October 9, 2022 • 24 mins
As more and more companies look to solar energy for power many new challenges come along that need a solution for it to all work. In this case The Rock River Lumber and Grain Company needed help getting their solar batteries to communicate with the utility grid. We talk with Jake Thompson a Network Engineer at Twin State Technical Services who explains how they got involved and created a network for their solar battery array and the challenges they faced in order to get it to work.
Twin State Technical Services: https://www.tsts.com/ | Phone: 563-441-1504
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Episode Transcript
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(00:01):
Creating a network, connecting solarbatteries to communicate with the grid.
Okay, solar batteries, a utility grid,
and creating a network sothey can talk to each other.
You don't hear that that often,but it looks like you soon will.
Today we talk with Jake Thompson,
network engineerat Twin State Technical Services,
(00:22):
who explains about their involvementwith a green energy project
for the Rock River Lumber and GrainCompany today on small business talks.
You know, I think most people think
that when you do a solar installationand you go with batteries,
(00:44):
you just set everything up and plug it in,and that's not the case.
Apparently, you need to havea network built into the system.
And with me today is Jake Thompsonfrom Twin State Technical Services to not
only tell us about a project they workedon, but also how networks work and how
they communicate with things that wenormally wouldn't think they would.
(01:05):
So hi, Jake, how are you doing?
I'm very well, Neil,thank you for having me.
Oh, glad to have you on the podcast.
So, let's talk solar array, batterybackup solar arrays and networking.
Yeah, I got to tell you right off the bat,
that's one of those things that when Iheard it, it sort of like, okay,
it's solar energy and it's a batteryand we have to network it.
(01:29):
Is that something that's common?
Tell me a little bit about.
It.
It's not a commonapplication for Twins Date.
That was our first go round.
I'll tell you.
We were contracted with one of our clients
that reached out to us and said, hey,we're going to need some help here.
(01:52):
Apparently their system needs to be
talking to the public Internetand they need some help with that.
So, yeah, we were the ones to come in.
Hook up to network to big battery,
a little bigger than a car battery,obviously, and get them access
to the public Internet and theycan send power out to the grid.
(02:15):
It's a pretty cool process.
So tell me a little bit about the project.
We had some battery arrays and if you wantto just kind of start from the beginning,
how did this project developand what did you do?
Yeah.
So Rock River, Lumber and Greenis one of our clients.
They are headquarteredin Profitstown, Illinois.
About five or six years ago,
(02:36):
they put in one of the largest solarrays in Whiteside County at the time.
There's bigger ones put in nowjust because of the solar boom.
I'm going to call it, but they putin it was probably a half a mile long.
I'm going to call it.It might be even longer than that.
They have a grain facility out in Sterlingthat operates as a rail terminal.
(02:58):
That's where they offload all their grain.
They put the solar away in just to combat
some cost, get some energybuilt up for themselves.
The battery was an afterthought, actually,
they put the solar way in to feed theironsite power during the solar hours.
(03:19):
Obviously, you can't doit during the night.
At that time,we were able to put into networking so
that they could monitorthe operations of the panels.
When sun is hitting those panels,they can see the power generated
later, about two years after that Moxiecame to them, or something along those
(03:41):
lines that, hey, we have this batteryopportunity we can install on your site.
The solar panels can charge thosebatteries during operation.
And then when the grid needs power,
they can pull off of thosebatteries in a stored format.
So they're taking stored energy,
pushing it out to all the localresidences, businesses, to the grid,
(04:04):
and it's just a way for them to keepthe frequency correct on the grid.
I might call it.
Okay, in order to do that,
someone has to come into the networkand say, hey, I want that power,
and that you do that over the Internetand different tools and equipment needed.
But that's it in a nutshell.
(04:26):
So you if you're that controller,
you're sitting in your house, you can say,hey, I need power, let's send some out.
And they take it from the batteryand it's hardly ever seen on site.
So that was kind of it.
Okay, so basically the task was,how do we get the battery to talk
to the network or to talk to the powergrid, is what it sounds like.
(04:48):
Right.
How did you go about solving that?
There's a few different challengesin the whole operation.
One, there's not a squarebuilding on the property.
Basically, it's a very small office.
And they've got about six or seven greenbins that are over 500,000 bushel.
(05:12):
They made them be 750 perspective wise.
One semi load is 1000 bushel.
So you can put over 5000 semi loads in.
These bins are huge.
The solar array was at one end,
the battery was in the middle,and they had to be connected somehow
to the DMark, which is where wesend our Internet out to the world.
(05:38):
The way we did that, we had to mountdevices called Point to point.
