Off to a late start with 2024

I know, long time, no update. Like most blogs these days, this one seems to be lost in the ether. But, as you may have surmised from the last update, we have been very busy around the house. Over the past year, our oldest child (Orion) graduated from high school and is now attending the University of Alaska at Anchorage. It is hard to believe, but little Cetus is now proudly walking around the house, showing off his new set of teeth. We have a new puppy (a giant coon hound) named Sweet Pea. The goats managed to break out of their pen several times, but we made an ugly but functional patch that is keeping them contained for now, but will need some more patching over the summer (yet another project!).

We did finally complete the bathroom and laundry room remodel project last summer (if such projects are really ever “complete”)! Because we now have 240 VAC available in the laundry room, now we have been able to use our old Miele Little Giants again!

The Little Giant (Miele PW6065 and PT7136) set is on the left, next to the Speed Queen Gas commercial stack (model# ATGE9AGP113TW) that we got in 2017. Both models have been discontinued, but replaced with very similar ones (Miele Little Giants, Speed Queen SF7007WG) . Why do we need two sets of laundry appliances you ask? We could not use the Miele units until recently, and the Kenmore stack that came with the house was dying a slow death. It ran on 120V and propane and so that is what we were looking to use as in its replacement. If we had been able to hook the Little Giants up at that point, we would have. However The Speed Queen has proven to be a daily workhouse, even with our use. It has a larger capacity and the gas dryer produces over 6kW of heat but neither uses much electricity. The in-rush current spike when the dryer ignites the propane, however, does seem to briefly overload the generator if it is running. The Miele’s on the other hand are all electric. The washer has a built in water heater, so it is great for washing things in warm or hot, and also has a very gentle delicates cycle (actually a few different cycles). When it is not heating water, it is very efficient, its electric usage seems less than the Speed Queen washer. We originally bought the Mieles when we moved to Dallas back in 2006, to better handle cloth diapers that we washed at 70 degrees C (about 160 F) and it has moved around with us first to Ketchikan (where we were able to use it in the house we rented) and then to Talkeetna (where it sat, forlornly disconnected). We do have a big family, so it is convenient to have both sets.

Another feature new feature of the laundry room is our Cat Genie, an automated litter box that flushes the waste down the drain. When we had the wall open, we installed an extra washing machine plumbing outlet box. The Cat Genie uses water from the outlet to flush the box after each use, and then pumps the waste into the drain. It uses special granules rather than traditional litter stones, and since they are not scooped and flushed with the cat waste, they only need to be replaced as cats knock them out of the box.

And we finally got rid of the glaring fluorescent tube fixture above the dining room table and installed a set of Hue ellipse light guide pendants alongside our neon jellyfish.

The bath room vanity is one of my favorite additions. It is a big chunk of redwood fashioned by Littlebranch Farm with a handblown glass sink basin from Sinks Gallery (our sink is featured on their website), the faucet is a Sonoma Forge Sans Hands sensor cap spout.

As far as major projects, at the beginning of last summer we finally got the our old solar panels mounted to the side of our connex and a new array mounted on top all connected to the Sol-Ark 15k inverter. We then proceeded to have one of the wettest and most overcast summers in memory. We still managed to produce a good amount of power, but then we had a early snowfall, and due to my own lack of foresight, did not maintain an easy walk path to the panels. Before I knew it, there were feet of snow piled up in front of the connex, and the top panels were covered with snow with no easy way to access them to clean them off. We did not dare take use the snow blower because we had no idea what was under the snow. That will be an easy fix for next year, we will just need to maintain a clear path next to the panels before the snow falls, and then plow next to them after each significant snow event. The good news is that the snow is now (mostly) off the panels, the sun has been out in force for the past week, and we are starting to produce power again. (about 24 kWh yesterday).

I still plan to add an additional inverter and more battery capacity, but that project will have to wait a bit as a higher priority project is on the horizon: we need to replace our Septic system. I now have engineered plans for an alternative septic system. It is a big project, and I am still in the process of getting bids. It seems like it will be expensive and time consuming. With our short construction season, I am not sure that I can make it happen this year.

As far as smaller projects, Sharon gave me a weather station last year. It is a Acurite 5-in-1 wireless station that was on sale at Bass Pro Shop. While it is a basic station, many of its supposed weaknesses, I see as advantages. Let me explain. This is a wireless weather station. It communicates with a its base station using short radio transmissions at 433 Mhz. The version of the base station I have does not have any USB or WiFi output. But that really is not much of a problem as it would seem. There is an active community of radio hobbyists who have built software defined radio (SDR) receivers that use cheap USB TV dongles, to process and decode signals transmitted on the unlicensed ISM radio bands, including the one used by this weather station. There is also decoding software (rtl-433) for these stations (and many other devices), and finally there is opensource weather software (Weewx) that can take the raw data as input, log it, and then present it as both local data, and send it to the Citizen Weather Observer Program (CWOP) and various other external weather databases to be aggregated with other personal (and official) weather stations across the globe. Perhaps more important, there is an active community with how-to guides (example), mailing-lists, and on-line groups to document and assist with the setup.

In researching the weather station, I am learning quite a bit about meteorology and learned some new terms for some exotic weather units and instrumentation (I guess that would be crossing over into metrology, the study of measurement). Here is a sample of new words I have encountered in the past few weeks (and of course, now I want all of these for my weather station!):

• Disdrometer: measures type, size, and rate of hydrometeors, aka precipitation, along with visibility and “present weather condition.”
• Pyranometer: measures indirect solar radiation, aka sky brightness with fixed sensor
• Pyrheliometer: measures direct solar radiation with a sensor that tracks the sun
• Ceilometer: measures number and height of clouds, cloud coverage in sky

I find this interesting stuff. Here are two home weather stations that I find particularly inspiring:

• https://belchertownweather.com/
• https://www.woellsdorf-wetter.de/ (in German, but use Google Translate if needed), lots of great weather information, and they have a disdrometer! Here are a list of the conditions it has recorded over the past 30 days.