ADDING FILTERS LAST MINUTE - Plumbing Airport Pump House + Building Mini VRM 12V System (Step 13)

Good morning. Today we are going to start laying out the plumbing for the pump house. Now this one is going to be different because we've decided at the last minute to go ahead and install some filters and a descaler which is kind of like a salt-free version of a water softener which we hope will remove the calcium deposits that end up clogging up everything. So we don't have all the actual like filters and stuff in yet but I want to make sure we've got all the right fittings in place for everything because I don't want to get in the middle of installing all this and realize we're missing a fitting. So I'm just going to lay all these fittings out and see what we've got. Did we finally get to plumb this dang pump house? Yes. Version 3.0 of the pump house. Okay. Is that the right word? Yeah. Okay. Let's do a quick explanation. Okay. Things are changing. But we gotta go to the table. Oh. And show all the way up. Okay. The water is going to come out of the ground from the tank. We're going to elbow up and go into this which will connect through this into the pump. So it's all going to be pressurized. It's going to go through here and it's going to come out. It needs to go into the big pressure tank first and that's sort of the big difference from our other ones is since we have a filtration system we need to pressurize first and then push through the filtration system. So it's going to come out of here, go through a shutoff, go into there but it does need to tee off. So what's going to happen is it's going to fill that tank and then push through and it's going to come over here and it's going to tee again. We're going to go through another shutoff and then these are for all the filters. So there's the spin down sediment filter, the whole house filtration, and the descaler which is kind of like a water softener but it doesn't use salt or electricity. And then a shutoff on the other side. You'll notice there's two tees on the end and so we're going to go around here and have another shutoff so that if we need to work on any of this we can shut it off here and here and turn this on and the water will still go through the system. It just won't go through the filtration. So after that we're going to come down. We're going to go through another tee out to the spigot. It's going to come out of the back wall here that the airstream will be connected to and then off of that tee we'll go around to the front corner of the building with our last spigot. And that should be it. And so if we ever need to depressurize the system what we'll do is we'll shut off this ball valve, we'll shut off the pump, and then we'll just run the water in the airstream until that pressure is released. The biggest thing I'm worried about at this point is fitting the filters and the pressure tank in this space and having enough room to have all the fittings work properly. So let's see if we can figure it out. Okay they are about eight inches apart. You're gonna fall. Okay before we can do anything else both of these filters need to be flushed so we have to hook a garden hose up to them and flush out. I guess there's like some carbon or stuff from the filters. We have to basically run it until it's clean. It's going to take a little bit. It said 15 minutes of full water and then 15 minutes of on and off for 30 seconds until the water comes out clean. So let's go waste a bunch of water. That's a lot of water. Yeah. Let me take the light one. Where should we run all this water? I think this way. Yeah. That way it doesn't feel as wasteful. Yeah. It's still wasteful. While we're waiting on those filters to get flushed out we have a whole lot of threaded connections we need to make. Yeah a ridiculous amount of threaded connections. So many. So we're gonna get our tape and we've got some joint compound. We're gonna go ahead and make up a lot of like these things here so that things will go a little faster when we start connecting the tubing. We'll be using tape and the compound on all the connections except the ones that are going on the filter because those instructions said specifically not to use it. Yeah they said that the compound might have a chemical in it that would interact with the plastic fittings on the filter and might degrade it. So glad we read those instructions. See it does pay to read the manual. Not always. All right it's been about 10-15 minutes. The water is running clear on that first filter. We had to turn the second one off because we don't have enough pressure to do two at the same time. So now it says you have to turn it on for 30 seconds, off for 30 seconds, on for 30 seconds, and do that for 15 minutes. So that's what I'll be doing. So just imagine that you watched that for 15 minutes. Okay great. All right that one's done. So time to start the descaler for 10 minutes and then I've got to do the 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off with this one, and a little bit. Both filters are primed. It is time to start actually installing all this stuff and listening to roosters. How many connections do you think are going to leak when we put this all together