What's going on everybody?

what is up everybody and welcome to the sentex uh retirement uh facility Asylum Ranch whatever the heck you want to call it it's probably a combination of all those things it's been a minute or so uh since we last uh spoke uh things have been a little busy I've been out here doing a bit of grass touching uh and I I've been having a good time as you can uh likely see lots of projects lots of things going on and got twin toddlers now uh things are just a little bit hectic around here um but uh I thought I would check in and let you guys know I'm still here and uh yeah give you a bit of a Ranch tour and what's been going on over on my end hope everybody has been doing good uh the first order of business is

the project I'm currently working on which is solar so I actually have a couple of these inverters and also please you know don't judge me for the rainbow uh lights on my fans St if you know a fix for this please let me know but in Linux there is really no RGB controller there is but they always have These Warnings that like hey we might actually break your uh entire motherboard and that's just not worth it to me to have pretty colors I do wish fans would just default to white instead of flashy rainbow why is that why do we have to default to Rainbow anyway um I've been working with these uh solar inverter batteries and or battery and I don't know what to call this anyways they're kind of like a combined unit it's kind of like those uh solar uh generators like jackary or ecoflow um that's kind of how I found my way here actually is I started messing around with those for doing some power out in the pasture and I wanted something a little more and then I wanted backup power for the house and to make it solar for the house we do also have a gas generator but it's expensive to run a gas generator and then of course um so where we live the population is like a thousand people so the power goes out fairly often and when it does we are not top priority to get fixed so uh I definitely wanted to have backup power and something like uh for example a gener backup generator um It's All Pure loss right it like to back up your whole house right a gener is going to be 20 to 30 grand installed and then to run it another like 200 bucks a day just in like gas or propane or natural gas so they're really expensive to install really expensive to run there's really no benefit there that I can see uh with solar at least you get some sort of Roi over a long period of time that said I will say I would never get solar as a investment I think you'd be better off just taking the same amount of money that you were investing into Soler and putting it in the S& P 500 Index Fund uh and you're probably going to Roi better so why solar well I just wanted backup power um and I just think it's cool it's

