I installed some luxuries today.
instant hot water
At our last house on the mainland, the bathroom sink was about 250 feet from the water heater. It took forever to get hot water. That’s bad because it means you’re more likely to just give up and use cold water, which doesn’t wash as well, or you’ll waste many gallons of water (we were in a drought!) and a lot of time just to have a warm water wash. I have to wear a contact lens, so hand hygiene is pretty important, and I was a physician for decades and wash my hands scrupulously (possibly obsessively) anyway. I put one of these water heaters in that bathroom for practical reasons, but I found I absolutely loved it. Having hot water immediately every time you wash your hands is just wonderful, especially on cool mornings. It’s something I’ve really missed since coming to the island.
Here, unfortunately, the installation was a lot more complicated. The temporary solar plant I’d put in years before didn’t generate nearly enough power to be heating water, and the scary, scary wiring didn’t even reach the bathroom. Now, though, we have excess energy and following our rewire it’s safe to use it. I had a receptacle installed under the bathroom sink for just this purpose. So now we have instant hot water in the bathroom.
It’s not purely a luxury item, either. In addition to the reasons cited above, it also moves us toward our goal of burning nothing for energy. The hot water to the house (serving just the shower and kitchen sink) comes from burning propane, so now hot water in the bathroom is one more thing that runs on the sun.
hot tub
I’ve sure missed my hot tub. It was a surprise how much I liked it after I bought it in 2020. I used it pretty much every single day. I last used it on August 26th, 214 days ago! I’ve been doing a lot of manual labor, and I’ve really missed being able to have a good soak. Alas, there were the same electricity limitations as for the instant hot water and, in addition, I needed to build a hot tub deck to put it on before I could fill it and use it. Many other projects took priority, but finally I was able to install the tub today.
It takes about 30 hours to heat the tub from ambient, but even our big solar plant can’t run the hot tub heater overnight on batteries. It would probably take three or four sunny days to heat it with its own heater. I decided to cheat and steal hot water from the outdoor shower:
That means I burned propane (bad!) this one time, but it got me into the tub today (good!). In the future — the tub has to be drained and refilled about every four months — I’ll probably have more patience and heat it with the sun.
I put cold water in it first, as I didn’t want to risk damaging the vinyl with water that was too hot. I also ran the tub’s heater as soon as the water was deep enough. There was plenty of sun today so we had energy to burn. By the time the tub was full, the water was a perfect 102° Fahrenheit.
The view down the gulch while soaking was awesome.
—2p