“They’ll just look like decorative trim,” Mary posited. When Mike Nelson stood behind one of the completed shutters with his HK for the first time to test them out, it worked beautifully. All that he had to do was open up the glass portion of the window, swing back the plate covering the cross slot, and pop out the wooden insert with the muzzle of his rifle. “Oh yeah!” he declared.
“Come and get it, you stinking looters. Today’s special is on hot lead!”
After Kevin bought his house in Idaho, he decided to do some upgrading, as well. Although his new house was wood heated and had double pane windows throughout, it did not have true “retreat potential” for any serious confrontation. There were several detractors. First, it was of wood frame construction, with decorative cedar siding, and a shake roof. A few Molotov cocktails, and it’d be history.
The house was served by a two-hundred-feet deep well, which produced twelve gallons per minute. He decided to upgrade the survival potential of the house by installing a Solarjack Type G pump to replace the existing submersible pump that ran off regular line current. In most scenarios, the power grid would be one of the first things to go. Outwardly, the pump looked like a miniature version of an oil field “cricket.” The Solarjack pump ran directly off of photovoltaic solar panels, with no batteries involved in the system at all.
When the sun shined, the ninety-volt D.C. motor ran the pump. When the sun stopped shining, the pump stopped pumping. Kevin bought the Solarjack pump from Sam Watson, the owner of Northern Solar Electric Systems near Sandpoint, Idaho.
On several successive weekends the Grays helped Kevin pour the pad for the pump, install the draw pipe, pump cylinder, and fiberglass “sucker rods,” the pump, and the pole for the solar panel tracker. Even more than the jack pump, the tracker assembly appealed to his engineer’s sense of a good design. The tracker, built by Zomeworks Corporation of Albuquerque, New Mexico, used a metal frame charged with Freon to turn the panel rack to match the angle of the sun. It worked on the simple principle of heat expansion. Because two sides of the frame were mounted with aluminum sunshades, part of it would be exposed to the sun, while the rest was not. As one side of the frame heated up, the Freon expanded as sunlight heated it up. This changed the balance of the frame, and hence the tilt of the tracker, roughly matching the angle of the sun.
According to Watson, the tracker would provide a 25 percent increase in the output of his panels. Although he did not anticipate the need, Kevin went ahead and bought a tracker that could hold up to six solar panels, even though his system would only be using three Kyocera forty-eight-watt solar panel modules. The ability to increase his pumping capacity by simply strapping on more panels appealed to Kevin.
The installation of the solar powered pump also necessitated changing the house’s water storage system. As it was configured when he bought it, the house used a thirty-gallon pressure tank connected to the submersible pump. Kevin decided to go whole hog with the water storage side of the equation. He requested bids from several makers of cisterns in the area, as well as distributors of poly and fiberglass tanks. He soon selected Adam Holton of Lenore, Idaho, some fifty miles away, to build him a concrete storage cistern. Holton put in an incredibly low bid of “$2,050 complete” to build a thirty-five-hundred-gallon cistern. This was about one-half the cost of putting in a pair of fifteen-hundred-gallon fiberglass tanks. It would also last much, much longer.
The cistern was situated on a hillside, four-hundred-and-fifty linear feet and seventy vertical feet, above the house. This provided a large, stable water supply with gravity feed. Because the solar pump ran almost continuously during daylight hours, it would keep the cistern constantly full. Rather than install a float switch to turn off the pump when the cistern was full, Kevin decided to have a pond excavated at the base of the hill below the cistern. The overflow from the cistern ran down a pipe to keep the pond full. Even at peak usage when watering his garden and small orchard, the pond remained constantly full.
While he was installing the solar pump and cistern, Kevin decided to install first-class water lines as well. He contracted with Underwood Pump Supply of Lewiston to provide the pipe and to do the trenching. Because Bovill was at fairly high elevation, Kevin opted to have the water lines buried at a four-foot depth to rule out the risk of frozen pipes. Despite a couple of unexpected breakdowns of the “Ditch Witch” trenching machine that caused delays, Chuck Underwood did an admirable job of digging clean, deep, trenches. With the incredibly deep topsoil of the Palouse, they encountered only a few rocks.
Again with system longevity in mind, Kevin selected Schedule 40 PVC pipe to use throughout. He opted for two-inch pipe for the service line, and three-quarter-inch pipe for the overflow line. Underwood also sold Kevin a dozen Merrill frost-proof spigots. In all, Kevin had to buy over eight hundred feet of pipe and have over seven hundred feet of trenching done. This was because he wanted to position several spigots around the house, several at his garden site, and two at his orchard site. To install the spigots and glue together the pipe, Kevin did not need the assistance of a contractor. He did most of it himself, with a bit of assistance from Todd in the more difficult steep section of the system just below the cistern.
The other upgrade that Kevin made to his house the first summer he was there also involved water. He installed a row of sprinklers on the peak of his roof, as well as an array of sprinklers around the house. When turned on full blast, the ground sprinklers thoroughly soaked most of the walls of the house, while the roof sprinklers did a good job of soaking the cedar shakes. Although not fully proof against his envisioned bands of arson-prone looters, Kevin felt a little better about the fire safety of his house. “Besides,” he suggested, “if things get really bad, I can go down the road to stay at the home of the little piggy that built his house of brick.”
Todd and Mary were so impressed with Kevin’s water system that they upgraded their own water system along the same lines. First, they had Underwood dig up their existing water lines. Once they saw the pipe that came up, they were glad that they decided to go ahead with the job. The pipe appeared to be about the same vintage as the house. It was rusty, had several small leaks, and at half-inch diameter, it was woefully undersized. They replaced the pipe with two-inch diameter Schedule 40 PVC. At the same time, they extended their water lines to accommodate a larger garden and their plans for a bigger orchard. Again following Kevin’s lead, they also replaced all of the old water spigots with Merrill “frost frees.”
Because Todd and Mary’s system was served by a spring, rather than a well, there was no need to install a fancy solar pump. Mary was particularly impressed with the photovoltaic array, however, and convinced Todd to take the plunge and install a photovoltaic twelve-volt DC power system for the retreat house.
With the help of Sam Watson, the Grays installed an eight-panel Zomeworks tracker, and a full complement of Kyocera forty-eight-watt panels. The tracker was mounted eight feet away from the south side of the house, between two sets of windows. Because of the tremendous line loss of DC power, on the advice of Watson, the Grays decided to wire only the living room with twelve-volt DC. This circuit charged a bank of nickel cadmium batteries, which Todd installed in the bottom of an old armoire. The batteries in turn powered the Grays’ numerous twelve-volt DC radios and gadgets, as well as an inverter. The inverter built by Xantrex of Arlington,Washington, converted twelve volts DC to hundred and seventeen volts AC. Because it used a modern sine wave inversion design, the Xantrex was very efficient.
Later, Todd added a Winco twelve-volt wind generator to the system. Mary saw it advertised in the for-sale ads in the Idahonian, a Moscow newspaper. Including the fifteen-foot tower, the used five-hundred-watt generator cost only two hundred and fifty dollars. It even came with two extra sets of bearings and brushes for the generator.