# Homestead Tech — Off-Grid Setup at 7,500 ft > Brad's homestead and off-grid infrastructure at the Carson National Forest property near Taos — LiFePO4 solar, a GOES weather satellite ground station, earth-tube passive cooling, and a multi-path network (Kit Carson fiber primary, Starlink backup, Starlink Mini in the Tacoma). Living on 20 acres in the Carson National Forest at 7,500 feet, a lot of the day-to-day is about systems that have to keep working without much hand-holding. Power, water, network, climate — they're all part of the infrastructure I tend. None of it is exotic on its own, but the combination of altitude, isolation, weather, and the kind of failures that happen out here makes the design choices interesting. ## Solar — LiFePO4 The off-grid solar setup runs on LiFePO4 (lithium iron phosphate) batteries. I rebuilt this from an earlier lead-acid system. LiFePO4 trades a much steeper upfront cost for a far better cycle life, deeper usable depth-of-discharge, and a chemistry that's more forgiving when winter temperatures push the system around. At 7,500 feet you get cold nights that lead-acid hates — LiFePO4 just keeps working. A typical small node here looks like a 20W Renogy panel + Renogy Wanderer 10A PWM controller + LiTime 12V 12Ah LiFePO4 battery. That's enough to run a UniFi camera on the side of an outbuilding for years with zero wiring run back to the house. The pattern repeats — small autonomous nodes scattered around the property, each on its own panel-and-battery loop, beats one big centralized system every time. Easier to maintain, easier to replace, and a single failure doesn't take down the whole network. ## GOES weather satellite ground station I run a GOES weather satellite ground station — pulling down imagery and data direct from the geostationary GOES satellites that NOAA operates. Started as a hardware tinkering project (an SDR plus a small dish and an LNA), ended up actually useful. Out here, the consequences of bad weather are concrete and immediate. Wildfire season. Snowstorms that close the road. Lightning that lights up dry timber. Knowing what the weather is doing without depending on cellular service or terrestrial internet is a feature, not a hobby. The GOES feed keeps working when everything else is down — which is exactly the situation where you most want to know if a front is rolling in. It's also the kind of project that scratches the same itch as eurorack synthesis or multi-agent orchestration — a system with simple rules and emergent behavior, where you get out exactly as much as you put in. ## Earth tubes — passive cooling Earth tubes are an old idea that's never really gone out of style: bury insulated duct underground at a depth where the soil temperature is stable year-round, run intake air through it, and the dirt does free pre-cooling in summer and pre-warming in winter. No moving parts. No electricity. The thermodynamics are simple and the maintenance is essentially zero once it's installed. At 7,500 feet the diurnal temperature swing is huge — you can have a 50°F shift between afternoon high and pre-dawn low. The soil temperature, on the other hand, is stable at depth. That's exactly the case earth tubes were designed for. Pull intake air through enough buried duct and you get a passive temperature buffer that does real work without ever drawing a watt. ## Network The household network has gone through a few iterations as Kit Carson Internet rolled out improved fiber service in the Carson Forest. Current state: - **Kit Carson fiber as primary.** Specifically on the green line — the underutilized one most neighbors aren't on. Same fiber backbone, way less contention, full bandwidth. - **Standard Starlink as backup.** Auto-failover if Kit Carson goes down (snow, lightning hits, transformer issues — they happen). - **Starlink Mini in the Tacoma TRD Pro.** Powers off the bed outlet, lives in the truck for road trips. You don't realize how nice full-bandwidth Starlink in the middle of a National Forest is until you've had it. The Kit Carson rollout actually let me cut costs — I dropped a second fiber line when the new line proved fast enough on its own. That kind of thing only works because we have a real co-op fiber ISP serving rural northern New Mexico, which is genuinely rare. ## The vehicle The truck is a 2019 Toyota Tacoma TRD Pro. It's the right vehicle for Carson Forest roads — high clearance, mechanical lockers, suspension that takes washboard without complaining. Bed outlet powers the Starlink Mini. What I actually want is a new Land Cruiser, but the Tacoma keeps doing the job, so it stays. ## Why this stuff matters here The Carson is beautiful and it's also unforgiving. Power outages happen. Roads close. Cell service is spotty in the canyons. The grid out here is what you build, not what someone hands you. Some of this is necessity, some of it is the hobby end of "I want to know how things actually work" — and the line between necessity and hobby is genuinely blurry the longer you live this way. The same impulse that has me patching modular synth cables or designing multi-agent orchestration protocols is what has me running buried duct for earth tubes. It's all the same kind of attention. ## Details - **Category:** Notes - **Tags:** off-grid, solar, LiFePO4, lithium, battery, GOES, satellite, weather, earth-tubes, passive-cooling, Starlink, KitCarson, fiber, network, Tacoma, homestead, Carson-National-Forest, Taos **Also read:** [All writing](https://bradanderson.org/writing?format=md) · [About Brad](https://bradanderson.org/about?format=md) --- **Navigate:** [Home](https://bradanderson.org/?format=md) · [About](https://bradanderson.org/about?format=md) · [Work](https://bradanderson.org/work?format=md) · [Projects](https://bradanderson.org/projects?format=md) · [Breeds](https://bradanderson.org/breeds?format=md) · [Writing](https://bradanderson.org/writing?format=md) · [LLM guide](https://bradanderson.org/llms.txt) _Ask BradBot directly: POST https://bradanderson.org/api/agent/ask with {"question": "..."} (details in https://bradanderson.org/llms.txt)._