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
My recent video, “Solar Grounding and Bonding Demystified”, caused quite a stir. Will Prowse called it an awesome video, but lots of other folks commented that I didn’t know what I was talking about. It’s a controversial issue...
If you already know all about legacy AC-coupled, grid-connected Solar power installations you might want to skip down to the paragraph titled “Planning for Upgrades” and avoid all the background stuff. A somewhat sardonic capsule history:...
My experimental solar container is doing exactly what I intended it to do: Teach me how modern solar power systems work. I’m definitely drinking from a firehose, but there are some things that make me stop dead in my tracks that just don’t...
“Nearly anything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.”—Richard Feynman Historically residential solar installations were frequently sold as AC-coupled systems (microinverters or string inverters), using the grid like a storage device...
Introduction to the Solar Container Videos This is the first video in the solar container series Which I shot at the early stages of planning. As the project progressed my plans changed substantially. The overall goal is to build a high-capacity three...
As the Expert Amateur name suggests, I’m not a professional electrician, which means no one pays me to do this stuff, but I’ve been working on electrical and electronics projects for a ridiculously long time, and I insist on studying and...
The neverending Solar Glossary I’m starting a glossary of solar electrical terms that I will continuously add to as long as new terms that seem worth defining pop up. It may seem that the terms used are just to confuse you, but really, any...
Something for Everybody We are doing a solar project that will scale in stages to show how to do modern solar power projects from a simple cabin or small house off-grid, to a light industrial or commercial 3 phase system with all the stages in between...
Transcript (sort of) I saw a video recently of a BDR trip where a guy rode 60 miles round trip to the nearest town with a wheel strapped to his back to get his buddy’s tire fixed because they couldn’t repair it themselves. I know that seems...