OFF GRID SOLAR WELL.....Learn from what I didn't know about FREE ENERGY!

ah guys welcome to another moontastic video here on the stoney ridge farm you guys having fun [Music] come along let's learn something together hey there folks this is josh stoney ridge farmer welcome back to another gorgeous day here on the stoney ridge farm we're up here by the solar well pump system and this is a lorentz solar well pump system we're going to walk through this system with you guys today and talk to you about how it works and some of the lessons that i've learned running a solar well pump system like this so come along today this is a completely passive all the way 100 solar well watering system for our cattle here on this side of the farm we've got about 60 acres around here and we'll be installing mirror fountain waters probably about five of them on this 60 acre track here on the farm so that we can intensively graze and mob graze our cattle so come along we're going to learn a little bit about the solar well setup all right guys get ready to be fed information with a fire hose because this is a lot of information on solar well pumps that you might not know already so these are 200 watt solar panels there's four 200 watt solar panels there'll be four more 200 watt solar panels going up here very shortly that allows us the capability of functioning on cloudy days so the way it's set up right now it does not function on cloudy days so there are a few different things that you need to know about here with the solar setup and all this comes as a package deal from laurent solar i'll post a link down the video description they're a company that's been around for a really long time and they make a very very efficient pump a very energy efficient pump because that's what it's all about is having an extremely energy efficient pump when you're running a solar system like this and it's all ran on dc voltage so there's no inverter that takes the dc voltage from the sun and turns it to ac and runs a standard well pump it's not like that it's all dc voltage so what we have here again are the four 200 watt solar panels and we'll be adding four more so subscribe to the channel jump in pound the like button i'd love to have you back and we'll show you how all that stuff's installed there's a control box under here and we're going to go see that but before we see that we have a sensor right here and this sensor senses how much sunlight is coming to these solar panels so that we don't overload or under load our pump in other words we don't want to send low voltage to the pump because that can wear the pump out just as fast as high voltage sent to the pump so that little i guess it's almost like a photocell or photo eye will sense how much sunlight there is on the solar panels themselves and send that voltage to the pump as needed so we had to do a few upgrades to our pump but we're going to go around we'll show you the control panel real quick and all this can be controlled via an app on your android device and you just scroll right through and it works on the android operating system i'm not sure if they've got ios yet for apple operating system but it's very very simple to operate you can change the motor speed you can change the voltage that you need the motor to run at you can change all sorts of settings the pump speed how many gallons per minute gosh just all sorts of stuff sensitivity pressure sensitivity so there are a couple different sensors we're going to talk about in the well too let's go around here and we'll show you the panel so this is a control panel back here this panel operates every single thing to do with this well there are several different surge protection situations going on here so inside this panel each tiny circuit board is protected from surge via the surge protectors in here and surge protectors in here if you do get a power surge because let's face it this is one giant aluminum lightning rod right here so lightning can easily run in on this so you've got surge protection in two different places on this and this is the switching mechanism that turns it on and off and you've got surge protection in here each individual circuit board can be replaced so you're not replacing a four or five hundred dollar circuit board you're replacing a forty dollar little circuit board instead of the whole unit now with cheaper solar systems not the lorentz style but cheaper ones you're gonna have your control board built into your pump which is going to be two or three hundred feet down in your well so if you ever have a hiccup you ever have a problem you can't do anything without pulling the pump completely out of the well so that's the advantage and that's why we went with this company guys we want reliability we want easily replaced parts we want our system to be very lightening resistant and we want it to be tough as nails and we don't want to have to pull the pump all the way out so that's an expense a very time consuming expense to pull that pump all the way out of the well and our pump is somewhere around the 240 foot mark something like that and our well is 460 feet deep we get about 11 gallons per minute so we've got the pump set at 9.1 gallons per minute there's a lot of figures going on right here but what you really need to know is when you're seeking out a solar system a solar pump system for your farm you need to be seeking something out that's easy to work on and easy to handle and easy to adjust and not something that has a cheap pump that's going to be down in the well it's going to last you 200 hours and you're going to have to pull it back out because you're going to have problems later on down the road this is super awesome now there's an app that i have on my