Professional at Being an Amateur: Expert Amateur is a website and video channel for people who do serious things without being paid to do them. We document open-source projects in solar energy, home automation, fire resilience, and anything else worth building — with enough detail that you can build it too.
Serious projects. No credentials required.
Popular Videos and Posts
So I’ve been building this wildfire defense system for my place on Maui. Cameras, sprinklers, automated response — the whole deal. And if you’ve watched any of the earlier videos you know I was pretty deep into the fire detection side of...
Project: Save Your Home From Wildfires With Solar Power Episode 1: Introduction Can Solar Power Help Protect Your Home From Wildfire? Yes it can, and this project will show you how. There is a long list of preparations you can undertake to make your...
The first thing I want to do is recommend that you watch some of Fire Safe Marin’s excellent videos. If you want to create a defensible space around your home you need to understand what that means, and these videos do a great job of that...
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...
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...
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...
A recent comment from Will Prowse about PV disconnect switches really turned a light on for me (pun intended). Especially since it contradicted some bad advice I’ve been giving people. He was saying, for lower current installations that a...
I didn’t really want to write this, but there is so much confusion about lightning protection I think I need to. Yay, an explainer video! I stole the cloud pictures (and corrected my faulty understanding of charge generation from Encylopedia...