Cold Spell

As with everyone this week, we’ve been experiencing a bit of a cold spell this past week. Unfortunately for us that means a bit of worry and stress about our pipes freezing and having enough battery and propane to keep everything warm. It was predicted to get below freezing several days this past week, I think as low as 26. Along with some cloudy days and even snow predicted, we were a bit worried about getting through the week without something breaking. Our tanks and water systems are at the very bottom of the fifth wheel, so they don’t benefit from any heat rising from our living space.

As data driven people, we have six temperature gauges from Govee which we originally bought to track temperatures in the bedroom, main room, battery bay, outside, fridge, and freezer. Our weather station now tracks our indoor and outdoor temperatures, so we repurposed a sensor to track the temperature near the water pump (in the basement, surrounded by many water connections). We have learned that when we keep the furnace (powered by propane) set to 50 degrees F, the water pump area also stays about 50 degrees F. The furnace is in this area, so that makes sense. It also means our internal pipes have little chance of freezing as long as we have propane and keep the heat on.

Our tanks have a “tank heater” we can turn on (powered by electricity). We’re not exactly sure how these work, other than you’re supposed to turn them on to keep what’s in there from freezing. So we did that when it got super cold. It uses a lot of electricity, but we’d rather not have issues with freezing tanks.

Our batteries are lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO) and will work while cold but not well below certain temperatures. Also they don’t like to charge when below freezing. Ours, in fact, have a built-in sensor that won’t allow them to charge if they’re below freezing. The space they’re in isn’t insulated, just a hinged metal door between inside and outside. The temperature sensor here showed us this area was around 5 degrees above the outside temperature so we took some of our insulated window coverings (for the summer heat) and put them against the door. They seem to help, keeping another 5 degrees of warmth, allowing this area to stay around 10 degrees warmer than outside. With temperatures as low as 25, that meant at least we’d keep it above freezing. We still need to figure out a better way of regulating the temperature in this space as it tends to overheat in the summer as well.

All told, it felt a bit touch and go this past week, but we survived unscathed. We even got some moisture, first rain, then maybe tiny snowballs or hail, then freezing rain. We’re about to head out to town, hopefully the moisture wasn’t enough to trap us (either the river or the bentonite)!

I should probably mention two other updates: painting and water. First, we painted our bedroom, upgrading from the speckled gold to sage green. Everything we read about painting the walls said to clean them thoroughly and use a basecoat that sticks to anything. Probably overkill but we went that route, doing two layers of Killz all purpose multi-surface sealer and stain blocker primer then the top coat. We had a roller but only bought a quart of the green so we only used paint brushes. More work but less waste. We are debating painting the main room while we’re here but haven’t decided a color yet. Probably blue.

Lastly, our water situation. We are lucky to have a contact in town who lets us use his city water hookup to fill up our 80 gallon water bladder. We’ve done this three times now since arriving, filling up in town, hauling it ourselves to our property, then using our water pump to get it into our fresh water tank. We’ve struggled a bit as we prime the hose and gauge how much we’ve pumped, so recently we got a water flow meter which is quite handy. We also purchase drinking water in town because even with our filtering, we don’t quite trust our fresh tank enough to drink our “tap” water.

Our eventual solution is to get some water holding tanks and build a water catchment system (basically a big metal roof the rain will run down and into the holding tanks). We have a contract, set to start early next week, to get a “sandbox” installed for the holding tanks to rest in and distribute the weight of the tanks (rather than being on our rocky ground and risk getting a hole poked in the bottom) as well as a pump house which will pressurize the water for us. Once that’s done, we’ll dig a trench from the tanks to our hookup area (currently just our septic) and run a water pipe and spigot for us to use. Then all that’ll be left is the roof which we probably won’t be able to get done before we head out of Texas this year. The same contractor who is doing our water work also does metal work like we would need for the roof. When we see him we might get a new estimate of whether he thinks he can get that project done before we head out in March.