1201 Articles
It took about 3 hours. I want to build another one before next Winter and I’m pretty sure I’ll adapt the way I built it, not the plan itself which worked just fine, just the order and methods for putting it together. I’ll try and publish a guide then. In the end, it takes a day to build, and it’s very sturdy.
Bill of material and plans bellow.
Megadouche is back in business, it has been since early April. We’ve learned that we can deploy it early and get some use regardless of small frosts. We have it for almost half the the year now and its deployment is cause for huge celebration. The kids are very excited about it.
It comes with several major improvements this year too, I’m not sure we’ll be able to top that.
Bigger tankless heater
This guy can heat double the amount of water the previous one could at 3.2 Gallons per minute.
Bigger pump, bigger shower head to go through all this water, and a better platform to step on
Output Switch
We now have a choice between the shower head and a longer hose that can reach places like the tub or laundry spot.
Continuous Propane Supply
It used to suck, when a tank became empty, to go get another one in the middle of a shower. This “auto change-over” contraption comes from the world of RVs and will alleviate that. I still need to make all this a little more stable.
Lights
We’ll often be out there after dusk, and so instead of playing with flashlights I found some outside 12V DC string lights I could hook up to the little solar system we have out there to move water. It’s extra magical.
The very fancy control board
Pest repellant
last year a mouse built a nest right in the water heater one night. I imagine it must have been traumatic how its house turned into a sudden inferno. I had to disassemble it and clean it, no thanks. Also one day the water switch was just pulled to the “on” position, and we’re just not sure what happened but we blame squirrels. In any case, this thing there emits ever changing ultra sounds and LED blinking to hopefully keep all this away.
What’s the same
The siphon & sediment tub are the same, the formula works great. I did add an old battery to the solar setup, but it wasn’t really necessary, I just had it laying around.
This very well may be the final incarnation of megadouche, it’s become a fixture we all love.
I often joke that the siding I use for my house is more house. And well, this year will be no exception. The piers are in, more house will follow soon. The more experienced I am at all this, the more I procrastinate on the planning. I’m still figuring out the roof line but I did get the footprint in the nick of time for pier day.
As always, but especially with stairs, figuring them out on a more malleable and fault tolerant medium saves a considerable amount of time. It helps get all the little details right too.
It will move with the ground frosts, and so it attached to the deck in a way that will allow for this.
This is the first door inside the house, and it’s going to the kid who started needing privacy. He still leaves it open at night because he’s not used to being isolated, he’s still just a little boy. We had to explain a few things about door use that are not obvious when you didn’t grow up with them. Being careful with where Esther’s fingers are when he closes it, or how not to close the cat in. He of course slammed it once, and I told him just as I had constructed the door, I would deconstruct it if he did that again. The threat was deemed plausible and it’s been honestly hilarious to see him ever so gently yet angrily close his door when he throws a pre-teen fit.
That’s the verdict for Sugaring 2022. I’ve heard that the sugar content in the sap wasn’t very high this year, and I believe it. I was surprised at how little syrup we got for how much we boiled. Another thing we’ve been told is that the later sap runs were “buddy”, meaning that the taste is a bit off from the trees budding. Except they weren’t actually budding so that is this year’s peculiarity. Nothing to complain about though, it’s been a good year.
She knows where the heat is
Because it’s not all about beer.
since it’s powered, we can send it back up
Wifi now reaches in the Sugarhouse.
Absolutely gorgeous, it’s a shame it will have to wait some for restoration. The sugarhouse is full of stoves now :|.
Mandalagaba is no longer available in Russia or Belarus. That’ll slightly annoy about 30 people per day. It feels wrongly targeted at little people going about their lives. But it also feels like I don’t want to pay server time to provide something nice while they have Putin in power. I say all this knowing full well how close we got to having our very own dickhead motherfucker of the same vein seize power.
A Winter thaw seems to have awakened the squirrels. They first started going after the crabapple tree which has fruit at the oddest times of the year.
Then they got closer to the house and started raiding the bird feeders, as squirrels will do.
The Christmas Card video was meant as a bit of a gimmick, something to post about. And it definitely worked to this effect. PlottyBot had some visibility on Reddit and ended up on HackADay :).
It’s always fun to get a bit of spotlight and see people react positively to something you built. Then Robin needed to actually write a bunch of valentines cards to his classmates, and he didn’t want to do it at all. So I proposed the plotter and his captured handwriting to make it fun. He didn’t hesitate and I learned a couple of things. First, he was fully capable of operating it, a sign that he’s growing up and that the software stack does make plotting accessible. Second, it was actually less work to “mass produce” handwritten cards. I thought it’d be the same amount of work as compared to writing them yourself, but really he’d just show up to change the paper when the plotter was done. He was watching TV while the plotter was working for him… Maybe this whole project is a failure.
