Nothing, and I mean nothing ever goes according to plan on this island… the inverter never showed up… We paid extra for overnight shipping from the manufacturer on warranty last Wednesday (nine days ago). It is still sitting in the Vancouver Customs clearing station with some sort of complication.. In desperation, E asked our retail supply company if they could intervene or know of what the problem could be…. They didn’t/couldn’t but were happy to…  (try to keep up) ….give us a new one until the other new one comes to replace the first new one that came to replace the old one, but didn’t work…

E went to town this morning to pick it up…

We are happy to go to bed pretty early when we have no power to turn on lights. But last night at the end of the day as we tried to make dinner and have a hot shower not only did we run out of propane, but we ran out of diesel too. At the exact same moment!!!!! sigh…. Don’t you hate it when all of the equipment that allows you to live like you are on the grid while living off the grid is unavailable and you have six guests (one of whom is 5 weeks old)  arriving for the weekend.

E took the empty propane and diesel tanks with him…

Normally, especially at this time of year, we would never be so low on fuels that we would run out but we have been kind of preoccupied with runs to town for urgent reno materials to monitor our supplies like we normally would do… This time of year we usually top everything up to get us through the winter. We forgot.

E got back at four pm with the new inverter, 80 lbs of propane, four jugs of diesel and a can of black paint for the window seat.

He took the old new inverter off of the panel and hooked up the newest inverter. The eight new solar panels he had installed on the new roof have fully charged the eight new batteries over the last two weeks so they were set to go. He plugged it in… and bingo bango bongo.. We have power and lots of it.

We celebrated with dinner before E spent 3 hours building an Ikea cabinet for some of our books.

Next we need to tackle the water pressure issue.. E had strung a garden hose down to the house from the studio and the water pressure was just fine.. So he bought new pipe today (its cheap) and we are going to ignore finding the leak, bypass the old system and lay a new water line…

But it doesn’t have to

be done today..