The Ultimate Answer to Kings

I am rubbish at this electrical stuff. And local vendors are rubbish at selling me stuff. An abridged version of the whole trying episode…

Last month Ian’s batteries finally died. And they died all together, too, as though stuck there in that dark powershed they had nothing to do but relate their suicide fantasies to one another until it finally all went horribly wrong. I assumed I could piece together the four best batteries and keep his fridge running for a while but it turned out there weren’t four best batteries.

Ian really splurged on those batteries – Rolls-Surrette L16s are not cheap – and they ran a fat fourteen years before giving up the ghost. You can get a lot of cycles out of deep-cycle batteries when you hardly ever cycle them deeply, as long as you also take care of the maintenance in the meantime. That’s the one advantage of a big battery bank over a small one. Anyway, those years of faithful service never really did him a lot of material good so he didn’t want to spend that kind of cash this time around. But he did want his electrical system to work, so he asked me to find out what eight new golf cart batteries would cost.

I called the vendor that sold me my own batteries four years ago, and he quoted me $450 each – which is exactly THREE TIMES what my batteries cost. That was shocking but I passed on the information to Ian. I also mentioned that the vendor didn’t have any in stock and was having a lot of shipping problems so he didn’t know when I might actually get batteries from him. I decided to keep looking. To expedite matters Ian actually transferred the money to my account – but I couldn’t believe it was really going to cost that much or take that long.

In the big town about 50 miles away there was a golf cart accessories place that supposedly had a whole pallet of Trojan T105s. Neighbor S said last time he bought them there they cost $165 each. That sounded a lot better – but nobody ever answered the phone there. Nobody ever responded to a voicemail there. As far as I was ever able to tell, nobody ever even worked there. Yeah, they’d cut their hours for the winter season, but come on.

Time was passing and this was getting really discouraging when this Tuesday afternoon I got a call from Neighbor S saying he had just discovered the existence of a store that sold batteries. Just batteries. Like, the name of the place was The Battery Store. And they also answered their telephone, as though someone actually came and unlocked the doors and engaged in commercial activity there. This was worth checking out so we made the long drive. And as simple as that…

…I had eight new batteries and could report not only progress but also a helluva refund to Ian.

Then came the next problem. I’ve mentioned before that I have a terrible time visualizing any electrical circuit more complex than simple series. Neighbor S even sketched the circuit for me – but if the batteries aren’t visually oriented exactly the way the sketch shows, I still can’t see it in my head. So it took me a while to get the thing working – and there were a few showers of sparks in the process. I really hate that. But finally this morning S was able to get me over my block, and as soon as I threw the switch on the inverter things started lighting up. In a good way, I mean.

Now I’m going to be visiting every morning for the next few days to see just how deep the cycles are going to be with these new but much smaller deep cycle batteries. These won’t have nearly the longevity of the old ones – but Ian’s Cave is still open for business again at last.

Yup: On December 7, 2008 I began my scribbling, more or less as a way to get myself through a cold dark winter with very little human contact. Didn’t expect to keep doing it, or that people would want to read it. But here we are: Three more years and I’ll buy it a beer.

Tobie made out like a burglar today: Three Jeep rides! And he got to see the nice lady! Three times!

8:30 on Sunday morning. I didn’t have very much planned: Needed to go take some voltage measurements at Ian’s but other than that I was just going to hang out. That’s when the phone rang – Neighbor L had no water pressure and couldn’t get her pressure pump to run, and could I come over and help her with the vault lid and see if we could figure out the problem?

Trip One: Tobie and I arrived, I helped remove the heavy steel lid and set up the ladder so she could climb down and see if anything obvious was wrong with the pump. There was no flooding, the electricity was working, and that was about as far as I’m qualified to check a pressure pump. They’re complex and confusing and I’ve never owned one. A phone call to Neighbor S, who’s far more knowledgeable than I, found him on the road and unavailable for the next several hours. We went home.

Trip Two: Neighbor L called again – no wonder the pressure pump wouldn’t run, the water tank was empty! Last time she checked it there were 800 gallons in there and she doesn’t use that much water in a few days. Must be a leak, and the ground is wet over by the workshop hydrant. Will I come over and help her dig it up to find the leak? Sure – Tobie and I rode again. The ground at the corner of the workshop near the hydrant was indeed wet but I pointed out that it was right under the drip edge. It snowed yesterday and everything was wet. I didn’t see any reason to dig up the hydrant but she already had the gravel raked away and insisted. Okay, digga we musta. We got down to the pipe and fittings and there was clearly nothing wrong down there. We went around to all the other outdoor hydrants – they have five – and there was nothing wrong with any of them. We went inside and looked everywhere water could be leaking. There was nothing wrong.

