10.24.07

Making a house a home

Posted in Life, Family at 10:22 am by Stoner

Home improvements suck only because they tend to cost money. Living in the sticks of Virginia, we risk loosing power for days while debris is cleared and power companies work to restore precious electricity. My solution to this dilemma was to buy a house generator. Not one of those wimpy roll-abouts with a 4 gallon gas tank and 2 outlets to keep the refrigerator running - we’re talking a permanently installed, propane/natural gas fueled generator that powers the whole house. Only two problems:

  1. our propane tank was a 45 gallon tank - which would fuel the generator for less than a day
  2.  our electric furnace is rated at 60 amps but the generator’s largest circuit is 40 amps

So, we couldn’t fuel the generator long enough to last an extended power outage nor power our primary heating source (we did have a propane fireplace in the living room.) Solution:

  1. upgrade our propane tank to a 200 gallon model
  2. install another propane fireplace

For those of you that have natural gas pumped into your house, a 45 gallon tank can be located next to your house but a 200 gallon tank must sit a minimum of 10 feet from any livable structure. That means trenching a line from the tank to the house, plus a large, white “pill” sitting in the yard looking all ghetto.

Ok. I can deal with the pill - just plant some shrubs around it to mask it’s hideousness. Trenching? There’s barely enough dirt covering the rock garden here to call it a yard. I’ll leave the trenching to the propane company. Too much headache for me. And a single propane fireplace won’t be sufficient so we opted to purchase another vented fireplace.

So, we now have a 2nd propane fireplace. This one is in the basement where the TV room is (going to be) and my office. With two fireplaces, we should have sufficient heat in winter if power goes out. A 200 gallon tank should last several days (even with the fireplaces going) as long as we conserve electricity by turning off unnecessary appliances during the outage.

Total cost, somewhere in the $12k range…I haven’t totaled everything up yet.

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