At least it was cold enough that it froze itself shut pretty quickly. We hadn’t gotten to this one yet…and it broke during a spell of below zero weather well before the winter solstice.
We’ve been slowly replacing them with frost-free faucets with a 12-inch lead that stays heated back inside the house, along with an in-house shutoff just to be safe. Our hose faucets along the side of the house don’t have shutoffs, which is a serious oversight. Besides that, occasionally the kids might leave a door open, and if it’s a long weekend a no one is out there it could end in disaster. If we’re short on power, heating that building is the last priority. Still, we turn off the water for the winter. We both have offices over our garage/shop, and we keep it pretty warm out there. Our pipes are buried good and deep but that won’t help if they come up into a structure that may freeze during the winter.
#Off grid heating generator
Luckily there are still enough sunny days left that we can pull the battery out and recharge it through a wall outlet.īeyond that, it’s good to check and make sure that everything is in working order and do basic maintenance before we go into heavy generator use season. I say we try to remember, but often we forget and the battery is dead before winter. It’s rare we actually need it during the spring, summer and early fall, but that’s a long time to have it sit idle. Test Generatorĭuring the summer, we try to remember to run the generator every month. Ideally, you go back and add more distilled water to the batteries after equalization too. This should only be done right after adding water to the batteries, as it causes the water to boil and there will be water loss during equalization. This cooks any minerals that have accumulated on the plates off and makes resets the system a bit so that it runs more efficiently. Our battery bank needs to be equalized periodically, and there’s a controlled program that our inverter runs to do a controlled overcharge. You can’t do it all, and at least for now we draw the line at making our own distilled water, perhaps I’ll regret that after the zombie apocalypse, but for now we have other priorities.
#Off grid heating full
I would guess we use about 20 gallons of distilled water per year, and they’re especially low after the summer when they’re constantly recharged to full on sunny days.Ī friend of ours that runs a small solar company makes his own distilled water using a small countertop water distiller, but we haven’t gone that far. Each terminal has a tiny cap that screws open and we use a big funnel to pour in a bit of distilled water. Periodically throughout the year, we have to add distilled water to our batteries.
We try to start in early September, as some years we’ll see snow before October 1st. Now that we have kids, we don’t have the luxury of hand splitting our own wood, but much of the summer is spent preparing in other ways.įreezers are cleaned out and reloaded with fresh homegrown food, chimneys swept, fences mended and all the other myriad tasks that take us through one more circle around the sun.īeyond all the general homestead winter preparations that are ongoing, preparing our off-grid systems for winter is a deliberate process. Therapeutic in a way, good exercise but a subtle reminder that winter is coming, even in July. Our first year on the homestead we split all of our wood by hand, which amounted to a full hour of stress relief at the end of each day all summer long. In some ways, I feel like we spend much of the winter waiting for summer, and then at least half the summer preparing for winter. While living off the grid in a cold climate has its challenges, I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
Sunshine year-round, no snow covering your solar panels and I bet their generators never get jammed up with ice. Some days I wonder what it must be like to live off the grid in a truly warm climate, like California.