Friday 7/12- It’s one of those weeks that the tides dictate that the turtle walks are early in the morning, and Ramie had to walk another morning at 3:30am. They didn’t even find any nests or turtles, so that early morning was for nothing. It's been a very slow season for everyone, not just Ramie’s group, so I guess you can’t blame them for being bummed.
While paying our most recent electric bill, Ramie somehow noticed/discovered something that he had never paid attention to before. Apparently, we are paying the commercial rate for our power instead of the residential rate. We presume that when a house is being built, the builder originally has to set up the account as commercial. We learned that when the house was finished our builder was supposed to coordinate getting some form signed by the electrical engineer that signed off on our house, and then the rate could be changed to residential. Unfortunately, we never got that letter. Ramie immediately called our builder to come up with a plan to get this fixed, we shall see how this plays out!
Essentially, for the last 2.5 years, instead of paying the residential rate that has a tiered price per kilowatt hour used, based on different times of day, we are paying one flat rate that is on the high end of this range. So, since we’ve been in our house, we’ve been careful to schedule the pool pump and other high consumption things to run when the electricity rate is lowest, however, since we weren't on that tiered residential price scale, we weren’t getting any of the benefits of it because on the commercial scale it doesn’t change! It’ll be interesting to see what our future electric bills look like compared to what we’ve been paying.
This afternoon, after I finished with work, we went up to Geoff and Tracy’s so Ramie could re-adjust Tracy's car headlights. The old owner must have had them moved, and they were aimed very badly, so Ramie was going to get that fixed. We set up a makeshift wall in the driveway using a few ladders and bed sheets, and then we waited until it was dark enough to aim the lights, see where they were focused, and make the needed adjustments. When all the work was done, we enjoyed the early evening catching up, but didn’t stay out late because Ramie was tired from his early morning walk this morning.
Saturday 7/13- It’s a weekend and I’m not working, so what does that mean? Chore day around the house. Right away in the morning Ramie got to work cutting the grass and pruning the plants, and I worked on the blog.
 |
| For those of you who don't know what these little pictures are- this is DuoLingo, the app that we are using to learn Spanish. Sometimes the lessons are just so perfect that I have to snap a screenshot for the blog! |
Once Ramie was done with the big chores, we had to run into town to get some groceries and stopped at the hardware store to pick out a new paint color. What are we painting now? Well, Ramie wants to repaint the living room and kitchen area to brighten it up in the house. I will admit, it is kind of dark at times, especially when it starts to rain in the late afternoon. After we ran those errands, we had to make a quick detour before we went back home to meet with the arborist who would be doing some work at Karen’s property. Since we were already out and I have not seen the progress at Karen’s, I decided that I might as well go up there with Ramie. We spent less than 20 minutes at the property while Ramie & the arborist talked about what would be the best way to cut the tree down, what needed to be moved from the construction project to make room for falling branches, and what to do with this massive tree limbs and trunk once it was all cut down.
 |
| It may not look huge, but trust me it is. It stretched over half of the distance where her house would be, so if one of those branches ever broke, it would do major damage to the house. |
After that little side-quest was done, it was back home to work on more projects. Ramie had asked the carpenter that made all of our original woodwork in the house to make another matching shelf for our laundry room so that we could get the light things like the big packages of toilet paper, paper towels, and other supplies that currently sit on the floor up and out of the way. You might not think that this stuff would take up that much room, but since we only go to San Isidro shopping about every 2 months now, plus the fact that we store all of the supplies for Adam & Katie’s rental house as well, there’s a lot and it takes up way too much valuable floor space. After we had the shelf mounted and all of the things put up overhead and out of the way and I saw how much more room we had, I will say that I wish that we would have done this sooner!
