The First Week - Let there be light!

Retrospect: November 2005

The next big advance of the week so far was securing a generator. We had already contracted an electrician to convert the trailer's main electric panel feed from standard line feed to a plug-in. With the help of our ABQ friend, we chose a Honda EU3000 generator. This generator uses inverter technology which produces a pure sine wave ideally suited for powering sensitive electronics such as our computers and features a variable speed throttle that allows it to run for up to twenty hours on a single tank of gas. Not cheap at about $2000 but being able to flick a wall switch and have real light at night was beyond thrilling after life with that single Coleman butane lantern. We bought a good supply of compact fluorescent bulbs and ran through the trailer replacing the old incandescents with them. Every watt would count from now on and these bulbs used about 25% of the power demanded by the standard style bulbs. Now that we are familiar with them, we would continue to use them even if we ever found ourselves back on the grid.

The generator ran extremely well for a couple of weeks and then left me suddenly without light one night. Of course, it had to be that one rare night when Mark retired early so I found myself groping around and cursing at furniture which jumped out and bit me repeatedly before finding my flashlight in the front room. Given the bitter cold outside, I had no intentions of troubleshooting that night and simply resigned earlier than usual.

What we discovered the next day was a sooty and fouled plug with a bridge of carbon in the spark gap. A good cleaning would possibly get us through until the next town trip but a rich plug is nothing to live with long term or the excess, unburnt gas will wash the lubing oil off the cylinder . Sure enough, it fired back up again but we now knew that the unit was jetted for a much lower altitude, a matter which the dealer had not thought to question us about. It's not something that jumps out at you but we are about three hundred feet higher than our nearest neighbor and probably one thousand feet higher than the town where we bought the unit.

Mark soon brought home a spare spark plug and a smaller main jet from the dealer and both were reasonably easy to replace. Now we were ready for anything, including the ability to pump well water when that day came. You know the deal by now ... "Or so we thought".

Next post: 2 or 3 days (but they are predicting MORE rain!)

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Humor of the Day: (courtesy of the Tomato Man)

Last night, my wife and I were sitting in the living room talking about many things. The idea of a living will came up and I said to her, "I never want to live in a vegetative state, dependent on some machine and fluids from a bottle. If I ever come to that just pull the plug."

She got up, unplugged the TV and then threw out my beer.