Snow Hits the Homestead, Off Grid Solar Power in Winter, and Arctic Cold Coming. January 2024

[Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] for well we get asked all the time how come we don't tarp your wood how come we don't have a Woodshed you know how do you burn it when it's all wet whatever well we want to cover it and all that stuff and we have problem is we've had so much snow up here last few years that you put a tarp over top of this or it gets torn up cuz it gets so much snow on it and the snow melts a little bit and it gets iced up and the many try to move it it tears the tarp top of that there just gets to be like last year there's probably 3 or 4 feet of snow on top of the uh wood pile and uh if you have a tarp on there or whatever it's just you can't get under and get to it the T it just it just makes things harder obviously a wood sh would be nice reason why it doesn't bother us too much I guess is it's it's wet and it's covered with snow down here but once we get it here get it out of here bang it bang the snow off it throw in the trailer take it up and stack it under the house most of the snow's kind of been banged off and then it sits underneath that that porch and sometimes it sits there for up to 3 weeks so by the time you get to it it's all dry anyways so it hasn't really bothered us too much especially since we had the cabin um cuz he stack it under there and it just dries up on its own so that's part of the reason why it's been working out too or it's not such a huge deal cuz if we stack both sides of the door I mean that can last up to like four to 6 weeks sometimes if the weather's nice so that's all part of it too here we are though in the snow and it's nice out and I I don't mind it too much today [Music] [Music] oh better be [Music] we made it suckers come on now I know you guys didn't think I was going to make that just got to keep trying oh that f sucks cuz it's got low mid and high range and low is great but you know he's can't get any speed obviously and you put it mid-range and it says mid-range but it feels just like high it has no power if you get out of first gear it just has nothing and so but you got to get it in second to get enough speed but it made it so that's all [Music] right here we are [Music] it's snowing right now so perfectly I just wanted to show you the solar panels are quickly getting covered with snow whoops oh my gosh I heard something break [Music] inside I bet we're going to have to shovel this is what fell a mason jar from up here got a little bit saggy my bad my bad why I got to get in here all right that's good still smells like Christmas Pines in here cuz I have all my Christmas wreath stuff still in here smells really good though I'm going to try starting it up just to see kind of how it's running what happened was when it actually was broke down on the side of the road there the first time it kind of died on me I pulled off on an off-ramp and it uh I let it sit there for like 5 or 10 minutes or something like that and I went and started up and it started back up again and I was like oh okay maybe I can make it home so I got back off the offramp started getting down the highway but soon as I got to like I don't know 35 40 m hour trying to pick up speed it just didn't want to pick it up and then I got up to like finally got it up to speed and then it just started dying right back off again so it's kind of a weird a weird thing it was like it kind of worked for a minute and then it didn't work at all and then now just like it's kind to the point where if I do get it started it runs on like one cylinder so or it's either that or it's like it's just getting no fuel and it's just starving I I can't tell anyways we're going to start it up kind of see what happens here okay that's weird oh there it goes see listen to it see starts to run like she's running on no cylind but it's weird I'm thinking this fuel pump when I turn that key over normally that fuel pump kind of has this wind to it you know or it windes up and loads up the lines with fuel it's not it's making kind of a weird sound like it's gurgling or something I'm not sure so I'm going to do is I'm take off this air intake we'll try to take off like the air comes in here spray a little starter fluid down in there and if it's if it starts up and runs normal then I know I'm just not getting enough fuel but if it's if it just it still runs like crap then I'm assuming that I just don't have I'm not getting my coils bad or spark plug wires are bad or plugs are bad I'm not really sure but what's what's this here little Nest you know you gotta have one of those CU why not who knows maybe a mouse shot a freaking wire or something too who knows anyways let me get at that see what happens all right so I took the air cleaner not the air cleaner but the hose off and I sprayed starter fluid down in here started it up had my wife started and uh it still ran like crap even after putting that starting fluid in there it would would kind of run a little bit it would just kind of it would kind of idle you'd have to really hose it with the starting fluid to get it kind of idle a little bit but it's still you could tell it wasn't running on all the cylinders so I called my local Napa guy and they ordering me plugs well the plugs they have but they had to get me the coil packs uh for each one's got a coil that goes down in it so I'm going to pick that up tomorrow morning at like 8:30 in the morning and then I'll be able to fix that probably them hopefully and then uh we'll see how it works but yeah so just a waiting game now l l l I told you it was slippery well let's look at the tracks around it well it's hard to see they're kind of covered in snow we got blood on the ground kind of a lot yeah but no feathers thankfully it's not a chicken no it's not chicken but that's a lot of blood yeah there was obviously some turkeys or deer in here scraping the ground up so I don't know if a wolf came in or coyot came in and got one you know but there's no I I don't see any turkey tracks though I see nothing but deer tracks all see any turkey tracks you seen them this morning though like not freaking out right no yeah they are calm you know what I always do what do you always do this is embarrassing but I will take a right right here you ever do that no I've done it so many times I'll just be walking and then I'll be like thinking this is cuz this actually looks more of a trail look the animals are using it a lot so now if you're off that way and it becomes like once you get in there pretty obvious that it's not our land I like I did it again then I got to come back to this Tru look at this Trail right here this is like a main for deer yeah l so they the high traffic thing and then I get I get chck okay so we're having an issue this time of year with our solar panels charging up the batteries quite enough um we have a lot of cloudy days and obviously they're really short in January so we are having some issues and I have to go start