Spring 2017 Update

Just thought I would take a moment to provide an update on how we got through the winter season of 2016/2017.  As I updated previously, we now have our full occupancy permit, and while we still have a fair amount of jobs to do, to get the house “complete” (lots of trim, painting, etc), we are settling in nonetheless.

This past winter was reasonably mild, compared to the winter we had a couple years ago when we were still in the RV, which was a nice change.  We did get a fair amount of snow, but had added a compact tractor to our range of snow clearing devices last fall, so things were much more manageable in that regard…though I didn’t get the exercise shoveling that I have the past couple years  🙂

I was also able to rig up our radiant heating in the basement, in a kind of rudimentary fashion (currently we can only control it manually, I still need to install some thermostats), but it did an excellent job of keeping the whole house cozy and warm.  We currently have the radiant set up as five “zones” – the main living room, the utility room, the two bedrooms, and the storage room (which may one day become a bathroom), and we were able to stay comfortable with only the living room zone activated.  Enabling other zones made the house ridiculously hot.  It is good to know our investment in insulation was worth the money spent and time invested.  We really only needed the fireplaces on the coldest of days, to take the chill out of the air upstairs.

In terms of new work completed, I have slowly been mudding the drywall upstairs, and we’ve got our master bathroom painted (nice to have at least one painted room in the house!) and will soon be painting the main bathroom / laundry room.  I’ve also started framing in the walls in the basement to divide up the space into the various rooms.  Even without drywall, it makes a big difference to define the space.

Our solar system served us well again this winter, and we had a good amount of sun, so we did not need to run the generator as much.  I also discovered that even though I took down a group of cedars that cast shadows on the solar panels during winter, there is a second group I’m going to have to take down as well, for the same reason.  Always another job to take care of  🙂

That’s about all there is to report, so I’ll sign off and wish you all a happy spring!

2 thoughts on “Spring 2017 Update

  1. Thanks for the update. It’s always interesting and informative. Happy spring to you too!

  2. Looking at the S-1860 batteries for my bank and have never found a photo of them connected. Could you show yours? My system is 24v and have been running three parallel strings of L-16s. Hoping a single string will work better!

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