Meanwhile she had turned on the well pump to fill the tank. We went out to the vault and she switched on the power to the pressure pump, which instantly began whirring cheerfully away. Checked the house faucets, which now poured forth very nicely. Whatever the problem was, it involved an empty tank and not a broken pump. We put the lid back on the vault. Tobie and I went home. I promised to come back after lunch and mid-day chores, and bring some stuff to insulate the hole we’d dug because she was still convinced there was something wrong with that hydrant.

Trip Three: Neighbor L called a third time. She’d been on the phone with D, who said he rebuilt that hydrant two months ago and there was nothing wrong with it. He also said that the water softener used 200 gallons of water every backflush, which occurred every other night. If she hadn’t run the well pump in a week, there was good reason for the tank to be empty.

(Joel’s chin hits his chest.)

Tobie and I rode forth, and I helped fill the hole and pretty the site back up. We came home.

Once the tank is full that should end the crisis. But the day is young.

I’ve spent the past week or two learning the limits of a good-quality portable generator.

Never used it for anything but power tools before, and never more than one at a time. Turns out when it comes to running household appliances the amp draw adds up fast. There are basically three things I’d like it to run in Ian’s Cave: The pressure pump, the washing machine, and (decreasingly and we’re almost done) the refrigerator. The Honda will happily run any one of those three things but it won’t run two of them together in any combination.

I did not know that. But it’s good to learn it in the absence of any real emergency, I guess…

Yesterday was gloomy all day. Overnight rain, a little morning rain but the clouds never went away. I spent most of the day in the sittin’ and readin’ chair and Tobie…

…after several attempts to get me up and throwing his Kong for him, huffily gave up and joined me for most of it.

Anyway – Most of the year “gloomy all day” is very rare. Less so in winter. In previous years I’d have just cocooned through it with minimal electricity use – I do have a lot of books, and the curtains do pull back – but about a year ago Big Brother sent me the one element I needed for an alternate means of charging batteries. This morning when I woke to this… Continue reading →

First propane purchase. It’s down almost fifty cents a gallon from last winter, making it only too much rather than far too much.

Guess I can save the difference to buy holiday ammo for good girls and boys…

Took a long truck ride for nothing. Nobody there, nobody answering the phone. Try again next week sometime.

I did get to help Neighbor S load drywall, but that’s the only useful thing I’ve accomplished so far today and a Lowes worker could have done that just as well.

Tobie has forgiven me. Now we’re going on a nice walkie while the weather holds.

Sometimes I think I take this ‘hermit’ thing too far. If I’m remembering correctly it has literally been years since I last visited the big town about 50 miles away. But today’s the day. I’m so excited my stomach is already griping.

Neighbor S, who actually makes money building off-grid power systems, has more grunt with vendors than I do. So a seasonally-closed retailer who won’t give me the courtesy of a return phone call will come out and open his doors for Neighbor S. And Neighbor S has graciously volunteered to use that superpower on Neighbor Joel’s behalf. So that’s what we’re doing this morning. If things go to plan, by mid-afternoon Ian’s Cave will have a whole bank of new batteries. When that turns out to have happened I’ll be ever so proud of myself. If it fails to pan out I’ll have taken a stressful journey to a place with lots of people for nothing.

Stay tuned, I guess…

The vital coffee-brewing portion of the waking-up procedure was unimpeded this morning.

Somebody in the previous post suggested that there was probably water in the kitchen regulator, freezing overnight. I had already come to the same conclusion and so was not surprised when…

…I removed it and water poured out. Somehow it really got a snootful during the rain of a few days ago.

I installed that regulator a few years ago, replacing a really perfectly good one…

…because I wanted a bypass regulator so I could stop going out and changing bottles in the dark on (inevitably) the coldest morning of the month. But there was never anything wrong with the old one, which I stored carefully as Plan B. And now my kitchen stove works again. Actually it started working around 9 this morning when the water melted, but that wouldn’t have lasted.

Or at least I always try to. When I get caught without a Plan B or when I reach for Plan B and it lets me down, I give serious thought to fixing that for next time. Because!

