Still Chuggin'...albeit slowly

Four days in the saddle and we're a bit sore, but I think we're finally starting to get stronger.  Yesterday we emerged from the rain forest and found the coast.  Wow! 

Lessons learned:

1. Use sunscreen...even if it's cloudy. Whoops.
2. Sandflies don't suck that bad...per Bill. Cass still thinks they're pretty awful.
3. Tomato sauce (ie: ketchup) is not a commodity to be taken for granted. We were reminded of that by a very friendly Kiwi who served us tomato sauce on the side of our fish 'n chips, for no extra charge! "I don't do this for everybody," he said. He runs his own dairy (small convenience store) and used to be a fisherman; so it was with great enthusiasm that he explained that the meal we were about to consume was elephant fish: funny looking but delicious. 
4. NZ uses 80% of the world's supply of the neurotoxin 1080. It's meant to kill possums, and is dropped from the air, but apparently it gets in the surface water supply. We didn't realize this until we'd downed several bottles of water we'd filtered from the above waterfall. We've not yet felt the effects...

 

Kiwi Road Trip

We made it to NZ! Only 7 short flights, one naked bus ride, and 60 miles into our biking tour, and we're feeling great! Currently we're in Westport at a hip little backpacker's hostel called Bazil's and have an internet connection.

 

 

 

 

Lessons learned so far:

1. Sandflies suck. They are like quiet, sneaky mosqitoes (just like black flies for you northern Mainers).
2. Never pack a bicycle helmet in checked luggage. Cassie's got crunched.
3. When crossing a road, look right, then left. Then stay on the left.
4. Pack less.
5. When someone says there are good pies down the road, they don't mean apple...they mean meat...and they are good!

The biking has been pretty easy so far. No major climbs. There's no shoulder to speak of, but drivers have been courteous and given us plenty of space. No flats so far. Bikes are working well. Everyone we've met has been really friendly and accomodating, even the bus drivers. One couple invited us into their camper for roadside coffee and cookies. They're from Christchurch and filled us in on the destruction there since the earthquake. Sounds pretty brutal.  

Tomorrow 62 miles to Greymouth...

"The Girl-Child" returns

Finally, some snow! Thanks to La Nina, it dumped about a foot last night. This link takes you to the NOAA Western Regional Climate Center, and explains how the ocean causes this cool phenomenon.

The chickens have done surprisingly well, considering it's been several degrees 

below zero, and I have no heat source in the coop (above photo). I've seen an 

occasional frost-bitten comb, but overall the ladies are very tough. 

Getting out the two miles of unplowed, unmaintained dirt road was a little hair-raising, but the good old Ford got it done, with a little help from 4L. The VW, however, won't be going anywhere for a while....

Hot Cuppa Joe

One of the toughest appliances for me to lose when we moved off the grid was a microwave. I can never seem to drink a cup of coffee before it gets cold. So Bill built me a cup warmer. Here it is: tuna fish can and tea light. 

Toasty Warm Feet with Energy to Spare!

Stewie has warm feet too!

For the past couple of weeks I have been working on re-configuring our propane boiler to make our in-floor radiant heat more efficient. I have been pondering how to do this for quite some time. The problem is, the original water pumping system was very inefficient. In fact, using the propane boiler with the original pumps to heat the house roughly doubled our electrical usage. And of course we need the boiler at a cold time of year when we have the least amount of energy to spare. Up until now, we've used our wood stove solely to heat the house. But now we have the option for toasty floor heat too. Here's how...

Originally, the boiler was configured with 3 circulating pumps: one pump circulated water through the boiler itself, and the other 2 pumps circulated water through each of 2 zones in the house. Each of the pumps was oversized for our heating system - they pumped a lot more water than they needed to and each consumed ~85 watts for a total of 265 watts. Our hot water pipes are stapled up under our floor. Since the pipes aren't embedded in the floor, not very much of the heat gets transfered into the floor and much of it gets returned to the boiler. Since the heat transfer is so slow into the floor, there is no point in pushing the water through the pipes this quickly.

