power
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It is my understanding that the handle was taken by Vandals.
Posted by garth on 16 Jun 2008 | Tagged as: power
So I got up this morning and went to put water on for tea. The water came out slowly and then petered out entirely. Our kitchen faucet has been troublesome so I assumed it was a localized problem and went to wash my hands. That faucet was also broken. So I went under the house and found out that, sure enough, the pressure on our pump is at zero PSI. I reset the fuses and verified that the house has electricity (Yes, it has electricity. You should have realized that by the fact that, golly, the dang lights are on. However, this was at 5:30 Monday morning so cognitive limitations should be recognized.) and that the pump is plugged in.
So we’re without running water and the plants are going unwatered. If pump doesn’t get fixed we can water the ducks out of the rainbarrels but I don’t know if we’ll get enough water pressure to activate the laser soaker line (PEW PEW PEW!). So we’re home waiting for the repair guy to show up. My fingers are crossed that it will be a ‘Stupid homeowner! You accidentally turned it off. That’ll be $200!” situation rather than a “Welcome to the Joys of homeownership! That’ll be $6,000, please!” situation.
[At this point, the guy from the well and pump company shows up...]
Aaannnndddd… the control box that lives inside the well was broken. $180 job. It turns out that there’s moisture inside a well that’ll kill a control box if you mount it there instead of, say, inside the house. The upside is that I got to see inside our well which is brick-lined and hand dug down to the water table at ~35′. It’s very cool. The technician told us that you can see stars in the midday sky from the bottom of a well. Lauren will post the pictures of the well if they come out. I reckon this will move “install hand pump” further up the list of priorities.
Good Job, World! Solar is the New Cordless.
Posted by garth on 23 Mar 2008 | Tagged as: local food, power, washington
Solar hen house vents. Solar fence energizers. Solar everything.
It seems that at some point in the past few years we’ve reached a point where solar isn’t an “alternative” power source, it’s just the easiest way to do something. Why would I, for example, want to deal with a battery charger to keep my electric fence charged? Why would I want to run wiring to the roof of the hen house or greenhouse to power the ventilation? I don’t. I’m a lazy man. It makes me wonder at what point it’s going to be cheaper and easier to wire houses for solar and wind instead of dealing with hooking them to the grid. It wasn’t long ago that the cool kids were wiring their houses with Cat-5 ethernet for their home networks. Then wifi became ubiquitous and that’s just a mess of useless cable now.
In other news, we finally got real growlights installed for the seedlings. I ordered them over the internet. I’m hoping that the cheerful vegetables clearly visible from the outside of the house will at least give pause to the paramilitary DEA agents as they conduct a no-knock raid on my home in anticipation of finding a stray, growlight-enable mary-g-wanna plant.
On a related note, craft distilling is a lot closer to legal in Washington state. There is a lot of tremendously good work being done around food and small farming by Washington regulatory agencies.