Life in a Dry Cabin | Winter Days

[Music] um [Music] so [Music] me [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] okay [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] as you can tell we got a little bit of snow i think we've got probably a good six to eight inches i haven't had snow in a while actually and this is some pretty good snow to remove it's nice and light and fluffy shouldn't take us too long we got arrow running the snow blower i'm running around on the plow we're gonna get some of the snow off the roofs shelter logic chicken coop high tunnel all that good stuff so we've got another hour or two worth of work ahead of us [Applause] [Music] [Music] so [Music] so uh [Applause] we're almost wrapped up with our snow removal i just finished up the high tunnel behind me this is its second winter it's doing awesome we're pretty cautious to get the snow off on top of our shelter logic and our high tunnel and definitely around the side so it doesn't build up too much the plastic that we built it from is uv treated it's doing great and the top railing that we built it from is super strong so honestly we probably don't have to get all the snow off of it but we like to because we depend on this when it comes to the springtime this year we decided to utilize the high tunnel as some storage space so we've got lots of things in there which has worked out awesome i'm about to pull out the wheelbarrow and head over to the chicken coop because we're going to take advantage of this really warm weather we've had and i'm going to be cleaning out the chicken coop usually i don't do that till springtime [Music] hey what are you doing you got that this chicken's mad all right 72 scoops later and two broken backs we have finished so we're gonna get some new straw in there it's nice and clean now for them i'm pretty excited about that we've got to get this over to our compost pile that nice cleaning coop or chicken the last thing i'm doing is scraping some of the snow from around the fruit trees that we have just right around the base of them and i'm doing that just as vole protection because the more the snow builds up technically the bowls could kind of like come up in there and chew the bark of the fruit trees we haven't had that happen so i just want to be cautionary and take care of our fruit trees it's our first winter with these fruit trees and other than that i think they're doing great so so so [Music] [Music] we've been making a lot of runs out to the new cabin lately and it takes a lot of energy out of us so we're trying to figure out a good food to bring out there so we can stop halfway get some food in this get some energy and we decide on granola bars first thing we're gonna do we're gonna take a bunch of oatmeal and some coconut shreds and i'm gonna be toasting these in some mousse tallow like eric said we're looking for an energy source that's fat fiber some carbohydrates and also protein of course not too long ago we found out about pemmican and pemmican sounds absolutely wonderful for what we're looking you know for out there it's fat you usually use meat dehydrated meat and berries and that's something we want to make in the fall when we have some blueberries that we can air dry that's just not in season right now of course since it's winter so we're working with what we've got to get some good energy bars those are going to take a few minutes to toast over there a few other things we're going to use we've got wheat brain that's what this is wheat bran nutritional flakes okay we've got chocolate powder we're doing some raisins we've got some like mixed dried fruits walnuts we're doing chia seeds we're doing some cinnamon a little bit of salt in there and the dried fruit that we're using was just like a trail mix we had i think it's fig plum and dried apple to help with the stickiness and the oils we're going to be adding honey peanut butter we have a little bit of a hazelnut spread and some coconut oil the coconut oil and the peanut butter is going to be a nice blend of saturated fats we're not going to be using tallow or lard i just don't think that it will really taste that good and we want to make these super tasty for out there yep we want these to be something that we look forward to on the trail and then we also want them to work yeah work give us energy and fill us up i'm going to mix the oil and the peanut butter and the hazelnut and honey first i'll eat it in something like a pb j yeah but we bought that paper so long though right who got this peanut butter like nine months six months ago six months ago we haven't touched it we definitely use other nuts in this i mean that's really good for having oils and adding the fats you want to this you could use sesame seeds flaxseed i don't have any of that on hand pumpkin seeds or also something really high in fat and protein but again we're just trying to use what we have on hand and we're actually making uh we're not gonna do bars we're gonna do like little balls like golf ball sized little granola bites so the mixture is still pretty hot we're gonna let it cool down outside for i don't know 15 minutes or so and then we're going to see if we can roll this into some balls lay it out on this butcher paper and then we're going to freeze them whoa maybe you should do that final part can i just hand them to you sure that was what happened that one's for me when i'm hungry i see i didn't squish them that hard big one finish it off you bit me gentle so [Music] [Music] [Music] oh what's up [Music] hmm tv [Music] there's a lot of colors i don't know where to go see a lot of colors only feeling blue there's a lot of colors lost within a haze don't rely on others to get you through their maze the dreams are not the same for me standing by the show why you're on the open [Music] anymore [Music] there are a lot of voices [Applause] drowning in the sea there's too many voices talking back at me there are a lot of choices waiting to be made too many choices [Music] making me afraid [Music] standing by the shore [Music] anymore the dreams are not the same for me standing by the shore [Music] anymore [Music] blue a question eric and i get a lot is do we shower or where do we shower how is our setup and our setup is super simple in fact we haven't changed it much since we've been here we have a shower stall outside it's not very glamorous that's why we don't show it a lot and we have two ways to heat up the water in the winter one is our tankless water heater we have a shower head attachment hooked to it and we run that outside through a window the second way we heat water is just like this with our wood stove we'll fill up a pot of water in the morning from the well and just honestly it only takes a few hours to get a nice temperature for showering and then we've got this nifty gadget it's a rechargeable