#Thegreatpoolpondconversion - 210502
Saturday was a bear of a day installing the 3rd and final solar panel.
A 30 minute job - turned into a 3 hour, very hot ordeal.
Why 30 min? Well the last time…
The mounting part was easy, getting it up there and positioned, impact wrenching the bolts.
It was wiring three panels together that was, well, an experience.
We could have gone with our instincts and spliced everything easily with parts we had.
We wanted to connect them in parallel using MC4 connectors to one feed instead of 3 feeds to the terminal block on the distribution panel.
It’s electrically more efficient, doesn’t create so much wasted heat at the terminal block, which, in fact, we were able to remove altogether.
So we bought a kit.
It came without instructions.
Yeah there’s a lot we don’t know about a lot of things and we are learning as we go.
But no instructions said to us, ‘it’s obvious, no big deal or they would have included instructions.’
Or a tool, like even Ikea does.
We didn’t get a ‘it’s not obvious so spend some time researching this’ vibe.
And it wasn’t obvious. Not hard. You just have to know. And we didn’t.
It was hot with the heat reflecting off the roof.
And we were standing/leaning up on ladders for long time - kinda uncomfortable.
We had to develop a ‘technique’ and take it apart and put it together 2 or three times.
And yeah, this is more solar than it is pond itself but you’re along for the whole ride.
Saving you most of the nonsense, we got it done and likely won’t have to do this ever again.
And it turns out we figured it out right besides.
How do we know? Well it turns out there’s dozens of youtube videos including ‘if you don’t have the right tools’, which we found the next day.
Sunday was a lot easier. No climbing, no lifting.
Our 40 bunches of hornwort plants showed up.
This is the first of possibly three batches. We’re going to give it a month and see how they do.
We wanted to weight them so they wouldnt float around.
We took 40 lava rocks out of the filter and drilled holes in them.
Then attached a loop of fishing line.
Looped it around a bunch and dropped them in.
It’s not really all that much to see.
The chute and wheel work fine. It looks like we won’t have to do any cutting or adjusting.
We did a little more tweaking on the filter discharge pipe into the chute to stop the backflow and think we got it fine tuned.
We are nearing a kind of ‘mature’ point. The look of the pond isn’t going to change much more.
We’ll finish screening in the filter this weekend.
Then it’ll mostly be adding plants and bird perches to the pond and deck, rockscaping the top shelf etc.
And a lot of fine tuning and tweaking of things that aren’t visible.
Adding another raised growing bed doesn’t count; that’s pond adjacent.
We’ve seen no new wildlife in a couple of weeks.
Two woodpeckers took up nesting in a hole in a tree in the front yard.
They’ve been here for years and it’s too far to credit that to the pond. Just the nesting is new.
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