I just sort of assumed that, based on related prior experience. I’d never really tried running a 250 watt heat lamp in an off-grid power system. Because really – who would do that, right? That’s just silly.
For the record – a heat lamp is a bad idea off-grid.
Fortunately it’s summer and the Cave is already quite warm, and the chicks don’t seem to care. They bunch up to sleep, but the temp of the shower stall floor is well into the eighties. Ian’s Cave runs the only full-size refrigerator in the gulch, and it seems that’s the only load his system can tolerate with the batteries remaining comfortably charged most of the time.
After a not-good-at-all start, the remaining chicks are doing quite well. The one I thought would immediately die recovered upon getting some water in it, and they’re all growing visibly.
Random Laddie stuff…
It seems we can scratch leather bones off the “things it’s always good to send Joel in a care package” list. Laddie could not possibly care less about leather bones.
He has a definite opinion about thunder, though.
I’m working out sort of a situation with Laddie’s bed. There’s a perfect place for it in the main cabin, which is where LB’s bed always was. But he gets very anxious at night so I started leaving the door open – but it’ll be full moon in less than a week and that’s too bright for sleeping with the door open. So I brought the dog bed into the bedroom, which seems to have immediately calmed Laddie down at night – I don’t know where he slept with ML, but apparently this is what he wanted.
We had a dry, still hot day, but then just at bedtime a storm cell forced me to close most of the windows, which made it a dry still hot night – and then it didn’t deliver anything but thunder, which Laddie didn’t appreciate.
He seems cool with the bed where it now is, but I’m not – the bedroom is too small for the addition. I’m thinking of retiring the current reading chair…
…which isn’t very comfortable anyway and mostly collects junk these days, and takes up too much room for its decreasing utility. If I take it out and just put a chair there, that would free up space for the dog bed and I’d be able to use my closet again. Think I’m going to try that today using the chair from the porch.
I can’t remember where I saw it, but there’s a design for a brooder that uses only a smaller incandescent bulb and it worked pretty darned good the one time I had cause to try it out.
The basic theory is to split the brooder into two chambers (one heated/enclosed, one open) and hang a ‘flap’ as a divider between the two.
Hang the bulb in the ‘closed’ chamber at the appropriate height for the proper temp required (determined by chick age, bulb wattage, and ambient temps).
The flap allows the chicks to move from ‘warm’ to ‘cool’ as desired, should hang approx 3-4″ above the floor to start, and be raised as they grow to allow easy passage.
On another, somewhat tangentially related note, you have mentioned in the past that for water, an RO system was ‘out of the question’ due to power constrains. I’m not filter system expert but I was under the impression that RO works on a pressure differential, not electricity. This may be just a brain-fart but it seems like it would be easy enough to fabri-cobble together a system that works off an air-pressurize-able tank to refill your bottles.
I’m not sure just HOW hard your water is, but a quick search nets a ‘1 PSI per 100PPM’ industry standard for a residential RO system.
Just a thought that’s been knocking around in my head waiting for the appropriate time to break free.
(I had to split this into two posts because any more text and the ‘post comment’ button disappears. It’s a regular thing. Anyone else have that happen to them?)
I had a dog that wasn’t interested in leather bones at first as she didn’t realise they were food. I had to hold one in her mouth for a few minutes till she got the idea. This may have been a mistake as that night she ate my wallet, watch strap and phone case.
“I had to split this into two posts because any more text and the ‘post comment’ button disappears. It’s a regular thing. Anyone else have that happen to them?”
Yep . . . all the time.