and pressurize it? Well I think the biggest possibility is going to be the filters since we can't put any pipe dope on them. Yeah. I feel pretty good about this install. I feel like we're not going to have any leaks. I feel like we're finally learning. Yeah, I think this one will be pretty good. A lot of things, babe. There's that. So tell me what you need. You need a short piece, right? Yeah, I think so. That's too short. Okay, don't do like we did. Make sure your descaler and filter are in the right order. You want to filter first, then descale. Somehow we got them switched up and I just noticed that before we made that connection. So we got to undo this real quick and switch them around. Is this the one? Okay, we're to the point where we need to put the actual hose bib through the wall. So we're going to drill straight through here next to this board so that we can like hose strap it there and give it a little extra support. It's a lot of insulation to go through. It's good though, right? Yeah, four and a half inches of insulation. All right, here we go. It's time to look at our mini 12 volt system for the pump house. Now, we do have AC power that's running up into the pump house, but what we want to do is create some redundancy here so that if the power ever does go out, because that is centralized, all that power is inside the solar shed, the inverter ever needed to be worked on, we want to still be able to have pressurized water, right? So this is a similar idea to our other pump houses. We have two other ones right now. The first one is connected to our original water tank. It's very simple. It's just a solar panel, a charge controller, a battery, and a water pump. Nothing else. When we did the Shelter Logic feed shed, we built a mini VRM 12 volt system, which uses all Victron components and a Global Link 520 that's cell-based so we can pass the information about this system to the cloud so I can always check on it without actually having to go over there. And then we used that same idea to build another mini 12 volt system for the chicken garden pump house. This will be the third mini VRM system that we have, and it's going to be similar to the other ones, but a little bit different. And so I'm going to show you the basics of it real quick. It's got a 12 volt lead-acid battery. This is like a deep cycle marine battery. It's about 100 amp hours, way oversized, but I like to just have plenty of headroom in terms of solar and battery storage just to make sure we don't let that battery drop too low. Now the big difference between this mini VRM system and our other ones is that because we have AC power right here, we are going to use that to keep the battery charged. So usually this is all I have in here, but I also have this guy. It's a little smart charger, so it plugs in to your AC power, goes to the battery, and it keeps it topped off. I got the smallest one they make, it's only five amps, because this system over here is going to be powering multiple things. It's going to power everything in the airstream, some other plugs, probably a water hose heater in the winter. I just wanted to make sure that we didn't overload any of the circuits while we're charging this battery, because it really doesn't need to charge fast. It just needs to kind of trickle charge. Now on top of that, we are still doing solar. You can see there's a huge solar panel here. The only reason it's so big is because these panels from Santan Solar are so cheap. They're like 45 bucks. We had some left over from our big solar panel install, so I said, why not? Let's put it on there. So this will be a dual charging unit. If the AC power ever does go out, the solar will make sure that it stays charged up. So first, when we come out of the solar panels, we're going to go through the DC circuit breaker, and this is sized appropriately for the max amps that the panel is going to put out. Out of that, we're going to go into a Victron charge controller. This is a very tiny one, but it is also sized for the size of this panel and the volts and the amps that it's going to put out. Out of that, we're going to go through a mini ANL fuse, and so I don't have the actual fuse, but it goes in right here. That way, if there's ever too much power coming out of this charge controller and into the battery, it will sort of blow this fuse and help protect the battery. Out of the positive of that, we're going to come through another circuit breaker. So these are for the loads, and that's going to run into the load center. So these will be connected, and then we'll put blade fuses in each of these and connect each of the hot lines of individual loads to each circuit. So we're going to have a water pump, and we'll probably have another heating pad, and I think that's it. But who knows, we might add something in the future. I like to have a little bit of expandability. The other part of the system is the smart shunt. This is another Victron product that you connect to the negative side of your battery. You connect all your loads to the system minus side of this, and then it tracks sort of the usage and the amp pull in the battery, and it gives you a more accurate battery reading. And finally, there's