It basically is a wireless connection
between where we want to send data to thesolar panels or to the battery backups.
And you just mount this radio antenna upas high as you can so there's no
interference, and you pointit as close as you can.
Line of sight, too.
(05:59):
We did one of the solar panels to lookat that data, and then we had to run
another point to point to the other end ofthe property to look at the batteries.
So
they just run on frequencies and differentelectronic megahertz and stuff like that.
That send signal one way, send it back,
(06:20):
we can read it, and then wecan get out of the Internet.
That was at least on site.
We had some firewall changes and policies
that we had to put in place sothat we could have security on it.
No outside world could get into it, only
the organization that wantsto control those batteries.
And those were put in place as well.
(06:41):
What would you say was probably
the biggest challenge youhad out of all these things?
It sounds like we're a lot,
but I'm just thinking,is there one in particular that sticks
in your mind that, wow,this was something we really had
to overcome, or we really had to kindof go a different way of doing it?
Sure, yeah.
Actually the equipment set up,I could problem solve that on the fly,
that we know where we needed to putthem and how to get the wires there.
(07:03):
The biggest challenge is knowing whereto plug those wires into the device.
We didn't have a lotof direction from Tesla.
These are Tesla branded batteries.
There was then a third partycontractor that installed the device.
He didn't have the schematics that Ineeded to know where to plug in.
(07:23):
And so the hardest challenge was tryingto find someone to tell me where to plug
our stuff into, which seemsreally uncanny.
And I found it by accident,
found a Tesla support number on the devicesomehow by accident,
and finally got someone to say, yes,you're plugged in the wrong port.
(07:45):
You just need to plug it into land two,which is local area network.
And everything was copacetic after that.
Very cool.
So compare this to what would youcall like a typical network set up?
And how different was this comparedto something of a typical setting up
(08:06):
a network for, let's say, just an officebuilding or for a small company?
Sure.
The similarities would be every building
that has internet has a point of entry,which we call the D mark.
That's the point where the internetprovider comes in,
plugs into a piece of equipment, and thenit becomes our responsibility after that.
(08:28):
That was the case at this facility.
They had a firewall, internet came in.
However, that firewallwas at another location.
It's separate from the Sterlingrail site where the batteries were.
So we had to route policies from one ISP
to another through our firewall andwork with a separate internet service
(08:53):
provider ISP to manage their tunnelsappropriately with the correct addresses
and carry different packets backto the firewall so they could get out.
Yeah, that was oneof the big challenges too.
That sounds like it.
So this is interesting because I likethe way of how you approached it and how
(09:15):
you kind of overcame and figure out how toput all these different things together.
Again, this is something,
this is a typical service that Twin Statedoes, is setting up networks.
Correct.
So twin state has threedifferent departments.
We have networking, web development,and web programming.
(09:37):
Networking handles all of that kindof things with firewall packet transfer,
routing different trafficwhere we needed to go.
So Internet comes in,we handle everything in the backside.
We say, okay, this Internetcoming in is this person.
We need to route it over to this device,
which happened to be the battery, which isin a sense similar to your computer.
(10:04):
It's just workingin the opposite direction.
So you have Internet to your house.
Obviously, we're talkingover a network right now.
Your computer is talking out
to the Internet saying,I want to get data to come in.
Well, we want a data to go out.
So in a typical company,you would have all these computers,
they route to a server,packets come in through the firewall,
(10:26):
throughout their network, goes to yourcomputer, says, yes, I'm here now.
We wanted someone from the outsideto talk to this device.
So that device data has to go out,
talk to someone, hey,I need some power, pull it out.
So essentially it's the same packets,it's just different data in the transfer.
(10:48):
Okay, hopefully that makes sense.
I don't want to get tootechnical, I guess.
No, that's great.
And I'm sure a lot of our listeners are
going to fully understand that a lotmore than I'm going to on that area.
I think it's fascinating and that's why Iwant to know more about the whole
networking and how you go about this,because I think the average person just
thinks of a network as I'm pluggingmy computer in and I've got a server.
(11:12):
It's that kind of thought.
And this is that whole thing of like going
outside that element and taking a realworld example and applying a network to be
able to get things to actuallycommunicate right.
This is not Networking 101 by any means.
It's not plugging your net gear router
into your modem and hooking to your WiFiand putting your password in and going.
(11:34):
There's a lot of bits and pieces that have
to be connected simultaneouslyand they all have to work in unison.
So we have to make sure thatfirewalls and policies are in place.
The firmware is patched so that there's noexploits coming into this
data or this network,and there's a lot of bits and pieces.
