Hello Everyone!

A brief introduction: Hi I am Jacob.

TL;DR: There is no tl;dr because you should have more patience and attention span than a gnat on a high wind.

Apocalyptic Homesteading Day 11!

Cleaning Up Dirty Power The Easy Way, Electricity Usage, Burning Brush, Relocating The Bar & Solar Crypto Mining

I managed to sleep in a bit this morning and although I woke up several times since one thirty-four it was really nice to fall back asleep each time and continue dreaming. Although I was rather groggy each time that I awoke I did manage to glance at the clock and see that each time that I woke up it was at precise one hour increments. I have no idea why that occurs but it (and waking at around one-thirty to two in the morning) each day seems to be a new pattern of mine. At first I thought it (the sleep cycle) was because I am at a new place but now I am inclined to think that it has much more to do with my recent work cycle often leaving me falling asleep either just before the sun sets or soon afterwards. All in all I actually like the new rhythm of my days (and nights) but like I have said before waking up at around two in the morning each day is a wee bit early even though it leaves me with plenty of time to accomplish my morning writing. This morning though I did not actually rouse myself from bed until around five-thirty and whoa I am feeling well rested because of it.

Since it was quite the rainy day I wound up spending the early portion of the day (until nearly ten o'clock) cooped up in the tent and staying out of the bad weather. After finishing all the morning writing and publishing though I did not have a whole lot to do indoors so I decided to tackle an issue that I have been having with the grid power here being a bit dirty and causing a bunch of 'hum' in my devices. I wound up digging through my stuff in the storage tent and finding that uninterruptible power supply that I modified with a heat-sink, a cooling fan and the ability to connect a large external battery to it what seems like ages ago now but in reality was only a little shy of four years ago. The unit itself has a power conditioning circuit in it and I wanted to test it to see if it alone would clean up the 'hum' from the grid power here which actually worked so I connected my last remaining good true deep cycle battery to it (just in case the grid goes down) and plugged everything into the uninterruptible power supply.

I also dug out my digital meter and put it inline before the unit just so that I can continue tracking my grid power usage. I thought about resetting the meter just so that I could start it from zero here at the new location but upon further consideration I decided to just write down the number on the top of the meter that it was already at from my previous adventure because I like the idea of tracking my usage over a long period of time just for the sake of good statistical data. Over the four hundred and forty-odd day period of my last adventure I had used only one thousand six hundred and thirteen point eighty-seven kilowatt hours of grid power which is not too damned shabby considering that most households in this country use on average around nine hundred to one thousand kilowatt hours of electricity per month. Basically I used what the average household uses in a two month period over a fourteen month span which is pretty damned good in my opinion and that number would probably be much smaller if it did not include running all the power tools that I ran to build the shelter, the greenhouse and the chicken coop at the last place.

Anyway, by the time that I finished all that jazz the rain had slacked off so I got my work clothes on, filled some containers with water and loaded them and a shovel into the big wagon and hauled everything over to the new shelter site so that I could set to work raking back the leaves again, digging a fire-pit and begin burning the small mountains of brush that I had piled up over the last few days while doing all that chainsaw work clearing the site. The three piles of debris that I focused on burning were just too large to leave sitting around and the one in the middle of the site was just in the way so I wanted to get them all dealt with before I put a fence in and made the task difficult to accomplish. I still have several smaller piles around the site for wildlife habitat and for making bio-char with so getting rid of those big piles did not interfere with my long-term plans or anything. I was only interested in making ashes with what I was burning but because I burned everything so fast the ashes mounded up rather quickly as I kept adding new material to the fire, thus filling the fire-pit that I dug and I wound up with a bunch of low-grade bio-char anyway!

The work of burning all that material was quite labor intensive but along the way I also managed to move my bar further down the hill some (closer to the future cabin site) where I can later use it as a cutting-table when I am doing the cabin construction. I learned from the last place I was at that having a stout workbench/cutting-table to work on makes things a heck of a lot easier than trying to rely on sawhorses or doing all the cutting on the ground. Once the bar was setup I put all my music rig on it and played some music while continuing to work on the fire which was pretty nice and the new location of the speakers made for a nice sound in the valley below. At the top of the new shelter site (where I had the music previously) it was creating a lot of echo (due to the terrain) and the new location eliminated the echo and created a nice reverb sound which was pretty cool considering that my speakers are just mid-range speakers and do not produce a lot of bass. Once I get started on the construction I will of course have to move the music rig yet again but I am thinking that I might just bite the proverbial bullet and build a small bar (with a roof) out of some of the the oak that I harvested during the site clearing process just to house everything on a more long-term basis. We will see how all that turns out because currently I have enough projects going on to keep me busy without adding new ones to it along the way!

