Spent the night in the new house

The new house is - as every major project is - 95% done. All the major functionality is there, most of it is working and intented but there is a myriad of tiny little things that isn’t quite right or even needs to be redone.

So… Let’s get started and close the gate:

Then get organized a little bit. There are still quite a few leftovers from construction and many appliances are installed temporarily. There is also furniture missing and the whole place is a mess. However, that doesn’t matter for this test. Neither do the missing door trims or the doors themselves.

The next morning was quite chilly. I don’t have anything to tell me the outside temperature but the information from a weather station nearby. It said 0C. As you can see in the picture that sounds about right:

A look out the other bedroom window showed these guys having breakfast at dawn:

How did the test go you might ask. Well let’s see:

• I had a power failure early on because the whole day was foggy and the batteries were not charged. Using the gas powered generator solved that but the generator has a smaller power rating than the inverter of the solar system, which then led to the first outage due to overload.
• I had two electrical failures due to overload. The 3000W inverter is not enough. The water heater puts the system beyond the limit when it turns on while other consumers are drawing power. The water heater has a 100 liters tank that it keeps hot. It is efficient from a yearly consumption perspective but creates a problem in our setting as it can turn on at any moment and create an overload.
• When the power is out the pellet stove stops working as it needs current for its fans and to load pellets. A pellet stove is a nice idea to offset the high cost of utility power sold to you but if you make your own power the cost is fix and your worry is power generation and storage and not the monthly charge from the utility company.
• Water pressure is great, but it turns out we have a few leaks at some fittings.
• Turning off the pellet stove at bedtime gets you up at 5 AM to turn it back on. Every structure looses heat and the heat loss has to be compensated by some heat source. I think the house looses about 1 degree Celcius in 10 hours.

But then this view from the kitchen window made up for the “hardship”:

As the sun rose the solar system started to charge and these guys are making sure to warm up as well:

Now I have a list of things to fix or to improve and hopefully we will get to 100% done soon.

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