Cliffhanger warning.....

 7:52 am - Sunday - January 19th - TWW  - 19° F, humidity 32%, wind 7 mph out of the southeast....crystal clear, blue, sunny skies (again) today with a forecast high of 51° F.  On this date in 2016 Steven Dempsey took the picture that I have been using since then as the masthead for my daily blog.  We were boondocking at Quartzite with he, and his wife Linda (met them both while working at Cape Blanco Lighthouse back in 2014), as well as Michael Vaccari (met at Amazon in 2012).....

Charles and Phyllis have been going through a lot of wood keeping the house warm when they are here, and we do what we can do to help them restock their wood supply, so Saturday was a good day to do that, since they had just left to return south to Phoenix.  We haven't cut wood for a while, and it was time to pull out the chainsaws, and make a lot of noise, and sawdust.....lol!  TLE loves that 6" handheld, cordless chainsaw I bought off Amazon recently, and it really does a good job on smaller stuff that we've been using the larger chainsaws to cut.  Ever since we cut down that dead tree which was blocking the early morning sun from our new solar array we've been nibbling at the stacks of dry wood, periodically, to refill the wood box on the house deck.....

Phyllis....you've got plenty of wood for your next stay!

....we worked at that for about 90 minutes, and managed to cut and split enough wood for their next stay.

An issue I've been wrestling with since we arrived is keeping the water bay above freezing.  As a reminder, all of our water.....fresh, gray and black, is in this one large 'water bay'.  We have three ways of heating that insulated water bay....1) an electric heater, 2) one of our Suburban gas furnaces, and 3) a chassis heater which runs off the hot coolant being circulated through the heat exchanger.  We use the electric heater early in the season at Likely Place Golf and RV Resort  when the overnight temps dip consistently into the 20's, and since we are plugged into a 50 amp outlet, it is an easy choice, but electric heaters are the death of off grid battery systems like ours.  They draw around 1 kilowatt per hour, and within a few hours our Bluetti battery bank would be at ZERO, so that is not useful.  The Suburban gas furnace which provided heated air to the water bay runs off 12 volt, and propane, and while it doesn't use a lot of propane, even with the new motor, it is still too loud to run at night, and would drain down our house batteries to an undesirable level overnight.  It does cycle off every 15 minutes, but comes on again within minutes, so that is not a practical solution either.  The chassis heater is not a solution as it only works when we are running down the road to our next destination, but we have used it on numerous occasions in the past, and it works well.

Back when we had a sailboat (26' Columbia) which we kept moored down in Long Beach, CA we always left an incandescent light bulb running in the cabin when we weren't there to keep the interior humidity down, and it worked well.  With this in mind I decided to run an electric cord down into the water bay from the Kitchen to power a lightbulb during the night to see if that would keep the overnight temperature well above freezing.  It only draws around 30-40 watts an hour, so would be well within the capacity of our Bluetti battery bank.....

.....so, during the afternoon I pulled out the pan drawer under the stove, cut a hole in the floor using a 1.25" hole saw into the water bay, and ran a cord from the outlet under the sink into the water bay (there are no electrical outlets in the water bay).  So, what were the results?  Well, when we went to bed the temperature in the water bay was 47° F, which is pretty typical.  Usually on a cold night the water bay temp will get down to the low 30's, but on this night, with the light bulb, it only went down to 41° F......NICE!  It got down to 19° F overnight, so that is a big improvement, and it was a good test of my, now proven, theory.

And that was pretty much our day.  We didn't begin cutting wood until almost 11 am, and I was done with my light bulb project by 3:45 pm....time for dinner!  I did a lot of other small stuff Saturday, besides the two things I've just written about, and at some point in the near future I'll write about that, but for now I'm still working out a solution for another issue.....nothing to do with TLE, nor I, but something which needs a long term solution.  So, I'll leave you with that cliff hanger, and bid you adieu until the morrow.

Thanks for stopping by!