All tucked in for Winter

Bee hives at Yellow Door Farm

Winter came with a wonderful snowfall this year.  Luckily I had prepared the hives for winter.  Bitter cold followed the snow and so I hope they are all ready.

I experiment with different types of winter wraps each year. I am trying black tar paper this year. It is fairly cheap, easy to work with and black so it absorbs heat. These are some of the properties that make it useful. You need to apply it early in the Fall as it becomes brittle as the weather gets colder.

Notice the electric fence to the right. It goes all around the hives as we have had some bear attacks lately.  I think we also had a deer walk into the wire late in the summer. The hives were not really disturbed but the wire had been snapped off a pole at one end and the wire appeared to be wrapped around a large animal's leg. The animal bolted, and knocked over another hive.  Eventually the wire was released and the animal took off. If it was a bear, it would have come back and started to eat the larva and honey that was in the hive.  Oh boy the challenges never end!

Swagging

I'm thinking about swaggin again. Don't tell my wife!

Swagging is a term plumbers use to stretch out a pipe to allow another to slide and and then be soldered together. I am always kicking around the idea of running a solar water heater along my roof over my deck.  My wife does not approve of the ugly ideas that I want to have projecting from any surface of the house. 

We use a lot of hot water - it is currently heated using a oil fired water heater. I want to get as far away from oil as possible. A few years ago we had an oil spill in the basement. It was awful. You could not sleep in the house due to the fumes. Also oil is the only going to become harder to get, more regulated (oil inspections, carbon tax etc) and it is terrible for the planet. 

My elegant solution has incorporated a stealthy sneaky solar panel that is mounted along the west facing deck of my house. It receives punishing heat and light late in the afternoon. I am going to run some copper pipe along the lower edge of the deck and cover it with glass or plexiglass and circulate the heat through a large cistern in the basement. The cistern will also connect to my water heater with a copper heat exchanger.  I want to have the water moving constantly as long as the heat inside the solar collector is greater than the heat in the tank. For that, I need to run sensors to the cistern and to the hot water panel.

Another aspect to the installation is the use of our wood stove in the living room. It basically runs all winter and is a main source of heat for the house. The hot water heat collection system will be turned off of the outdoor solar in the winter, and routed along the back of the wood stove during the colder months.

Ahh to dream. I think I spend more time thinking about ways to save money from energy than it is worth. But, it is my hobby. Some people have expensive cars, trips or toys, for me I get a real kick out of getting energy - whether it is a plant, hot water, maple syrup, honey or whatever.

I hope I can piece together this system over the year. I have been planning and working on it since 2014.

New Year's resolution for 2017?  We will see.