Things We Didn't Expect

We're Still Learning How to Do This.

We thought last winter was crazy when it snowed three feet in 36 hours, but this winter may have been worse… in a different way.

We live in a high desert region of Washington state. When most people think of Washington (if they ever do), they picture Seattle: the gloomy, overcast, rain soaked city of grunge.

Seattle by Matt MacDonald

Washington is a vast state, however, and east of the Cascades things are very different. So are the people, by the way. On the eastside, winters are typically sunny and dry, albeit very cold - perfect conditions for running solar power.

Usually.

This winter we didn’t see the sun for three months.

Unfortunately, that’s not an exaggeration.

As if it’s not dark enough in winter here on the 49th parallel, the daily gloom of cloud cover took a serious toll on our motivation. Overcome with Deja Vu from my days on the westside, I sank into a funk. John and I spent a lot of time hanging out in our cozy den watching YouTube videos and movies on Netflix while, outside, it was dark, cold, and dreary every day.

It was hard to want to do anything. Even the chickens stopped laying.

Worse yet, we used more propane this winter than ever before since we had zero sunlight to naturally charge our batteries.

Power Sans Solar

In case you don’t know, our solar system runs on batteries. People who have solar panels installed on their roof to sell power back to the grid typically don’t have any power storage for the solar power they intake. Their system just feeds that power directly back into the grid (to the power company). The pitfall with this set up is that when and if their power goes out, they’ll have no benefit from their solar panels if there is no sun, like in the evening or on a cloudy day.

In our case, our panels take in sunlight and convert it to DC (direct current) which fuels our battery bank. A fully charged battery bank can last us for many days depending on how much energy we use. In fact, a fully charged bank will last us nearly a week even if we have little to no sun… assuming the batteries start off with a full charge.

We also have a back-up generator that runs on propane just in case we need to charge the batteries when there’s no sunlight. In fact, if our batteries’ charge ever dips below a certain level, John has the generator programed to automatically start.

Of course he does…

Where we live, it’s normal for us to go months at a time without running the generator because we usually have plenty of sunlight - that is, until this winter.

This winter, our generator was coming on every two days. That’s a big change and a dramatic increase in the amount of propane we’re using!

As I write this, our 500 gallon tank is sitting at about 20% full. Weather-wise, we probably still have another two months to go before we can have more propane delivered and I’m kinda thinking about that every day in the back of my mind…

Thinking and hoping we don’t run out.

We have our propane tank filled twice a year, in the spring and fall. Usually, they just top it off because we try to keep it full. Our window for having propane delivered can be pretty small some years. In the fall, they have to come before we get snow and in the spring they can’t deliver until our roads dry out from all the snow melt.

While running out of propane wouldn’t be the end of the world, it would make some things very inconvenient. For example, I’d be cooking on top of the woodstove and we’d either need to move everything in our freezer outside (assuming it’s still cold out) or I’d need to get canning all that meat fast - and on top of the woodstove.

I don’t even want to think about how that would go.

On second thought, maybe we’d just host a huge barbeque for everyone we know. Beer, BBQ and lots of crazy snowmobiling… that sounds way more fun!

For now, we have our smaller 100-gallon tank manifolded to the larger main tank so we can pull from both. It took a bit of figuring to learn that the flow from the smaller to the larger tank happens organically as the two tanks’ level’s equalize.

You can’t force it.

We got tired of the regulator icing up so John built it a roof.

In the meantime, we’ve learned some things about propane this winter. For instance it doesn’t like to be cold.

While the constant cloud cover has kept this winter abnormally warm (around 30F), the temperature dipped briefly to -22F in mid January. Coincidentally, also because of the warm winter, our propane tank was not covered by a blanket of insulating snow.

This is the first winter, by the way, that our tank has not been covered by snow. We had no idea what a difference the snow made until we didn’t have it.

Okay, we had some snow but not much. Everything is relative…

I mentioned earlier that the generator was set to start automatically when the batteries got low, so when the generator started sputtering I thought for sure we’d run out of propane!

John opened the hood and started checking everything. He looked for error codes, but there were none. He checked the oil and it was fine. While he was outside freezing and checking dials, I was inside searching online troubleshooting forums.

John came in and took off his gloves.

“Have you checked the spark plugs?” I asked, trying to be helpful. I was brimming with tips from the forums.

“It sounds like it’s out of fuel”, he answered, which only worried me more. Probably just to make me feel better, he put his gloves back on and went out to check the spark plugs.

He’s a good man.

And he’s pretty smart, too because his initial assessment was right - at least partially right.

The generator was not getting fuel.

While the fuel level was lower than we’d like, the fuel we did have had stopped flowing altogether. It turns out, propane does not like to flow when it’s extremely cold.

Propane, which is a liquid, turns to “sludge” below -40F degrees and just stops moving.

-22F is a long way from -40F but propane doesn’t seem to care. Maybe combined with the wind chill and constant exposure on the northside of the shed, our propane just felt like it was -40F and lost its motivation, too - just like the rest of us.

There was really nothing we could do but wait regarding the propane.

Every winter, we have about a week of deadly cold weather so we assumed it wouldn’t last too long. And just because the generator didn’t want to start didn’t mean our batteries were out of power entirely. Remember that John had set the generator to come on when the batteries dipped to a certain level, but that level wasn’t zero so we still had a bit of wiggle room.