just cool uh so anyways what I have here are um I actually have two of these holis uh units they're the holis Apollo 5K and the reason I went with these over something like uh the there's eg4 makes like 18K and these 12K like wall mount uh inverters and then you can buy like server rack batteries and you can do this a little cheaper than the way that I went about it although I will say uh the prices listed on like high solace's actual website these are not the real prices if you go through a distributor it's like 3/4 that price or actually a little less so uh I would if you're interested in this sort of stuff or you've ever looked at high saws just look at a distributor's price rather than high as is price but anyways I like these for a variety of reasons one um you can expand the batteries uh and they communicate pretty well with each other U multiple units will balance so if you tie them together multiple units balance with each other uh they also have huge solar input it's like 60 to 500 volts or vocc uh for the incoming solar which is kind of huge which I think is probably one of the more important things so if you don't have a huge vocc that means you're going to need uh really more inverter or really like more solar panels more of like everything whereas really if you can get everything you need right away uh over the course of say 3 four five 6 hours in a day um I think that's good right solar panels are like the cheapest thing in the entire calculation so um I like that huge solar input also these you can configure them in like a million different ways so you could hardwire these straight up to your house you can also when you like pair them together you can use the like a split phase 240 volt like you can use a standard just basically generator 50 amp Inlet to your house um they are uh portable they're heavy as heck but they do these ones come with like a little thing that you can wheel them around but you can move them I like that aspect I think everybody who gets into solar winds up uh they change their mind or they expand their system or they want to change things these I figured I could buy these learn about solar learn about what I wanted uh these can do just about anything you could possibly want there's all kinds of configurations all kinds of settings you can have single phase 120 volt split phase 240 you can have three phase you can combine these to any uh any combination of these like inverters that you could want and then also out here we've got many buildings so even if I decided on the house hey I actually want that 18K um eg4 uh inverter I could switch to that easily and then I could use these at the barn or here in my lab um or there's just multiple buildings out here like the workshop all that stuff so anyways um yeah that's what that's my current project is the solar also speaking of which Speaking of this being the uh separate building I do I get this question fairly often because I've posted a few pictures of the solar or the solar rack I do actually want to do uh solar power all this and actually the computer here is solar powered um by this unit here so uh right now I'm not really getting any uh solar input anymore but as you can see oh also these things come off which is it's cute I like it so you can control things here and again I just I really like it cuz it's like it's so simple so for example uh right now I'm on battery first so I don't know how well that'll come on uh here but basically it'll drain the battery and then uh one of the other cool things about this unit so since this is not actually outside and I'm really just solar powering my computer um it you you're essentially like grid tied um but also with solar so as long as I'm getting solar input it's going to start it's going to use up the battery here and then when it runs out of the battery it's actually just going to pass through U my wall so I just have it plugged into the wall outlet and it uses solar first or battery first which is solar and then when that run when and if that runs out it just goes through the wall so that's pretty cool too so it's just a nice way to have um grid backup essentially for your solar in like a really basic way so on the on our house what I did is I had an electrician uh install two 50 amp inlets to the house and half the house is split out on a subpanel and um this is quickly turning into a solar video rather than a ranch T I promise the ranch T is coming uh so I had the house split into two parts basically so half the house could be completely off grid completely disconnected to grid the other half is on grid and so like half of it can be solar powered and then my plan there is one I can I use that for my generator uh and then two I can basically start Solar without needing cuz basically like the most expensive thing is like the batteries for solar like if you really want to fully back up your house uh you need a lot of batteries and if you want to back up uh and like stay be fully off grid you need a ton of batteries so you always want to be able to fall back to grid I think because it's like to cover your house 85% of the time uh it's like half the cost that last little 15% will like double your cost so anyway um so half the house can be split apart and then so I can kind of Tinker play around and then if I like it I'll continue to expand and essentially do the entire house and then probably do this area next I'd also like to personally learn a little bit more about doing kind of my own Electric work it was a pain in the butt to try to get anybody to do this work and um no insult to those professionals but I'm pretty sure I could do just as good if not better so if I just simply know what I'm doing so anyways um now let me uh I think I'm going to take you guys on the Drone and give you a tour of the rest of the ranch and leave the solar uh behind but maybe more projects on solar in the future one of the things I'd really like to do especially now that I've been solar powering the computer is doing like a solar powered uh hosted gpus so host the gpus on like vast. a or something like that and just have it be purely solar powered and then starlink since that's our internet so I could like literally put it somewhere out in the pasture doesn't it could be completely off grid um just connecting through starlink getting all the power from solar and then host gpus on vast. a so things like 309s all that like any consumer grade GPU like you return on investment on the gpus like a year if you don't have to pay for electricity so obviously inverters batteries all that like I said earlier it's not a great investment I don't think I'm pretty sure you're more much more likely to Roi have a much better return if you just took the money that you would spend on solar and uh invest in the S& P 500 Index Fund but solar is fun it's cool it's just cool and I like having backup power especially out here uh taking charge of like all these like services and depending less and less on other people um I just I take I enjoy that process I enjoy the engineering aspect of it I had someone get angry at me on uh Twitter or now x uh like for suggesting that you can pump water out of the ground and have your own well water and you don't even need city sewer you can have a septic and somebody got very angry at me like over that and I was like it is it's cool you can pump perfectly fine drinking water and in some places um I would argue it's better than the drinking water at least here in the United States uh than you would that you would get from the city but anyways I digress let me take you guys around the Beautiful Ranch all right we will be flying the

DJI of Auto 2 this is super fun drone we'll see if I can make it through without crashing so it's been super cool being out here it's so quiet so peaceful uh it's just been so nice compared to everywhere that we've been before um I cut all these Trails we'll only see a handful of the ones that I've cut but I cut all these trails with my tractor which I think uh if you like engineering and you like python you'd probably love a tractor it's kind of the Python of dirt moving or something um it's rarely the best tool for the job but it's often the second best tool uh for the job so I've been really enjoying that it helps you once you start having like a tractor

just any like it's like any power tool really but a tractor is just a really powerful Tool uh once you have something like that you start to be able to like look at things just completely different because suddenly you can do things that you could never have done before you know with a tractor you can add a hill or remove a hill um and that's just that's really cool so anyways out here we have uh a handful of acres and uh coming basically back this way this is kind of No Man's Land out here uh this is really the deer the coyote all of that the wildlife out here is spectacular we have so much uh diversity out here even in like

little stuff like insects like there's so many insects I've never seen and when I like scan them with my phone and like look them up it's like the only information I can find on these bugs is like from like universities and stuff that like it'll be like some uh I forget what the type of uh degree it is but it's like people that like research bugs because there's really no other information on these bugs uh at least