I’ll admit that we are pretty boring people for the most part, and this next section will prove it! The most exciting part of today was that Skye got to pick out a new toy. When Taylor came down to visit us last October, she brought a bunch of dog toys for Skye. Obviously, this dog doesn’t need 20 different toys at the same time (she probably has about 10 though), so we put a couple of them away for the future and today we let Skye pick out a new one. I chose a few from the stash, placed them all on the floor in a line about a foot apart, and let her pick which one she wanted. Instead of just running up and grabbing the first one, she actually looked at and sniffed each one, and then eventually picked up one that is a sloth. (Taylor was very deliberate about picking toys that went along with our tropical Costa Rica theme of life. Taylor also brought down a stingray, an ice cream cone, and a few other fun ones like that.) This particular toy is one that is meant to have the outside part torn off, and inside is another toy. It will be interesting to see if she will tear it open or if she’ll be gentle with it. Kota, Taylor's dog, also has several of this type of toy and he has never torn one open yet. The stingray that Skye has been playing with since Taylor brought the toys down is this type too, but so far she has only ripped the tail off of it and hasn’t torn it completely open. We are curious to see what's inside, maybe someday we will find out…
Monday 7/15- Lately Ramie and Karen have been talking about home backup power solutions, like solar and generators, since the electrical infrastructure here in Costa Rica leaves much to be desired. When they move down here, Karen is going to have to continue to, just like I do, so she is concerned about the best way to stay connected to the grid. Karen's house is more susceptible to the power issues since she is further up the mountain than we are, so it's important for her to have good back up energy options. While we were living up at her casita there were times when the power would be out for several hours at a time, and once when a storm came through and knocked some power poles down, the power was out for nearly 24 hours. Because of the recent discovery of our electric rate error and the power conversations with Karen, Ramie started researching solar solutions that might work for us as well. We aren’t as susceptible to the long outages, but we do have lots of power “blinks” (probably a dozen a day) that knock it out for just long enough to clear the clock on the microwave & stove, not to mention that electricity in Costa Rica is VERY expensive! (So please keep that in mind if you come to visit, turn off the lights when you leave the room, only use the AC at night, etc.)
Wednesday 7/17- Today the arborist that we met with last weekend will be cutting down that tree up at Karen’s property. The construction crew is onsite, and they will work together with the tree crew to get the construction stuff moved so they can drop bigger limbs of the tree without worrying about damaging whatever it could land on.
Ramie got a call around 3:30 this afternoon to let him know that the tree was on the ground, but the crew would have to come back the next day to finish moving all of the pieces and cleaning it up.
Today our builder also got a hold of Ramie to let him know that he was able to get our electrical switched to the residential rate. Hopefully this will make a huge difference with our bill, but Ramie is still curious about the solar option as well. We do get a lot of sun here so we might as well take advantage of it, right? Costa Rica doesn’t let you go “completely” off-grid, but if we can get a large majority of our power from the sun, it may not take terribly long to save enough in utilities costs to offset the cost of the hardware.
Friday 7/19- This morning Ramie convinced me at the last minute to go on today’s 5am turtle walk. It was a beautiful morning for a walk, but there are still no turtles or nests being found. I started work about an hour later than I normally do, but it was nice to get out on the beach, even though we never go in the water on turtle walks. These turtle walk days are not beach days, just walks on the beach. There’s a difference. Which reminds me, it has been far too long since we’ve had an actual beach day.
Saturday 7/20- We started out the day with no plans. I started a loaf of bread to rise, and we were just relaxing, when all of a sudden at about 8:30 Ramie got a wild hair to start painting. This was not planned, but it certainly did not take long to put this plan into motion. We knew that we’d be painting 2 of the walls for sure, but weren’t sure which of the other 2 walls we’d be painting, and which we’d be keeping as an accent color wall of the original blue. I un-decorated and cleaned the walls that I knew we’d be painting; Ramie started masking off the places that needed to be masked, and by 10am he was ready to open up the paint can.
Skye was very nervous the whole time this was going on. Apparently, she didn’t like the living room furniture all moved, everything taken off the walls and all torn apart, it was clear she didn’t know what was going on and she didn’t feel good about it. By about 1:00pm Ramie was already putting on the 2nd coat, so it was progressing along fairly quickly. I was available to help as he needed it, but mostly I was working on the blog. After painting together when we lived in MN, Ramie does not allow me to paint anymore, so this project is all him. I am very ok with that!!
