A Chilly Tale

Our first set of hard lessons in off-grid living

When we saw our first snow about a month ago, I journaled about waking up to Earth’s glistening white cloak, the one that ushers in the time of rest and hibernation. Oh Glorious Winter, how I do adore thee! I never did send it to you. The truth is that many entries remain half written and unsent, fleeting joys captured in words on a page that are never spoken again.

The joy of that first snow seems a distant memory. The gorge between then and now marked less by the passing of time and more by a domino of calamities. Hiccups, I suppose are expected in such an off-grid adventure but I promise you they are as unwelcome a big red pimple on a first date. No, that’s much too trivial. More like a flat tire on a back road where there’s no reception and you realize the jack wasn’t put back in with the spare tire. But there is a spare, so you’ll figure it out, but its a huge pain and you’re not happy about it.

Not long after that first mild and glorious snow we were hit with the first cold snap of the season, which was, of course the first cold snap in our tiny house. And that, my friends, brought us an entirely new set of adventures. Or if I’m completely honest, three weeks of troubleshooting, problem solving hell. It was like the gods of fate were laughing in our faces, “Bwahaha! You think you can just roll into winter without lessons and hardship? You think this will be easy? Suffer as we take you down a notch, you prideful humans, you! Bwahahaha!” Red faced and pointy horned, they laughed their cartoon demon laughs and took first our water, then our power and finally our heat. For three weeks we struggled without one or all of the above comforts. But alas, I am skipping the details. There is after all a story to tell and I do believe that’s why you show up. So let us step back in time three weeks and allow me to regale you with a chilly tale.

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It was a Monday night, three weeks ago that we hit our first true cold nighttime temperatures. In the squeaky morning hours while the sun was certainly just beginning to kiss the eastern side of the continent, Morgan rolled out of bed to make his coffee before work. And I, drifting somewhere in the land between sleep and wake, was suddenly jerked into reality by the dropping of a single word of profanity. My eyes shot open. I could feel on my nose that the air temperature had dropped in the house. I whispered “The pipes are frozen.” It wasn’t a question. We knew the night would be cold and there was only one way to test our house. Bring on the cold! Here we were, waking up on test morning one. With frozen pipes. We were prepped with full jugs of water in the house, but that didn’t make the reality of opening taps and finding them empty any easier.

Morgan began his early morning trouble shooting. All the taps empty? Yup. Bundle up and head outside. The hydrant frozen? No. Head down to where the well pump lives. All is working there. Frozen internal pipes confirmed. Welp! Work was calling so there would be no running water for the day, that evening Morgan would take up the floor and solve the problem. That night was the first of many nights he ripped up the floor. Lets go a little more point form with this part of the tale.

Tuesday night: Rip up the floor. Confirm frozen pipes. Heat blast the pipes. RUNNING WATER! Replace the floor. Glory in a problem solved. Tuck into bed late, snug and proud.

Wednesday morning: No water. Frustration rises. Do all appropriate checks to confirm frozen internal pipes.

Wednesday night: Rip up the floor. Heat blast the pipes. Reinsulate and extra insulate the pipes. Aha moment… There’s a draft coming from the seam between the floor panels. This air entry point is where the pipes are freezing. Morgan curses, having known this seam wasn’t properly sealed, but with a million things to get done before winter, this fell off the list. He crawls under the house to confirm what he already knows, shoves more insulating things into this space. Tomorrow he will pick up spray foam and get the seam sealed properly. Replace the floor knowing that tomorrow will be a repeat.

Thursday morning: Hot water runs in the kitchen and bathroom sink. No cold water anywhere. This seems like a pretty ok problem to have.

Thursday evening: Rip up the floor. Heat blast the pipes. Crawl under the house. Seal the seam. Replace the floor. Tuck into bed satisfied about a job well done.

Friday morning: Everything appears fine when Morgan leaves for work. Water to all the taps but once I’m up, the truth is revealed. Cold water runs everywhere. There’s no hot water in the kitchen. I call Morgan. He groans. The water comes into the house and the hot pipes run to the bathroom where the hot water heater is, then back under the floor to the kitchen. This will mean ripping up the kitchen floor. He prays the problem isn’t under the cupboards.

Friday night: Eat dinner and go to bed knowing what Saturday brings.

