Sunday, May 3, 2009

Watering Treehaven (may 3rd addendum)

Wow... Well, Spring has arrived here in the wilderness, and it has hit Treehaven and we are all pretty happy. Today so far we have gathered 30 gallons of water to put into our big tanks! lol. I think Hubby has lost about 5 gallons of it when he transfers it from our gathering totes to the big holding tanks, which are now called A and B. :D It was pretty impressive when one rain squall that came through dumped about 10 gallons in EACH of the 3 totes we are using as collection barrels in less than 30 minutes.

With rain in our forecast for the next week (at least) I am thinking we may just be able to fill up both A and B sometime before Friday. This is a good thing! With these tanks full that takes our major items of consideration only gas and propane!

Next time we go into town we'll add another large propane tank... Or perhaps a few small ones. I am completely torn as to what to get. The small 25 lb tanks only last about 24 hours on our propane fireplace/heater. the 40 lb tank lasts almost 4 days. And the very large 80 lb tank lasts almost 12 days. But we can't use the two larger tanks on our cook stoves. When we switch over to a woodstove, then it will make it so we won't have anything to use the large tanks on and I'll just have those to trade off. Maybe I can find someone who will take these two large tanks in trade for a woodstove? It's a quandry that I just don't know what to do. but I DO KNOW that until we get the woodstove in that I'll have to get more propane here at the homesite.

A woodstove will run us $200.00 to $2,500.00 depending on if I can find one used or new and it also depends on the size of the woodstove. We have 840 SF (we found out our trailer is 14 feet wide, by 60 feet long. This measurement does not account for inner walls, cupboards, toilets or whatever that would detract from the measurement of square footage) so we would need a medium sized woodstove. A large woodstove would work too, we would just need to be sure not to load it with too much fuel or we would have to open windows. lol. Beleive me, I have no problem with putting in a used woodstove, so long as there were nothing wrong with the stove.

Gas is also still needed for charging Tim (the battery), the laptops, and other items we have that are rechargeable. So I am still pondering ways to safely (or more safely at least) keep some more gas here on the homesite. Currently we have 2 - 5 gallon containers and 2 - 2 gallon containers. Whenever we go out we fill up whatever we have empty and the truck. If we need it that way we can always siphon it from the truck and that would give us about 10 - 12 gallons of storage there. 10 gallons of gas get us about 7 days.

Anyway. I started writing to tell you about the rain and the water storage and I am kind of digressing. lol. We were told that there were LOTS of thunderstorms in the spring up here, so far (knock on wood) we haven't had any. But I am sure that we'll see them. Spring still isn't all that springy... yet! lol. We'll have to see what the future brings.


Later everyone!

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