The boys managed to get the sheeting done on the new room and mill some 2x12's into 2x6's for the rafters before taking the weekend off   We'll get back at it tomorrow.


Installed a new porch light I got from HD.  Pretty simple really:  screw into wall, plug into panel.  Done.


Works like a charm!  I think I'll get one or two more!


Took a few minutes to install a dowell for hanging shirts/coats by the woodstove either to dry or for convenience.  Being that I have no closet and am trying not to use the loft until I finish it I'm going to have to come up with some creative space management ideas!

I'll be adding anbother one of these this evening I think.

Another fine day at the cabin   It's supposed to be sunny and warm (around 55 degrees) so the boys ought to be able to get the roof on the new room framed and the composting toilet composting drum set back in place.  Which means, if I can sneak away early today (not really early unless leaving at 8hrs is early!) then I can get it hooked back up.

I let the fire go out last night (because I really needed some sleep) so had to start it again this morning which wasn't much of an issue other then there wasn't enough small wood in the cabin to get some coals built up so I had to go out in and get some.  Was about 30 degrees but the stars filled the sky and it was pretty motivating:)

Was able to shower again too!  Ya, that's a plus! lol  I replaced the shower head last night and while I'm still having an issue with flow through the heater it does work and only seems to be a problem in the tub/shower for some reason.  I'll have to tear the tub taps apart and see what's clogging them up.  Because of the flow being so restricted in the tub the heater shuts off unless you have another tap running so I have to have the bathroom sink hot water cracked a bit.  Needless to say I'll have to fix that soon.  Good thing I'm on well water!

Managed to get home early last night from Cheney too   I was heading over the pass from Coulee Dam towards Omak when I decided to take Lyman Lake Road over the hump into the valley where our cabin is.  It's a 20 mile stretch of forest road that I hadn't driven in 4 years because it ddn't seem to save me much time but boy was I glad I did!  I arrived at the cabin just over 45 minutes later!  Considering I was a good 90 minutes out if I stayed on the pavement I was pretty stoked   Turned a 4 1/2 hour drive into a 3 1/2 hr drive (roughly).

Now it's time to get cracking!  Gotta get heading to work soon but am hopeful the boys will get some work done today (they were relaxing yesterday which is kinda bad since winter is approaching fast (plenty of timie to relax when the work is done!).

Cabin Life:  I managed to get home early yesterday because I took a visit to Oroville to help one of my techs at a job and to visit the CO Tech in the Oroville CO.  So, I managed to get home by 5PM.  When I arrived the roof wasn't framed on the new room because the boys were having issues getting the rafters cut right (I think they have that sorted now or at least how to get it sorted anyway).  So they were remounting the hot water heater on the outside of the cabin (they had removed the box it was enclosed in along with it earlier).

I was a bit worried about the heater being exposed and expecting a cold morning (as in freezing) but there wasn't much we could do so we affixed some plywood around the upper section of the heater and as a roof (temporary) and insulated the opening in the wall in the bathroom and hoped for the best.

One thing I was able to do, however, was purge the unit a little by opening the drain valve with the water running.  This seemed to improve the water pressure in the tub and gave me hope that I might actually have a good shower in the AM.

OH THE JOY!  By morning it was only 40 degrees out (warm) so I had no worries about the water freezing in the hot water heater (instant on but it has water in it all the time) and ran the shower.  I HAD PRESSURE!

You just don't know how good a HOT shower is first thing in the morning until you are living with a failing one in the middle of the woods and then suddenly you get it fixed and it's 5am and you need to wake up!  AWESOME!

Heck, it ought to be a great day!

I should add that the 'pause and soap' head is excellent for cabin use!  It allows you to stop the shower at anytime and then kick it back on easily when ready to use it again.  Great idea!   

Hard Freeze! Or at least a freeze hard enough to stop my hot water THe cold was barely running but I got it going by opening all the taps but the hot is just toast I sure hope the hot water heater piping is ok (which I think it will be since it's not THAT cold out yet).

