With the pump house online and water running through the system, I must make sure it does not freeze. As if that happened it could cause damage to the lines and cause a huge flood. So keeping the well components above 32F is critical for us. Seems not everyone does this, but the locals around here tell me I should heat my pump house. So I think its a good idea to follow their advise.
I was going to run a light bulb for heat, but decided a personal space heater would be a more efficient option. It uses 200 watts and the brand is a Lasko MyHeat model.
It does not have any kind of thermostat, I only found the ones with higher wattage had that feature. So I bought a power switch controlled by a thermostat.
The settings only allow it to go down to 40F. But honestly that is probably a good temperature to try to keep. Do not want to get that close to freezing if possible.
Got it all set up, and placed a hygrometer near by to see what the room temperature gets down to. As the next day after installing this we would get a freezing morning. Sure enough the heater came on around 5am and ran for about 2 hours until the temps came up outside. Looking at the hygrometer it got down to 37F in the pump house. Not bad, if it gets much lower I may need to raise the settings on the thermostat to kick it on sooner. Or get a more powerful heater. But with so much insulation we may be fine. We will need to see how the winter treats us, as its only got down to the high 20s. And deep into winter it will get much colder than that, possibly in the single digits.
Heating the building where the batteries are should be more easy running my miners. I got both of them going during the autumn, hopefully we get enough solar in the winter to run both to. But I would think I can run at least one. That should hopefully keep the building temps above 45F when the Pytes battery bank heaters kick on. I would rather use energy to power the miners, generating excess heat. Rather than running the battery bank heaters. It will all be a balance, saving enough power in the 15kwh battery bank to power the pump house heaters. But also use the miners enough to heat the building the batteries are in. Should be interesting to see how it all plays out this winter. I can always add more solar panels and batteries if need be. But for now the 7kw I peak at is doing me pretty good.
The garlic has started to emerge, great to see them coming up. Soon it will stop growing as the weather gets colder. And then next year the pump house will really prove it self watering over an acre of garlic on a regular basis when the weather is not favorable. But living in the Southeast its possible we mostly meet our needs based on local rains. But having this pump house will cover us between any dry spells we encounter.
