It’s about time for an update on what’s going on around here!
With the CoCoCo a thing of the past you would think that I would be busy with house by now…well…I’m actually just about ready to work on a wall for a change. August went by way too fast and I found myself tying up a few loose ends before getting back to the house.
If you recall, I’ve been working on and off with the local National Weather Service office designing a soil temperature probe that takes advantage of digital technology. I’ve been experimenting with the sensors for over a year now and had some successes and some failures. My failures were due to moisture getting into the probe and shorting out the sensors. Hopefully that problem has been fixed. Time will tell as the winter months are the hardest on soil temperature probes.
While working on the design of these probes, the local office asked if I would be interested in writing the software to get the probe to work with a data logger that gets used in the field to store and forward weather data up to the GOES weather satellites. It sounded like a fun proposition…so that’s what I did during the month of August. (With above normal temperatures, who wants to mix mortar in the hot sun anyway?)
Well…as it ended up programming the data logger was just about as much fun as mixing mortar on a 90 degree day with no wind and high humidity! It reminded me of the days when I wrote a few assembler language programs for the Z80 microchip—that was 25 years ago in the days of the TRS-80! Oh boy…what fun it was! When all things were said and done, the program worked just peachy and on September 6th, the NWS installed a soil temperature probe at their weather office along with the data logger that will log the soil temperatures.
We’ll now have to leave it run for at least 6 months to see how well it performs. If it ends up meeting their requirements, I might end up with a side-job of building soil probes for them. Only time will tell and I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
Cleaning out the Cistern In August I started noticing a slight odor to the water coming out of the faucets and decided it was time to clean out the cistern. I hadn’t cleaned it out for 18 months, so I was getting a little concerned about the odor, so I decided to investigate. Besides the odor, there was a slight discoloration to the water.
With my nifty, thrifty trash pump, the tank was emptied (almost) within an hour. All that remained was about an inch of water at the bottom. Getting that last inch out is not the most fun thing in the world to do since it requires me getting down inside the tank with a wet/dry shop vac and dumping containers of the water out as I manually suck up the water.
I was relieved to find not much gunk in the tank. There was the usual fine sediment at the bottom and a few stray worms—how they got in there I’m not sure, but nonetheless there were a few floating around. The most interesting object found in the tank was a tree root that managed to snake its way in through the manhole cover. It was quite thin, but big and hairy! I doubt this had caused the water odor, but who knows for sure.
I scrubbed and washed out the tank with a bit of bleach and sealed things back up for at least another 18 months. The stainless steel grease splatter screen that I have been using to “pre-filter” the water has done a decent job and I think I will leave the rain catchment system as is.
I had considered adding an above ground pre-fill tank that would overflow naturally if I was not there to control the valve to the cistern. The original plans had called for an above ground tank for this purpose, but so far I have had a hard time finding a tank at a reasonable price. I need something on the order of a 500 gallon tank to store enough water from a 1-inch rain.
The system I now have works, but I have to watch it when the cistern (below ground) gets nearly full. If it was to overflow, it can cause a big mess and some of the muddy water from the overflow might leach into the tank. Having an above ground tank eliminates this problem, but I consider it a nicety rather than a necessity.
I will say this…I sure do miss my rainwater. Until I can get a decent amount of rainwater back in the cistern, I have been using well water which contains quite a bit of iron and is quite hard. Hopefully, we should get enough rain over the next week so I can switch things back again. I sorely miss having rainwater.
Back to Work! Finally, I have started construction on the final walls to the interior of the house. To boot, I was able to land a good deal on an old but functional mortar mixer. I will be writing a separate journal entry about this new toy—it makes a big difference!
If all goes as planned, I should have only four walls left to do in the very near future. I don’t know yet if I will have time to get the remaining four walls done before winter though…I am so far behind on other things that have to get done before winter: split fire wood, fix a few rain gutters, install snow brakes on the roof, clean and inspect the chimney, insulate the cistern with hay, add a layer of gravel to our driveway…the list keeps on going.
Once things are ready for winter around here, I do hope to tackle indoor construction of the staircase, frame out the remaining rooms and build a kitchen. There’s never a dull moment around here, that’s for sure. Plus, there are many things I need to take care of back in Illinois: house-wise and family matters. It should be a very busy autumn.
That’s about it for now…I should be writing another journal entry in the next week explaining my new toy: A mortar mixer.