That’s why. No phone, no lights, no motor car you don’t provide for yourself. Ditto running water and cooking fuel. And when you build it yourself, with materials either scrounged or available on the consumer market, your chances of unexpectedly having to fix it under adverse conditions are – accept the word of one who knows – high. They’re high.

This morning’s case in point…

My kitchen propane regulator has suddenly decided that it doesn’t want to work when the weather gets frosty. Which it certainly did overnight. So I stumble into the main cabin, fill my teapot for all-important life-giving coffee, put it on the stove, light the flame, then take Tobie out for First Pee. Get back and find the pot, which should be whistling by now, standing over a cold inactive burner. I never CHECKED to see if the fire lit, I just assumed because I trusted the stove. It clicked happily away when I hit the igniter but no gas was coming out of the burners. It did nearly the same thing morning before last: The gas flow rate was very low until the sun warmed up the regulator. This morning it didn’t work at all.

Grumble! Curse! Also, where did I store my camping stove?

Before I moved here, when I did a lot of camping, I used the hell out of this thing. Now, the last time I remember using it was a memorable day in April 2015. It was a gross grody mess then, and that was going on nine years ago. I really ought to keep my gear clean.

Anyway, I only generally even knew where I left it. Also, the only little propane bottles that could run it were stored off-site. So I had to go get one and that wasn’t my greatest prepping moment, but what the hell.

I did eventually get my coffee and breakfast. Really ought to clean it before I re-store it. And get more of those little propane bottles. Oh, and I need a new kitchen regulator, dammit.

Meanwhile, speaking of Plan B…

It’s laundry day at Ian’s cave, which still doesn’t have a functioning electrical system. The problem here isn’t money but availability. There are still shipping issues four years after the apparent collapse of civilization caused by a bug, and my usual battery supplier is struggling to maintain supply. I’m just looking for some golf cart batteries, you wouldn’t think this would be so hard, but the big town about 50 miles away is largely a seasonal resort kind of thing and some businesses I really need to talk to right now are kind of closed for the winter. Fortunately Neighbor S is locally one of the big boys in the off-grid power biz, and some people who won’t give me the courtesy of a return phone call will come out and open their doors for him. So we’re going to take a trip together on Tuesday, when hopefully this will be resolved at last.

Meanwhile my wonderful donated Honda is keeping my scrawny ass wrapped in clean clothes, among other duties. I went without any generator at all for so long I just sort of learned to live without, but I’m really happy I don’t have to do that at the moment.

I haven’t been paying attention to the weather forecast so this came as a surprise. So far we hadn’t had so much as a little sleet with our rain – except for one brief cold snap it’s been very mild. But overnight the clouds rolled in and dumped maybe half an inch of snow.

Tobie always finds this very exciting. New stuff! New scents!

Which is why I immediately changed the itinerary, because our usual walkie trails involve going up and down the ridge and I won’t risk Tobie towing me down a steep slope when it’s slippery. He certainly didn’t mind: We seldom come into the wash together anymore so it was a new treat for him.

Here’s the Secret Lair in its hollow, pretty much hidden by juniper and snow…

Neighbor L is going through horse withdrawal. It’s been a week now since they went away and she says she’s down to checking on them through the windows no more than six or eight times a day now. And they’re never there, and you can imagine…

D is still stuck in a rehap center in the city far away. His most recent travail is an infection in his hip surgery, which a week ago was a big thing but which may be under control now. I spoke with him briefly on the phone this morning and he sounded much better. There’s hope that they might get him to a medical center closer to home in the next few days – but that has been promised before. All I can say is that he sounded strong when I talked to him. I’m still waiting to find out how this will really work out.

I woke up at around 3:30 as normal, took care of some physical impediments to further sleep and laid back down. At some point I dozed off and found myself in the Gulch driving to Ian’s place. There I found that the yard was covered with litter and there was an open-top car with a family sleeping inside. When asked what the hell they were doing there, they informed me that they were moving here: That something called “Dark [something] Tactical” had declared that an intentional community was setting up right here and that lots and lots of people were coming. I informed them that they were mistaken or misled and that they should please kindly go away. I went into Ian’s place to find it gutted: Somebody was completely redecorating the place with new drywall. (Ian’s Cave is a cylindrical structure: You couldn’t actually drywall anything but this was dream logic) At this point I started to freak out just a bit: I went in the back and there was another whole family staying there with every sign of comfortable intention to stay.

