Hello All!
A new year is upon us, and there are big things planned of this year, but we won’t really move to quickly for a few months in order to gather up our new plans and resources. Until then, we go up and enjoy our time there, working on small things that we need.
We headed up Thursday (New Years Eve) for a long weekend trip, which included a quick trip to Phoenix. On our way up Thursday, we stopped in to our see the seller of “Rusty”, inquiring about purchasing a sister for “Rusty”. I think we settled on another 20′ shipping container to sit side by side with “Rusty” and at first provide us a good secure staging area, until we can start outfitting that one. We are very excited. We do have to wait for the delivery though, as there is some good winter weather going through the area this week, which is not conducive to heavy trucks on the ranch roads.
So, some point in the near future we will get her delivered, which will start our new year out exciting with new options for our future house.
One of the things I needed to get done right away, was replacing our solar charge controller. Our previous one went South on us and caused our batteries to really run down, which has caused some issues. I purchased a new 30amp PWM charge controller, which seems to be better and has better user information via a front panel LCD.
It seems to be working much better, and the charge is coming back, slowly. We had dropped the total percentage down to about 30% I estimate. Not good for those types of batteries. We are hoping You can see in the left image, the batteries are at 11.9v. While that may seem close enough to 12 volts, it is about 30% charge. I am hoping when we make it up there again, they will be topped off and just charging as needed.
After I had that installed and charging, we decided to take a little hike. There is a hill down the road from us, where you can get a great view East, and one of our property. We climbed up the hill and sat for a bit. It was windy, as it was all weekend, but the view was great.
In the left picture, you can see I circled our loft, which you can see…kinda stands out. We have a plan for that! In the right picture, those are the mountains outside of Flagstaff, which plenty of snow, the San Francisco Mountain range. Below is a nice panoramic picture I took, not sure how it will turn out here though.
That night was pretty chilly, probably in the upper teens. We sat in front of the fire having some coffee before we started our day. Our day plan on New Year’s Day was to drive to Phoenix and have dinner with my kids. It is about a 2 1/2 hour drive to Phoenix from the ranch. Really, it is an easy drive down through Chino Valley and Prescott.
While in Phoenix (a gorgeous 70 degrees), we had dinner with the kids…which was really a great time and then on Saturday drove to Scottsdale to visit with Sherlaee’s sister. Great weekend all the way around. We headed back up to the ranch about 1pm.
We arrived at the ranch, and there were a few clouds, but definitely warmer, I think low 50’s. So nice. While in Phoenix, the kids had gotten us some very cool ‘outdoor’ type of things, but one item is this blow up solar light, that has multiple colors. It is so light, and you can hang it anywhere. We experimented that night.
It was just so cool, to sit there and have the green or blue light on while the fire was going. The pictures don’t really do it justice!!!! Great gift!!!
Sunday, we had a couple smaller tasks we wanted to work on, one of which was composting, which meant the mobile pump in action again. One problem though, our water level a the compost bins was very low. We threw around some ideas, and we were going to try and get water out of the sink 35gal tank. I had a better idea….here we have 1550 gallons of water sitting there doing nothing, with more rain/snow on the way. Why not take some out to try and make a little room…turns out it was just barely any room, but still it was the thought of using that water.
Our first time using rain water collected in our tank!!!!
This worked AWESOME! We filled up some 5gal water jugs, and transported them over to the compost area, filling up our compost tank to the top. So very cool.
That was about it for this past weekend. It is nice to see some of the things we plan on, working out for us!!! Very very cool.