(11:58):
So yes, no, that's great.
The reason I also bring that up is becausedo you think this is something since
there's more of a pushtowards green energy?
G and solar panels are going to be more is
this something you see that is goingto pick up, that people are going to need
this awareness or even this understandingand this service to be able to communicate
(12:21):
with the batteries to the networkand things like that?
Do you see a growth in that area?
Do if you just drive in a higher mile
radius, you'll see solarpanels everywhere.
I mean, they're taking out farm groundthat you're going to be cash, renting,
or pulling crops off,and they're putting in solar farms.
(12:42):
They just are going crazy.
And they're stuckin the middle of nowhere.
So they have the most sun.
There's no trees, flat ground.
Somehow they got to talk to those as well.
And that's pretty muchexactly what we did.
We just had it over a couple of different
locations, a couple of obstructions inthe way that we had to navigate around.
But essentially it's the same thing.
(13:03):
You're going to put a device on site,
you're going to reach out to it,whether it be cellular,
whether it be Internet,which that's whole different ball of wax.
Reach out to those equipment,talk to it, see what it's doing.
Good feedback.
And yes, I do see that coming downthe road for a lot of people.
I got to ask, when you mentioned about,
(13:25):
like, logistics and about getting overobstacles, I'm guessing that a rail yard.
And because I'm figuring this is rather
narrow but really long, and you'vegot active railroad going on, right?
It is the main line of the North Pacific,
I think, northern Pacificor BNSF, one of those two.
(13:47):
There's two main lines right next to it.
So the trains, they route right off
of that main line, and they getloaded with corn and go back out.
Now, the device, the battery and the solarpanel are
both on the same side of the track,so you don't have to worry about that.
Okay.
(14:07):
But this terminal brings in probablyanywhere from 100 to 200 trucks a day.
They've got two dump pits that are liveall day, 10 hours, and
where the Internet is, and the battery,the trucks go in between there.
So we had to make sure we wereat least 14ft in the air.
(14:29):
The trucks are 13, six.
They have a safety rail thatguys clip to with the harness,
and they have to walk along the trainsto open the doors to load them.
So we were able to mount a bracket
on that safety rail,shoot it across the truck traffic,
over to the battery,and that gave us our high enough clearance
(14:53):
that we weren't goingto get any interference.
All it's going through my mind right nowis this is obviously something,
if you have a solar panel,don't try this yourself.
Hire a professional is what it soundslike, because
I don't mean that to be an advertisement,but I think it's important because, again,
you're dealing with the heightof the trucks.
(15:16):
You're dealing with, I would imagine,a variety of frequencies because trucks
are going to have different radiosignals and things like that.
And it's just the whole planningof that whole thing and putting all
the logistics not just weneed to connect this to this.
Would you say it was like also adding
in all these other factorsthat didn't make it.
Just plug this right in and we're done.
(15:38):
It was like, how do we overcome this?
How do we overcome this?
How do we overcome this?
And it sounds like you hada few of those to handle.
Exactly.And the network was almost an afterthought
from the design of the battery, too,so that if they were to come to us before
they put the battery in,we could have just ran our networking
underground from one office throughthe trenches up into their device.
(16:03):
They put all the conduit and they neededthey put all the wiring and underground.
So it would have been really helpful
to put a conduit in juststraight, hard wired.
But since they didn't do that,that's where we had to go in the air.
And then you get weather elements and wind
and that kind of variablesand obstacles that you got to overcome.
(16:27):
So there could have been some forethoughtto that to make it a little bit better.
But it's working great right now.
Now, do you do any other additional work,or was that just like a one time you just
installed it, or are youcontinuing to work on the project?
I continue to work on that project.
It's very minimal for that location.
(16:49):
However, last week they didhave a network switch go down.
It actually tookthe battery out of service.
It was right before Labor Day.
So they were out of service for five days.
It was on a Friday, of all things.
Everything happenson a Friday or Saturday.
But I do handle their services to this
day, and I had to go out there and replacethat switch, and it was all good.
(17:12):
But we also handle all their server,
set up, their wireless, their email,making sure everything is up to date.
They have new computers,we build those out, that kind of stuff.
They have nine locations,
which seven of them are elevators,and they've got three lumberyards.
(17:34):
So there's two different domain networksthere that we have to separate,
but also tied together throughdifferent pathways around the Internet.
And yeah, we handle those on daily basis.Okay.
Now, Twins A would handlea one off project like that.
If someone came to us, we would lookat the project, see if we can do it.
