No. Kelly Blue Book still gives a value of over $8,800 for the car. This one has a new battery. Should be good for another 100,000 miles. It's been kept in excellent shape.



I look forward to the days when I don't have to commute at all.

Have finally taken possession of the new property and have had a very productive couple of weeks. Got the garage/shed concreted, dam scoped out, furniture and stuff delivered and unpacked. Sourced tv and computer and got connected (not always easy in the country). Water tanks are full and have worked out additions required with minimum plumbing needed. Constructed, filled and planted out 5 vege boxes. Moved plants from existing pots to bed and replanted. Made contact with neighbours and engaged their kids to water garden for pocket money. Mum is on the water board and dad is the local ranger. Very nice people and extremely helpful. Sourced new wood fire and have started chopping and woodchipping big tree that has fallen down. Done some soil tests and determined spot for fruit trees. Investigated local source for posts and wire to prepare for espalier trees to be planted next year. And a million other little things that needed to be done. It all went so well to plan I kept waiting for something disastrous to happen! Still a very long way to go but it was a great start.

turner,

Great progress there! Keep up the good work!

Daughter is working on her own design of a VERY cheap solar box heater, and having very good results. The basis is a 4 x 8 sheet of foil faced foam insulation board, with polycarbonate film covering, put together with aluminum foil duct tape. Out put in full sun is over 140 deg. F.

Using the greenhouse covering material (hollow core polycarbonate, 8 mm thick), they got 170 F. before they turned on a muffin fan to coll it off lest it melt something! 600 CFM fan, 110 V., gave output temps of around 140 F. Cost of materials was around $100. $70 of that was the polycarb sheet. Fan cost not included. Serious heat coming out of this thing!

I have 6 sheets of the foam board, and plan to use it in our sunroom, vertical inside the windows, for a passive setup. Will post results as available. Looking into using offset printing sheets (.007" aluminum) with Birchwood Casey's Aluma Black coating, as a heat absorber, the thin aluminum being fan folded to increase surface area. By making the folds with the creases vertical, I hope to improve performance without tracking the sun. Our initial trials are promising, just using the foam board with the foil spray painted black with high temp exhaust paint, and getting a 100+ deg. F. output in a WEST facing window!

Will post results as available.

Daughter and hubby came by to get their two 180 watt solar panels today. They should have them operational in a few days, and reduce their generator usage. They don't have their tracking unit together yet, but some power from the panels is more than NO power from them, so up they go, as is. That made a bit more room in my basement, too.

Lots on their list to do right now. they just got new flooring down in their kitchen, and have a gas water heater to install as part of a heating system that includes a wood fired boiler. They just got some their batteries installed in an insulated container with a muffin fan for power venting when charging. The batteries will be EITHER plugged into the solar panels, OR the generator to totally eliminate problems with backfeeding. The standby generator is one they built, that can do constant voltage, or constant current, as required. It has a 2 HP gasoline engine that uses a quart of fuel/hour, and can easily do 30 amps at a little over engine idle speed, with a Delco 60 amp alternator. They are totally off-grid, but use so little power that the generator was cheap enough alone. With solar panels, the generator won't run hardly at all.

I wired the breaker panel into the barn tonight, then drove a ground rod for it, and got stopped for lack of daylight. Might get back to that tommorow.

Garden is still making salad greens and radishes, volunteers from the summer crop that reseeded itself. The chickens are benefitting from the late greens, too, and my wife transplanted some into pots to go on the sunporch for winter salads. In the past 10 days, our 6 hens laid 58 eggs, or 96.6%, and the days are getting shorter. I think all the windows in the hen house help them get enough light to trigger laying. That natural light might be enough, but if production drops off in winter, I'll wire up a light on a timer to lengthen their day.

I am in the process of up-armoring our maple sugarhouse. I just built a 2x4x3 foot box of sand for protection of the evaporator and whoever is feeding it. Am installing 1/4" plate steel on the door. We also put lexan on the windows and got lights and cameras.

I sound paranoid, but it's been shot up 3 times in the past year.

It's fun to learn about this stuff, but not so fun to be targeted.

The permit for the sugar house came in the mail today. Good thing as the concrete for the floor slab is coming tomorrow afternoon. 5 1/2 cu.yards on top of seven yards of 3/4 stone over fifty yards of bank run gravel.

vtsnowedin,

That is an impressive foundation! Is it a problem area for supporting a building?

We are blessed/cursed with red clay and rocks here. You can build about anything you want on that with nothing more than a modest concrete footer and it will be as stable as the pyramids. But, when you try to make a garden here, that is a different matter. That's when the heavy equipment comes out.

That sounds like it will be a nice foundation. Ours is seeming a little small at 12x28 with a 12 foot woodshed. We were constrained by the site and the fact that it's hard to haul wider than that on the road. Have you checked out my other favorite website, mapletrader? I'm revi on that forum too.