SO, this morning I have no hot water at all. Good thing it's Friday and I am the boss! I'll call it 'casual Friday' and ...not worry about not shaving.

Cabin is nice and warm though I tamped it down last night at 10pm and then added a log at 3am so when I got up at 5:00 it was both warm and still burning with lots of life left in the log I put in a couple hours earlier.

Good thing the room is almost done! I MUST have insulated hot water or I will not make it through the winter wich can be VERY harsh up here!


Luckily we are close!  THe boys have the roof framed  -- it ended up a 3:12 pitch but I think that will be ok as the rafters are on 16" centers and only about 4 feet long.


It's clear to me, however, that by tonight this room must be sealed and insulated or I won't have hot water as I'll have to shut it off until I get the propane installed (in just under a week) and can provide heat to the room!

Quote from: OlJarhead on October 10, 2013, 07:47:32 AM
I should add that the 'pause and soap' head is excellent for cabin use!  It allows you to stop the shower at anytime and then kick it back on easily when ready to use it again.  Great idea!   

As someone that has lived in a fifthwheel for over a year now.....  That feature seems second nature.  Yet oh how I want to have the ability to just stand there and let that warm to hot water rain and rain and rain.  Long showers are thing of the past with any RV hot water heater we have had!  Yet I remember when we got our first one up here and had how nice it seemed to shower after a day building fence, putting in the orchard or cutting fire wood.

I 'farmed' out the plumbing to a pro on my house build in the interest of time and knowing the tricks of the trade.  Getting it done right the first time and on and on goes my reasoning.   My mistakes cost a lot of money in time and material.  So we were going over our wants.  He asked 30 gallon water heater?  Long showers and hot baths ran helter skelter in my brain.  I replied nope 50 gallon.        

I think I just found some used Costco GCB's that are the same size and age as my battery bank.

I know it's not really good to add batteries to an existing bank unless about the same age and usage but I figured that these were old enough to likely fit in alright for the next year and would give me 1/3rd more capacity then I had already (I have 8 total now which will be reconfigured into two strings of 4 batteries in series to give me two 220AH 24vdc strings in parallel).  They are advertised as 1 to 3 year old batteries that were not used regularily and trickle charged every 2 to 4 weeks.  So while probably not optimal I figured they ought to be ok to add to my bank which is 2 and 3 years old.

My total capacity should then be 660AH at 24vdc (my current system is 880AH at 12vdc).

If I understand how the calculations work then I'll have 15840 Watt Hours of battery reserve with these 4 added and my research tells me that 3 parallel strings is fine.

Looking back I see I instsalled the first 6 of my 8 batteries in September of 2010 (posted about them the 28th).  I then added two more in either October or November 2011 (still checking).  The used batteries on CL are from 2011 and 2013.

Of course the 2013's are a little new to be adding to a 3 year old bank but I'm optomistic that doing so won't be a problem if I don't plan to use them for years   After all, I plan to pull the trigger on a bigger better bank of batteries (is that a poem? *snicker*) next spring/summer so I really just need these to survive the winter and allow me to live without running the generator 4+ hours a day every day (which is what's happening right now).

My wife and I returned to the west side from Curlew yesterday...  Since we have a place over near Bellingham (Samish Island), we came over 20....met an absolute army of hunters going east--towards your place!!!!  Good luck!   We did manage to lock our gates and repost our signs.  That will only slow them down a bit... A good time to be outta there, beats trying to dodge bullets............

Quote from: curlewdave on October 11, 2013, 06:25:17 PM
My wife and I returned to the west side from Curlew yesterday...  Since we have a place over near Bellingham (Samish Island), we came over 20....met an absolute army of hunters going east--towards your place!!!!  Good luck!   We did manage to lock our gates and repost our signs.  That will only slow them down a bit... A good time to be outta there, beats trying to dodge bullets............