So, I started looking into some lower flow solutions that would use less energy. The first thing I did was calculate the amount of water we need to move. (Thanks to folks on the following forum for helping me out with the calculations: Terry Love DIY Forum)

BTU requirements:
We live in a cold area, but our house is extremely well insulated. Walls and ceiling are both > R40. Our house is 1300sq ft and is designed for passive solar (If it's above 0F, we don't need supplemental heat until the sun goes down). For my calculations, I used a heat requirement of 60,000BTU/hr, but I think this is definitely overkill.

Flow requirement:
The heating array is made up of (60) 30' lengths of 1/2" pex for a total length of 1800'. These are divided into 7 different loops of 257' each. Each loop is responsible for 8500BTU/hr. Assuming a 20 degree temperature drop, then the flow through each loop should be 0.85 gal/min. Total flow for all 7 loops combined is 5.95 gal/min.

Next, I needed to calculate how hard the pump would have to push (in feet of head) to move that much water through our pipes.

Head Calculation:
Assuming 0.03 ft of head per foot and a loop length of 257ft, the total head is 7.71ft. This only needs to be calculated for one loop. The fact that we have multiple loops in parallel doesn't mean the pump has to push any harder, it just needs to push more water.

So, I finally started shopping around for pumps. Three pumps for our system is overkill. There isn't much benefit in having multiple zones, and one pump can easily handle the whole system. The first pump I looked at was 24V dc pump from Ivan labs that we could run directly off our battery system: Ivan Labs El-Sid. The pump consumes about 10W but it doesn't move very much water: only about 3gallons per minute at 3 feet of head, so it would require 2 or more pumps to meet the needs of our system. At almost $300 per pump, the price was going to add up rather quickly. Finally, I stumbled upon the following article: Grundfos Alpha Case Study. This pump has multiple speeds, very low power consumption (15-45W) and our flow requirements fall right in the center of it's capabilities.

With a lot of help from folks online and a local plumber at R&R pumps in Helena I decided to dive in with both feet and do the installation myself. It took a bit of practice to get used to solder 1 1/4" copper pipe, but with a second propane torch and some help from Cassie we finally got the new pump installed. Last night was our first trial run, and...

IT WORKS!!!

The pump has a digital readout, so we can easily tell how
much energy it's using and how much water it's pumping at any time.

By installing the new pump, we lowered our energy consumption from 265W to 20W! That is 13 times less energy! Even if we ran the pump all day, it would only use 480W-Hours of energy. The previous setup would used 6360W-hours for a full day of use -- we don't even produce that much electricity on a good day in the winter. We are still in the trial stages -- I may need to push a little more water through the system to meet our needs, but I have the flexibility with this pump to do that if necessary. 

Here is what the boiler looks like now.
It looked like a rat's nest of piping before
the conversion too.  

We still don't really like the idea of heating with propane and will probably continue to primarily heat with wood, but it's really nice to have the option and know that we can leave the without our batteries dying and our pipes freezing. Eventually, we plan to install solar hot water heater. At that point we can use the same pump to heat the floors -- sans propane!

Count Down

Only 18 more days until we take off on our next biking tour. We set big ambitions this year, planning to bike the west coast of the south island of New Zealand. Time constraints, excessive mileage, and significant elevation gains prompted us to scale back our original plan. However, our route is still pushing our limits (we think), with an average of 45 miles per day and several passes to climb. But even with the cut backs, we'll still get to pedal the majority of the west coast. Here's our planned route, from Murchison to Queenstown:

We were inspired to do this route by a fun book we picked up in Portland's Powell's Books some years ago. It's called Bicycling Along the World's Most Exceptional Routes. It's basically a compilation of rides put together by different tour groups--a coffee table book with pretty pictures, without the technical, nitty-gritty details of the rides, but it's given us plenty of ideas. We'll keep you posted with pics and updates along our journey.