Professional at Being an Amateur: Expert Amateur is a website and video channel where amateurs become experts. We focus on raising your skill level for pursuits you care about. Our scope of topics might seem a little crazy (currently Food, Motorcycles, and Solar), but it’s just the start of what we will likely cover, and we chose these topics to start with because we have expertise in each. Our goal as we grow Expert Amateur, is to include high quality instruction from other experts–instruction that levels up skills in a single video. Our early videos are visually terrible but the content covers skills we have spent many years mastering. So welcome, and we hope you find this useful and entertaining.
Popular Videos and Posts
There are any number of people posting about the huge PV systems they are building to support either taking their home offline or supporting the majority of loads for long period of time when grid power is not available. In most cases I don’t see any...
I didn’t design or build the ground mount system at my home on the North Shore of Maui. It was done by a professional installer who left the solar business years ago. It looks improbably flimsy, but it’s held a double row of 32 Sanyo 250...
I’m generally considered a reasonably smart guy. I can blunder my way through some fairly complex technical issues, write coherently, and I read stuff generally considered challenging. I’ve started and ran several successful companies, I...
So this is going to be fun. As soon as I get back to the Northwest (right after I calm down from taking delivery of my new Ducati Desert-X and return from a very short trip to Connecticut to attend my Daughter’s graduation from the Yale PA...
Yeah, I know, “what oil should I use” is what bored or clueless folk post on any FaceBook motorcycle forum to see how many pointless comments they can get. Everyone has an opinion on what oil should be used, which is generally what they...
The usual way to manage critical loads is to isolate them in a subpanel so that during an outage or other similar event you can power just that panel. That works more or less OK when you’re doing new construction, or you can easily access the...
To mitigate wildfire risks for homes and businesses, a comprehensive strategy focusing on defensible space, structural hardening, and proactive maintenance is essential. I’ve developed a 10-step plan based on wildfire resilience best practices...
So it’s time to figure out how we’re going to power everything and set up the electrical system so three scenarios are met. Scenario 1: No fire, grid power available. Scenario 2: No fire, grid outage. Scenario 3: fire, grid outage. I...
Update: Okay, at the end of this article I wrote “I don’t foresee major problems, which may say more about my foresight than how challenging the issue might be.” which turned out to be accurate. The pool recirculation pump and the...