Solar Power at the home

Hyde University campus has two buildings. One of them was designed and built by me, aka "the barn", and the other is the house.

Where HU is located it's readily possible to have a 30 inch snowfall. I think two years ago we have one that was ~24. Fortunately, it's rare, and doesn't last long (the 24 was only a few days long before melting). The barn has a poured concrete floor on cinderblock supports (because the ground is sloped there). While the foundation isn't precisely flat, it's close. There's about a half-inch variation from the corners to the side-centers. (I didn't know that at pour time, only discovered it as I was installing wall framing sections and not getting the precise alignment I wanted.)

So when I designed the barn, I requested roof trusses capable of handling that 30 inches of snow. The roof is corrugated sheet metal sections on one-inch purlins every 24 inches.

Part of the reason for that was to handle the snow, but another part is that I would like to put about 5KW of solar on the roof. Solar has some weight, but not like the snow. But it's permanent weight, so the trusses are "storage trusses", which means I can also shove boards up there on the inside, and I have done that; mostly it's 2x4 and 2x6, altho my 50/60-year-old cherry one-by is up there too.

So this is all fine. I have a price quote on installing solar, but it's higher than I want, so I haven't done it yet. The quote has, in my opinion, too much battery and not enough panel. I want to be able to start my table saw (Delta Unisaw, 1HP motor, this looks about the same vintage as mine)

while a sawdust collector runs. There's a power-drain-surge while an electric motor starts up, so I want to only start them one at a time, but that's easy enough, and you want to do the collector first. (That said, my "collector" might just be a squirrel-cage blower to vent sawdust out the side wall; I have one, but it's sitting on the floor right now.)

This is a typical two-bag collector.

If you look at Google Images for "sawdust collector" you can see a lot of home-brew variations involving a shop-vac. Shop-vac is usually fairly low-power.

A Squirrel-cage is like this (except that mine is WAY bigger):

I'd just bolt that square opening to a hole I'd cut in the exterior wall, mount a water-blocking cover/shield over it and blow dust out. That'd work fine. It's not like I'm going to be cutting so much sawdust that there'd be a mound of it, it'd just be a dusting, and there's often enough breeze to dissipate that anyway.


So where is this all leading?

The HU house doesn't have the same kind of roof trusses. They are simple triangles with a center-post, no diagonal struts. That makes it easy to climb in around them, but I now have the feeling that I can't do solar on the house, which I *especially* wanted to do, with the barn as a test-drive.

This is a bummer. The house has A LOT of roof, because it's a single-floor ranch, and solar would be great.

I don't know if this has a solution. The trusses over the garage are 2x6, so they are stronger than 2x4 trusses, where the barn has 2x4 trusses with mid-supports.

It might be going to take an Advanced Degree I don't have to figure this one out.