Building A Log Cabin | Ep. 57 | Off-Grid Shower, Front Stairs, and More Solar Power

so you can see behind me we just finished up our third exterior wall of mortar I'm sure you notice that we tried a different method of holding the mortar together we're using this wire mesh the reason why we didn't use this earlier is because we thought it would be a little bit too tricky to get it in between the logs the gap between our logs are pretty small and we weren't sure if we were going to be able to properly get it in between the logs in terms of actually putting the mortar into the gaps of the logs with the mesh we didn't really notice any difference though we did have to push the mortar a little bit harder to try and squeeze it between the gaps of the mesh I think we may have gotten mesh with holes that are a little bit too small I think if the holes were bigger it would have been easier to push the mortar in between it but if we used mesh with even bigger holes in them it would have been even trickier to get the mesh between the logs because there would not have been as many holes to properly nail it into so overall there's pros and cons to both methods we're not sure how it's going to hold up whether or not cracks are going to end up forming in a few days and if it does prevent the mortar from cracking a lot better than the other technique of just nails and we're definitely going to continue using this for the rest of the cabin in terms of the other walls that we've done a few weeks ago now two three weeks there looking really good the mortar is still adhering nicely to the logs it feels nice and solid though there is the occasional surface crack I think every three or four feet We've noticed a small crack they're not too big we could probably just plaster over them with a cement and water mix just to seal it back up but we really don't think it's it's going to be a problem long term but compared to the very first batch that we did a long time ago it is way better it actually holds into logs and there's very very few cracks compared to it so we're really happy with the way it turned out if the mesh does end up being a better result than these walls then we'll continue using it but if we don't really see a difference then we'll probably just end up using whichever technique we feel like doing so it's finally time to get some power up the cabin and we decided to work with jackery today's sponsor so they were kind enough to provide us with the Explorer 2000 plus it's a portable power station and they also provided us with 200 watts of solar panels and this other thing here which we'll actually explain a little bit later so we went with this model for a few reasons but one of those reasons is because it's portable which is really handy for us because we're probably going to be transporting it between our Sugar Shack here and the cabin next March or April when we start producing maple syrup here we're gonna want a little bit of power to maybe run some lights and some tools but we won't need it here now so what we're going to do is we're going to carry it up to the cabin and install it there so on its own the Explorer 2000 plus has 2 kWh of storage capacity but the other main reason why we got this model is because it's very easy to add capacity to it this is what this is for so this adds another 2 kWh of capacity to our system which essentially doubles it and if we want to we could add another 4 on top of it so that would give us a total of 12 kWh so we think that'll be really useful for us in the future because today is the summer solstice so we're getting plenty of power but we're not sure how this is going to hold up in the winter time if we need more capacity it'll be really easy to just add on to it Because the power bank is portable it allows us to bring it in and out of the cabin pretty easily which allows us to edit our videos on the porch in the evening after a long days of work so it perfectly fit our lifestyle and what we wanted it allows us to enjoy our land even more so we also use it to run our 12 volt fridge since he has such a big capacity we can run the fridge overnight no problem just to show you guys we're going to plug the fridge in we'll see how much power it draws and then you'll be able to see how many hours of continuous usage of the fridge would take to drain it so let's check it out so with the fridge running it's stabilized between 35 and 40 watts of power consumption you see down here it'll take about 40 hours for the Explorer 2000 plus to be drained from the fridge so it's been a life changer we've been able to keep our food nice and cold and we're really thankful for it so to welcome the Explorer 2000 plus to the Jackery family Jackery is going to be having a promotion until July 10th so we have a special discount code for you guys you can use our discount code PLUSNICK to get 9% OFF on all the products that we showcased to you guys today so you can use that code to get the discount on the Explorer 2000 plus you could also use it to get the discount on the Explorer 2000 plus and two times the 200 watt solar saga panels or you can use our discount code on the whole kit that we showed you today so the Explorer 2000 plus the extra battery bank and two times the 200 watt solar Saga panels so be sure to check the links in the description below and make sure to use our discount code to get 9% OFF there's more missed there than hits but hey low percentage but success anyway So the shower here is basically done it was pretty much our first priority when we moved into the cabin full time to fully finish the shower so we're excited to finally start showering in here there is a still a couple things that we need to do to finish it so we have just a shower head here but we need to build the whole structure to actually hold it up we'll do some piping in the back here so that we can attach it to the wall right now it just kind of sits in the tub and we have to hold it manually which is not the end of the world and the other thing that we kind of have finished is the outlet drain so let's go see it now and I'll explain the future plans for that so you can see that the drain pipe we have is draining just onto the surface of the ground so our future plans are to dig a trench for the tube and put it underground and then dig a big drainage pit just around in this area so the water can properly drain into the groundwater but our priority over the past couple weeks has just been to get some sort of shower working as soon as possible just to maintain our hygiene so yeah those are future projects and you'll probably be seeing them in a future episode we also just wanted to take a second to thank those of you that reached out to us with concerns about the forest fires here in Quebec we are lucky enough not to be affected by them they were still a couple hundred kilometers away from us and we only really had a couple days where the sky looked a little bit orange but it wasn't anything worse than that compared to some of the footage we saw from nearby cities like Montreal and New York we had it pretty easy compared to them so we were pretty lucky on that front to have pretty good air quality here actually thank you all again and thanks again for watching all our videos take care and we'll see you all in the next episode

Channel: Nick and Maëla

Views: 1,218,912

Keywords: tiny house, outdoors, diy, hand tools, manpower, canada, quebec, forest, off grid, couple, log cabin, cabin

Id: 8G151_SbLqw

Length: 42min 25sec (2545 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 01 2023