tablet and you can scroll through and you can see what your well pump is doing you can see whether it hit peak pressures you can see how much sunlight you can see how many gallons you can see how much money you save there's all sorts of calculators on this awesome lorentz app so we're going to go ahead and we're going to start this pump up there are two on off switches right here there's one inside this panel and then there's a simple toggle switch right over here that will turn on and that should go ahead and engage the power to our well pump system so with the power on everything's in place we're going to go over here to the hose bib and we're just going to turn the hose bib on right now temporarily here on the farm i just have a simple hose bib set up and that's going to run to a stock tank with a float valve in it later on in the fall here when it's not 95 degrees with a heat index of 104 we'll be running trenches all the way out here and putting different mirror fountain watering systems out here so when you first start planting your water system for your farm or for wherever it is that your your piece of property might be whether you're doing cattle horses sheep goats whatever you need to do if you're planning on intensive grazing and moving your animals a whole lot you really need to concentrate on your watering system and make sure that you have everything in place appropriately so we'll go ahead and we'll turn on our hose bib right here our husband this is a frost free hydrant and it's ran off inch and a quarter poly line i've also got some inch and a quarter right here laying on the ground that's what we'll be laying in trenches and running all throughout the farm here we'll cut this up like pizza slices so uh you'll see some drone footage right now of what this looks like with the water right in the center of the field we'll cut it up into actually smaller pieces of uh pasture for the cows to graze about one acre per day all the way around the entire farm that's what it's all about let's crank this thing on and show you what kind of water pressure we get all right guys so i'm really impressed with the amount of water here we get about again 9.1 gallons to the minute out of this thing it's basically set up at 30 psi to pump 9.1 gallons per minute and that'll do 9.1 gallons per minute all over the farm now you'll notice we're up here on the top of a hill there's a reason why i put the well on the top of a hill so eventually we're gonna have a water storage tank up here we need enough water for the cows to drink for three to four days okay so we're probably looking at a stocking rate of about 40 cows and we're probably going to go through somewhere in the neighborhood of 1500 to 2 000 gallons over a three to four day period in the summertime in the heat of the summer so we're looking at uh we've got our eyes peeled because man if you go to buy one of these tanks storage tank water storage tank you're going to spend five six seven ten thousand dollars so we're on the lookout for an inexpensive used water tank to set up on this hill so that everything gets fed via gravity and we're just about on the highest point on the entire farm right here now this is the well head right here we're going to kind of go through all the parts of the wellhead with you so you can understand what you need and what you need to be thinking about if you're considering a solar well system like this so when you look at this it might look like a scrambled mess right here you don't know what in the heck you're looking at but actually it's very very neatly done very nicely done so this is the pipe that comes out of the well there's inch and a quarter poly pipe that goes all the way down into the well and again i believe we're down at about 250 feet down in the bottom of the well there is a sensor right here that senses pressure there's also a sensor down inside the well that senses the depth of the well so the way this laurent solar works is that sensor down at the bottom of the well will allow you to run it all the way down as deep as it possibly possibly can and then it'll shut it off so if you've only got about five feet of water left it'll shut it off let it fill back up for 10 minutes and it'll turn back on so in case you're out here irrigating you'll never run your well dry if you've got this whole setup so out of the well we go to pvc pipe there's a union right here this union is so that we can separate the pressure tank and the pressure tank is what i installed yesterday i actually had some guys the guys that put the well in actually installed this pressure tank this pressure tank is set at 28 psi this is set at 28 psi actually 26 psi 28 psi so it's a low pressure high volume type system the reason we want low pressure and high volumes because all we're doing is watering cows and maybe a tiny bit of irrigation so we're set again at 30 psi this was your house well you'd probably set it at 60 to 80 psi this is set up so we can easily detach so what you'll do if you need to add air so there's an air bladder inside this tank right here so part of it is filled with water and part of it is filled with air the reason we have this on here is because if you don't have a pressure tank system in here and you shut off water like on that hose bib over there when you instantly do that you send a surge of pressure it's called water hammer you send that surge of pressure through all of your pipes and down in the wellhead so we were getting over 100 psi at the top of the wellhead whenever our float valve shut off which is a bad thing it can cause a blowout down in the bottom of the well and we don't want that and it can also reduce your pump life so we installed this little 22 gallon i believe 20 gallon