Derek Ramirez

Behind Fothergrid

About

IT support is basically a loop: something breaks, file the ticket, find the root cause, document the fix, move on. I'm 41, I've been running that loop in suburban Phoenix for years. Two years ago I started running the same one on energy hardware in the garage. The first build was a solar array and a 100Ah battery bank that I measured every morning for six weeks before writing a word about it.

The garage looks different now. One full bay of pegboard holds labeled wire bundles and hand tools. A folding workbench carries a clamp-on multimeter and a yellow notepad of morning and evening readings going back to that first build. A corner box fan runs May through September, and in July the motor-oil-and-asphalt smell from the driveway makes it in regardless. Vince Paderewski sits at the desk next to mine at work. He heard about the project early and lent a clamp meter and a handheld thermal camera; he has questioned every result I've shared since. Kwame Asante, a contact I met on a DIY solar forum thread, lives in Glendale and emails test data back and forth. We meet at a Mesa maker space when a wiring question needs another set of eyes. Both of them push for cleaner data, and that shows up in how the articles are written.

Voltage behaves like bandwidth: the number only means something once you know what it's costing the system. A circuit diagram reads like a network topology map, and a bad connection between two nodes degrades the path the same way a misconfigured switch does. The first battery bank build had the charge controller polarity wrong. The forum post asking whether 14.7 volts was supposed to happen on a 12V system got a patient answer. That reading later showed up in three separate articles, because knowing what a bad connection looks like on a multimeter is genuinely useful.

Scope matters. What I cover: portable and semi-permanent DIY builds from parts and hand tools. What I don't: whole-house grid-tie systems, professional solar installations, or anything a local code requires a licensed contractor to permit and inspect. Permanent electrical work carries risk that a two-car garage and a multimeter can't fully account for. Rosario Batista, a neighbor two doors down who runs a small balcony setup, tracks her utility bills month to month; her husband is a licensed electrician who gives me periodic code-compliance reality checks. That kind of verification matters, and the articles flag where it applies.

A fire extinguisher sits next to the workbench. First time it appeared there, the reaction from inside the house was one word: "finally."

Articles by Derek Ramirez

Disclosure

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