some of them that we find which is pretty crazy so let's see if we can find the chickens today see if anybody's in here no they usually hang around uh over here I put this little Feeder out for them usually somewhere in here but they're probably not the biggest fan of the Drone but I'll put some pictures up of the chickens we have uh let's see we've got seven hens and one rooster we had eight hens and one quite literally disappeared Without a Trace probably a large bird got them uh they all free range so it is what it is uh I think that uh if I was a chicken I'd want to be free range it is what it is uh we definitely have coyotes and fox and all kinds of other stuff out here so yeah um anyways here is my baby call it Amos it's named after Amos from the expanse series if you guys are familiar um absolutely love it have a few attachments uh one of those is a pallet forks and that's like the best thing in the world like anything heavy you can just move around on the pallet Forks even little stuff like or not little stuff but even stuff that you wouldn't even consider for pallet Forks like uh I'll come over here uh this's my pile of Rock never thought I would be super excited about piles of limestone but I love me a pile of limestone there's so much that you can do with Limestone uh including uh my the driveway and all that uh see if I can get over here I'm

losing signal a little bit but anyways uh yeah like this giant log like we took a tree down cut it up into pieces and then you know if you just have some pallet Forks on your tractor you can easily move these absolutely massive logs I'm planning to use this as a bit of a ballast uh to continue reinforcing my solar panels that uh I'm going to put out for the uh the house so coming back over here we'll take a quick visit to our garden we really just put this up as fast as we could uh so it's definitely not the prettiest of gardens uh the best thing out here is our uh sweet potato we could definitely be a sweet potato farm out here uh the soil is just not great we've been trying to slowly treat it as best as possible as part of why we have those chickens is we're just trying to uh treat the soil and try to cultivate it and get it uh back pretty healthy again I'm not sure what else we could really grow successfully out here but we've got some peppers coming in some Tomatoes can't really quite see those Tomatoes though can we I'm not really sure there's definitely some tomatoes on here um maybe you can see it better on the video than yeah at least we have a couple of tomatoes but we have these like giant uh what are they called tomato caterpillars or tobacco caterpillars but anyways they eat your Tomatoes they just like poke a hole bore in and go to town but they're super cool looking caterpillars but boy do I hate them nowadays uh we'll come up over here to our uh Orchard it's on its way it's

not the greatest Orchard ever it looks pretty sad at the moment but we've got um some peach trees that we put in apple cranberry avocado we've even got a little uh blackberry bush that has followed us uh through I want to say three different moves uh including from Texas uh so that's pretty cool to still have that thing kicking it's just it's been uprooted so many times um let's see if we can spot it it's very hard to see here it is right here yeah one of these days I'm probably just going to mow over it accidentally honestly but uh hopefully it'll get much bigger it has been giant compared to this probably it used to be I don't even know probably like 10 ft tall or so coming out here this is usually where I take a lot of photos so if you follow me on Twitter or X this is a view you've probably seen many of times uh winter is approaching so the grass is not quite as Lush as it once was but there's actually an aquafer that runs basically right here all the way through uh and it is a flowing aquifer you could have what do they call Artisan Wells whatever they're called uh you could have one here but we just have a regular well like a three horsepower pump um let's see if there's anything else this is another spot this is a candidate number one for a lot of solar panels it's a south facing Hill um it could definitely generate a lot of power on that Hill um and actually this is basically to give you an idea this hill actually continued all the way over to here all of this was cleared and leveled by the tractor and once again that's just it's one example of like man that tractor is a lot of fun you just see a whole area I can't even imagine you could clear it someone um with a little more work ethic than me I'm sure

could have cleared that but I would not have wanted to be that person um okay so then we'll come over to probably the last place which is our beehives that I at least want to show the rest of it is uh mostly just you know it's just Forest basically I've got some Trails through it and all that but it's just Forest don't want to get too close to piss off the bees but this is our beehives uh actually there's two of them uh the second one the one that is not the one that's like green and white um it

doesn't have any bees in it right now and I'm not even sure if it was populated when we moved in but both of them were left behind by the uh the previous owner um so my wife and I have been slowly learning about bees trying to make sure we keep these guys uh happy and healthy uh we recently added a brood box and a super box that was super uh it was cool doing it uh luckily we had be suits and all that but uh Point basically the entire Hive is like swarming around us it was a it was a crazy feeling the population of this Hive is probably uh 80,000 bees or so that was quite crazy so anyways let's see if we can spot these chickens before we leave but uh oh then

