Originally Published: 2019-12-28
As this is the first post of this kind, I thought I would give it a bit of an introduction.
Every week I will write a brief description of the activities around here and related to off-grid living. As well I will describe any thoughts and plans for the upcoming weeks. Without further comment, below are the activities from Dec 23 to Dec 29.
This has been a very busy week, we:
- Registered the domain, started the blog,
- Enjoyed Christmas with our younger son, wife and grandson. I hope you had a chance to get together with family and friends as well!
- Unfortunately our eldest son and his girlfriend both were sick and my wife spent some hours over there helping them.
- The last few days have been spent preparing for the ice storm that is currently happening. Stacking wood on the dry, enclosed deck and making sure what needed to be moved and readied was.
- HAPPY NEW YEAR! I hope all your plans for the new year are prepared and you are able to do them or at least start on them! Around here we have our growing list, that includes:
- setting up the second green house we purchased,
- planting both green houses and fixing the outdoor garden that the first ice storm broke. My fault really I didn’t take apart the bird netting that overhangs the garden before fall, leaves collected, so did ice and snow,
- Moving the old battery room and repurposing it for gardening
- Reassembling the old deck (10 X 20) solid cedar to be used in the garden,
- Adding a covered area to work on tractors, snow blowers, projects and welding as necessary,
- Move the wind turbine to a much higher location,
- Finish tearing down an old building that pre-existed my purchasing of the land.
- Cut, split and stack wood for next fall/winter.
- That’s it for the list, so far. Last summer I said next summer would be one of enjoyment with little work outside of gardening. My neighbour laughed, “Welcome to the country”.
Thoughts….
Sitting by the fire at 2:30 this morning I reminded myself why I installed the wood stove. It had been a great sleep, almost 5 full hours when the house started to fill with a chill. Five hours is too many to leave the fire without putting wood on it. Not a real problem as I have propane heat that would kick on eventually if it started to get too cold.
Nursing the fire back to a heat producing dragon took about an hour and I reflected on the stove. As mentioned above with the ice storm coming and currently raging around us, I stacked a few day supply of wood on the deck to avoid slipping on ice in the next 24 hours. And here I am feeding that wood to the stove as it cares little for my sleep.
The stove’s reality is that it saves on electricity because it uses natural convection instead of electric fans. During the winter, when solar power is scare any savings in power means less generating and more electricity to use for other things like charging phones. The stove is an important part of the puzzle, so far wood has been free and propane costs real money, in my mind that means the payback is also in dollars saved.
Another key part of the worth of this stove and my less restless nights is what I have eluded to already, less sun means less solar power. Over the past couple of weeks we have only had 3 sunny days and while the solar panels will produce some power on these days it is little compared to normal. Couple that with the fact that it is winter so the arc of the sun is lower in the horizon, shorter days and 60 foot trees and charging isn’t great in winter. I’ve needed to run my generator for about 2-3 hours each day for the last 2 weeks, which is far less than last year (I doubled the size of my solar production last summer). The two biggest consumers of electricity are the fridge and the propane heater, the stove has all but eliminated the later.
As far as the sleepless nights during these short days, as the saying goes, “Drink Coffee and Carry On”. Have a great week and new year!