Saturday morning: After breakfast (aka avoidance behavior) the ripping up of the kitchen floor begins. Pipes revealed and Morgan tugs on the hot water pipe. We hear the slight sound of crunching and the open kitchen tap starts running. It was just a tad frozen. Small victory. We discovered the pipe had no insulation under it at all. This was a quality control problem in the build: the floor was insulated by a bunch of kids. Morgan properly insulates under this pipe. Floor goes back down. We breathe. All is well.

Sunday morning: Morgan installs the electric underfloor heating in the bathroom and we rejoice in a finished bathroom floor.

Sunday night: We are all starry eyed by how cozy the bathroom is. We make jokes about sleeping on the bathroom floor. I say to myself and the kids “We have to remember to shut off the floor tomorrow morning before we leave for the day.”

Monday morning: We leave the house. The floor is left on.

So this is the part where we should stop and talk about labels. Theoretically, according the power draw listed on the product label, this floor, even on max heat, should not have drained the power of our batteries. But I do hope you don’t believe everything you read on labels. I know this to be true of the food industry, the beauty and body care industry and many others, I can now confirm that labels on heated floors lie too. You can guess where this story is going.

Monday night: We get home and discover we have no power. I’ve never seen the batteries completely dead. I turn on the generator for back up power and call Morgan. It must have been the floor. It was the single independent variable in this experiment we never consented to.

Here’s the real problem with this predicament. The batteries are at zero. Completely drained. Even when they were shipped from the solar company, they came with a small charge because the inverter can’t find the batteries when they are completely empty. We were rudely reminded of this on Monday evening when it was evident that the generator was not able to charge the batteries. This was a problem we didn’t have the tools to solve.

Tuesday: Order a special super duper charger from the solar company so we can give the batteries charge enough that the inverter can find them. Rush shipping on that thank you very much! Should arrive in 1-2 days. (Are you laughing? 1-2 days? Currently delivery is so predictable).

We were living for the next week without battery power. This meant we were running direct from the solar panels into the house when the sun was shinning and when it wasn’t I switched off the panels, off the inverter, on the generator, on the inverter and we ran from generator power. The inverter itself can’t mediate the power of the panels and the generator so if they are both on the system it shuts down. I learned so many things this week and I suppose the silver lining of it all is that I understand our power system much better than I did before. It’s amazing what we can learn when forced to.

At some point that week we were no longer able to have a fire in our little wood stove. Yup, of course, perfect timing. We had major smoke backup into the house. We didn’t really expect to need to clean the chimney so soon but we estimate a few factors caused this: the type of wood we have available to burn, the diameter of the chimney being half that of a normal sized chimney and the small size of the stove. The doll-house sized stove means that to keep the fire hot enough to burn really clean it needs to be stoked every ten minutes, which it never is and we also don’t need a fire that hot to heat the house therefore we expect we have more creosote build up in the chimney. It took about a week for the delivery of the mini chimney cleaning brush to arrive. Throughout that week we had many days without water, power or heat.

I know this sounds really terrible and there were times when Morgan dryly quipped that he just built us a really expensive tent to live in, but in all the lack it became evident that the house works really well in its passive nature. When it was -30 outside overnight and we had no power whatsoever, the house was still livable however chilly in the mornings. And when the sun hits the windows the temp rises quickly and we hang out in bare feet and t-shirts.

We have been grateful for our foresight in layering our power and heat systems. It was tempting to put everything on solar when we built the house but we stuck to propane for a few things on purpose. When we couldn’t have a fire to warm the house, I baked bread and scones and simmered soup stock. The house heats up quite quickly with the gas oven or range and it smells delicious.

We are far from having it all figured out and this morning I cried out of frustration when once again we were without power. But I wiped my tears after screaming in the meadow and got to trouble shooting the system. I’m sitting here now with a hot cup of tea, a wood fire crackling and soup stock simmering. I’ve got the wifi to send this to you which means I have power and as soon as I do that I’m going to go out and check on the system. This is just something that needs to be done.

Over the last few weeks people have said to me “You won’t make that mistake again!” And it’s not true. We’ve made the same mistake many times over. Because we aren’t used to living in a closed system where we are our only back up plan. So we need time to develop new habits of checking battery charge and wood piles and propane levels. We didn’t grow up having to do such things and so we are making the same mistakes many times over. And we are learning. Sometimes the learning is slow and other times it slaps us in the face. I’m not sure which I prefer, the important kind of learning hurts no matter which way it’s received.

And so here we are, keeping on in our little home that we truly love more each day, counting our blessings when we have the capacity and swearing and crying when we don’t.

Many blessings to you from our simple home on this sacred earth.

Andrea