Feeling Low (Energy)

There is no two ways around it. Sometimes van life gets me down.  Take tonight for instance.  I am low on power.  It has been cold again and my engine battery seems unable to handle it.  I went to start the van last night so I could move to another part of town. I got one weak roll over.  Not enough to fire, and that was it.

Today over lunch hour I pulled the battery out again and brought it into my cubical to warm up and thaw out.  Always a cold finger freezing job when it is near zero.  Other people have a plant in their cube.  I have a DieHard.

Additionally, my house batteries are really low.  We had a nice clear and sunny Sunday.  But there was a foot of snow on my solar panels.  Not much collection happened that day.   Prior to that, and since, it has been cold and grey.

A thawing DieHard on my office floor.

When batteries get weak they can't handle the cold well.  They freeze and don't hold much power.  That is a bit of the cycle I am in here as well.  Even if I plug in to charge, if the batteries are half frozen they won't charge much.

I spent part of my workday today doing some research on small propane heaters.  It seems like I am going to have to somehow heat the house battery space.  But figuring out a way to do this and not get battery acid fumes inside the living space seems the trick.  But at the same time I have to come up with some solution that doesn't suffocate me by burning up all the oxygen in my small space.  So far I have not found the right answer.

I looked at the Little Buddy by Mr Heater.  The size was bigger than I really wanted but the area it wanted for clearance from flammable materials was the real deal killer for my situation.  I just don't have that much space.  There was another small propane heater that screwed on to the top of a one pound cylinder.  But it was built to point up at a 45 degree angle.  No way to change that and really I need to point down 45 not up.

Here is a way to feel even more crowded.
Stack up a bunch of boxes.

What I have done tonight is pull my slide out drawers and have them stacked by the side door.  I won't be warming the battery space but at least the space next to the batteries.  Hopefully that will be good enough to make some difference.

Right now is the lowest I have ever run down my batteries.  You shouldn't run them down to even 50% and I am sitting at 51%.  Some battery damage is likely to occur.  Tomorrow I have to get some sun or I have to get someplace where I can plug in and charge up.

All of this stuff is the harsh reality of van life.  Particularly cold weather van life that can get a person down.  Sometimes it just plain and simple isn't fun to be living in 63 square feet when it is -11 inches away, outside my steel walls. When a few other things go wrong, it all starts to pile up.

At least there is no shortage of white stuff!

Wait, It Gets Worse

So when I last wrote I was a day past the second coldest day of my lifetime. I was home for the weekend. I had the boiler running.  The house was warming up, the family was happy and everything was looking great. 

I was naive.

On Saturday I did my morning inspection and realized the house temperature wasn't really where I expected it to be.  We keep the kids-side of the house thermostat set to 59 degrees (they will work through our parenting in therapy when they get older) but this morning it was 55.  Sure, even with the really great furnace we have it takes hours to raise the house temperature by a few degrees but once there it does a really great job of holding it.  When I saw it was low I had an ominous feeling.

A radiator with a hairline crack running
almost the full length of one fin.  Research
tells me this can be filled with JB Weld.
It seems like a good summer project.

That feeling intensified when I got to the basement. The boiler panel read PR_0.  I have seen that once before. It means Pressure Zero.  Somewhere in the system there was a leak.  To find it I turned on the fill valve and walked around.  It didn't take long.  In a small room off the basement garage where it is our understanding the driver used to live, back in a time where our house employed servants, there was water gushing from a radiator.  It was a foot long split in the cast iron.

At this same time pressure on me was intensifying to get the water working in the kitchen sink.  This is also the families source of filtered drinking water and talk was happening about maybe the need to buy bottled water.  Something I consider fine out of necessity for an event but six people in a house can go through an environmentally unconscionable amount of bottled water in day to day living.