I was having difficulty speaking: Somehow every time I inhaled to speak I snored. Can’t imagine why. Made it hard to express the extreme depth of my desire for all these people to go away. I went outside and now there were lots of people standing around. They all claimed to have been invited to move here – specifically to Ian’s Cave, which it seemed extremely unlikely that Ian had anything to do with this so I kept trying to chase them away purely on the basis of my authority as “the caretaker,” which I am but which none of the dream people seemed to find very persuasive.

I haven’t been so happy to wake up from a dream in quite a while.

Pretty morning here at the Gulch…

Tobie and I had a nice frosty walkie, then Neighbor L wanted to go to town. Now, I always schedule 15 minutes to get from here to D&L’s place through the wash, takes longer by road, and I really hate to be late. Seriously, I’ve always been neurotic about that. I hate when other people are late almost as much as I hate being late myself. I was supposed to be there at nine so I left the cabin fully geared-up at 8:45.

And then I remembered frost.

It rained for most of three days so there’s lots of humidity right now, all of which gathers together above the Jeep every night to freeze it solid. Scraping that puppy off will really tell you everything you need to know about the healing progress of your shoulder injuries, by the way. Whose idea was it to get a jacked-up Jeep anyway…

Yeah, I know – I took this pic right after most of the kindling had burned down and before I stoked the stove for actual heat. It’s a process. The process is kind of a pain in the ass, but once you own the infrastructure and tools it’s super cheap and reliable. It’s a fire in an iron box: The only way to make it simpler would be a stone circle on the floor and a smoke hole in the ceiling. The world outside the Gulch could go full Mad Max and I’d still have winter heat.

There’s only one complicated bit, and every year at this time I have this anxious moment while I wait to find out if the heat-actuated fan still works.

I’ve had bad experiences with electronic gadgets that work fine when I put them in storage and then never again. But this thing…

I’ve had it for a long time now. A Generous Reader gave it to me – I dunno, pushing ten years ago. I shouldn’t say anything stupid like it’s apparently never going to break, but…

Texting is an unalloyed blessing to introverts, I think we can all agree. Basically everyone who lives in the Gulch meets that description or they’d live somewhere else, so most remote communication involves texting. It was such a comforting alternative to voice telephony that even the boomers among us find it a big improvement.

There is one disadvantage, of course. When you’re a certain age, it’s kind of time-consuming.

We’ll never get the hang of all those abbreviations.

The day dawned almost completely clear, after all the rain of yesterday and last night…

…and when I came ’round Ian’s place I found my frozen meat pretty much all thawed. Cold, not yet ruined, but very not frozen. There’s not a lot of meat left in there so I’m not getting emotional about it. But Tobie and I have upped our meat intake.

And anyway I need to wash clothes, so…

It has come to this. Give me enough extension cords and a place to put the Honda and I can move the … well, the washer and fridge, anyway.

ETA: Oh, I should have mentioned that there’s a plan. There may be new batteries as early as the middle of next week.

It’s been such a dry autumn that actual rain came as a shock. Seems unnatural to have water falling from the sky. What’s with that? Also…

A shoutout to Generous Readers who are the reason I possess rain gear. Don’t use it often, but walkies must happen even when it’s raining and so it does get used.

And it was raining.

Cold, wet. Happily the wind didn’t pick up till later when Tobie and I were snug back in the Lair.

Along the way we stopped to investigate something I had sort of noticed before, but the significance of which didn’t quite sink in till this morning…

Along one of our walkie trails there’s an old Toyota cabover camper that has been filling with rat poop for far longer than I’ve lived here. There has always been a hole in the side, which is probably why it took a while for it to dawn on me that the hole had suddenly gotten substantially bigger.

And the reason for that was that someone had ripped the propane refrigerator right out through the side of the camper shell. 😀 I don’t really condemn this – I stole the stove out of it years ago – but what the actual cliché do they think they’re going to do with it? If they ever get it working I want to learn who they are so I can visit and marvel at their skill. Funny thing: They didn’t make a mess of it, either. There’s always been a sort of debris field around that truck and if anything they tidied up a bit before leaving.

Coming home, I praised Big Brother without whom the Lair probably wouldn’t have a porch and definitely wouldn’t have a covered porch, because…

…the only thing I hate more than mud outside is mud inside. 🙂