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drifting Adirondack snow
Saturday, January 4 2025
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
I hadn't had contact with some of the devices at the Adirondack cabin in something like 20 days, so I've been wanting to redo how they are powered. (It turns out that running devices on the starter battery in a Generac generator is not a good idea, since as the generator does not seem to charge it regularly even when there is grid power.) Serious cold weather would be arriving there soon, and I didn't want to fly into it blind. So I checked the weather forecast and the snow depth maps (sidenote: the one from the US Forest Service is detailed but impossible to use because of the particular colors they use) and determined I could probably drive up there today and not get stuck there. So after a brief weekend morning ritual in the living room, I announced to Gretchen that I'd be driving up to the cabin today and spending the night there. I then packed up the various things I'd be taking, which had been accumulating in a pile for the past few weeks atop the portable Riyobi generator out in the garage. For food, Gretchen rummaged around in the refrigerator and got me the rest of the leftover chili and the remant of some high-end moldy vegan cheese. She also threw in a bag of corn chips and a some crackers (Kellogg's Club crackers: the "crackers for happy snackers") that weren't very good.
I took the usual Middleburgh route and the only stop was at a gas station north of Schoharie and little south of the I-88 interchange. (There I bought a big strong road beer, my second of the drive, and a bag of Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos which I wolfed down greedily. I didn't see any snow until I was north of the Catskills, though I didn't see a sizeable accumulation on the ground until I was driving through Johnstown. There were a couple inches of unplowed snow on Woodworth Lake Road and my little parking spot at the beginning of our driveway had a foot or so of snow on it, so I had to dig myself a parking space before I could park the Forester.
There seemed to be a foot or so of dry, fairly new snow accumulated on the ground as I trudged up the driveway to the cabin. But it had blown around and in some places it was heaped up into drifts and in other places the ground had been blasted by the wind until it was nearly snow-free. There was a large curving drift about then feet north of the cabin and behind it was a snow-free swale that made it easy to walk to the generator, which was great because I would be doing a lot of that this evening. The roof had dumped a bunch of snow directly in front of the door like it always does, though some of it had melted and then refrozen, producing a concrete-like material that I couldn't remove and had to climb over. After getting a fire going with some dry wood from the last time I'd been here, I made a couple trips back to the Forester to get other things, including a plastic-wrapped pack of nine of those compressed-sawdust fuel pellets that Ken and Laura had given us.
After getting the fire going, the second priority was to fire up the generator. Its starter battery was flat, of course, but big fat wires to that now come into the basement, and I tried hooking up batteries to those. But they just couldn't provide enough oomph, especially with the improvised connections I was making with big alligator clips. So I took the brand new lawn mower battery that I had bought just yesterday and rigged it up outside the generator itself. This was what it took to get the generator going. Then I could trickle-charge the cabin's big lithium battery and get it back online, and then charge it, and eventually turn off the generator.
With the generator going, I decided to run the minisplits to help with the big project of heating the cabin, which was at 32 degrees Fahrenheit when I arrived. (It was about 42 degrees down in the basement.) Since I'd drained all the water from the hot water heater last time I'd come, I had to run the pump to charge its pressure tank so I'd have water to use for flushing the one toilet I'd taken out of winterization.
Once I had everything pretty stable, I boiled up a pot of water to soak my feet in like I'd done last time. While I was doing that, Gretchen called with the great news that we'd found a renter for our expensive house in Rochester. I'd been worried we wouldn't be able to find anyone with enough money to pay the rent, since people with that kind of money would be more likely to be looking to buy. But a business-owning woman who is freshly divorced needed a nice house in a hurry, and she was exactly what we needed. She might even start renting in the middle of the month, giving us two more weeks of rent than we'd been expecting.
While I was trying to figure out the current requirements of various relays and contactors I'd brought (to see how best to control them with a ULN2003), the generator suddenly conked off. What the fuck? I went out to look at it (by then the wind was howling and very unpleasant) and saw that it was throwing a 2800 error. I then had to google that, since I don't have Generac error codes memorized. Apparently this code comes when one of the emergency shut-off switches are thrown. But I could only find one such switch, and flipping it didn't seem to fix anything. Sometimes the generator was go to start and then stop with a weird whining noise. I googled all of that, which got me nowhere. But eventually I found someone describing the location of a second emergency shut-off switch inside the generator itself (that is, accessible when the lid is up). When I toggled that, the errors went away. But what had caused them? Had the generator vibrated that switch into the off position?
With that problem out of the way, I charged the cabin's battery all the way up to 100% and then nestled into my usual cold-cabin routine of watching YouTube videos while snuggled under the blankets on the couch and drinking boozy drinks.
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