It seems like it's time for my annual update. First of all, I hope the few folks reading (and responding) are having a great summer.
Our camp has had a very good year for tourists. A lot more international travellers for some reason. We haven't expanded yet because we're never overbooked. Just reasonably booked and as a family business, that's enough because we don't want to take on paid staff.
My latest modern 'ger' (yurt) improvement is automatic window openers for the crown windows. Before they had bar hinges and we had to open and close with a long pole and physically push/pull with quite a lot of effort. There were other disadvantages, such as being unable to seal the gap with insect screen. Also, the only positions were fully opened and fully closed.
So I looked into remote control electric window openers, chain style. I chose some from aliexpress which have some extras: remote control, wifi (app) control, and rain sensor. They cost about $56 each + $17 shipping.
These are intended for rectangular outward opening windows but I figured that I could work out how to install them on our circular crown windows.
It took some hard work, frustration and some colourful language but I got them done all by myself. It's tricky working at height. The crown of our modern ger is 3.66m (12 feet) high. Best of all, the insect mesh creates a much tighter seal. Ironically, we've had far less bugs this summer, possibly because it's been a drier summer than usual.
The only thing I've failed to get working is the "smart" part. I haven't been able to pair the wifi controllers with the app yet. I'm guessing this could allow me to put them on timers. So, currently I'm limited to using the remote control and the rain sensors. I'll keep trying. Even if I don't, it's a great upgrade for a relatively small investment.
I'm guessing I'm not the first to implement this solution. Has anybody seen another installation like this?
In other news, I decided to start collecting our own firewood. Electricity prices doubled last November and I'd like to use more firewood and less electricity and "smokeless" coal. We used to buy firewood by the bag but the quality was awful and frequently too wet to burn. I'd have to dry it myself which sort of defeats the object. So annoyingly.
As luck would have it, recently a crew cut down a lot of trees next to us for a fire break where a high voltage line runs up and over our mountain. They took much of the lumber but left a few tons of 2 meter (6 feet) long logs, a mix of silver birch and Siberian larch. Some very long, skinny larch trunks but also some quite decent diameter silver birch. I've barely scratched the surface of the leftovers but I'm doing it bit by bit. After the cut trees are exhaused, I could start collecting fallen trees and there's hundreds of them but a bit hard to access. At least they are close by - the forest is right next to our camp.
So I've started collecting the logs in my pickup truck, cutting them into rounds and a bit of manually splitting with a maul axe. I upgraded my tools to a gas chainsaw, instead of a borrowed electric one, and ordered a kinetic log splitter. Don't get me wrong, I like chopping wood on a small scale, but splitting potentially thousands of rounds is slow, inefficient and physically demanding.
The nice thing is for a bit of work this summer, we'll potentially have several years of of firewood. That being said, because of the high cost of heating in the last 3 winters and the hard work involved, we're almost certainly going to shut the camp down for the coldest 3 months (Dec-Feb) and become snowbirds, specifically to South Vietnam. We figured the savings on heating alone will pay at least the rental on a beach side apartment.
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