it's a 20 gallon tank so there is water up to probably about half and then there is a bladder inside here and that bladder because water does not compress that bladder compresses and that stops that water hammer effect if this is confusing post comments and questions down below the guys from lorentz will also be answering comments and questions the setup that we have here on the farm is a little bit overkill because we didn't know whether we'd be irrigating a whole lot whether it be irrigating crops or what exactly we'd be doing but with 10 gallons a minute on our well we really can't irrigate row crops with this well right here but we can water our animals and irrigate a small garden so that's how this whole system works right here so water fills up in here there's a reserve there's always a reserve in here there's always pressure in here and that pressure stops at about 26 psi this is set up so when you shut your water off it senses higher than 28 psi and shuts the well pump off thus saving the life of your well pump so it's all about lifespan saving the lifespan of your well pump and energy efficiency here on the farm now contrary to popular belief guys you don't just graduate from farm school and just be a farmer you don't just plop down on a piece of land and decide hey here's a farm i'm going to be a farmer you don't you've got to learn it's a constant learning process and it's a constant upgrading process or downgrading process on the farm depending on what situation you're in so this well pump system and again i totally recommend lorentz i'll post a link down in the video description those guys are top-notch you can get on the phone with somebody if you have trouble a real person on the phone which is super super cool they can design a system for your farm to make it the most financially efficient and energy efficient for you so eight solar panels is what we went with i accidentally set that post a little bit too close my measurements were off so we've got to set another post and we'll go ahead and hang our other four panels so this will work in cloudy weather it will work in sunny weather it will work in all sorts of weather again we went through all the parts here and the parts that you really need to know about are the solar sensor and you need to make sure that you're aimed south okay so you can buy all sorts of upgrades you can set this up where it will follow the sun you can move it two or three times a year however you want to however the most simple way that we set it up is to point it due south so pointing doesn't do south captures the maximum amount of sun throughout the year the pressure tank is a must guys the pressure tank is a big time must so what we were thinking is that our valves would be shutting off slow enough that we wouldn't have the spike in pressure we wouldn't have the water hammer issue but we did have the water hammer issue that's about a 700 upgrade to get a pressure tank installed on your well pump now we'll have a big insulated cover that goes over top of this we're here in the foothills of the blue ridge mountains in north carolina so we don't get much below zero so we don't have to really worry about freezing our frost line is somewhere around 18 inches so typically we'll bury our pipe around 24 inches and again we're putting in mirafount frost-free waterers throughout the farm so stay tuned to a future video as we show you how to install the mirafount frost-free watering system and we show you how this thing works and i'll keep you updated and posted over the years again there's a simple very very simple app that we can look at all the stats all the figures on this well and we can tell exactly what it's doing and exactly what it's done historically over weeks and months it's really really cool guys so if you have any questions please post them down there in the comments the guys from laurent solar are going to be taking a look at this video too and watching the comments if you have any questions for those guys please post it down there in the comments section i'd love to hear from you please pound that like button jump in subscribe the channel i just thought i'd take you guys and show you what's going on with the solar well pump system and why you haven't seen it on the channel being used because we need to put the pressure tank in place in order for it to function appropriately cool guys thanks a lot pound the like button hope you'll subscribe the channel come on back to the stoney ridge we've got all kinds of stuff going on from tractor projects to tool restorations to tool tuesday to food fridays man it's a good time here on the stoney ridge farm i'm going to go move the cows got to get them on a new paddock of pasture and also if you are starting a farm and you're clearing land one point that i need to make leave some shade for your cows leave some good shade trees for your cows your cows will appreciate it trust me when these hot summer days come out here like today it's supposed to be again 94 to 95 degrees those cows are gonna love that shade so be sure you leave some shade trees behind for your cows thanks a lot guys we'll see you next time on the stoney ridge farm please pound the like button all right [Music] somebody's are you mowing for sometimes you just gotta pretend like you're one of the cows so they'll all just come right through the fence so we've got the cows on three different paddocks right now and they're able to return to three different water tanks over here so we've got two water tanks up there and one big 400 gallon water tank right there but i want to get the cows over here into some shade so this area is not going to be shaded today and you really got to take care of your animals in this hot weather