The first winter here has been hard. We are able to keep our house between 50 and 70 which is fabulous. It’s been a struggle and has cost us more than we would like (which has pushed some of our proposed improvements back a bit), but we have been more comfortable than we have been in several winters.
The current struggle has been between keeping the electric on and the water pipes thawed. This winter has been unusually cloudy, which has not helped keep our batteries charged. We have a generator but it has been having a tough time connecting to our inverter properly. It will start charging the batteries and then the inverter kicks it off charge. We should hopefully have the issue fixed in the next week, but for now we have had to have nightly blackouts where we turn off the inverter and turn it back in in the morning.
Due to these blackouts we haven’t been able to run our pipe heater when the temperature gets below freezing. Every few days we have to thaw out the pipes. Thankfully it’s only happened on nights when the temperature gets over 40 the next day or when the sun is out enough to run the heater during the day.
The plan for this year is to get a wind turbine connected to the batteries. That was always the plan but it wasn’t in the budget of things we could get done before we moved in. Once we get that hooked up we should have no issue running the heater all night.
I am not a fan of winter.
