Our HARSHEST Winter in the Swedish Wilderness So Far

It is minus 27 degrees celsius and the light you see here now is from the full moon. My face is being lit up a little bit from the screen as well. It took Ivar a particularly long time to fall asleep this night, so two ways. Now sleeping with Ivar inside the cabin and I'm going for a late night full moon ski trip. This is a truly remarkable experience. I hope that Ivar is going to go to sleep better tomorrow evening and that the skies are still clear so that Tuva can do this tomorrow evening. It is the end of January here and the moonlit ski trip yesterday was fantastic. It is now below minus 30 degrees celsius. It feels a little bit frosty. It certainly bites your cheeks. I want to show you here what happens to our stream. Unfortunately Tuva was here in the morning poking away the ice already. I forgot to tell her that I wanted to film this but you can sort of see what I mean because all the rest of the stream is frozen up compared to the last video we made when I was here. One of the things I'm most curious about when it comes to generating power is some kind of stream generated power like a water wheel or some kind of turbine or underwater water wheel of some kind. But as you can see here when it's this cold in the winter the whole stream freezes up, almost the whole stream at least. There are some places where it could be better but a couple of days with minus 30 and there is not much water without ice on top. I had some idea that maybe one could build a small hut on top of the water and have a water wheel inside that hut and somehow and maybe if there is a roof and inside the little hut the ice wouldn't form but I don't know. I have no idea. As I said it's the end of January and for the first time we get peaks of sunlight onto our place. We're sort of in a little bit of a valley here so usually we just see the sun shining on the treetops but it's starting to get lighter every day so we can see the sun between trees more and more. So that is a problem when thinking about solar power. Ivar is sleeping in the sled in the outdoor kitchen but I wanted to show you here that there is our cabin and then all the way on the other side of the field here the sun comes first so my idea is to have the solar panels all the way in that corner of the field and then somehow get some cables or something along the tree line here back to the cabin and then have the battery bank somewhere here. I've been thinking about having some solar panels in the tops of some tree or something but I don't really know how that would work and it's also harder to maintain and get the snow off the solar panels. My main concern with the wind turbine is how much does it sound and how ugly is it or how to say. Solar panels are not that beautiful either I guess but and also how will it affect the birds. I wouldn't like the small birds to be scared of it or fly into it and also I don't know it is not that windy here at least not this winter the wind has not been blowing that much. In the spring and in the fall there is lots of more wind but maybe a combination of all those three will give us the power we need in time in time but I'm absolutely most curious about generating power from the stream somehow and preferably with some really old looking nice wooden water wheel. It is the next day and the temperature continues to be below minus 30 so just over the night the ice has been growing on top of our water hole so two years ago I think it was two years ago we had a winter with a lot of snow more snow than this and that winter and up until that winter we had hand shoveled everything so we had very narrow paths to avoid exhausting ourselves too much but after that winter with that much snow we got ourselves a snowblower and two years ago we had even less money than we have now so we got the cheapest smallest one we could find and it turned out it couldn't even work properly in snow so that was a farce we tried to send it back but they wanted us to check this and that and tighten the gas wire or tighten the this or that wire and try again and our mail conversation was like a mile long and they really wanted us to not send it back and we were in a dilemma there because if we were to send it back we wouldn't have money for another one anyway so we needed it but it was really bad so after a lot of mails back and forth we got it even more cheaper than it already was so we decided to keep it anyway so the problem was that the snow leaked into the mechanism that got the wheels turning around and got the whole snowblower moving forward i put some glue here and there and i put a new piece of thin sheet on a place as a protective shield against all the snow flying around so i actually got it working pretty good i actually liked it pretty good because it was so small so it was so handy to move around here but in the beginning of this winter the handle to the snowblower started come apart so we had to get it welded and i don't know anything about welding so so we got it to a shop close by here car shop yeah and asked if he could weld weld some and get the handle stuck to the snowblower again so we got it there and some days later he started welding on it and we didn't hear from him and we didn't hear from him and then i just sent a message and asked like how it's going they have promised snow now tomorrow so and he just immediately called back and was a little bit silent for a while and then said so it's not going so well it appears that the snowblower caught fire went up in flames yeah so something was probably leaking from the tank luckily his shop and himself managed to not get destroyed or hurt so so but that that was the story of our very cheap snowblower that didn't even work in snow but then the snow came a lot a lot of snow so i just shoveled by hand some paths here and there so we wouldn't trample down the snow because when you start to trample down the snow it's really hard to to remove it afterwards and we were wondering like how what are we going to do now we need a working snowblower a functioning it's too much we can do it by hand but it's so much work it's so much because this place also is it's not planned for winter there is no place to have heaps of snow you need to throw it out of out of the way because there is hills on both sides of the pathway here so so i got frustrated and went went into town and and or and bought a new snowblower so now we have a new snowblower and i was shoveling snow here with the snowblower two days for two days morning to evening i was really tired after that i had some trouble because the the wheels started digging themselves down and so the snow in the middle of the snowblower came up so the wheels just started spinning and we didn't have any chains no and i don't know if the chains would have helped either way i was i'm really curious to know how a snowblower with tracks works if that would be better but i feel like they are way clumsier as well harder to maneuver with yeah so we