so this sent me down the road of trying to research potential alternatives to a
generator
the knob is frozen again so even though this is a frost-free hydrant I found
that this knob freezes up when it gets really cold hey luckily I've got a way
to fix this
nice and toasty so right here is the plumbing line where
it goes to that house just take our hot water bottle into place just right here
so you got the hot water bottle sitting right on top of the plate if I just give
it about 15 minutes or so that knob will be nice and thawed so while I wait for
that to thaw out I'm gonna go downstairs and check on the cats because the
weather was sub-zero again I decided to keep them in the basement
our house was built in 1835 and we've got the basement to prove it it's got a
stone foundation and a dirt floor really old school hey Pablo how's it going good
so our house was built in 1835 and it's been one of those things where even
though it was built in 1835 it hasn't been frozen in 1835 we still have you
know remnants of the stone foundation down here and then you'll even notice
here when we were doing a lot of our work on the house in 2017 we poured
footers like this and put it in stabilization like this and the LVL that
you see right there and did a lot of that work to really stabilize the house
because there was a lot of problems with it the house had been expanded from
one-and-a-half stories to two and a half stories and they'd never done the
structural support necessary but like even if you look at the joist work and
inner workings of our house you can notice it's a mix of old and new I mean
you can see this here this is an old hand hewn beam that was put in place
gosh nearly 200 years ago but then you'll see this support beam that was
put in that was something that we put in only about two years ago you'll notice
that we have like pecs lines running through for our heat and hot water
system we have propane tanks we have water softeners we have kind of all the
standard stuff you would have in a modern house here's the remnants of oil
tanks from an ancient oil burner system that we have we ultimately ended up
replacing that with propane to fuel our flat panel radiators and even when it
comes to the electrical we did a lot of replacement work there used to just be
all old knob-and-tube wiring down here and we put in a modern system but all
the improvements that we've made down here arguably the coolest has been the
addition of these tesla powerwall x' look at that futuristic green glow
these are our backup batteries they are the tesla powerwall twos we have two of
them so the origin of these guys is this we live in an area that gets power
outages a lot you know we're very rural there's lots of above-ground lines we
get lots of wind lots of ice storms lots of possibilities about falling trees and
and so the odds of us getting power outages are very high in fact you know I
think you know the first year or so we have the house I think we had about
seven different outages some of them only last for a couple of
hours but there's been others that have lasted for days because of this
situation it means that we need some sort of auxiliary power beyond the power
lines that we have coming in up from off the street and as I was researching the
decision of what to get you know the immediate thing that people usually go
to is oh you need to get a generator generators are a great tool that can be
used in a variety of ways when powers need them so you get a generator and you
have it either fueled by propane or gasoline and you hook it up to your
house and that becomes your backup power but the problem that I've found with
generators is that they are pretty expensive just in and of themselves they
take a lot of work to install you've got to maintain them and you got a there's a
lot of work to do from a maintenance perspective they're loud and noisy we
either have to hook it up to our propane system which already fuels our heating
system or we would have to get gasoline and figure out ways to store the
gasoline none of those things are very attractive to me
so this sent me down the road of trying to research potential alternatives to a
generator and one of the first things that I came up with was the tesla
powerwall yeah so I know Tesla is this sort of flashy company and I'm not
necessarily a huge fan of Elon Musk he's what every billionaire aspires to
beat
that's what the supervillain does yeah elongated muskrat but when it comes down
to it the tesla powerwall is a pretty cool product so the principle that we're
using with these tesla powerwall z' is not that different than if you had like
one of these like backup power banks and you'd like hook it up to your cell phone
to charge it now boom see all right now it's charging it's essentially the same
principle these things are just giant storage batteries and if you lose power
your house is gonna draw in these things to keep everything running now a common
myth that is out there is that you need to have solar panels to actually work
with the tesla powerwall that is completely untrue in fact you don't need
that at all you can just draw down energy from the power grid so you know
get it from your electric company fill these guys up keep them stored keep them
already charged and then when your house loses power they kick in automatically
and then that becomes what runs things and the nice thing is too you can
actually control when these things will draw power and so if your power company
has peak metering where they're charging more money during certain times of day
like you know peak usage periods you can draw out the opposite of those times so
you can get the cheapest possible price per kilowatt for these things
the other cool thing with the tesla powerwall is we do intend to get solar
power in the near future and when we do we can use these as batteries for that
as well these things will last for us based on our household energy
consumption at sort of a normal rate with the two batteries we can actually
get about nine days worth of usage out of it that numbers gonna depend a lot
for you guys on how you use your your energy at your house obviously if we're
gonna be trying to use our electric dryer to dry clothes for eight hours a
day that's not gonna last nearly as long but if you're thoughtful and you're
conservative you can get a pretty good long stretch of things but now as we've
seen you can get natural disasters that could knock you out for much longer than
two weeks and now it'll be months before most of
the island has electricity again I know that some folks out there who have a
strong preparedness mindset would say I'm crazy but I'm one of those people
who likes to play the odds a little bit I think that it's really important when
you're thinking about preparedness to balance both the
probability of something happening with the expense that it takes to mitigate it
and let those two things drive some of your decision-making and just don't look
from one side of that or the other you gotta keep things in balance they are
quiet the maintenance is like nothing they are easy to use
I don't need an additional fuel source or system I don't need to house it
outside our house and maintain that and keep snow off of that I just leave it
down here in the basement and you know check on it maybe every couple of weeks
so from that standpoint these things are awesome in terms of the drawbacks let's
talk about the drawbacks I guess number one they have a lifespan so you know
you're not gonna get more than a decade out of these things and as they get
older and older they get less and less effective the other major drawback that
exists with the tesla powerwall is cost I believe these things retail for about
6 grand apiece you're probably gonna spend about another thousand bucks or so
to get them installed we actually didn't spend that much money though because our
power company Green Mountain Power here in Vermont had a program running where
they were trying to get homeowners to buy these things because they wanted to
try to level out the energy consumption in the region a little bit so it cost
about $3,000 to get both of them put in when you think about that compared to
the price of a generator they actually ended up being about the same cost so if
you're out there researching whether or not to get a generator or look for some
other alternative I would strongly encourage you to think about the tesla
powerwall it's been great for us so far we've had
it for about nine months and it's worked really well all right
I've got to go outside and get water to our ducts they are probably thirsty
they've been looking at a block of ice probably for the last nine hours and
they want their morning water
if you guys have questions or comments about the tesla powerwall or power walls
versus generators or other alternatives to generators be sure to leave them down
below in the comments I'm really curious to hear what you guys think and I will
see you next time here at Gold Shaw Farm where we're trying to build an
innovative farm here in Vermont thanks