For the past two weeks, J. and I have been trying to work through two of three huge hurdles standing in our way of getting started on actually building the solar array. The first one is the fact that we need to move the chicken coop but our Ford Industrial 4400 tractor is sitting where the coop needs to go and, even after repeated attempts, it won't start.
This thing weighs like 3 million pounds and has questionable brakes at best, so getting it started was a must. J. found a mobile tractor repair guy 3 weeks ago and setup a time for him to come out. Wouldn't you know it...it rained cats and dogs that day. So we picked another time...and it was raining again at his house (although not here). He called to say he was on his way and, 4 hours later, he hadn't showed. Never called and won't return phone calls. What is it with service people that many of them treat their customers this way? I'm putting "good mobile tractor repair" guys on the list of "hard to find" right under concrete guys and plumbers. At least the tractor repair guy called us back initially.
Anyway, mobile tractor repair guys are hard to find and even harder to schedule but we finally found another one and he got us all fixed up yesterday. "No spark" was the diagnosis - whatever that means. And $250 later ($50 for the "housecall", $70 per hour for 2 hours of work and $60 in parts) and we had the old tractor moved.
The second of our troubles was finding a local supplier for the pipe that will support the solar array. I'm going to talk more about that tomorrow, but we did finally find a source and they delivered it for us yesterday afternoon. Woohoo!
Now all we have to do is move that chicken coop out of the way and we're ready to start digging footings. Yep, that's the last of the 3 roadblocks in our way.
Have a good one,
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