that Global Link 520, and so all this does is it uses data cables to connect to the charge controller and to the smart shunt, so it can pass along solar input and battery state of charge to the VRM. So I can pull it up on my phone, make sure the battery's full, make sure that everything's working properly. The reason we're using this Global Link is that for VRM to work, you have to have a Victron device that connects to a Wi-Fi network which connects to the internet. Now, you know, I'm going to be inside this thing. Connecting it to a consistent Wi-Fi network is going to be a little tricky, and so I've opted to use these on all my many VRM systems. It's a SIM card in it, and it runs off of the LTE-M network. Basically, it just needs a little bit of cell signal. It's going to pass a very small amount of data, and when you buy this, you basically get a five-year plan that's included with the unit, and then five years down the road, we pay a little bit, we extend it for another year, another five years, or whatever. This simplifies this installation a lot, because otherwise you're looking at a Color Control GX or a Servo GX, which do a whole lot more stuff, way more than we need for this system, and also way more expensive. Anyway, I'm rambling. We have a lot of custom cables to make, custom connections, crimps. Also, we need to drill some holes through the side of this box in a few spots so that we can put some grommets in. We can pull, you know, wires through and keep this all nice and clean and tidy. So I'm just going to get started on this and start getting hooked up. One reason I keep coming back to these storage boxes for these mini 12-volt systems is that they're lightweight, but they're sturdy. They're easy to drill holes through and install grommets in because the walls are thin. They're fairly waterproof. I mean, they're not watertight, but like if you have the lid on it, I mean, unless the water comes up to the height of the lid, water's not going to get in if it's just raining on top of it, right? But the other nice thing is that it's not airtight either, and so lead acids do need to vent a little bit, so that makes sure that we aren't completely creating a vacuum in here, like there's still some airflow. These are just really good sizes. Battery fits good here. A 2x6 and some plywood kind of make a nice little shelf, and then you can hide your wires under everything, put your grommets in, and it's just a nice self-contained system that you can just, you can pick up and take wherever you want. One thing I'm doing differently with this is adding a bus bar for my negative lines. This is a very large lug for the minus side. They're kind of hard to find sometimes, especially for a wire this small, so what I'm going to do is go ahead and put this on here, run the wire straight into this, and then all of my loads I can just individually add to this without having to take the whole thing apart. I think it'll make it a little bit easier. All right, so we've got everything connected inside here. Global Link has power. It's been connected to our VRM network, so I can see the voltage of the battery. You can see there's no solar coming in yet because we don't have the solar wires hooked up. We've got our holes already set with the grommets, so basically when we are ready to start installing the pump house, what we'll need to do, I'm going to put this inside there, run the solar wires in. We'll need to run our loads into our fuse block center here, and then we'll run wires in here that will be connected to our AC power charge. So this is kind of ready to be set aside for right now, and then hopefully once we get the rest of our stuff in, we can put everything in there and get this project finished up. Today we were able to finish the plumbing. All the things are hooked up, but I haven't been able to test it yet because we still need to hook up power, and that's coming tomorrow because we're out of daylight and I can't handle the cold. The 12-volt system is already built, so it's just a matter of wiring the pump into a switch. Yeah, we had to knock out like a cut out an area for the switch on the outside. Yeah, and once we have power to the pump, then we can start leak testing, and then we're supposed to we are supposed to flush it again after for those filters. I agree, and then I can start filling this up because I don't think we're gonna have rain for a while. We need to get some water in this tank. We need to get water in our other tank. Water runs, then can we move up here? Then we've got to get the ground prepped to pull the truck and the trailer up onto the pad. No, we're not going to be done once we pull up the truck and trailer. We still have several other things that we need to get done, like we need to pull on the septic and all that. There's a lot of things left to do, but we're on the downward slope. Yes, we are. Feels good. Feels good. Tomorrow we're going to hook up that power and then test everything, and then we can start doing the finishing work on the pump house. Getting all this crap out of here. Yeah, it's a mess. It's a mess. That's all for today. We'll see you in the morning to finish this dang pump house. It's very exciting.