Trial and Error Confession

If you read the previous post you'll remember that I occasionally admit to trial and error in accomplishing stuff.  Well, here is the biggest trial and error accomplishment so far!  My water heater connectors have always been a pain in the a**.  Tried shark-bites but the threads didn't fit, ordered fittings from the water heater company, but the clamps were cheap and didn't work, bought new clamps, they didn't work either.  So to this point my hot water heater either wasn't online, or I would open the propane and water shut-off valves every time I wanted hot water.  That actually wasn't the pain!  The pain was that I worried about the fittings leaking and the leaking water ruining my radiant heat pads under my floor.  I had almost given up and purchased a different water heater, which would have also been a pain because the propane was done by a professional and looks like it will never come apart!  Anyway, went back through the reviews of the heater, looking for any clue about what other people did with the fittings.  Quite a few had difficulty and mentioned brands of fittings that worked for them so I ordered another set of fittings with my fingers crossed.  Guess what! No leaks!  Hallelujah!  I can put my wall back together.  Ok, yes, there is more to this story.  In a nutshell...I put leak alarms in my wet walls months ago when finishing the bathroom.  As with all alarms they started singing at 2am.  Yes, I have a leak. Yes, the hot water heater.  Yes, I took my wall apart.  Yes, too tired to figure out how to disable the alarm at 2am, so I put it out in the Jeep so I could go back to sleep. (Just had to take it apart and cut the wires, they are a one-use item.)  That is when I started using the shut-off valves each time I wanted hot water.  So I also must confess to shedding a tear when I put these new fittings on, opened the water valve and it was DRY, DRY, DRY!   I am now going to take a worry-free shower, then wash my worry-free dishes, and maybe even do a small load of worry-free laundry in my laundry pod with hot worry-free water. 

Took a little road trip to Portland this weekend. I was delivering an antique desk to my aunt. While there I decided to buy a cubic yard of sawdust, because my search locally was not coming up with much, and I really didn't want to haul an empty trailer home. So went to a place I found online. Their front end loader was too wide to dump into my cargo trailer so they dumped my sawdust (which cost all of $28) on the ground an I shoveled it into the trailer. 

Done!

Got home and transferred it into 32-gallon garbage cans. So now I have 5 big cans and about a quarter of a trash bag of sawdust for my toity. Won't have to worry about that for a while. Yay!

So the goal for this week is to get my solar panel on the roof and hooked up. My little heater is doing very well, but since the weather has suddenly turned to winter, I need to get the heat moving throughout the house. I'm sure my ceiling fan will do the trick, but I don't have power to it currently.  That's come to the top of the list. Loving living in my tiny house!