(17:56):
It's not that they had to be a customer,but we are their service provider,
and they asked us to do it,and we took care of it.
Well, I'm thinking this is also a questionfor people that when they're listening
to this, that they'regoing to get into solar.
And I think you point a couple things out.
So I'm just going to redirect the question
and say,let's say I'm a company and I am getting
(18:17):
into solar and I'm goingto have batteries and all that.
If somebody were to come to you,
what is the advice that yougive them in setting this up?
What are things that they should bebringing to you that will make this
an easy and smooth transition for themto be able to get this installed and have
a network applied withtheir solar batteries?
Yeah.The biggest thing would be let's make
(18:39):
the networking a forethoughtrather than an afterthought.
As I said before, there's a lot of detailthat being in the expert of the field,
not calling myself an expert by any means,but it's a very technical field.
We understand a lot of the nuancesthat need to be involved in the project.
Your project engineer for thebattery might not know that.
(19:02):
They're more concerned with getting
the power to the battery,connecting it to their solar array.
They really don't think about, okay,
how am I going to send this or tell it,send this power out to the grid.
And if you're going to go through that,make sure it's part of your project plan
to get networking involvedprior to the build.
(19:24):
Do it in the design,
make sure you know where it's going, makesure you know where it's coming from.
Just give us the details and we cando a lot of the late work after that.
But then you're not scrambling at the end.
That was like our last step in gettingthis thing up and running was
the networking because we wereinvolved in the beginning.
But that sounds like that's something likepeople that want to get into this,
(19:47):
they really should get in touchwith a company like yours and kind of lay
it out and just say, we can help youdo the proper planning.
And that's what it really sounds like it
comes down to, is proper planningand doing things in the right order.
Otherwise it's going to be a lot harder if
you put something in and thentry to adapt to it later on.
That's exactly right.
(20:07):
It's like baking a batch of cookies.
You're not going to put them in the ovenbefore you mix them up, kind of thing.
I like that.That's a great example.
That's a great analogy.I like that.
Yeah.
And it's just think about everythingand sometimes it doesn't.
We roll the punches here where we solve
a lot of problems on a daily basis,and that one was one of them.
(20:29):
Well, that sounds great.
I'm going to leave youwith to give a summary.
I'll give you the last talk on this.
Just give me a summary of how you feltthe project started, what you did,
and what you learned out of it,let me put it that way.
Definitely learned a lot about point
(20:50):
to point devices, understandingthe right equipment for the job.
There's multiple point to point devicesout there, but we needed a little bit
of special ones to handlenot having to go plug 110 power in,
that's kind of detailed information, butalso
(21:10):
being able to understand all the languagethat another company coming in has.
I've never dealt with power schematicsand any of that, so
learning how to read those and thentime into our network was really cool.
Again, it would be nice to have been
a forethought rather thanafter thought, as I said.
(21:31):
However, having Rock Riveras a client in that relationship,
they were able to reach out to us and giveus as much information as they could.
They were very good with that.
And then sometimes you got to be lucky.
And I was I found information to getsome stuff going, but that was very fun.
(21:51):
And anotherreally good exercise to make sure you have
the right equipmentat the front end, the D mark.
As I said before,
if you don't have the right firewallin place, this is never going to happen.
You can't come in here with a Walmartnetgear or something you buy on Amazon.
It's a very sophisticated piece of device.
(22:12):
It's like its own separate computer andmake sure you have the right security.
So don't want to cut cornersdoing those equipment.
You want to make sure you getwhat you exactly you need.
Which sounds like it was a success.It was.
It's still a success to this day.
And Rock River is very happy.
They're sending power out,
(22:33):
they're helping the environment andgetting a little bit of kickback for it.
So it's very good.
So if anybody is listening and they kindof say, this is something I'm kind
of interested in, how wouldthey get in touch with you?
So Twin State main officephone number is 563-441-1504.
(22:57):
You can also go to our website,tsts.com. That's tom sam.
Tom sam.com. I know that sometimeshard to understand.
You can see all of our different
networking, web designand networking staff.
We've got our links, there some info,you sign up for a newsletter.
(23:19):
It's all there.
Great.
Well, Jake,thank you very much for showing us how
this all put together and giving us somelessons on if we're going to be
connecting, some ideas and somerecommendations for doing that.
And thank you for being on the podcast.I appreciate it.
I appreciate it.Thanks for having me.
This was actually my firstpodcast ever, so thanks.
(23:41):
You did great.
In fact, I'll even open that up.
One thing we always want our listeners
to know is that if you have any questionsor comments, we ask you,
give us post a comment or posta review and let us know how we did.