battery powered shower head so we'll show you how this works outside this is what we're going to be using today all right we have arrived at our shower eric made two little attachments for the two different shower heads that we have inside the shower and i'm going to put this in the water to show you how it works [Applause] pretty straightforward this is a really awesome little gadget we found and i'm going to turn it off for a second the the pros to this one is it's simpler this is obviously more ideal if you're camping or you just didn't have a setup like the one i mentioned before it's more ideal for eric and i for quicker showers if i'm not rinsing my hair or something like that it does last for both of us to take a shower but ideally we would use closer to five gallons and this is about three gallons as far as the battery life i don't know how long it lasts but i know it lasts a long time because we have used it for many showers before we recharge it and it's super simple to charge with our solar system we really like this gadget it's really cool in fact when we had a period of really really cold weather if you get down into the negatives maybe like negative 20 fahrenheit or so and it's sustained our windows actually freeze up so it's very difficult to open them and it makes it extremely difficult to do showers at that time outside i know you're thinking wow that's really cool to be taking showers outside but in fact for eric and i personally it's really not a big deal we don't mind it at all um the the key to a shower in my opinion is warm water running over your body so if you get that and you accomplish that really nothing else matters so it's super low-key simple setup we take showers as often as we want we're going to take a shower tonight and we will see you afterwards we didn't get much sun today so it's kind of a daily thing in the winter we got to fire up the generator and charge up the batteries for the house this is our little generator that we use it's a 1600 watt and it does a max of 2000 and we use this one because it's fuel efficient i think this holds a little over a gallon of fuel and when we're charging the house it's not putting a huge load on this so that gallon of fuel will run for about eight hours in this little machine and at night i like to run this for about an hour so we're gonna get fired up we're gonna head inside and we're gonna charge all of our equipment this is our inverter charge controller setup and this is what controls the charge that the batteries are getting when i got the generator right out there and that noise you hear is the fans on the inverter anytime there's that much juice coming into this thing uh the fans kick on so that's the noise you hear with this whenever that's running it's basically the time in our little cabin where we can have all the lights on and we charge all of our stuff and i usually do that over here on the kitchen counter i like to keep up on the charging around here so i only got a couple things to charge tonight we got our two lights and we got our yeti and we use the yeti upstairs with the inverters off we just use that to charge our phone let that generator run for about an hour we should have a full charge and then we will shut it down for the night foreign [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] got a lot of snow out here trying to pack down a little path out to the bees as you can tell we haven't been out here for a little while so we're going to check in and see how the bees are doing i'm sure they really liked that we're nearing the end of january and our bees are still alive and i haven't gotten in there and i can't go in there i mean you really shouldn't in the middle of winter but this is when rb's last year kind of started to go downhill and they didn't make it into february or just the beginning of it so these ones are loud and they roar i mean i can hear them once we clean things off that kind of flusters them and i'll listen through the side and you can hear them in there so i'm very hopeful that they'll make it they need to make it at least until april to know that they're really going to take off again next summer but so far things are looking pretty promising and i think it has to do with this january pad has been warmer than usual a lot warmer we've been in like the mid-20s which is really unusual i haven't even seen a negative temperature for a while and we made a lot of changes to the hives this year after we clean off the snow i usually go along with a stick just to make sure their entrance is clear they do come out for cleansing fights but not usually do they make it back in um they usually die right on the outside and i'm gonna listen to see how they're doing that's the loudest over them be all winter i'm pretty sure they're really mad because we script all that ice off so they're very loud and they are alive awesome this is really exciting for us being that this is the second winter and this would be our first success with overwintering it's still a little too early to say that i do have plans to most likely add on or third hive back if these two do overwinter successfully we're out checking our traps or snares that we set yesterday eric and i tried earlier in the season to do a little bit of snowshoe hair snaring and it just didn't really pan out that well there was a lot of lynx tracks early in the season which is not good every time we saw a rabbit track there was lynx tracks and we just figured no point of competing with them so we're waited a little bit later in the season it's awesome when there's fresh snow because you can see all the different animals tracks um so this is great we saw some areas where some there was more activity and we're just going to be checking our snares today nothing check three out of six got three more to go [Music] [Applause] nothing today but it was still really nice day out here we exercise bandit and we're gonna head back i'm pretty sure we could both get up here with the shovels do i have to walk on the beams you should try just take just take light footsteps if you can't but where is the beam you can't really you're not gonna be able to help them up there like am i safe to stand on it okay

Channel: Simple Living Alaska

Views: 718,715

Keywords: off grid living, living in alaska, homestead alaska, cabin life, tiny house alaska, off grid cabin, daily life off grid, off grid in alaska, snow removal, solar system alaska, living in a tiny house, cabin in alaska, winter cabin living, homestead off grid, off grid shower, cheap shower set up off grid, tiny dry cabin, heating with wood stove, splitting firewood, shower set up off grid, water off grid, solar off grid cabin, cabin winter living, tiny cabin alaska

Id: V1SI-IMFuvE

Length: 31min 28sec (1888 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 30 2021