sun and snow

I wanted to try that snow picture again. Here you might see two drifts across the road due to the opening that is our driveway:











Rob has since gone out with the shovel and reduced them a bit.

The other surprise is that we had sun coming into the house this past weekend!!
















Of course, winter sun can sometimes be associated with clear cold nights. We didn't go far on Saturday what with -50 F at the airport and dense ice fog in town. Then we went to town on Sunday and no one came to our class - even though we had to go. We almost hit a moose coming home after dark.

drifting snow

The picture in the last post is from a few weeks ago. We've just had a long string of cold weather. Now it's a bit warmer, but blowing like you wouldn't believe! Here's a drift by the front door:

















And a drift by the garage door:

















Venturing outside, there's a drift by the yarn shed:















I tried to enhance the contrast some, but it's still tough to see. What we get at the top of the driveway is drifting across the road:














It comes from this big opening in the trees along the road:















Again, do not drive beyond the orange flags! That way lies madness (or at least cursing):














View of that front door drift from the other side:

















Note that the snow is well packed and supports my weight (mostly).

It's winter!

It's been cold around here. In the new house, we can regulate the humidity, so it's more humid than the old house this time of year. It leads to dampness in some places:

















This is the door from the garage to the outdoors.

In other news, I was in Anchorage last week and got to see Denali on the way home. I was supposed to be flying home after dark, but a friend was on the same flight - he thought - until he realized he'd book his return for July 20. So he called the airline to arrange an earlier flight.

Resistance is Futile! Our Inverter has been re-assimilated!

Renewable energy system update!  The new monitoring system is up and running.  We can control whether the inverter is on or off.  At present, we can turn the inverter off on demand and it will automatically turn the power back on when the battery bank is nearly depleted.  We now need to look into extending this time period by using a separate battery bank and small inverter.  Being able to control the inverter electronically is a big step forward.

The next piece is adding more logic to the system.  A piece of critical logic is to have the system turn the inverter back on when it detects that the temperature of the house reaches a critical level.  The (below) graphic shows a green line that is closer to ZERO amps.  Instead of burning 4 to 6 amps continuously, we can make the system idle so it is only using 0.3 to 0.5 amps.

Using the ability to turn the system off, it looks like we can go to running the generator every third day instead of every second day.  Say, we need to run the generator from Oct to Feb (appox. 151 days).  Every 2nd day would be 75 generator runs times 10 run hours or 750 engine hours.  Every third day is 50 generator runs or 500 engine hours.  Good deal!

Here is a curious device for those with wood stoves and are off grid.  How about powering some lights from your wood stove?  Up to 13.9V at 30 Watts?  I've not tested this yet, but here is a link:
http://www.tegpower.com/pro1.htm.

Home again

We spent a fabulous week in Florida, working on Tai Chi (we aren't skilled enough for it to be all play). We met the instructor in the Atlanta airport on the way there - she recognized our T-shirts - she came down from Toronto. But now we're back. Here are some tracks we made coming home Tuesday morning (2 AM):















Note that the bottom of the car was acting as something of a snow plow.

Here's Rob doing some brushing:
















Can you see the two orange flags? Any guess as to what they mark?















That's right - beyond them is the drop-off. If you step out there, you'll sink to your knees and beyond.

Here's Rob adding some finishing touches to the shoveling:














Ester Dome from the top of our driveway:

Just a tiny bit of sun at sunrise this morning. It won't be long until it stays below that ridge on the right all day long:












I know this blog is pretty quiet. I've been posting more often over here.

Pink mountain

View on the drive home (new camera!):