I have my M1A and lots of Ammo

Stay safe out there!

The build looks great! 

Quote from: OlJarhead on October 11, 2013, 05:01:07 PM
......allow me to live without running the generator 4+ hours a day every day (which is what's happening right now).

Having to run the generator 4+ hours a day raises a question(s)    I wonder why you think adding more batteries will reduce generator run time?  You add more capacity, okay. If your use remains the same you will still need to replace the power by running the generator. Maybe not as frequently, but it will then run longer. Or at least that is what it seems to me. So I'm not sure there will be any net gain achieved by adding batteries.

If the generator needs to run every day it would seem the PV capacity is insufficient. Or am I missing something here?  If the PV capacity is sufficient the PV system charge controller should be able to bring the batteries through bulk and absorb charge and into float every day.

I must be missing something if more batteries are going to solve the generator run time.

If you have 10,000 watts of solar charging power (I do not but I'm using it as an example) and only 1 12v 220AH battery and plan to use enough power to kill the batter inside and hour then adding batteries WILL solve your problem because the solar charging isn't the issue but rather the capacity of the battery bank to hold the power.

In my case I know the solar panels can completely recharge the bank provided there is sun to do so and I'm not killing the bank every night however adding more capacity will increase the reserve that the panels can charge up.   

In another way, your spreadsheet gives a 'total batteries required' and a 'less capacty'.  I've always been in the 'less capacity' zone and would like to ncrease that to the 'total required zone'.

My neighbor who's been living on solar power since 1979 (yes) and has only ~500 watts of solar power (though he has a tracker so increase that by about 25% so I've read) uses a 1000AH battery 12v I believe but am not entirely certain) and runs his generator every weekend (which allows him to use more power and run things like driers etc) and often sits around 70-80% of battery reserve capacity during the week.  I beleive his situation is similar to mine in which he can't afford new panels and knows that he'll run the genny on the weekend to get the reserves up so having the larger bank gives him plenty of power to use during the week without needing to run the genny.

On a side note I'm not using my system the way I designed it and now must recalcuate what I need vs what my system will provide and then try to modify the two in order to find a happy medium.

One thing that I see is that with the boys home dring the day and using power and then watching TV at night has placed a demand on my system that I won't put on it when they are gone so it is likely I'll see less generator use when they leave at the end of next week.

Using my current systems (I need to add the stove though it doesn't use much power since it's a propane stove) the calculator now shows the following when using a 24vdc system:

12 batteries (Costco GCB's)
4 Panels (205watt 12vdc panels).

I have 8 batteries and 3 panels so while adding the 4 batteries will bring me up to where i need to be for reserves the missing panel means tht on days I don't get 4 hours of charging I'll not likely have the solar power to get the batteries back to 100%.

My experience using this system for the last 3 years has taught me that is really just a guide and nothing more (a good guide perhaps but a guide none-the-less) and practice will be different.  Good sunny days will likely net no need to use generator....2-3 days without much sun and the genny will run.

I'll add the 4 batteries and next year upgrade the battery bank and add another controller and more panels.

After getting the roof sheeted on Friday but much of the room yet to be closed in and insulated we had to shut off water to the hot water heater to prevent it from freezing.  Next morning we were at it early and though it felt warm it was 30 degrees.  Guess it was a good idea to disconnect the hot water!


As Saturday progressed we managed to get most of the room covered in felt (wasn't sure I even needed it but had it so used it) and started putting the insulation on the outside.


Needed some furring so grabed a handful of 1x6's and took them up to the mill where we ripped them down to 1x3's.  Gotta love having a tractor and a mill


Because the store only had some pink 2" insulation and some of the R13 stuff I had to get both.  I figured it shouldn't make that much of a difference in the end.  Anyway, the exterior was insulated and the roof was also.  Though we have some gaps to plug insulation into and some backfilling to do.

