daughter, one of the homes that they had, they got a soccer field and a lot of the green grass, and they did their backyard and it was awesome.
Well, Donna wants to do that. We’re going to go in the Phoenix, have a place to where you can, you know, how much of a soccer field do you want? So she’s probably going to do, I don’t know, 20, 30ft wide. She wants to take this and put it underneath the pool and make this nice. She’s going to get a sturdy when resistant steel frame, not too many billion dollars gazebo that’ll go over here.
Make her kitchen out of outside because she likes cooking outside. And you know, she got that stove that thinks pep that that was only 120 bucks. And it’s a five burner. And this thing is awesome. I yeah, we just started using it. And I mean, damn, you know, so you can make a kitchen now the outdoor main kitchen, outdoor entertainment area will be that pad there where that bigger dome is way over there on the other side of that building.
Now, you’ve seen it before. So we’re going to go ahead and green this up because we got family come in for the holidays. So we’re going to make it nice for them. But I didn’t want to get too cheap like a pop up because you know that’s not going to withstand the wind that comes out here. You know, when resistant to 30 something miles.
Yeah, I laugh at your 30 miles an hour. So we’re going to go ahead and, concrete screw it into pads that we have over here. So she has that the when the guy wires that we had were poly and the sun, sun rotted them after a year, and then our awning ripped off, just boom. It was it was on the other side of the bus all of a sudden.
So it didn’t mess up anything else. And it needed. It was the original. With this I was surprised it last as long as it did, but, we’ll probably get another one here for that shade. And then the gazebo and the grass area here. And that’s kind of one of the plans for the holiday season. So our family’s comfortable now here because not everybody can stay in the bus.
For Donna and I. It is very comfortable out here. We we enjoy it. Now if we’re going to have guests and stuff, we need to upgrade a little bit. We have the shipping container. The second one is coming tomorrow and I won’t be spending some time on that. And, I ordered a bunch of shells that will go in, and then you start transferring a lot of the storage and things we need to get access to from that big white trailer that’s been our storage, and we’ve been getting a lot of stuff done it, more infrastructure.
But we really, really, really need all that. So we can get the fastening, the frames and the windows and customize them. The stamp press, the integration of the domes onto the, stem walls here and so on. We’re right at that point. We got a lot of decisions to make, and I need the workshop to do that. So I’ve been focusing on the capabilities of that before I get too much further into, I wish I didn’t do that.
I need to do that. And I wish I had the stuff for that. Well, that’s what we’re doing. So in the meantime, while it’s moist like this, I can really carve the desert and make it drain exactly where I want it to do. I try to get a good rain. I can see where I need a little tweak here and a little bit of tractor there and a little bit, and then boom.
Because when it does rain and if you can retain this stuff, you can get grasses will grow for months, you know, until then it gets to dry, it goes away. But we’re going to green this. We haven’t even really got started. And you can see it starting to green. Go over there and you’ll see the desert just starts to green up.
That’s why there’s so much cattle out here.
So now we have these two shipping containers that are 30, just a little over 30ft apart, that we’re going to put our 30 by 60 by 22ft tall building.
In this thrilling episode of Occupy the Land, a modest
In this episode of Occupy the Land, we seize a
In this busy-week update from Occupy the Land, Ernie finally