Frost here goes six feet deep on anything that is unheated or not covered by snow. You don't heat a sugar house through the winter so the foundation is completely frozen. Then you fire up the rig in March and thaw the whole shebang in one day. You don't want the rig to go out of level as they run most efficiently at a low level of sap in the pans and if you have a high corner you have to raise the level to keep that corner wet at all times or the fire will burn through the pan in seconds.
The site is Vt. side hill and used to be the barn yard with one of the barn foundations inside the foot print of the building. I disassembled the old stonewall foundation and moved it and the fill behind it to the low side sorting out organic material as I found it and placing it outside the limits of buildings load. I cut down to bedrock on the high side and had four feet of fill on the low. Then I capped it with two loads of bank run and a half load of stone. I had to build a driveway through the old foundations to get the concrete truck to the slab. The slab is 20 feet by 14 feet and the rig is just 8 feet by 3 feet. Plenty of room to work around it. I plan a 14x12 woodshed on the south end and poured concrete in post holes for the corner posts and set in a post bracket for each. The truck came yesterday at 1:30P.M. and the pour went pretty well but it was only 34 deg F with some wind so the concrete just sat there. I didn't get the final floating done and the hay and plastic on it until 10:00P.M. This morning it was 20 outside at dawn but the crete was 50F.

Not yet but I will.

Today I recycled the household collection of crushed aluminum cans at a local dealer that also sells split oak firewood. Was credited over $22 for the aluminum and I had $13 of cash from aluminum recycled earlier this year, so I essentially got a $30 stack of firewood for free. I did NOT use my Honda Insight for this task today.


I picked up four more 10' long 3/4" pvc pipe on the combined-errand trip in the F-150. I'm continuing the work on the rainwater plumbing to the greenhouse.

Did some wiring in our little yard barn, preparing for cold weather. I need to be able to run a de-icer water heater for the chicken house. The building is well insulated, and I'm letting a manure pack build up to help, so I don't think it will take much heat. The thing has a thermostat that only kicks on at 35 F. anyway, at 150 watts. I plan to put a watthour meter on it to see what it uses, and thus if I need it at all. A wrapping of foil/bubble wrap might help, too, with some sheet metal outside of that to keep the curious chickens from chewing on it.

The henhouse is staying about 20 deg F. over outside temps now, daytimes, with one window OPEN for ventillation, so I can close it up and gain a lot of solar heat, just venting a couple times a day for fresh air, It has 5 windows, 3 on the east, and 2 on the south, 32" x 60" each, in a 6 ft. x 12 ft. building, LOTS of solar gain there, and 3" of styrofoam in the walls to keep the heat in.

We had some mice manage to get into the sunporch and chewed on my drying seed corn. I set traps (cheap Chinese) and finally caught one, but mostly, they ate the bait and never set off the traps. Two of the traps vanished. ???? Yesterday I bought some good ole Victor US made traps and caught 2 right away! They have a hair trigger! And I greased it to make it more sensitive. (HARD to set without going off.) And, I tied the traps to a steel table leg with monfilament line, so they didn't run away with them. No need, though, it kills them dead, no problem.

A friend tells me that the best mousetrap he ever used was a tall 6 gallon plastic bucket, with a little grain in the bottom for bait. He provided a small board ramp for them to climb up, and once tempted into the bucket, they couldn't jump high enough to get out. He got 13 in one night! I gotta try that one!

He says if you never saw chickens play football, toss the live mice you catch in the chicken pen.... My wife thinks that is sicko, but I am pretty burned about my seed corn. We have a bumper crop of mice this year. Hardware store sold out of traps and bait a couple times already, and my 6 cats are working overtime on the problem. Cuts down on the cat food consumption anyway....

Our four cats like to trade their mice for cat food or catnip. If you don't accept their offer they will leave you part of a mouse where you are sure to step on it barefoot when you get out of bed in the morning. They hunt all the time but it doesn't save any on cat food.
Our hens are up to ten eggs a day. I have lots of work to do snugging up their coop for the winter but its a bit down the list of priorities. I will have to work it in between sugar house, woodpile and hunting.
I went up to hunting camp (Plan C) the other day and found that some stupid idiot (me) left the water turned on last spring and a drizzling leak has soaked the floor and sheet-rock in the kitchen area of the camp. Black mold and all, what a mess. Opening day next Saturday and the guys will be up. I'm going to spread them around between my daughters house and mine so no one has to sleep with the mold.
Going to rip out the damage today and see how far I have to go back, At least three sheets of floor plywood.

I posted some info on industrial auctions on the page linked here:

http://peakoil.com/post955321.html#p955321

For anyone looking for machine tools or industrial equipment, it may help.

I found a 1924 book called "Fresh Air Poultry Houses" and built my coop accordingly. Basically, a coop with the entire front open to the air, covered only with some hardware cloth to keep the predators out. According to the book, chickens can handle cold pretty well (some minor frostbite to their crops may happen in extreme weather). So I am not worried about keeping them warm.

I had my last two flocks in open air chicken tractors for two years with no problems. The only reason I went to a coop was the weasels learned how to get into the tractors and killed them all in one night.

Obviously, living on the Puget Sound, I don't get a whole lot of sub zero weather. However, the book showed these open air coops in use in Canada where they get a lot of freezing weather.

So I would not sweat getting the insulation installed on the coop.

http://tinyurl.com/ybq84zg