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
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...
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...
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...
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...