Showering felt so good today!
When one lives off-grid, you are generally your own fix it person, not always, but often. That is certainly true for us, we designed, built and maintain our off-grid system, all the utilities that would normally be in the purview of the utility companies or a commercial repair service company, we take care of ourselves.
One of the big things we take care of has to do with our water system. When we first moved out here, before our water system was really set up, I would walk to my neighbor’s house to collect 3 gallons of water per day, why 3 gallons you ask? Simple, it’s how many empty one gallon water containers I had. We learned during that time how to really REALLY conserve water. Before you think we moved out here to leech off of our neighbor, we were set up to get water from the community well, several miles from us, but since our neighbor very kindly offered the use of his tap, we gratefully accepted.
Since then, we have greatly expanded the water setup, we have several large water storage tanks, some are set up to collect water from the roof, that is something that will be improved upon in the very near future, to the point where we will get 100% of our water from the sky.
On the inside of the SkyCastle, we have a 12 volt water pump, the original one we had came out of an RV, we liked it well enough to continue with that line when it came time to buy a new one. The nice thing about the 12 volt system is even if the batteries that store our electricity are too low for the inverter to work, there is still enough power to run the pump.
In the beginning, we just used the pump, it was (and still is) inside the SkyCastle, just under the sink, every time we turned on the faucet, the pump came on making our home sound like a gas station air pump. We eventually installed a second hand pressure tank. The water pump would pressurize the pressure tank, which meant the water pump didn’t come on as often but ran for longer periods of time.
Eventually that pressure tank failed and we purchased a new one, a spiffy shiny blue tank that sits under the sink in the kitchen. The reason we have so much of our system inside the house is to keep things from freezing in winter.
Now that we had our water, sink and shower plumbed for use, we needed to be able to heat the water. Enter the Eccotemp L5 portable propane powered water heater, honestly it’s designed to be used OUTSIDE, not inside, but since our home isn’t what you would call tight, I don’t mind running the one in the kitchen, installed right over …