We had no more than dropped that heater into the trough and the temperatures plummeted with brutal wind-chill, minus 30C being the bottom line here for a couple of days. Respite is in sight tomorrow but the up side of this dismal few days is that the tank heater was thrown in the deep-end and came up swimmingly.
Not having to run the genny to water the nags is a treat and I'm still in awe at hot little wood / coal is needed to keep the water open, even at these levels of cold.
I drop 6 small sticks down the tube, leave the butterfly open for 15 mins and come back to a raging inferno, drop 6 or 8 nuggets of coal down the hole and close her up. That will be good for about 6 hours. By then there will be a thin skim of ice forming, so repeat the process. The ashes are still hot enough to re-ignite.
I have yet to clean the ash out, perhaps in a couple of days we'll tie into that.
The brutal weather has also rendered the additional solar panels we connected yesterday somewhat of an anti-climax, although we did get almost 15 amps for a brief period this morning before the cloud settled in. We are now at 350 watts of panels with another batch to add that will put us in the 800 watt range which will mean our genny run time will be halved, the fridge/freezer being our largest power hog.
With the 1600 amp/hrs of battery capacity we have we could last 4 to 5 dismal days with no solar, were it not for the fridge.
The thought of dropping $5K into a new propane fridge / freezer combo is hard to process but there are times when I catch myself pondering just such a move.
Seems crazy to be running a deep freeze...... when we live in one.
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