The snow slid off the house fairly easily. Even after 5 years, the polycarb still sheds snow quite well. So well in fact, that when I was raking the other end of the house, the ice buildup came down on the other end of the house and took out one of my garbage bins.
I also inadvertently knocked down the cover for my heat pump. Oops. Since I am not using it, I am not going to care until spring.
I checked out the snowblower since I was intending to use it to blow the snow I just raked off, but it wouldn't cut through it, it just rode on top. Kind of annoying. Turns out that doing the entire place burned enough oil to barely register on the dipstick. I put a half quart in, and that was too much, but oh well.
I ended up clearing the slab with the tractor, which was nice since it scraped all the way to the concrete.
I made an unfortunate error when I was clearing the slab. I push the snow into the back yard normally, but since the last couple of storms I cleared with the snowblower instead, the tractor struggled to push it. I almost got the tractor stuck and it slid when I was trying to back out. Unfortunately the back end slid and the grading blade on the back whacked my clothesline. The tractor naturally won. I will have to see if I can fix it come spring.
I tried to rake the carport, but that ended in failure. I only got a small section of it done, the rake isn't long enough, and it didn't slide off like the house did. This took me over an hour, at which point I gave up.
On the shed I tried a different tactic. I just fired up my kerosene heater and ran it out of fuel (a couple of hours). The hope was that since the shed has a much steeper pitch it would melt the bottom layer and it would slide off. That failed. Hopefully it is built well enough to withstand the additional weight it is about to get.
On a side note, the move from the heat pump to the space heaters definitely paid off. Despite the same average temperature as last month, my power bill was under 300 dollars, and my usage was notably lower.
Here is a sunrise picture I took on my way in today.
I am definitely ready for spring at this point. The electrician said most of the FineLine homes he works with only come with 100A service, which I thought was a bit surprising and I will want to double check (especially how many slots in the panel are available). That isn't a dealbreaker, but it means if I go off-grid, an upgrade will be required (electric stoves are 50A on their own). Until then though it is fine. Even with 100A, central air and all that should be fine. That said, 200A has been standard for quite some time now. It isn't a painful thing to upgrade down the road if I need to though. The electrician predictably said since my current 100A wire is not buried to code (not surprising considering it isn't buried at all in some spots), the upgrade to 200A service is basically required. There is no problem with getting 200A service to the lot and just running a 100A circuit to the house though. He would take care of dealing with the power company, which is nice, but he also said that most likely they would put the second pole over by the creek, meaning it would cross my driveway. I don't like it, but I like having to pay to deal with the rock shelf even less, and on the other side there is enough dirt that trenching for burying the wire into the house wouldn't be a problem.
On the plumbing side, he seemed to think that was all easy stuff. Something interesting he mentioned is that if my current pressure tank doesn't fit, they make ones that go under the house. That is kind of an interesting idea, as long as there is sufficient heat tapes around it to keep it from freezing. I will need heat tapes anyways, so that is a very distinct possibility.
I should have the quote from him hopefully towards the end of the week or early next week. Still no word from the excavation guy.
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