02 June 2023

How we will utilize the empty barrels we use to ship stuff

I ended a recent post stating that I would describe in a future post what we were going to do with some of the heavy duty plastic shipping barrels we have accumulated over the years.  This is the future post but I'm not going do the describing after all.  The video below can do that much better than I can.  

False Bluff sits on the very edge of one side of Nicaragua.  Anything east of us is an island.  We are located on a 26 mile stretch of Caribbean beach and except for the communities at each end of this stretch of beach our only 'neighbors,' often hours of walking away, are a small number of subsistence farmers.  

There's no infrastructure to speak of except the fairly recent addition of electric lines running behind us carrying electricity to Bluefields.  What we thought would be a tremendous boon to our lives turned out not to be any kind of boon at all...except to the view and whether that's a benefit is questionable.  Our first effort at 'official' electricity failed in less than 2 years because the salt in those lovely Caribbean breezes ate our transformer.  

What the barrels will solve deals with plumbing, not electricity.  We now have solar systems to take care of electricity and we can wash the salt off of solar panels.  The guy who actually shows how he uses the same kind of barrels at his off grid cabin tells that story here:


Note: The man who did the video posted an update some years later describing how the installation in the video is doing now...and he had nothing but praise.  The circumstances under which we will be using this system are very similar to his and we expect the same results.