New, modern yurt build in Mongolia

[UKadventurer]

How's your winter going?

I was enjoying my winter, even modifying my electric dirt bikes to work on snow and ice with ice screws. Lots of fun.



Then disaster struck. The local power station had a failure in the night. Unfortunately, I was fast asleep and couldn't take any steps to mitigate any problems. Off course, Murphy's law dictates that this would happen on one of our coldest nights. About -39C which is a nice temp because Fahrenheit and Centigrade agree on the number more or less. Very cool.

Totally oblivious to what had happened the night before, I went to the boiler room to maintain the fire. To my horror, there'd been a literal meltdown.









Behold various melted plastics next to some unaffected plastics. Interesting. Also the root cause is the pipe going into the boiler tank melted and separated.

The evening before, I had started a coal fire for the central

heating

. While also running electricity (an immersion coil) to keep the boiler temperature stable. Our system has an electric pump to circulate the water in the pipes to the gers, insulated container and well house.

This is what I think happened: when the power went off the pump stopped circulating the water. The fire doesn't care about that so it overboiled the water, melting the pipe connecting the water supply to the boiler then probably steaming off any water left in the system. Various plastic components melted.

Now with the water just sitting in the pipes it did what water does in these temperatures, it froze. Despite

insulation

. We'd originally had anti-freeze in the system but due to several over boil incidents, it'd had all leaked out and I had to replace it with well water. Anti-freeze in those quantities is really, really expensive.

My handyman came up on his day off (Sunday), first going shopping for replacement components. That's a big deal and very nice of him since he's very religious.

We worked together all Sunday afternoon and half way through the night to get some semblance of a system going. We thawed out accessible pipes with a blow torch. Bypassed the well house completely because it has 40m of buried pipe with no easy way to thaw them out. He replaced all of the damaged components: a

heating

coil (now upgraded from 4.5kW to 12kW), a timer, a relay, various melted plastic electrical components, sections of pipe cut out or bypassed.

What have I learned?

You can't depend on the electric grid.

Our boiler is too basic and is incredibly labour intensive. I may upgrade to one of with thermostatic and barometric automation. Also, more capacity for a larger load of semi-coke.

I need a reliable UPS backup for the pump (12v battery, charger, inverter).

Also, some sort of alarm that would wake me up if there's a temperature spike or power outage.

We can survive any temperatures that nature throws at us because we have our dumb stoves and plenty of solid fuel. Or just simply lots of bedding and shared body warmth.

However, the systems with water in them are really susceptible to freezing and I need to be constantly vigilant to keep them above freezing. It's stressful. Maybe the Mongolians got it right by keeping everything basic and no reliance on electricity.

[TSRalex]

Originally Posted by UKadventurer

What have I learned?

That shit happens?

No - serious now:

Really a bad situation you have had, but you are a clever guy and you made right conclusions.

Good luck in solving that all....

[UKadventurer]

Originally Posted by TSRalex

That shit happens?

No - serious now:

Really a bad situation you have had, but you are a clever guy and you made right conclusions.

Good luck in solving that all....

Luckily, as an early retiree, I have time to figure it out, improve, learn etc.

Each mistake I make, I learn what NOT to do next time.

One thing I've learned is you can't rely on one system of heating on a camp. The cheap, dumb ones (semi-coke and firewood) are labour intensive. I've realised I could run the system I have efficiently IF I spend 18 hours a day monitoring and adjusting it. That's a double shift job 7 days a week in the heating season which is about 6 months! Even with my free time, that's impractical and not how I want to spend my time.

Electricity would be the easiest system in theory but only fools rely on the grid system even in a highly developed country. Didn't Texas have a big problem with inclement weather, failure of the grid and an over reliance on electricity as a means of heat?

I'm researching coal boilers now that have some level of automation. Specifically these features:

• Thermostatically controlled blower.
• Barometric damper.
• An alarm that would wake the dead if there's an impending over boil.
• Some means of monitoring/adjusting the boiler heat remotely.
• Larger capacity for once a day cleaning and refueling.

Yesterday, I spent several hours thawing out some pipes and a radiator with a blow torch and a thermal infra red camera to "see" the ice. Not much fun but ultimately successful.

In our living situation, a thermal camera is very, very handy. I imagine it would be handy for anybody with extreme hot or cold temperatures.

Here's a progression of thawing out frozen pipes and then a big radiator in my insulated container. I find this very interesting. I hope others do too.

In the first image, the hot water is hitting ice in the feed pipe.



Starting to progress a bit in the hot water pipe.



It's reached the radiator.



Finished. The radiator, feed pipe and return pipes are at operating temperature. Yay!