got small paths here so i don't know but i'm really happy with the new snowblower anyway it was just the first first time trying to get rid of the snow that we have already walked on top of that was the problem and it's really nice with cleared paths again it's hard to struggle with carrying water when it's snow everywhere and yeah and taking care of the animals is way easier with the paths cleared so we have started removing some snow from all the roofs as well i really want to build so it's not necessary when it's this much snow and then i guess any day it could be become plus degrees again and then the snow got gets really heavy so we are going to remove the snow from the the outdoor kitchen and also i i was planning on trying to remove the snow from from the cabin as well and we are going to try to do that with some ropes but i don't know if that will work i've seen some youtube videos when they do that but the idea is to remove it before it gets to slush because then it's really heavy and hard to remove from the paths to the out house and yeah so hopefully we can get it down and then i can take the snowblower and just blow it away since this cabin is built for summer use they haven't bothered with where the snow falls from the roof so it's not so nice when all this snow falls on this path for us and the same here all this snow falls straight in front of the entrance on the new cabin we will build it so that no snow will fall in front of the entrance or anywhere where it's important so the rope thing didn't work for us i guess the faster roof is to not so steep how to say but i shoveled the ridge line on the on the bigger roof and we will try tomorrow with with a rope there and see if that will work better now i need to get rid of this heap of snow for those of you who have not experienced snow if you alter the state of how the snow is when it has landed from the sky so if you take the snow up and and put it on some other place then the altered snow will become much harder so this snow here is still pretty loose or how to say other things like the wind and and if it becomes melting degrees for a while and then minus degrees again also alters the state how snow is behaving or how the snow is but if i were to leave this pile of snow here till tomorrow it would become very hard and i would be and i would have a hard time removing it then so now i need to see if i can get our new snowblower started in this cold i hope the new one is better with snow and cold than the last one we had and then i think that will be it for today it's pretty tiresome to be outside working in this cold okay so i got the snow blown away but there was something weird with the snowblower the mechanism that drives the wheel forward i need to call the place i bought it from i can't have another one that doesn't work in snow i've been the evening round to the animals feeding the sheep and seeing that the chickens are okay and and the moon has risen again now i'm gonna go inside to toba and ivar tonight we're going to eat some liver patties one of my favorite dishes very very nutrient dense but i can't show you that because if i bring the camera in now it's going to fog over totally when it's this cold outside i need to acclimate the camera to inside again and that takes a couple of hours i put it in a dry bag one of those bags that kayaking people have when they are packing their bags so so it's airtight and and that's supposed to make the camera not fog over and i suppose i will avoid kind of dry spots or drying water spots on the sensor as well with that technique so when it has been inside in that bag inside the cabin for two hours or so i can take out the camera again and it's fine ivar has gotten two more tooths teeth how to say so that's why he was so grumpy last evening i guess hopefully tova can go out on a moonlit ski trip this evening we'll see there's a lot of talk about temperature in this episode snow and temperature i guess it's the theme so just yesterday there was plus one degree celsius and a little bit of wind so all the snow came down from the almost all the snow came down from the trees and some birds started singing in a different way so this morning we the woodpecker did his usual spring drum and it was minus 20 so a little bit early maybe but right now it's minus five degrees and really really nice it certainly has been the coldest winter for a long time for since we moved here we have had some colder days in the other winters but not this long period of time so the coldest winter in weeks you know it's been around minus 30 for many many days weeks almost it has also been nice because when it's that cold it's really beautiful outside but a bit tiresome when it's cold all the time and a lot of firewood there was something wrong with the new snowblower and i had to go into town again with it so they changed the i don't know what the term is in english but something that drives the wheels forward string the rubber string rubber string rubber band flat rubber band yeah you get what it is so you went there and was all day and waited for them to fix it yeah right now it's working at least so that's good yeah for a new one i i like to think it should work from the beginning yeah that's another thing we need to pay for it now we got it on invoice so we pay in the end of the month yeah so we need to scrape some funds from here and there to pay it another thing that is going to be a little bit thrilling is did we put away enough money for taxes we started the company last spring and then from everything we earn we have to put away some for the taxes that is going to happen this spring so so we are totally new to this self-employment thing and and doing your own taxes and we have hired some help with the accounting so that we will get it right so hopefully we will have put away enough for the taxes otherwise i have no idea what we're going to do so hopefully it is a lot more money we have put away than we need to pay taxes before so we have some savings for the first time in our life but we'll see we'll see if everything goes to ---- they're coming to say we have all our wonderful patrons to thank for everything that we are able to do here and these videos as well so thank you it's really nice without you this wouldn't be possible at least not in this way no we would have a lot more struggles it has also been we haven't been that much outside with ivar when it's this cold or have been this cold so i think it's so i think he think it's fun to be outside a little bit we're longing for spring now i would say yeah but there was a change in the season now it's not no longer winter it's spring winter yeah as we say in swedish but i don't know if there is some better term for that in english it's lighter outside and the sun is warming birds are chirping there is more seasons than four yeah here i would say at least eight seasons so i guess this is it for this episode thank you for watching and we'll see you in the next one i do just doggies have done this