And we definitely will putthat on the website as well.
We'll also put your phone number and webaddress down below on the podcast as well.
(24:05):
We would appreciate that.Thank you.
Okay.Thanks, Jake.
Alright.Have a good day.
You too.Bye.
Bye, you.
Creating a network, connecting solarbatteries to communicate with the grid.
Okay, solar batteries, a utility grid,
and creating a network sothey can talk to each other.
You don't hear that that often,but it looks like you soon will.
Today we talk with Jake Thompson,
network engineerat Twin State Technical Services,
(00:22):
who explains about their involvementwith a green energy project
for the Rock River Lumber and GrainCompany today on small business talks.
You know, I think most people think
that when you do a solar installationand you go with batteries,
(00:44):
you just set everything up and plug it in,and that's not the case.
Apparently, you need to havea network built into the system.
And with me today is Jake Thompsonfrom Twin State Technical Services to not
only tell us about a project they workedon, but also how networks work and how
they communicate with things that wenormally wouldn't think they would.
(01:05):
So hi, Jake, how are you doing?
I'm very well, Neil,thank you for having me.
Oh, glad to have you on the podcast.
So, let's talk solar array, batterybackup solar arrays and networking.
Yeah, I got to tell you right off the bat,
that's one of those things that when Iheard it, it sort of like, okay,
it's solar energy and it's a batteryand we have to network it.
(01:29):
Is that something that's common?
Tell me a little bit about.
It.
It's not a commonapplication for Twins Date.
That was our first go round.
I'll tell you.
We were contracted with one of our clients
that reached out to us and said, hey,we're going to need some help here.
(01:52):
Apparently their system needs to be
talking to the public Internetand they need some help with that.
So, yeah, we were the ones to come in.
Hook up to network to big battery,
a little bigger than a car battery,obviously, and get them access
to the public Internet and theycan send power out to the grid.
(02:15):
It's a pretty cool process.
So tell me a little bit about the project.
We had some battery arrays and if you wantto just kind of start from the beginning,
how did this project developand what did you do?
Yeah.
So Rock River, Lumber and Greenis one of our clients.
They are headquarteredin Profitstown, Illinois.
About five or six years ago,
(02:36):
they put in one of the largest solarrays in Whiteside County at the time.
There's bigger ones put in nowjust because of the solar boom.
I'm going to call it, but they putin it was probably a half a mile long.
I'm going to call it.It might be even longer than that.
They have a grain facility out in Sterlingthat operates as a rail terminal.
(02:58):
That's where they offload all their grain.
They put the solar away in just to combat
some cost, get some energybuilt up for themselves.
The battery was an afterthought, actually,
they put the solar way in to feed theironsite power during the solar hours.
(03:19):
Obviously, you can't doit during the night.
At that time,we were able to put into networking so
that they could monitorthe operations of the panels.
When sun is hitting those panels,they can see the power generated
later, about two years after that Moxiecame to them, or something along those
(03:41):
lines that, hey, we have this batteryopportunity we can install on your site.
The solar panels can charge thosebatteries during operation.
And then when the grid needs power,
they can pull off of thosebatteries in a stored format.
So they're taking stored energy,
pushing it out to all the localresidences, businesses, to the grid,
(04:04):
and it's just a way for them to keepthe frequency correct on the grid.
I might call it.
Okay, in order to do that,
someone has to come into the networkand say, hey, I want that power,
and that you do that over the Internetand different tools and equipment needed.
But that's it in a nutshell.
(04:26):
So you if you're that controller,
you're sitting in your house, you can say,hey, I need power, let's send some out.
And they take it from the batteryand it's hardly ever seen on site.
So that was kind of it.
Okay, so basically the task was,how do we get the battery to talk
to the network or to talk to the powergrid, is what it sounds like.
(04:48):
Right.
How did you go about solving that?
There's a few different challengesin the whole operation.
One, there's not a squarebuilding on the property.
Basically, it's a very small office.
And they've got about six or seven greenbins that are over 500,000 bushel.
(05:12):
They made them be 750 perspective wise.
One semi load is 1000 bushel.
So you can put over 5000 semi loads in.
These bins are huge.
The solar array was at one end,
the battery was in the middle,and they had to be connected somehow
to the DMark, which is where wesend our Internet out to the world.
(05:38):
The way we did that, we had to mountdevices called Point to point.
It basically is a wireless connection
between where we want to send data to thesolar panels or to the battery backups.
And you just mount this radio antenna upas high as you can so there's no
interference, and you pointit as close as you can.
Line of sight, too.
