Good news and Bad news
GOOD: The weather’s too cold and wet to do really much of anything. The recommended adhesive for installing the InSoFast panels needs to be above 40 degrees F and below 90. And as you all can remember, Texas was no where in that range for most of January and WAYYYYY below 40 for a large chunk of February. So…no working on the containers.
BAD: With no power, no water due to the town’s generator breaking down, and a propane tank estimated to last only a few weeks, we really weren’t sure how we were going to weather the storm, now called “Snow-mageddon”. In the end we went 10 days until power was fully restored.
A silver lining is we have a furnace that runs on propane and only needed 110 volts and approximately 900watts of power on start-up. All we had to do was find a power source. I really wish I’d finished my power wall by now but with little sun light it wouldn’t have lasted very long. Luckily, I found a piece of junk 1000Watt portable generator my father had bought online and was never able to get running 5 years ago when he first got it. Taking it completely apart I found that some of the carb parts had been assembled backwards. Chinese Quality Control. Assembled correctly, remove the mud-dauber nests, a little clean up and BAM, we were up and running.
Another help was having a small pond so we could fetch toilet flushing water once a day with a pick-axe, a couple of 5-gallon buckets and an old trough. Yep, this was definitely reminiscent of the famous Texas Ice Storms of the ’70’s and 80’s and what it means to live in the country and know how to survive no matter what mother natures throws at you.
All that remained was to run the extension cord to the furnace and set an alarm every 3-4 hours to go out, refuel, and restart the little beast. Thank goodness we had 2-stroke oil and enough gas on hand to last the rest of the outage.
Note to Self: Research propane backup generators that work with the Sol-Ark 12K in the event we get another one of these extended outages. And definitely think about designing in a wood stove for the shipping container prototype.
See y’all in March when we can start installing some insulation!
Thales of Miletus 