 |
| OSHA approved...? |
 |
| These two walls are left, which do we leave as an accent color and which do we paint? |
Sunday 7/21- When he was finished painting yesterday, Ramie wasn’t sure if he would want to paint again today or to save the rest for another day. Even last night when we left Mosaic he said that he would not be painting again today. But, this morning at 8am he had a change of heart. Yep, let’s do it! Part of his justification for painting again today was because he wanted to paint the wall behind my desk when I wasn’t working so that he wouldn’t interrupt me on a work day. He also didn’t want to have to wait until next weekend to finish. And away he went! Today went much faster than he’d expected and he was done with everything by early afternoon. Since it had been about 24 hours since he finished the other 2 walls, we figured we were safe to re-hang the decorations and TV, and to put the covers back on the switches and outlets. This took us the rest of the afternoon until it was time to make dinner & settle down for the evening.
Monday 7/22- Ramie has been having sneezing fits all day today and mentioned that he thought that his allergies were kicking in, which makes sense since the season is changing and we’ve started getting more rain again lately. These past couple of weeks have been kind of like a mini summer for us and it’s been drier and warmer than it typically is during rainy season with more beautiful sunny days than we were expecting. It’s starting to turn rainier again these last few days, which perks up the plants, activates mold, and all other sorts of things.
On a side note, even though it’s only been a few days, Skye has already got her new sloth toy open. As mentioned earlier, this particular type of toy is meant to have the outside torn open and taken off to reveal something else underneath. Now, instead of having a fuzzy brown sloth ball, she gets a squeaky pink rubber ball.
 |
| This ball is so big that it almost doesn't fit in her mouth, she loves carrying it around anyway! |
Wednesday
7/24- Well, the sickness isn’t getting any better and Ramie skipped his
turtle walk this morning. He truly isn't moving far within the house
and he pretty much spent the day doing the same thing he did yesterday.
Thursday
7/25- Ramie thought that he may have been starting to feel better
today, but unfortunately this evening I had a bad feeling that it might
be my turn. I started coming down with a sore throat and nothing I took
offered any relief.
Friday 7/26- Even though he was
definitely on an upward swing, Ramie skipped his turtle walk again so he
wouldn’t “overdo” it and take a step backwards. I wasn’t feeling great,
the coughing and sore throat were getting worse and by the end of the
day I was starting to lose my voice, but I made it through the workday. I
could tell that the tiredness and brain fog were beginning to set in
too. By evening it was getting worse and I could already tell that it
would be an unproductive weekend for me. Go figure, I always get sick
when I’m about to have time off work, even if it is just the weekend.
More
and more, the rest of this past week, Ramie and I have been discussing the
option to move forward with a solar set up for our house. It wouldn’t be
a full blown off-grid system, but kind of a hybrid to supplement the
power we get from the grid. The advantages of this setup that we’ve
identified include:
- Protecting the critical circuits in our house from the surges, under voltages and overall problems with the Costa Rican electrical grid
- Prolonging the life of our appliances by not subjecting them the power fluctuations
- Supplementing our high use loads, including our pool pump, to run off of the solar power and batteries
- Having power during the outages and brownouts that happen daily here
- Reducing (hopefully) about 80% of our use from the electrical grid
- Having a much smaller electrical bill.
Between all of these advantages and a sale that was going on right now for the equipment that we were leaning toward, we decided to pull the trigger. Since shipping to Costa Rica is quite expensive and based on size and weight of what is being shipped, we would order the solar panels from a company here in Costa Rica instead of shipping them from the US, and we would have the rest of the components, (the inverter, smart panel and the battery) shipped down to us.
We know some people who have had companies install solar systems here in Costa Rica and, in general, it cost about $28,000 for a very small solar setup. With that kind of price, the time it would take to “pay for itself” with the reduction of your electricity bill is so far out it just wouldn’t be worth it. After all of Ramie’s research, he has found some great deals on the components, and since we (he) can do the work himself we will be spending about a third of that amount. So, as of this afternoon, everything has been ordered. It will take about a month to receive the parts that are coming from the US, but in the meantime, he can get to work with the solar panels that will be delivered much sooner. Stay tuned to learn all about our DIY solar electricity system!
(Real-time update 10/27/24, after our trip to the US and getting the last of the parts that we needed, this weekend we used energy from the sun for the first time!)
Pura Vida!!!
Comments
Post a Comment