Backyard Aluminum Casting #backyardcasting #foundry #aluminumcasting #solarpower #selfsufficiency

In preparation for my coming solar build, I am casting a dozen post caps for the ground rack. I could have bought these, but what fun would that be? So far I have 10, 14 foot sticks of iron ridge xr1000 rail that I got on clearance. 200 feet of 2 inch galvanized pipe, and 12 post caps I cast. My grand total at this moment is 600 bucks. I still need to get the u bolts, the angle brackets as well as the ufo's. I think I can get the whole rack built for around 1k. On it are going to be mounted 20, 400 watt bifacial panels for a total of 8000 watts of PV. While this will not be enough power to take us off grid, it should be able to run the necessities in the house when the power is down. And generate about 1/3 of our yearly power needs. This is the first step to going off grid, I will be installing a SolArk 15K that can take in 21000 watts of solar, leaving us a nice upgrade path when we add more PV panels in the future.