Started Tiny House Shower Install & Snowy Off Grid Homestead

Friday I started to install my tiny house shower. I have a 32 inch light weight plastic stand up shower complete with shower curtain, faucet and shower head. It will fit perfectly in my tiny house bathroom.

This has a lot of parts to it so it took me a while to sort things out and figure out how it all goes together.

I laid the shower base on the tiny house floor to get an idea where the drain will be. I had wanted to go out the side wall with the drain pipe because my floors are sealed up solid. But this was not going to work without hitting the ceiling of the bathroom or cutting the shower stall down some.

So I marked the location of the shower stall drain in the tiny home floor. But it was very cold out and blowing wind so I did not want to drill a hole in the floor and leave it overnight so I left it at that for now.

I connected my Tristar MPPT solar charge controller up to my laptop to share with you some of the details of my solar power output in the last month.

The Morningstar solar charge controller stores up to 200 days of history about the solar panels and battery state.

A strange thing that I saw was that the charge controller is showing a low daily voltage of only 11.9 volts while on the front panel display I have only seen about 12.2 or 12.3 each morning.

I turn off all loads on the solar forklift battery bank every night so there should be no drain at all. I even disconnect the battery desulfator and the HF solar panels just to be sure. The inverter and modem all get shut off as well.

So I do not know where this low voltage is coming from. I have not see it myself at all. Not one time.

The solar panel output per day is good to see. It gives me an idea of how much usable energy I get each day. I am only getting about 800 watts of usable energy per day right now in the winter months.

That is not much power at all. That means I only have a total of 800 watts for all of my devices combined per day. Actually I have to use a little bit less than that in order to protect my battery bank and allow my solar panels to recharge the batteries every day.

I have been using my HF 800 watt generator with a small battery charger set to 10 amps for now until the sun gets a bit higher in the sky. When I work on the laptop, I use the generator instead of the battery bank.

I am not taking any chances with this new forklift battery pack.

It snowed a lot at the off grid homestead Friday so I spent a lot of my day just shoveling snow. This is quite a job really. I have to shovel out a path to my solar panels and then sweep them off.

I have to shovel out the chickens and give them an area to scratch food.

And I shovel my paths around the off grid homestead. To the forklift batteries, to my wood piles, to my tents, to the RV, survival camper and water tank. It is a lot of work but it is better to maintain the paths rather than trudge through snow every day and pack it tighter.

Also when the sun shines usually my pathways get cleared off to the dirt when the ground warms up there.

I am getting 4 to 5 eggs per day now since the red rooster is out of the chicken coop. He is living under the RV right now and living like a king. He has the best shelter of them all now and he is quite happy.

I am considering running fence around the RV and tiny house in spring to allow chickens to run under them. This prevents rodents and bugs. Especially ticks.

Follow my daily progress on the path to self sufficiency on my off grid solar homestead.
https://www.youtube.com/user/techman2015/playlists?view=50&shelf_id=10&sort=dd

Please donate to help keep The Off Grid Project ™ going: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=3TQSWXLLRZ6HW

Join The Off Grid Project ™ and The Do It Yourself World ™ forum and share your ideas, tips and projects.
http://www.thediyworld.com/forum

The Off Grid Project ™ is presented by The Do It Yourself World ™.
http://www.TheDIYworld.com