I had been running an electric heater in the sink basin for a few days, but it had just been so cold it couldn’t seem to un-thaw it.  I began to suspect the freeze-up was not actually in the basin but in the garage below the kitchen.  When I did further inspection I found that not only to be the case, but in a way it was lucky because the pipes, old fashion CPVC plastic had split and broken.  Both the hot and the cold.  If it had thawed out in the basement I would have had a real mess. Now added to my task list was re-plumbing the kitchen.  As much as the family wanted a working sink again, it wasn’t going to be a quick fix and getting the heat back on took precedence.

The Pex tubing where the radiator used to sit.

What I did to get around the radiator problem was to just bypass it.  I installed a 3/4” Pex line from the radiator input to its return.  Tightened the whole thing up and moved on.  The basement room would no longer have heat, which is going to cause us more trouble in the bathroom off our bedroom.  The plumbing there will be even more prone to freezing that it already is.  But at the time I didn’t know any way around it.  Since that time I have done more research and discovered a product called JB Weld.  A two part epoxy putty with enough flexibility to stay water tight through the expansion and contraction of the radiator.  I might write more about it later when I actually apply it.

There were two dead cars in my driveway.  I had to replace one battery and brought the other in to thaw out.  It was a long day but by the end of it I refilled the heating system with water.  Got the pressure back up.  Everything was holding water.  The house was beginning to warm up.  I had one bedroom prone to air bubbles in the system that wasn’t heating yet but I was feeling pretty good.  This whole freeze up was behind me.

I was naive.

The cold water pipe to the kitchen sink.
Lucky for me this pipe was still frozen.

Sunday morning I knew everything was fine.  I lounged.  I drank coffee.  I relaxed.  Basking in my confidence of surmounting every difficulty.  About ten we were planning lunch for the family and I went to the basement to grab something from the deep freeze.  What was that sound?  Gushing water?  Is someone running the wash machine?  I opened the laundry room door and discovered my state had added a new lake over the course of the evening.  Lake Laundry. The boiler was back to showing PR_0 and I had new problems.

When things freeze up, they take a very long time to unthaw.  What I didn’t realize is when the pipes froze they had large plugs of ice inside them.  With the basement just barely above freezing it took a long time for those ice plugs to thaw out.  When they did, the heating water could get to places it hadn’t been able to the day before.  Those places all had pipes that had broken in the freeze.  In my case, the cold water return pipe for the radiator in the garage had three broken spots in it.  In the process of discovering that I found the cold water pipe going to the laundry sink was cracked as well as both traps in the drain.  My wife had been bothering me to replace the sink for years, it looked to me like just as good a time as any.

I love how the Pex tubing can be color coded.

By Monday night with the handy plumbing assistance of my youngest daughter we had everything running again.  We used Pex tubing for all the new plumbing.  I drained out the radiator in the garage and determined it had not frozen.  For now that radiator is bypassed as well.   I will plan to hook it up in the summer as another heating zone.  A new laundry sink has been purchased.  We bought a two sided sink and I have cut out the center divider so we can use it as a dog washing station.  And, we have framed in a stud wall in the laundry room so we can insulate it this summer after I remove the window and replace it with some glass block.

So this freeze up was huge.  Record setting cold temperatures made for a record number of problems.  But I guess we got through it.

I love Pex tubing.  It is super quick to work with.  Really
easy to add things later.  And can handle freezing!

The sink with the center divider cut out.  

Trouble On The Home Front

I make no secret that I live on the frozen tundra of the northland.  The last few days the outside temperatures have been nothing short of brutal.  Meanwhile I’ve been cozy as all get out in my Big Van.  Going through a 20lb propane tank in about three and a half days.

Part of the reason for the rapid use is it has been too cold to even go do anything. Rather than walking downtown to visit a pub or go see a movie, I have just been just walking to the van and determining it is too cold to go back out.  So every night I am just hanging out in the van. Running the furnace and needing to keep it…sitting around playing guitar, doing some writing, or van planning... temperature rather than being able to lower it down to the sleeping under a pile of blankets setting.  So yeah, I am burning more propane.

Minus ten below floor temperature
under a few layers of sweatshirts.