(05:59):
We did one of the solar panels to lookat that data, and then we had to run
another point to point to the other end ofthe property to look at the batteries.
So
they just run on frequencies and differentelectronic megahertz and stuff like that.
That send signal one way, send it back,
(06:20):
we can read it, and then wecan get out of the Internet.
That was at least on site.
We had some firewall changes and policies
that we had to put in place sothat we could have security on it.
No outside world could get into it, only
the organization that wantsto control those batteries.
And those were put in place as well.
(06:41):
What would you say was probably
the biggest challenge youhad out of all these things?
It sounds like we're a lot,
but I'm just thinking,is there one in particular that sticks
in your mind that, wow,this was something we really had
to overcome, or we really had to kindof go a different way of doing it?
Sure, yeah.
Actually the equipment set up,I could problem solve that on the fly,
that we know where we needed to putthem and how to get the wires there.
(07:03):
The biggest challenge is knowing whereto plug those wires into the device.
We didn't have a lotof direction from Tesla.
These are Tesla branded batteries.
There was then a third partycontractor that installed the device.
He didn't have the schematics that Ineeded to know where to plug in.
(07:23):
And so the hardest challenge was tryingto find someone to tell me where to plug
our stuff into, which seemsreally uncanny.
And I found it by accident,
found a Tesla support number on the devicesomehow by accident,
and finally got someone to say, yes,you're plugged in the wrong port.
(07:45):
You just need to plug it into land two,which is local area network.
And everything was copacetic after that.
Very cool.
So compare this to what would youcall like a typical network set up?
And how different was this comparedto something of a typical setting up
(08:06):
a network for, let's say, just an officebuilding or for a small company?
Sure.
The similarities would be every building
that has internet has a point of entry,which we call the D mark.
That's the point where the internetprovider comes in,
plugs into a piece of equipment, and thenit becomes our responsibility after that.
(08:28):
That was the case at this facility.
They had a firewall, internet came in.
However, that firewallwas at another location.
It's separate from the Sterlingrail site where the batteries were.
So we had to route policies from one ISP
to another through our firewall andwork with a separate internet service
(08:53):
provider ISP to manage their tunnelsappropriately with the correct addresses
and carry different packets backto the firewall so they could get out.
Yeah, that was oneof the big challenges too.
That sounds like it.
So this is interesting because I likethe way of how you approached it and how
(09:15):
you kind of overcame and figure out how toput all these different things together.
Again, this is something,
this is a typical service that Twin Statedoes, is setting up networks.
Correct.
So twin state has threedifferent departments.
We have networking, web development,and web programming.
(09:37):
Networking handles all of that kindof things with firewall packet transfer,
routing different trafficwhere we needed to go.
So Internet comes in,we handle everything in the backside.
We say, okay, this Internetcoming in is this person.
We need to route it over to this device,
which happened to be the battery, which isin a sense similar to your computer.
(10:04):
It's just workingin the opposite direction.
So you have Internet to your house.
Obviously, we're talkingover a network right now.
Your computer is talking out
to the Internet saying,I want to get data to come in.
Well, we want a data to go out.
So in a typical company,you would have all these computers,
they route to a server,packets come in through the firewall,
(10:26):
throughout their network, goes to yourcomputer, says, yes, I'm here now.
We wanted someone from the outsideto talk to this device.
So that device data has to go out,
talk to someone, hey,I need some power, pull it out.
So essentially it's the same packets,it's just different data in the transfer.
(10:48):
Okay, hopefully that makes sense.
I don't want to get tootechnical, I guess.
No, that's great.
And I'm sure a lot of our listeners are
going to fully understand that a lotmore than I'm going to on that area.
I think it's fascinating and that's why Iwant to know more about the whole
networking and how you go about this,because I think the average person just
thinks of a network as I'm pluggingmy computer in and I've got a server.
(11:12):
It's that kind of thought.
And this is that whole thing of like going
outside that element and taking a realworld example and applying a network to be
able to get things to actuallycommunicate right.
This is not Networking 101 by any means.
It's not plugging your net gear router
into your modem and hooking to your WiFiand putting your password in and going.
(11:34):
There's a lot of bits and pieces that have
to be connected simultaneouslyand they all have to work in unison.
So we have to make sure thatfirewalls and policies are in place.
The firmware is patched so that there's noexploits coming into this
data or this network,and there's a lot of bits and pieces.
(11:58):
So yes, no, that's great.
The reason I also bring that up is becausedo you think this is something since
there's more of a pushtowards green energy?
