The last board is ripped to size, then I try to mimic its factory round bevel with the sander. Worked pretty well.
The ends having been cut need to all be resealed.
228 square feet, half of the house we moved into.
The trees are perfectly placed for some late afternoon shade. These nice trees are the few sticks which survived our reclaiming the land from brush years ago.
Load off my back, money in his pocket.
I asked a neighbor if they were doing anything with manure from their horses. turned out they had a ton extra and were cool with giving it away. It also turned out it was all piled up nicely already, and was pretty much already compost. I left things very tidy and we gave them some soaps Nicole made, what an absolute score.
6 loads without a dump truck
I added the 2 buckets of ash we keep for icy weather. We’ll have time to rebuild our stock come Fall. We’re mixing in wood chips and grass clipping. Pretty much anything green we can get our hand on. It will be a serious pile of serious compost soon.
3 year update after planting 3 little Chestnuts, piggybacking off a New York guy’s effort to reintroduce Chestnuts to American forests: they all look wonderful.
The stronger growth comes from the one that’s in the shade, go figure.
We got a few more this year since they’re doing so well and promise to deliver a bounty in a few decades.
We’ll find them a spot in due time.
I worked through the week end, but it was really fudging hot and that slowed me down. Still, the deck it taking shape. And that shape is that of 2 decks to be joined with a couple of steps.
The intermediary seasons between Summer and Winter have always been a challenge for us. When it’s not cold enough to make a fire, but it’s cold enough to not take a cold water shower outside. With Megadouche‘s ability to deliver infinite hot water, it really is not an issue to bathe outside even when it’s cold. It was evident immediately after “inventing” it last year, that it would remain as a permanent fixture of our homestead. This year I set it up as soon as possible in April and I polished it a bit. And boy has it been nice, it really is the absolute best thing we’ve made. It’s not just nice as taking showers outside is really pleasant, it also changes the dynamic of our day completely. When it’s too hot, or when we work hard, we can just hop under and just get a refresh. No longer are showers something that needs to be planned, moved with buckets, and kept for the end of the day.
The solar setup is all scrap lumber and spare parts. Old panels, old batteries, old charge controllers. It looks funny but it performs well. This year I added 1 panel because we started moving a lot of water right off the bat and I could tell the batteries were getting depleted.
The sediment tub with the siphon coming from upstream. A great formula.
I let wood piles meander through the land more and more. I love how it looks.
It seems as though we build something substantial every other year. This construction season, we are building a deck and focusing on siding (which is very much overdue).
Ken is back to help me plant piers
Chatting about what to do where
Some piers go in very close to the house and septic pipes. Having an actual toilet is still something new here, and we want to keep it this way by not crushing the septic pipes.
Esther is fascinated by the “big tractor”
It’s going to be a big deck 🙂
We also planted 3 piers by the Sugarhouse to extend its coverage of equipment. The piers will be ready for me whenever I get inspired.
Ken helped us plant 32 piers so far, including the 9 first piers which got us in a tiny house in the middle of a very rough land. I’m extremely bummed to hear him talk about retirement, and extremely happy to hear him compliment how much we’ve done here.
Between the housing market, the empty nurseries, and how hard it’s been getting compost; all signs point to the pressure Vermont is receiving from pandemic migrants.
Finally though, after months and many phone calls, we were able to score a truck load of compost, from a super cool local farm at that!
6 years is how long I’ve been after the goal of closing a loop of trails all around our land. I started the day with a mission, to close that loop from the disparate trails I pushed a little each previous year so that I could go all around the land on the ATV.
It is notable that an ATV is not a tractor. It is less capable and it is much lighter. There is no way I could take the tractor through the trails I made, yet it would be very useful to work on them and turn them into nice trails. Even, dry, wide, this is not where we are now. But… I can take the ATV through the loop and that’s one heck of a start. It means access to fire wood, it means the trails forming the loop are bound to get nicer and better managed. It means being able to bring equipment & material to various places of the land (sugaring, lumber, et cetera).
Today’s mission.
Parts of the patchwork of trails I’m sticking together for the loop were obviously man made and used, all I have to do is clear all the trees which came to obstruct them.