Over the next couple days we have to get ready for the propane install, once it's in place then I can backfill the trench and up to the north wall of the room (left of the door).  The boys still need to pour a pad in front of the door and lay cinder block around it to provide the 'well' for the stairs to allow a person to walk down into the room from ground level.  Once this is done we can backfill the rest of the space around the room and start working on the interior a bit more.

Eric if you are going to put a sunken stoop at the entrance you might consider putting a drain at that location. Little late for the floor in that addition which would have probably been nice.   Wouldn't take much more than a 2" line to drain it if you can get a line low enough to drain properly.

Also I would imagine that if you could put "underpinning" around the cabin it would probably make a difference in the heating of the cabin.  Not sure whether you insulated the floor but the underpinning would probably help in addition to that.

Much craziness went on yesterday as I made trip after trip to town to get parts and pieces to try to finish off the hot water install and the penetration for the hot water heater.  Seems more just ruun them through the wall and then up but the placement of mine meant it needed to go through the roof.  In the end we settled on a wall thimble placed in the roof with two layers of R10 foam (drywall, osb, 2" foam, osb, 2" foam, osb) then two adjustable angle chimney pieces and a chimney cover and cap.  It will be water proof / weather proof once we add the collar required but not in stock, to keep the weather out (basically above the thimble you have the conical piece which gives a wide area of cover and then on the pipe itself is a collar which sheds rain and snow etc away from the middle portion of the 'thimble/collar'.

The hot water is not hooked up in it's permanent fashion as is the cold water and it should be better then ever before.

Once the room was pretty well insulated (on the outside with R10/R13 foam) we stuffed all holes with spray foam and sealed up the room as much as possible and then used some 2" foam and OSB to make a temp door.  This allowed the room to raise to 42 degrees when the hot water heater was running for dishes and showers etc however with temps dropping below 30 outside the room dropped to 36 fairly quickly so, in a bit of a worry I had the boys install the vent free backup propane heater in the room and set it at the lowest possible setting (barely on).  This brought the rooms temp up to 51-58 degrees while it was 26 outside.

I hated doing this because I only have a 5 gallon tank right now but figured it was better to have pipes that weren't frozen and have to buy propane today and tomorrow then to have lots of propane and need a new hot water heater.

So, with the wood stove running in the cabin and a 16x16 inch opening into the new room in the bathroom, with the heater running in the new room as described the cabin stayed about 80 degrees (yes) and the new room about 55 (51-58 as mentioned).

I'm confident now that once the room is completed the 8000 BTU though the wall vented heater should do the trick nicely BUT it occurred to me that I better darn well think about the batteries being in there.  After all, they vent Hydrogen right?  Open flame plus Hydrogen gas equals no more cabin.

Guess I better build a well sealed batter box with a vent -- though I'm uncertain just how smart it is even still to put the batteries in there.


Ahh the challenges of off-grid living!

Quote from: Redoverfarm on October 14, 2013, 12:18:45 PM
Eric if you are going to put a sunken stoop at the entrance you might consider putting a drain at that location. Little late for the floor in that addition which would have probably been nice.   Wouldn't take much more than a 2" line to drain it if you can get a line low enough to drain properly.

Also I would imagine that if you could put "underpinning" around the cabin it would probably make a difference in the heating of the cabin.  Not sure whether you insulated the floor but the underpinning would probably help in addition to that.

The floor is insulated with R10 2" foam and I'll be running that out up to 24" to the sides (is this what you mean by 'underpinning'?) where it can be -- some spots I could not get that much (none in the area under the cabin and only 12" on the east side).

Was mad I didn't put in a drain in the room but lack of time and experience resulted in that.

For the stairwell I'd like to get one in but don't think it will happen -- shopvac will have to do I think and then maybe I'll cut one in later (or not)...I plan to cover the entire thing with a roof though in hopes of keeping water out.

