Solar systems design & other projects

It's been a thoughtful couple of weeks as we research the details of our systems and place many orders to obtain all of the components.  Taking this route is certainly not easy - especially when you have to shop online and can't browse the aisles at Home Depot!  After four days adding 80ish items to an online cart I finally placed an approx $1200 order yesterday evening.  Did I buy everything we will need? - I am hoping we thought of 98% of the needed items for the plumbing and electrical systems.  

Husband has been going back and forth on email with Northern Arizona Sun and Wind and hopes to place the solar system order today.  

In the meantime, while planning systems, we have done some manual labor. We had 20 yards (two large loads) of cinders delivered and, with the help of my folks we spread it around the buildings. This will keep the dust down as well as control the mud during the rainy season. The pile doesn't look like much here, but looks are deceiving and took us two days to spread!

We also dug up the plumbing we put in the ground 10+ years ago as we now intend to finally use it!

Our goal is to live on solar power for everything except for the use of an outdoor propane grill for some cooking and a wood-burning stove for heat in the winter.  I will be using the solar oven more and more.  Speaking of the solar oven, I am really getting the hang of baking bread in terms of the time of day, length of time for baking, and keeping the oven oriented to the sun properly.  The other day the solar oven reached 400 degrees for the first time!

Something I am very excited about is the solar water heater we ordered!  We will have an completely passive solar hot water system thanks to Sunbank.  It is on its way here and I am really excited about setting that up!  We are also adding a solar panel to our RV with a roof mount....I will share more details later!  We hope to have all of the components of the systems around the same time the garage door/end wall is installed in our new building (mid-June) by the contractor.  Then we can get to work putting all the systems together so that we can finally have running water & power in our house!