I should note here that getting the fire started was a bit of a bear because everything was soaking wet and I did not have much in the way of burnable paper/cardboard products to help get it started. I wound up collecting a bunch of leaves from under where the bar originally was (because it had been covered with tarps and everything was dry under it) and that along with lots of small pieces of 'fat lighter' (also known as pitch pine, lighter knot, fatwood and about a dozen other names), one large chunk of fat lighter, a bunch of small pieces of cherry wood, random small sticks and a liberal dousing of some two year old mixed fuel... I got it burning and whoa did that fat-lighter dry things out rather rapidly and made for a nice 'heart' to the fire for burning all the green material with. Just to be clear I do not really recommend using gasoline to start fires with but that old fuel (that needed disposed of anyway) sure worked rather well and the oil content (from the two-cycle oil in the mixed fuel) helped make it burn long enough to catch the dry leaves and fat lighter on fire and get them burning. Even with all that it took me nearly four times of dousing the fire with fuel to get it going because not only was everything super wet but also it was incredibly humid outside and was sprinkling rain on and off throughout the process!

All total it took me nearly ten hours to get the three big piles reduced to ashes (and inadvertently bio-char) and by the time I was ready to put the fire out it was nearly nine o'clock in the evening. It was quite the coal bank to try to extinguish with the nine gallons of water (plus the five gallon dog water bucket in the dog yard) so with the aid of one of the land owners I found several water hoses and ran water to the site to extinguish the coals and insure that the fire did not come back alive during the night. Aside from spraying the coal bank down with water I also used a shovel to churn the entire mass and make sure that I got all the coals extinguished. Having the fire in a pit sure helped because eventually the pit filled with water and I was able to slosh everything around in it with the shovel. Since the ground here has a few inches of loamy material near the surface I also thoroughly saturated the ground for about a meter around the fire-pit to help make sure that there was no subterranean fires burning. Basically the process of extinguishing the fire was just about as much work as getting it started in the first place but it was well worth it just for the 'safety' factor even though by then it was already sprinkling rain again and the woods were still quite damp.

Anyway, I guess that I do not have much to write about regarding the day's activities because I pretty much just spent my time tending a big fire, hauling brush to the fire and setting up that new bar/cutting-table. It is worth mentioning that to get electricity to the bar that I had to add another hundred foot extension cord to my existing two hundred feet of cord and because of that the music rig could not draw quite as many amps as I would like it to but hell it still sounded good so whatever! We are actually planning on running real power to the site soon and already got the wire to do it both ordered and received and just have to pick it up from the supplier and get the installation done. It is looking like I will (for the first time in a very long time) have not just 'real power' (as opposed to just using extension cords) to work with and I will also have a sub-panel with two hundred and forty volts in it to work with which probably is not all that exciting to most folks but absolutely wonderful for me because I can finally look at getting a decent welder (and perhaps a plasma cutter) to do metal work with.

As much as the grid power will be nice and all... me and one of the landowners have been discussing how to re-engineer the new shelter's roof system so that we can mount all the solar panels on it in a fixed position and I can set it all up as a backup power supply and as a source of power for my various crypto mining rigs. It is really challenging to explain to folks just how all that works out (producing electricity to mine crypto with) but thankfully that landowner totally gets it and has crunched the numbers on doing that sort of thing before so they know that it is not just some half-baked idea. We even discussed doing a much larger solar setup and how long it would take to pay it all off via the crypto mining which was pretty damn cool in my opinion because the more that they understand the more likely it is that eventually it will happen. I do dislike having to 'pitch' such ideas to folks in the first place but hell I have to start somewhere if I am ever going to get that project out of the 'idea' phase and into the 'actuality' phase and generating some much needed revenue each month. My current idea is to just use all the panels and batteries at my disposal to setup a 'proof of concept' mining rig and from there I think that we will get a much better solar installation all setup in short order because to be blunt the fucking math does not lie!

Well, it is now much later in the morning than when I try to have all this writing stuff wrapped up by and the sun is feebly shining through the cloud cover so I should probably call this one 'good enough' get all the editing/posting done and get the heck on with my day. I hope that folks are doing well and have a nice day/night or something like that and I will undoubtedly do the same.

More about me: I have been doing property caretaking (land stewardship) for many years (decades) and live a rather simple life with my dogs doing what most folks would consider to be an 'alternative minimalist lifestyle' but what I often just think of as a low-impact lifestyle where I get to homestead and spend the majority of my time alone with my dogs in the woods doing projects in the warmer months and taking some downtime during the colder months.

Nearly four years ago I began sharing the adventures (misadventures) of my life via writing, videos, pictures and the occasional podcasts and although my intention was to simply share my life with some friends it undoubtedly grew into much more than that over the years and now I find myself doing what equates to a full-time job just 'sharing my life' which is not even all that glamorous or anything but hey folks seem to enjoy it so I just keep doing it!

The way that I look at it is that I give it all my best each day and while some stuff I write is better than others I think that for the most part I do a pretty good job at doing what I am doing which is simply 'sharing my life' as candidly as I possibly can and whatever folks get (or do not get) from it there is always the satisfaction of me doing what I set out to do... which is to simply share my life.