Chapter 31: Grid Input
A far more positive encounter was with a solar power system installer, referred to us by Kenny’s little sister Laura, from the rafting trip. She’d met the guy through her classes in renewable energy at the college and passed on one of the business cards I’d handed out liberally to the group. Laura pitched it by observing that his work was hard on his crew’s back and knees; he agreed, calling my mobile number to set up a solo massage with me later that same evening.
My wife pulled up beside the house just as he was getting out of his work truck, and she quickly up-sold him to a four-handed massage. Molly called it once again: we were going to do well at this business!
“This is just amazing,” the man said to us while lying on his belly, the warm sand of our backyard therapy area soaking into his bare body.
“We do try, Mr. Vett,” I told him while I pushed back the inflammation around his patellas, having moved on from his hips, his knees in even worse shape from all that crawling about on rooftops.
“Matthew,” he corrected, eyes still closed, one cheek pressed to the sand, head resting on his forearms. “I feel positively solar-powered,” he added, giving his bare butt a wiggle to illustrate his quip.
“Speaking of,” I said, “would you be interested in a trade of services? We want to go completely green here, not off the grid but instead a net input to it. We’d like to do a solar power system backed by pumped hydro; we own the land going up the hill there, a few hundred meters back, so it should be capable of storing quite a bit of energy.”
He bobbled his head and shoulders as best he could on the sand and said, “I don’t want to pay my guys wholly out of my own pocket.”
“Half and half?” I offered. “You and your crew can certainly use the massage credits.”
“That we can,” he admitted.
Kaitlyn was drinking power from Gaia and pouring it into his spine as she pointed out, “We have another client that’s done a similar trade with us, doling the credits out as work incentives. This client swears productivity and morale have gone up since starting the program.”
I knew she was talking about Sherry, but we had to be circumspect about our clients for ethical reasons.
“Yeah, that might work for me, too,” he agreed as I got him up onto his knees and Kaitlyn began cleaning the sand off his front with our trademark soft brush technique.
Once we had him on his back, he went on equably, “Then there’s the hard equipment costs…”
“Of course, of course; we’ll just buy that outright,” I said as we gave him a long, slow, coordinated soothing stroke from thighs to hips.
The negotiation proceeded in spurts, intermixed with our massage work. At one point he said, “I don’t know much about the pumped hydro part of this. I can get the hydro pump/turbine for you, but the plumbing and tanks and all, that’s outside the scope of what we normally do.”
“Don’t worry about that,” I told him. “We’ll see to that separately.” I knew we could get suitable tanks and piping through Ramón’s farming supply contacts. With help from mi burro and Gaia, we could do the rest ourselves.
Vett’s crew got started immediately, working in parallel with Kaitlyn and I installing the tanks and plumbing into the acreage behind our house. They worked days while we were off at our day jobs, then Kaitlyn and I would come home, pick a crew-member each to work on, nibble a few hours off the crew’s massage credit account, and send those two home, walking much more steadily than the ones that left early. We’d have our dinner, then bust out the magic, spending the rest of the evening doing our bit of the job.
We sank one tank beneath the massage therapy area in the back yard. We’d managed to find one just barely able to fit down between the huge sandstone foundations we’d pulled up under the slate patios and walkways, so we didn’t have to redo any of that work, thank Gaia.
The other we put up on the hillside above the house, right at the back of the property line. It was slightly smaller than the lower tank, since we wanted to allow some extra capacity for emergency water storage. Drought in the desert is a serious condition, worth planning around.
The plastic tanks were far too technological to touch directly with our magic, but we didn’t have to.
The lower one we dropped into the earth by simply moving some of the sand out from underneath it with our magic, so it sunk a bit, allowing us to remove a bit more sand, and so forth. This work was actually easier than lifting up the foundation stones, which suited us, since it meant we could do the work without sex magic. Believe it or not, we nature mages have our limits!
I had to tow the other one up the hill with mi burro before we could emplace it magically, a task perfectly suited to my grunty little beast.
We chose not to sink that tank below the surface of the hillside, since a drop in height is a direct drop in the amount of energy we can store according to the equation of potential energy in a gravity field.
ELI5? Okay, more height equals greater energy equals mo’ $MONEY!
Therefore, we chose to sink the upper tank into the hillside only far enough to give it a stable footing, then brought a sandstone foundation up under it in pieces, surrounding the riser pipe entering it from the bottom.
I was initially concerned that leaving it exposed to the elements would be a problem in winter until Kaitlyn called my attention to the town’s aboveground tanks. On researching it, I found that you can get away with that in climates mild enough that ice formation doesn’t become excessive, since ice floats, and the riser pipe enters from the bottom.
That settled, we magically raised sandstone slabs and boulders around it, fusing them together to make it look like a natural rock formation, concealing the upper water tank within. This impressed Vett’s crew greatly, some of then quizzing us on how we’d done it; we claimed Kaitlyn was an amateur mason, something she learned as a farm-girl.
We left the top uncovered for a bunch of reasons.
First, being many meters above any gravity-bound eye-line, we didn’t need it to be concealed for any esthetic reason. Only the aerial mapping companies would be likely to see it, showing up as a new black spot the next time they overflew our property. We looked forward to this in anticipation, hoping the next pass of pics would also show a few nude people laying out in the yard at the base of the hill!
Second, the tank didn’t need to be covered to prevent algae growth, being made of thick opaque black plastic for that very reason.
Third, we might later need access to the tank for maintenance or repair through the manhole in the roof.
And finally, we saved money buying a less expensive above-ground tank, rather than one rated for crushing masses of soil and stone on its domed top, as with the lower tank.
The next tricky bit was installing the piping. We solved that by capping the lower tank’s opening before sinking it into the back yard, then used the power of Gaia to cut a deep furrow from it to the upper tank’s opening on the bottom, this latter designed to accept a riser pipe. That then let us hook up the feed pipes manually, the same way farmers have been doing it for decades. Ramón and Miguel helped us out a lot with this stage of the process.
Those two caught one of my design errors, too: I’d forgotten the need for a breather tube on the lower tank to allow air to equalize as the water level changed, either displacing or drawing in air. It was a big “Durr!” in hindsight.
Once the plumbing was all fastened down tightly, Kaitlyn and I magically re-covered the pipeline so cleanly you’d never know it was there.
Next, we poured a concrete-and-rebar box around the pipeline at the base of the hill, the box’s upper edges sufficiently far above ground level to keep rain from getting in. We made it large enough for the pump/turbine combo we’d ordered through Mr. Vett’s company, bolts sunk into the concrete base at points corresponding to the footprint diagram he’d emailed me. After extracting a section of the pipe from within the concrete box, the water-handling equipment dropped into place perfectly.
Kaitlyn’s the better carpenter, so she built an insulated pitched roof for the box to further muffle the quiet pump’s noise, shed the rare precipitation that the Moab area gets from time to time, and trap some of the equipment’s radiated heat in winter.
This last was key, because despite being a desert climate, Moab’s most of a mile above sea level, so it has a substantial frost line, about three-quarters of a meter. We had to keep the piping below this level, the top of the lower tank below that in turn.
Vett’s crew covered the south-facing section of the house’s roof in solar panels, but we also had them put another set up on a framework over the south edge of the patio, which not only gave us extra solar capacity, it formed a canopy that would let us use the patio in the rain, if we wanted.
The whole project took us about a month, but in the end, our house became a net input to the local power grid, day and night. The initial investment put another big dent into our savings, but it’d go net positive in just a few years.