The appliances in the house that run on propane (stove/oven/freezer) use a relative trickle of propane compared to the generator, which demands a large volume to start, so we were still able to use them even though the propane had lost it’s motivation for “serious flow”.

Once the temps eventually warmed, the propane flowed normally again and we were able to charge the battery bank using the generator.

But that didn’t solve all our issues.

A couple of our batteries weren’t reaching their full charge so they were depleting more quickly than we had expected. It may not have been -22F anymore, but it was still cold enough to need the chicken’s water heater running all night and the heat trace on our pipes so they wouldn’t freeze.

That constant draw of energy ran our batteries down quickly every night. We’d go to bed thinking we were in a good position and wake up to the freaking generator turning on again!

What’s going on?!

We were getting pretty frustrated.

Are Our Batteries Dying?

We don’t have the most expensive set up. We use lead acid batteries which require a bit of maintenance but are easier to obtain than probably any other batteries around. They’re less expensive and more common. John considered all the different types of batteries when he built the system and lead acid has worked for us, thus far.

Off grid, lead acid batteries require more regular maintenance than usual simply because they’re constantly being charged and depleted, charged and depleted. This constant cycle can kill your batteries if you don’t take the time to equalize them regularly.

Usage causes crystalline sulfate deposits to build up on the lead plates. When you equalize the batteries, the charger emits a high-voltage, high-frequency, low amperage pulse into the battery that knocks this build up off the plates and back into the solution. The process is also called desulfation.

If you go without doing this for some time, the batteries will not hold their charge for long - as we discovered.

John used to perform this process about once a month, but he’d slacked off a bit and hadn’t been over-charging them as much as they needed. Frankly, I get it. It takes time. A lot of time.

He measures the charge of each cell every hour for an entire afternoon… He does other things in between measuring, but it’s time consuming and tedious.

Finally, equalizing causes all the cells start to bubble as the acid turns from clear to brown - knocking all that gunk off the lead plates - and the batteries are once again refreshed and fully charged.

If you’re planning to use lead acid batteries off grid, the maintenance is something to consider. If you’re using them now and not equalizing, you’re going to find out at some point that it pays to do it religiously.

So, you might ask if we suddenly became flush with cash would we run out and buy a bank of brand new lithium ion batteries? Well, maybe.

For now, though, as long as we keep doing the maintenance the batteries we have are chugging along fine.

That’s the batteries sorted…

However, we’re still running uncomfortably low on propane but the sun has begun to shine around here and we think we’ll make it. Cross your fingers for us - either that or wait for your invitation to our barbeque party.

And prepare to bring your snow goggles.

Humidity

Another factor that came with the clouds this winter was humidity. Our climate is more humid in winter than summer, but it’s never been like this since we moved here in 2020.

Our cellar, in which we store pumpkins, spaghetti and butternut squashes, and potatoes (as well as many other goodies!) has been very humid this winter - 75 -80% humidity! That level is not good for food storage.

Our potatoes and spaghetti squashes have been surviving fine, but our pumpkins and butternuts started to mold and had to be chucked into the compost bin.

I grew so many this past season that it felt horrible to lose them. I cooked a lot of them before they started to mold, though, so it wasn’t a complete loss.

I had hoped to freeze dry a lot of the pumpkin meat, but to freeze dry requires a lot of power which means I need a lot of sunlight and… You see the problem.

It’s just a series of unfortunate events.

Moving Forward

Despite the issues we’ve faced, we’ve learned a lot. We’re grateful that each winter is something new and all the problems haven’t come all at once in the same year! At least they’ve been spread out a bit so we can deal with them.

John is starting to think about burying our propane tank so we never run into the issue of cold propane again, but we’re not sure it’s allowed. We have to check first whether the propane delivery company will fill the tank if we bury it. Some tanks are specifically made to be buried, but ours isn’t so John would need to modify it. The propane companies will not always fill tanks that have been modified - understandably for safety reasons. So that’s to be continued…

We’re also thinking of running a line in the ground from our den (where the woodstove is located) to the chicken coop so we can force warm air into the coop instead of using a chicken water heater all winter. Those little water heaters and heat lamps use a lot of power!

That’ll be a spring project.

In other news…

Our old boy, Brisket, has lost his eye sight entirely. He’s an old guy - we think 11 years old or so - but we can’t be sure because the people we adopted him from seven years ago didn’t know either.

Brisket in 2017. Looking good, boy!

Brisket, a rather stoic fella, would never play with toys. He didn’t play with us much either. In fact, his description in the adoption ad read, “Homebody. Does not like other dogs, dog parks or long walks. Likes to be alone and prefers to stay home.”

We read that and said, “Perfect”. We brought him home. That was back in 2017.

That’s Brisket’s excited face.

In 2021 we adopted Henry, our German Shepherd. At first, Brisket merely tolerated him but over time, they’ve become great friends.

In fact, Henry has even taught Brisket to play. You know - like a dog.

I’m not sure how much longer we will get to spend time with our beloved Brisket in this world but I like to think that he’s enjoying every day with us here on the farm -living a true dog’s life in the great outdoors.

Feeling secure, loved and happy - chilling with his pack.

BFFs