Here is a shot of the east side of the room which has been backfilled.  On this side there is about 24" of the wall under ground with R10 2" foam on the walls and about 12" of R10 laying flat on the ground at the base of the wall.

Quote from: OlJarhead on October 14, 2013, 12:24:52 PM
The floor is insulated with R10 2" foam and I'll be running that out up to 24" to the sides (is this what you mean by 'underpinning'?) where it can be -- some spots I could not get that much (none in the area under the cabin and only 12" on the east side).

Was mad I didn't put in a drain in the room but lack of time and experience resulted in that.

For the stairwell I'd like to get one in but don't think it will happen -- shopvac will have to do I think and then maybe I'll cut one in later (or not)...I plan to cover the entire thing with a roof though in hopes of keeping water out.

Hindsight is always 20/20  .  But having a stoop lower than the surrounding land is inviting a ice skating party entering or exiting the room.

The underpinning that I was referring to is the cabin not the addition.

Oy!  LOL I was thinking that wasn't quite right and kept thinking it meant a wall but was a little groggy 

Yes I do plan to put some underpinning (pony walls for now) under the cabin.  Eventually I plan to have the foundatioin go all the way around at the outside, then put the deck on etc.

Propane installed!

Only 275 gallons in the tank so they will have to come out and add to it (to get it to 400 so I'm set for the winter and beyond).

This means I can get my new generator installed!!!!!!  I plan to get it installed this weekend (I'm not there now) and hooked up to charge the system as it.  Then I'll get the room finished and try to build a good rack and enclosure for the batteries   Once that's done and I can vent them, then I will install them and plan to add the 4 I found on CL (Still need to pick up).

I'm VERY excited though as it means I won't have to worry about keep the composter room warm for fear of running out of propane!  Plus, it will be a LOT cheaper to run this generator and it will run when needed, on demand   I like that!

The 8000btu vented through the wall heater arrived too!  

I'm heading back up today after spending a few days at home (for work believe it or not).

So I arrived at the cabin and suddenly realized that I did not have the cabin keys.  I was furious with myself and with the boys since they had the keys last and didn't think to make sure I got them. 

So there I was, 4 1/2 hrs from home (and $120 worth of gas) and no keys to get into the cabin.  Then I remembered that there may still be the spare main key in the truck and the broken key that we replaced with two more (one Darci has and one the boy had).  I rummaged through the truck and found the roken key and the spare to the main door.  Then, after some serious messing arround with a small gerber and a broken key I got the outer door open and was able to get into the cabin.

I realized that I did not have my tractor keys either, so rather pissed I looked about at the mess and dirt and just walked out and began back filling the propane trench by hand.  I'd asked the boys to give me 6 to 8 inches of dirt on top of the propane line but I guess that was too difficult for young men to accomlish and the 3 to 4 inches barely piled on top had to be covered.  So I spent the 30-40 minutes they should have spent backfilling the trench by hand.  Alone I did more then the both of them did and probably in half the time (unless they were just screwing off -- most likely).

I thought at least I'd be able to have a diet coke this evening (since Kurtis drank the last few drinks worth of JD I had -- thanks son, you owe me).  However, the empty diet coke bottle et me in the porch as if to say 'screw you buddy, get you own' --- but it WAS my own.  Grrrrrr kids piss me off some times.

I then set about sweeping up the pig stie that was left for me and after an hour of working away I had the cabin at least somewhat ok to stay in with a fire going and most everything put away.

Next I got out the car stereo and ran power to it, hooked it upand turned it on   Nice!  Now at least I have music/radio that not only sounds good but gets stations in easily and can play CD's too.  Life is good eh?

Now if only I had a drink and a little less mess....oh and keys to my tractor so I could backfill the trench and install the generator.  Oh well, you can't have everything I guess.

Key bimmer!  Re-key the cabin locks to match the house keys.   Just an idea... leave home and lock up, drive, use same key to open up.