G and solar panels are going to be more is
this something you see that is goingto pick up, that people are going to need
this awareness or even this understandingand this service to be able to communicate
(12:21):
with the batteries to the networkand things like that?
Do you see a growth in that area?
Do if you just drive in a higher mile
radius, you'll see solarpanels everywhere.
I mean, they're taking out farm groundthat you're going to be cash, renting,
or pulling crops off,and they're putting in solar farms.
(12:42):
They just are going crazy.
And they're stuckin the middle of nowhere.
So they have the most sun.
There's no trees, flat ground.
Somehow they got to talk to those as well.
And that's pretty muchexactly what we did.
We just had it over a couple of different
locations, a couple of obstructions inthe way that we had to navigate around.
But essentially it's the same thing.
(13:03):
You're going to put a device on site,
you're going to reach out to it,whether it be cellular,
whether it be Internet,which that's whole different ball of wax.
Reach out to those equipment,talk to it, see what it's doing.
Good feedback.
And yes, I do see that coming downthe road for a lot of people.
I got to ask, when you mentioned about,
(13:25):
like, logistics and about getting overobstacles, I'm guessing that a rail yard.
And because I'm figuring this is rather
narrow but really long, and you'vegot active railroad going on, right?
It is the main line of the North Pacific,
I think, northern Pacificor BNSF, one of those two.
(13:47):
There's two main lines right next to it.
So the trains, they route right off
of that main line, and they getloaded with corn and go back out.
Now, the device, the battery and the solarpanel are
both on the same side of the track,so you don't have to worry about that.
Okay.
(14:07):
But this terminal brings in probablyanywhere from 100 to 200 trucks a day.
They've got two dump pits that are liveall day, 10 hours, and
where the Internet is, and the battery,the trucks go in between there.
So we had to make sure we wereat least 14ft in the air.
(14:29):
The trucks are 13, six.
They have a safety rail thatguys clip to with the harness,
and they have to walk along the trainsto open the doors to load them.
So we were able to mount a bracket
on that safety rail,shoot it across the truck traffic,
over to the battery,and that gave us our high enough clearance
(14:53):
that we weren't goingto get any interference.
All it's going through my mind right nowis this is obviously something,
if you have a solar panel,don't try this yourself.
Hire a professional is what it soundslike, because
I don't mean that to be an advertisement,but I think it's important because, again,
you're dealing with the heightof the trucks.
(15:16):
You're dealing with, I would imagine,a variety of frequencies because trucks
are going to have different radiosignals and things like that.
And it's just the whole planningof that whole thing and putting all
the logistics not just weneed to connect this to this.
Would you say it was like also adding
in all these other factorsthat didn't make it.
Just plug this right in and we're done.
(15:38):
It was like, how do we overcome this?
How do we overcome this?
How do we overcome this?
And it sounds like you hada few of those to handle.
Exactly.And the network was almost an afterthought
from the design of the battery, too,so that if they were to come to us before
they put the battery in,we could have just ran our networking
underground from one office throughthe trenches up into their device.
(16:03):
They put all the conduit and they neededthey put all the wiring and underground.
So it would have been really helpful
to put a conduit in juststraight, hard wired.
But since they didn't do that,that's where we had to go in the air.
And then you get weather elements and wind
and that kind of variablesand obstacles that you got to overcome.
(16:27):
So there could have been some forethoughtto that to make it a little bit better.
But it's working great right now.
Now, do you do any other additional work,or was that just like a one time you just
installed it, or are youcontinuing to work on the project?
I continue to work on that project.
It's very minimal for that location.
(16:49):
However, last week they didhave a network switch go down.
It actually tookthe battery out of service.
It was right before Labor Day.
So they were out of service for five days.
It was on a Friday, of all things.
Everything happenson a Friday or Saturday.
But I do handle their services to this
day, and I had to go out there and replacethat switch, and it was all good.
(17:12):
But we also handle all their server,
set up, their wireless, their email,making sure everything is up to date.
They have new computers,we build those out, that kind of stuff.
They have nine locations,
which seven of them are elevators,and they've got three lumberyards.
(17:34):
So there's two different domain networksthere that we have to separate,
but also tied together throughdifferent pathways around the Internet.
And yeah, we handle those on daily basis.Okay.
Now, Twins A would handlea one off project like that.
If someone came to us, we would lookat the project, see if we can do it.
(17:56):
It's not that they had to be a customer,but we are their service provider,
and they asked us to do it,and we took care of it.
Well, I'm thinking this is also a questionfor people that when they're listening
to this, that they'regoing to get into solar.
And I think you point a couple things out.