the generator and it's about 7:15 at night and I'll probably run that for quite a while like an hour at least to charge up the batteries just to make it through the night and so we'll run it tonight for about an hour and then we'll have to run it again in the morning for about an hour this time of year but in the summer we don't even have to really run the generator at all so it's just these really dark times of the year where we get many many cloudy days in a row and it just does not keep up I know it's dark and you probably can't see anything but I just wanted to show kind of what we have to do do to live off grid right now this time of year okay so the inverter is telling us that it is charging right there you can see the battery symbol going up so it's always good to just check that it's working [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] okay so you can see dealing with solar and being off- grid can be kind of a pain during the winter um it's mostly just during December and January a little bit of November but towards the end of January things start um brightening up the Sun comes out more usually those cold weather temperatures are coming in and that means that the clouds are going away and that we get a lot more sunny days um and actually hopefully that starts to happen here pretty soon because we're supposed to get like a really cold um cold spell coming up so it'll be really good to hopefully see the sun cuz it's been quite a while a lot of cloudy days and so we run the generator in the morning and at night um we do have some options for in the future we're thinking about getting a different refrigerator one that has the capability to run on electricity or on propane gas and it's from what we've been seeing they they run about $2,000 so it's something we might save up for this summer um and get that installed before next year this time just so we can switch over to propane and then we won't even have to turn the generator on at all so I mean the fact that our electricity is getting drawn down so much from the refrigerator right now um is really the only reason why we're having to run the generator so much so I think that's a good option it's just having to save up the money for it so we don't really like to go out and take loans out um like with credit cards and stuff so I think we can just manage these um few weeks of just kind of getting up in the middle of the night um to stoke the wood St stove and then also running the generator early in the morning so it's almost over though so it's not too bad all right we're back at it I went and got the parts got Napa just down the road for me which is kind of nice spent about 400 bucks to get coil packs got all five of them and then I got plugs for obviously and so that's what we're going to do we're going to put those in today and hope that that is what is actually wrong cuz otherwise I just spent $400 on the wrong issue which is possible but you take it into the shop and going to charge you $400 just to sniff it so anyways let's get going all right so apparently you have to just pop this clip up come on and then push this down pops it out okay then this just slides off oh no you got to push this down that's right then it slides off got to push this little black piece [Music] down just a little interesting note here here's the old one you can see the Gap there here's the new one and you can see the difference there obviously of the Gap so yeah she looks pretty toast drop a new one of these in literally drop it cuz it's so far down in there I hope we thread it on right go beautiful okay that should be good all right there's the plug now coil pack in it's just a fancy freaking spark plug that they charge you 75 bucks a piece for I shouldn't say spark plug fancy Spark work plug cap excuse me hook her up all right that's one four more to [Music] go I'm going to give it a try got everything in get it all put back together it's the Moment of Truth tiny bit nervous hopefully everything works well let's see what happens have a feeling it's the fuel pump I'm going to put some jumper cables on the on it and see what happens just to get some more cranks out of it well I spent 400 bucks for no reason it's the fuel pump and I got fooled cuz the fuel pump wasn't completely dead it was dying that's what my conclusion is I think that uh I think that it was still kind of half ass working a little bit when I was uh would start it up after it got cold it would pump for a little bit I could hear it whine um but now when I'm going to do it now that I got all this changed over I don't even hear the that sucker whining anymore so I thought I'd try this again and uh fired right up when I put spray in there so I know I'm not getting fuel now now I'm charging up the battery in the truck cuz kind of wore it down cranking it over man I can even show you here I can give you a demonstration all right I'll go turn it over without any spray watch it's like it pumps a little bit just enough to make it kind of fire I put some of this in there watch this see that it actually fires and runs so I got to order a fuel pump now and all right so today I'm going to add insulation to the chicken coup we already have one Lake in there but I'm going to add another layer and it's just I'm just using this like bubble wrap um reflective insulation it seemed to work last year really well nobody got frost bit or anything like that and all I do is use a staple gun and staple it in there so it's really really easy first thing I'm going to work on is the door I have not insulated that yet and I think that will really help the other thing I have not not insulated is the ceiling but you can see how I have this reflective insulation already in here one layer of it so I'll do a double layer on that as well what is going on okay really that's it everyone's going out everybody out okay let's go out out out coming over here to get you guys out let's go let's get out out out out out out that is better for my sanity somebody likes a wild chicken going crazy I think insulating the ceiling is going to help a lot just going to keep a lot of warm here in here [Music] a [Music] all right here we go it's all done I got all the chicken food back in here but you can see the insulation on the top the ceiling and double insulated here on the sides yeah and the door of course is a big one so I think that's really going to help so we just got some snow and we're heading to Michigan to go skiing it's like 2 hours away in the upper peninsula so we're pretty excited about that but so nice to have snow finally yeah you can I don't know how much like my yeah looks really pretty we're here at the ski resort in upper Michigan has this beautiful river right next to [Music] it okay

Channel: Krumries Cabin

Views: 36,725

Keywords: Off Grid Homesteading, Off Grid Log Cabin, Off the grid, Offgrid log cabin, Woodstove, Free Ranging Chickens

Id: vVtBnsjdEiU

Length: 34min 24sec (2064 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 13 2024