Closing the loop means going through a marsh, this was definitely the hardest part. I shouldn’t have done this after 3 days of rain, on the other hand I won’t be able to see the ground very soon when all the greenery sprouts. It was now or never.
I’ll need some slab wood to help, and now I can take it there :).
Every year in January, we spend one evening dreaming of greenery and raiding nursery websites. Then we forget all about it and random trees & shrub show up in the mail through April and May.
7 plum trees, 2 apricots and a few more shrubs not pictured here
We are starting to have a lot of fruit trees around. We try to pick a good spot for them all, but some just don’t make it. Since we put an emphasis on variety, we couldn’t possibly know and cater to all the optimal conditions needed by all. So our strategy is more on the carpet bombing side, imprecision and loss are part of the equation.
I rarely post about the garden as it has mostly become Nicole’s project, but it’s starting to be seriously amazing. I’ll have to post more pictures of it this growing season.
With our recent solar upgrade, we are able to produce much more than our charge controller can take. In fact, on days of perfect sun (full exposure, perfect angle) we need to turn off half of the array or the charge controller, which can only take up to 80A shuts off. This sounds silly, but on cloudy days, having all these panels is invaluable. So right now we’re a bit in a manual mode of turning panels on and off based on the weather.
3 years ago we had a brutal heat wave which sent us away from our house. I vowed then to have some sort of A/C capabilities before the next one. One of the nicest thing we’ve done to ourselves was getting a “regular” fridge. While at the time, it pushed our solar install to the limits, today it’s really not a big deal to keep going, even though it’s by far our biggest consumer of electrons. So we bought an 8000BTU A/C unit, I was expecting it to be maybe “a couple of fridges” worth of power consumption, but let me tell you… This thing is 7 fridges put together! Ouch!
We’ve been testing it now to make sure we won’t have any bad surprises when the heat comes.
We’ll never have the battery bank to store and supply 70A through the night. Also true, when the Sun shines, the solar panels can most definitely keep 70A coming and more. We’ve gotten good with stove heat, at managing not heat itself, but how to buffer it in the house, to buy us time through a cold night. It looks like we’ll have to do exactly that, but with cold. Run the A/C all day while the Sun gives us more energy than we can do anything with, to buffer the house as much as possible against the heat. Nights usually provide respite from heat in the Summer, in the Winter this is also true but it’s the opposite of a respite when you are fighting the cold :).
So our panels are more than enough, our storage is essentially null for the purpose of A/C, and our charge controller is too close to its limit of 80A to funnel all the panel energy to the A/C while doing the few other things we need electricity for.
I think this tells us we need to upgrade the charge controller. This way we can have a more pleasant Summer, and more specifically mitigation of heat waves.
All for free, money wise and carbon wise. Amidst these mundane concerns of solar system design to tackle such a juggernaut device as an A/C, it is easy to forget how beautiful and elegant it is that the hotter the Sun is, the more we can turn it into Cold. How often are problems their own solutions?
We only had 1 good week of sap flow this year, and only boiled 1 batch. It just wasn’t a maple syrup year. We still made 5 gallons which is enough for our family’s yearly consumption, and we still have 2 gallons left from last year. We’ve been experimenting with making granulated sugar with it. Last year we tried maple candy, and that was delicious but it was a lot of work. Granulated is much easier to make and to substitute in recipes. We will try to ramp up our sap production next year.
It’s cleanup time.
The loot
Very little flow and we’re already mid March.
Sugaring season is around the corner and so I’m giving us paths through the woods. No sledding 35 gallons of sap, no stuck ATVs. One hard lesson after another, we now know what to do and when. We also know how: I didn’t even get the tractor stuck and made quick work of it all. It’s so nice for these things to have become evident.
Our lives just took an enormous leap in comfort as we now have running water. It isn’t fully installed yet, and I’ll post more about the pump when it is.
I estimate that in the past 5 and a half years, We pumped and carried 248,930 liters (65,760 gallons) of water from the well 100ft away. I’d love to know how many joules this represents, and how much ingested Ben & Jerry’s this translates to, but I don’t need to go down this rabbit hole right now :).