also I'll show you guys my pasture Wi-Fi so this is one of the uh one of the solar stations this one's a bit Overkill it is uh they're basically those like portable solar generators and then so those sit in that little box behind there that's a uh I want to say it's like a rabbit house or it's like an outdoor Dog House basically uh so I put the solar generator in there I got the solar panels here they're just laid out these ones are very lazily laid out um and then I have basically a few of these stations around the pasture and it connected that thing that's spray painted green I just spray painted it green because I was tired of looking at it it's like a bright white um and that gives me basically it's mesh Wi-Fi it's these TPL link Deco outdoor units and I have them placed around uh outside so basically this entire property is uh has Wi-Fi now which is nice because it doesn't even have good cell service certainly no internet um and uh that's been it's been nice to have that out here and it's just cool to have like Outlets randomly in your uh in the woods in your pasture and as you can see I've got some cameras on there and I've got cameras all over the place basically for uh to be like game cameras stuff like that seeing what's crawling around out here uh which is always fun it's always fun to go through the events on those cameras and see what's out here so anyway I don't know if we're going to find the uh chickens today but uh yeah like I said I'll put some photos of the chickens up there uh in a bit but anyway that's that

yeah it's uh it's absolutely beautiful out here I my wife and I are super happy to be out here I know it's a bit of a tech meme to to get a become a farmer or something we're definitely not Farmers I still program uh every day I'm a full-time programmer that's how I earn my living I don't think I could uh earn a living farming honestly I'm not good enough at it and uh that's really hard work um I'm good at being a programmer but I love absolutely love uh being out here and all the time that I can spend out here in the Woods playing around doing the chickens all that also would love to get uh probably a couple of donkeys or a couple of horses can't really make up our mind eventually we'd get both that Barn has uh essentially three Stables one of them is big enough for two uh as long as they got along um really the only thing holding us back from getting horses or donkeys is figuring out how to not get scammed like our chickens uh were given to us by a family friend um also we uh my wife and I actually built that Coupe it was that was pretty fun um I'll put a picture up of us doing that um but anyways the chickens were uh from a just like a family friend but the chickens that you know that they were willing to give up are chickens that uh just didn't get along with the other chickens so uh the same thing is true with like horses and donkeys if people are going to give you uh a horse or a donkey or even sell you nobody wants to sell you their good horses or good donkeys they want to get rid of their bad ones so as soon as we can figure out how to get uh some good or donkeys uh we certainly uh would be very interested in doing that but until then um yeah I guess we'll have to see but uh anyway yeah that's the uh that's the ranch um yeah hope you guys have been doing good um I'm not sure when I'll post again I might share more of the uh solar Journey the solar stuff has been really cool I think just like with the tractor and a lot of the other stuff I think people would uh it it's just it's a fun

engineering problem same thing with like the water honestly like it's like as soon as you start pumping your own water you have to think about okay well you know how do I get that water from you know where the source is all the way up the hills and all that and obviously if you've got City Water you have a constant pressure and if you have a well pump you can be pretty good but even powering a well pump is Pretty Tough uh they require a lot of power but anyways uh so maybe more of that content I don't know about programming content honestly uh I know that's like Blasphemous out of my mouth but uh nowadays man all the programming I do is with large language models uh I'm not really sure why anybody would do a basic programming tutorial these days because you can ask a language model anything that you want and it can explain every bit every line of code that you're confused about and if you're confus confused about the whole thing you could ask it to create a lesson plan to teach you everything you would need to know to understand that code um we really live in a completely new time in a new era uh for programming and I'm not lamenting that at all I love this era um I love programming now more than ever for it's so fast it's so powerful um and yeah but making tutorials is a little tough because it's like why would I do that uh we're now we're just we're zooming we're just accelerating uh and we can do anything that we want and that's what you should do if you want to learn a program or how to do a certain thing go to Claud Sonet 3. 5 or whatever it is at least right now at the time of my recording that's the best one but I'm sure other people have their opinions and as time goes on it will they will get better oh man the colors are so pretty out here as it's changing I'm recording this in like October something so uh yeah these trees are these are nice all the uh what are they called uh not Sycamore uh sweet gum trees out here just changing color

anyways uh that's it for me uh questions comments concerns you guys know to deal leave them below uh otherwise I will see you guys uh in another video hopefully less than 6 months but uh you never know actually bonus as I was editing this I got to see the Northern Lights all the way down here in Alabama this is in the Southern United States not for the first time for the second time this year due to these like strong geomagnetic storms that are happening that's another nice thing out here the skies are just so clear with very little light pollution also very little noise pollution uh most of these like summer nights for example you can look up and you can clearly see the Milky Way with your naked eye it's been really making me want to get deeper into astrophotography I've been spending a lot of time outside just looking up at the stars uh anyway okay that's really all for now I'll see yall next time e