So I'm just going to redirect the question
and say,let's say I'm a company and I am getting
(18:17):
into solar and I'm goingto have batteries and all that.
If somebody were to come to you,
what is the advice that yougive them in setting this up?
What are things that they should bebringing to you that will make this
an easy and smooth transition for themto be able to get this installed and have
a network applied withtheir solar batteries?
Yeah.The biggest thing would be let's make
(18:39):
the networking a forethoughtrather than an afterthought.
As I said before, there's a lot of detailthat being in the expert of the field,
not calling myself an expert by any means,but it's a very technical field.
We understand a lot of the nuancesthat need to be involved in the project.
Your project engineer for thebattery might not know that.
(19:02):
They're more concerned with getting
the power to the battery,connecting it to their solar array.
They really don't think about, okay,
how am I going to send this or tell it,send this power out to the grid.
And if you're going to go through that,make sure it's part of your project plan
to get networking involvedprior to the build.
(19:24):
Do it in the design,
make sure you know where it's going, makesure you know where it's coming from.
Just give us the details and we cando a lot of the late work after that.
But then you're not scrambling at the end.
That was like our last step in gettingthis thing up and running was
the networking because we wereinvolved in the beginning.
But that sounds like that's something likepeople that want to get into this,
(19:47):
they really should get in touchwith a company like yours and kind of lay
it out and just say, we can help youdo the proper planning.
And that's what it really sounds like it
comes down to, is proper planningand doing things in the right order.
Otherwise it's going to be a lot harder if
you put something in and thentry to adapt to it later on.
That's exactly right.
(20:07):
It's like baking a batch of cookies.
You're not going to put them in the ovenbefore you mix them up, kind of thing.
I like that.That's a great example.
That's a great analogy.I like that.
Yeah.
And it's just think about everythingand sometimes it doesn't.
We roll the punches here where we solve
a lot of problems on a daily basis,and that one was one of them.
(20:29):
Well, that sounds great.
I'm going to leave youwith to give a summary.
I'll give you the last talk on this.
Just give me a summary of how you feltthe project started, what you did,
and what you learned out of it,let me put it that way.
Definitely learned a lot about point
(20:50):
to point devices, understandingthe right equipment for the job.
There's multiple point to point devicesout there, but we needed a little bit
of special ones to handlenot having to go plug 110 power in,
that's kind of detailed information, butalso
(21:10):
being able to understand all the languagethat another company coming in has.
I've never dealt with power schematicsand any of that, so
learning how to read those and thentime into our network was really cool.
Again, it would be nice to have been
a forethought rather thanafter thought, as I said.
(21:31):
However, having Rock Riveras a client in that relationship,
they were able to reach out to us and giveus as much information as they could.
They were very good with that.
And then sometimes you got to be lucky.
And I was I found information to getsome stuff going, but that was very fun.
(21:51):
And anotherreally good exercise to make sure you have
the right equipmentat the front end, the D mark.
As I said before,
if you don't have the right firewallin place, this is never going to happen.
You can't come in here with a Walmartnetgear or something you buy on Amazon.
It's a very sophisticated piece of device.
(22:12):
It's like its own separate computer andmake sure you have the right security.
So don't want to cut cornersdoing those equipment.
You want to make sure you getwhat you exactly you need.
Which sounds like it was a success.It was.
It's still a success to this day.
And Rock River is very happy.
They're sending power out,
(22:33):
they're helping the environment andgetting a little bit of kickback for it.
So it's very good.
So if anybody is listening and they kindof say, this is something I'm kind
of interested in, how wouldthey get in touch with you?
So Twin State main officephone number is 563-441-1504.
(22:57):
You can also go to our website,tsts.com. That's tom sam.
Tom sam.com. I know that sometimeshard to understand.
You can see all of our different
networking, web designand networking staff.
We've got our links, there some info,you sign up for a newsletter.
(23:19):
It's all there.
Great.
Well, Jake,thank you very much for showing us how
this all put together and giving us somelessons on if we're going to be
connecting, some ideas and somerecommendations for doing that.
And thank you for being on the podcast.I appreciate it.
I appreciate it.Thanks for having me.
This was actually my firstpodcast ever, so thanks.
(23:41):
You did great.
In fact, I'll even open that up.
One thing we always want our listeners
to know is that if you have any questionsor comments, we ask you,
give us post a comment or posta review and let us know how we did.
And we definitely will putthat on the website as well.
We'll also put your phone number and webaddress down below on the podcast as well.
(24:05):
We would appreciate that.Thank you.
Okay.Thanks, Jake.
Alright.Have a good day.
You too.Bye.
Bye, you.
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