It isn’t yet perfect, I’m still figuring out a few things around priming and proper plumbing. But it’s still an enormous improvement. Running water, which we took for granted most of our lives, is the culmination of not only all the projects surrounding it (well work, frost lines, piping, et cetera), but also all the projects surrounding electricity. No wonder it took 5.5 years to get here with our starting point being zero understanding of any of these things. We often run into the people we once were, who have no concept of the fact water can move outside of pipes, in buckets for example. It seems evident when you read it, but I can guarantee we were met with confused looks more than once.
We barely used our Champion generator these past 5 years, but it did come in handy on rare occasions. It sat for 2 years unused at one point and needed some TLC to get back going again, a fact we didn’t want another way. Working from home in the time of Covid, having upgraded our solar setup, and still not making enough power through very cloudy days, we had to compromise our values a bit more and get decent fossil based 🙁 regenerating capabilities.
I’m still gathering information on water and wind turbines to diversify down the road, but today we are not ready to pull that trigger and we need to work.
So we acquired a very nice Honda EU2200i, and a wonderful little device that plugs into it and produces 70A at 12VDC on demand.
The Honda generator is really nice and very quiet.
The AIMS Power CON120AC1224DC is very impressive, is can truly put out 70A on demand, it can be tuned to charge several battery types, and it decouples the load. I don’t need to switch the load to the generator, which means it’s always on the nice clean pure sine inverter.
The Honda generator comes with Bluetooth, a fact I was not happy about as it’s gimmicky, but I have to say it is nice to not have to go back outside to turn off the generator. The AIMS converter is definitely working it hard.
The results on the solar graph are, well, a bit absurd to look at :). 
As Murphy’s law would have it, our solar upgrade coincided with a strange phenomenon which affected us for the whole month of November. Our batteries voltage took a sudden drop every night around 9:00PM going to well bellow any usable voltage and leaving us scrambling for power through the nights.
Because of this unfortunate timing, and my lack of understanding of all things battery related. I ended up chasing this dip for weeks, trying everything under the sun isolate it. Long story short, all our AGM batteries are shot.
Years ago I bought AGM batteries because they are more self contained and don’t require maintenance (no off gazing, no re-filling them). A choice that made sense when everything was new and too much to think about. Today, I’m realizing that the flip side of this is that AGM batteries have a shorter lifetime and that there is nothing you can do about it. Sure they were no maintenance for a few years, but today they are between 3 and 5 years old and we have to replace them all (all $1600 worth of them).
I reevaluated our battery situation, and with a much better grasp of all things solar, I decided to go with regular flooded lead acid batteries, they are deep cycle, they have 65Ah, they have a port to maintain the chemicals in them.
It does mean I’ll be poking at them every couple of months to better quantify their state and not let a slow boiling voltage dip sneak up on me. And I’ll be maintaining the chemicals (mostly adding distilled water on occasion).
This conclusion was confirmed by chatting with a couple of old timers who have been off-grid for decades. One gets 6 to 8 years out of his batteries which are allowed to freeze (our situation today), the other gets 10 to 13 in a controlled environment and a water turbine providing constant power 24h a day. This helps the batteries not cycle so much.
It was a real education talking to people who have been doing this for decades. As I build my own experience, I make mistakes and sub-optimal decisions. For today though, I’ve eliminated a blind spot of our solar setup. I can recognize the phenomenon for what it is, the data I collect was really helpful and I have ideas for algorithms to interpret them automatically and get a health measure of the battery array.
So I bought only 3 new batteries, giving us 195Ah to get through night and cloud. It turns out it’s a thousand times better than where we were with our theoretical 775Ah as it had slow boiled down to pretty much nothing :). I’ll get in the habit of maintaining these batteries properly.
It’s late November and the ground isn’t frozen, it’s a perfect opportunity to work on water evacuation to the septic tank as we get ready to create our bathroom. If we don’t do it now we’ll have to wait another 4 months. We unearthed the existing line to split it into another one for the bathroom.
