While cleaning up around the yard, one of the girls reached the far post of the clothes line and called me over to look at something.

Hmm…

So… we have a National Geographic remote sensor, attached to the clothes line post, with electric tape.  (The rope is there because the post as started to lean over.)

There isn’t really anything to say what it’s there to sense.  A search has turned up nothing; this thing is so old, nothing even close to it is showing up.  Most of what does show up is weather related, but they look so completely different, I can’t even guess that this is also some sort of weather sensor.

The wire from the sensor is also attached to the pole with electric tape.

This has been there long enough for that bit of lichen above it to actually overlap it!

I’m guessing it was sending a signal to a receiver inside the house at some point, though I can’t recall finding anything that could be a receiver while we were packing up my parents’ stuff.

Though this device isn’t going to be sending signals anywhere, anymore!

I’m going to have to ask a sibling about it and find out what the story is!

In other areas…

Along with the clean up, we’re gathering a fair bit of stuff that normally would go into the burn barrel.  We haven’t done a burn in ages, with good reason.  There is a total burn ban in the area, and while approved fire pits and BBQs are still allowed, we aren’t going to take any chances.  Sure, we could hook up a hose, now that the outside taps have been turned on again, and spray the area around the burn barrel, but why take chances?  This stuff is just going to have to go to the dump.

I also did the meter reading today and sent that in.  I then went back over the last 5 readings and worked out the differences from month to month on our power usage.  This gives me some idea of what we can expect on our next electric bill.  It was quite interesting.  Our highest bill was just under $600, then the next one was about $550 or so.  Those two months can predictably be our highest consumption periods, though this also included the weeks we spent heating water every day, until we could get the new hot water tank.  The next month saw a consumption drop of about 1/3, and the month after that showed another slight drop.  That’s when we saw bills of just over and just under the $400.  This month?  The consumption dropped by almost half – more than 2/3s less than our highest month of consumption.  So our next bill, I am thinking we will see just a bit more than $200.  It should be interesting to see how much it’ll drop when we are at our lowest consumption period over the summer.

Interestingly, I found that we have been living here long enough to qualify for the electric company’s “equal payment” plan – with monthly payments of only $44.  !!  Based on the last 6 months of meter readings, including the one I sent in today, I just don’t see how they came to that number.  Unless I’m just not understanding something about the plan.  I think we’ll give it a few more months and see if that changes, before we apply for it.

Our electric bill is much, much higher than it was when we were living in the city, which we expected.  I’m just glad we’re not living in Ontario.  I know someone there who got an electric bill of over $2000 – about double what they paid in the same month the previous year, with less consumption!  So I’m definitely not complaining about our power bills, that’s for sure!  Still, we will be examining our options to see what we can do to bring the bills down.  Especially for the winter months.  Options that do NOT include heating with wood, since that will increase the insurance costs.  Add in the cost of buying wood, and there would be no savings at all.  Theoretically, we could cut our own wood, but even if we were all able bodied enough to do the work ourselves, it’s not worth it.  There are too many other things that our time, efforts and energy need to go to.  Like so many other things, it’s a balance of priorities, not just about dollars and cents.

Which is how we will be looking at all sorts of things as we clean the place up and learn what work it needs.  There is going to be quite a few things where we are simply going to hire people to come in and do it, rather than try and do it ourselves.  Sometimes, it’s just more efficient that way, even if it costs money.  I think some of the biggest problems we are finding now come down to the fact that no one wanted to spend the money to hire people to do it, but didn’t necessarily have the time, knowledge, resources, or skills to do it themselves.  Sometimes, the best way to save money in the long run, is to spend money in the short run.

Of course, that requires having the money to spend in the short run, which is always its own problem, too!

To complicate things further, we have my mother, who owns the place, and siblings, telling us about things that will need to be taken care of, like covering holes in shed roofs.  Which we do appreciate, since we haven’t spent a lot of time looking at the outbuildings, with our focus being the house and yard.  Then we go to look at what they are talking about, and all I can think is, this shed is not worth patching.  It’s not worth fixing.  It should be torn down and gotten rid of.  The stuff inside that’s worth keeping needs to be moved elsewhere, to protect it, and the rest needs to be turfed. Heck, some of the sheds I’ve gone into, I’m reluctant to even walk across the floors.  I’m no light weight, and there’s a good chance the rotting wood won’t hold my weight!  Meanwhile, things that could have been salvaged, like the log cabin out by the fire pit, has a roof that was allowed to cave into all the stuff that had been store inside it.

Ah, well.  Little by little, we’re figuring it out.

The Re-Farmer