Last week, we got eight inches of rain. That was a Very Good Thing™, as this is a cloud forest and it is supposed to be very wet. We’re still way off from our annual average. On the other hand, we got very little sunshine. Joulee the Free Salvage Tesla, after barely making it home with zero charge, had to stay in the garage for lack of enough sun to recharge. We had to take Timmy the Titan everywhere, burning diesel fuel. Ugh. I had to skip using the hot tub a couple of days because it just wasn’t, well, hot. I guess I’m more spoiled than I thought. I designed the infrastructure here with the idea that the electric car and hot tub were energy sinks, places to put excess power when our generating capacity exceeded our needs, but I still managed to catastrophize and feel as though I’d never had those luxuries again.
This week, we’ve had half an inch of rain. We’re still officially in drought conditions. To make matters worse, there’s a problem (a leak they cannot find) in our municipal water system and we’re under a mandatory 25% reduction order and our water has been off for several hours each day. Publicly, they’re blaming it on the drought but from here on the ground (we’re right by the primary water tank) it’s obvious that the weather issues are only secondary to problems cause by crumbling infrastructure.
I’ve considered switching the house over to the catchment system. Not that the water has been off long enough to create hardship, particularly as we’re already filtering all our water through our countertop reverse-osmosis filter. It’s more that I’m curious how well the system will perform. I’m using a small diaphragm pump instead of the more common big-pump-and-pressure-tank arrangement that most well or catchment systems use. Though I think it will be sufficient for just the two of us, we won’t know until we try it. (Naturally, I wouldn’t expect to be able to water the yard and take a shower simultaneously, but that doesn’t happen often anyway.) The problem is the catchment system is non-potable. It’s probably safe to drink, if a little over-chlorinated, but I’m super conservative about drinking water. So once we switch the house to catchment, the plumbing will all be potentially contaminated until it’s thoroughly flushed with municipal water. Again, we filter our drinking water, but I guess I’ve lived in first-world cities too long to want to live with non-potable tap water.
It’s hard, actually, to have any credible complaints about the weather here. It’s rarely over 80°F and rarely below 50°. Mostly it’s in the 70’s all day. The total lack of need for an HVAC system is really what makes the off-grid lifestyle possible. This week has been a pretty good mix of enough sunshine to keep the car and hot tub going and enough rain to move us toward non-drought status and keep the outdoor botanicals healthy. I just have to develop a little patience and lose my distaste for running the backup generator and driving Timmy occasionally.
—2p