The coldest outside air temperature for two nights was around minus thirty two degrees Fahrenheit.  Fairly calm the second night but the first night was very windy too. The BV was rocking! Like I said, sitting up on my bed I was plenty warm.  The floor though was cold.  Particularly in spots.  By the side doors, which as it turned out, were on the windward side.  Around those doors it was very cold and drafty. I put my big coat on the floor in this area.  That helped a lot.  Under my table, which is at the back of the side doors, I threw down several sweatshirts.  Later in the night I checked the floor temperature back there and it was minus ten under those shirts.   I had no idea sweatshirts were such good insulators. 

I thought this was cold.  ...This
was not cold.  It went down another
five degrees.

By the back doors there always seems to be a gentle breeze on my face when I am sleeping.  These two nights of course this breeze has teeth.  I took to wearing a hooded sweatshirt as part of my night attire.  I woke up at one point and felt my nose trying to determine if it could be getting near frostbite temperature. …I don't think it was but it was cold enough for me to decide to roll over.

All of this must sound really miserable, but it is just my life right now.  I look it all as an adventure, and as Bilbo Baggins would tell you, adventures always have some rough patches.  Nasty uncomfortable things, adventures.

But my van life is only half of the life I live.  At the opposite end of the spectrum from the sixty three square feet I live in five days a week is the sprawling manse I live in the other two.  A big old one hundred and ten year old structure I am sure on my deathbed will be the pinnacle of cool places I have dwelled.

When the salty road ice freezes on your tires.

As I lay sleeping one of those awful cold nights my phone rang at four AM.  When I saw the caller ID I knew this could not be good news.

The Wife said the kids were complaining about being cold in their rooms earlier when they went to bed. But what can you expect?  It was only two degrees shy of the coldest temperatures I had ever lived through.  Given the size of the house, we are cheap how we heat it.  The kitchen and our office/bedroom we keep around seventy.  But the rest of the place, including the kids bedrooms we keep 59.  Add wind and sure they complain some.  She didn't think anything of it.

It was the four AM call to nature when she remembered she had not reopened the dining room doors.  Those doors hide the thermostat and we have discovered in the past will throw off the whole house temperature.  She walked to the other side of the house to open them and discovered the kids were not lying.  The house temperature was 43 and the furnace was not running.

We did some debugging over the phone to no avail.  You know, the normal stuff you try.  We power-cycled it a couple of times.  She got some boots on and went outside to check the air intake and exhaust for obstruction.  No joy.

Low sun cresting just over the fence top
at eleven in the morning.

This didn't seem like a situation that would wait until the weekend so I took a day off.  I have a friend who is a plumbing - heating guy and so I am able to call him up for some advice from time to time.  He suggested the trouble was in my flame sensor and told me how to go about pulling it out and cleaning it.  I had to call him back a few minutes later when I pulled the sensor out and a gush of water came out of the hole.

So here is what happened.  The basement got very cold.  As in very, very cold. The condensation pipe coming out of the bottom of the boiler has a trap in it just like a sink drain.  I suppose that keeps bugs from climbing up inside the burn chamber during the summer.  With the cold basement temperature the trap filled with water froze up.  The condensation could no longer drip out.

I hooked up an electric heater to blow on this area while I was cooking supper and about an hour later it drained.  I still cleaned up the flame sensor before I put it all back together.  But then the boiler lit right up.  It took about five hours to heat this barn back up.  Two rooms aren't getting any heat.  I expect the radiator pipes might frozen.  Now with the heat back on they should thaw out.

What a condensation tube trap looks
like and how it changes your life.

That was one crisis abated.  The kids bathroom was frozen up. That is a common occurrence.  It freezes up if it gets below twenty.  In fact we joke we can tell you the outdoor temperature based on what plumbing is frozen in the house.  Still though, setting new records breaks new records. 

As I sit here tonight four of the five bathrooms are frozen up.  The kitchen sink both hot and cold and the laundry room are all without water… So I will have a busy day of it tomorrow and look forward to warmer days ahead.

The flame detector re-installed in my boiler.