Living where we do, in the shadow of Lake Michigan in the southwest of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, I’ve focused a lot of my thinking, time and energy on making sure we are never without ready access to two necessities; water, and heat. In this post I address the delivery of pressurized and filtered potable water […]
First 2 pages of an atypical Navy maintenance planning MRC (Maintenance Requirement Card)
On the homestead, and in the Primal Woods business, there are a lot of “moving parts,” literally, and figuratively. Of course some of the required maintenance is more important, some less, but choosing to do a particular planned maintenance task, or not, should be a conscious decision. It’s “okay” to choose not to perform a particular task, or not to do maintenance planning at all, so long as a person is willing to accept the associated cost:benefit trade-offs and consequences. And I will note; a state of “resilience” is difficult to attain without maintenance plannning and execution.
In response to my recently well-documented failures to perform some required maintenance, Central Boiler Heat Exchanger Maintenance for example, I went about looking for some sort of free “app” or program that might support my maintenance planning efforts. No such luck. I found a lot of work order planning tools, some with free versions, most overly complex, with functionality I don’t need at this stage, and none that I thought would meet my needs at low cost, i.e. no cost. So, I am going about doing it the “old fashioned way,” the “Navy way,” and developing a maintenance planning system, or Planned Maintenance System (PMS) as it was in the Navy back in the day, maybe it still is, for the Homestead and Primal Woods.
Well, maybe not easy, but cheap for sure. I am simply starting with a spreadsheet, and the various equipment manuals that we have around us, either as hard copies, or as digital downloads. And, I’m not trying to pull all of this together at one time, it will come together in the ensuing weeks and months, as I pull out a manual to do maintenance, or as I encounter of breakdown.
Maintenance Planning spreadsheet for the Homestead at Primal Woods
Let me just point out a few things relating to the structure of the spreadsheet, which itself will be improved as experiences informs change.
Columns: The first two I am using to categorize and subcategorize the tasks. You could do more or less of this, but I enjoy some way of sorting and filtering maintenance planning items. Column C contains labels for the various dates, and the individual task descriptions. Column D and beyond, the Week Number and date range within which particular tasks will come due. I have come to prefer the European-style Calendar Week approach for maintenance planning; I don’t need daily resolution on this calendar, but I want something a bit more precise than monthly or quarterly.
Rows: One row for each maintenace task, categorizing and subcategorizing the tax, describing the task, and providing the the cell comments, a reference to the safe source describing how and when to perform the task. I am not feeling the need to develop Maintenance Requirement Cards just yet, but the one I included at the top of the post is worth a look <wink>. Yes, it gets that bad! <smile>
Body: In the body of the spreadsheet, where you can currently see “Due” in various cells, “Due” will be replaced with the Date that a particular maintenance task is completed.
A beauty of a spreadsheet, and there are many, is that it can be changed and improved relatively simply and quickly. When the process is substantially proven out in the spreadsheet, it could be recreated in a database, with canned reporting, input forms, etc. Who knows where this might go over the years, but regardless, the spreadsheet is a good starting point. Also cool, is that I put this spreadsheet on Google Drive, and I can edit it, in other words make entries, using Google Sheets from my smart phone. Or not; print it out, stick it on the wall, use a pencil, or update the spreadsheet on your laptop/desktop.
Central Boiler Nitrite Test Kit p/n 405
You will see in Row 10 of the spreadsheet, “CB Check pH and Nitrite levels.” It was due the week between Christmas and the New Year, though that date was discretionary, I just wanted to get it done “soon.” As it turns out, soon was yesterday, January 4th.
The date moved out because we did not receive UPS shipments due to the weather for several days; I was awaiting the Central Boiler test kit. But that’s beside the point. The maintenance was performed, and though the task was simple I documented “How I” did it in a 6 minute YouTube video. I know from my own experience, that sometimes it is very beneficial to see someone else do it, and some people consume information better visually than in written words.
Doing it for the first time, and making the videos as I went, it probably took me a little over an hour. Next time it should take me less than 15 minutes. I wrote earlier about more important and less important maintenance items; well maintenance to the water quality in an outdoor wood furnace, aka outdoor wood boiler, definitely falls in the “more important” category. Have a look at the video if you like, and thank you for reading, and for watching!
All the best in 2018, and kind regards,
John
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It’s safe to say I think, that these two words, resilience and sustainability, pretty well define our long term goals for the homestead. The first three areas in need of attention that come to mind are shelter, and specifically heating the shelter, food, and water. I have posted relatively frequently on all of these, and the focus of today’s post will be water. My most recent post in the resilience and sustainability catgories was Sustainable Heat – Year 2 of Our Journey. I also wrote some on these subjects in my Late Winter 2013/2014 post, and in the 2016 Year in Review post. Well, as it turns out, we have come a long way, but we are still quite far from the goal line.
As I think about it now, both in retrospect and in looking towards future needs, we are probably furthest along in achieving the twin goals of sustainability and resilience, with the provision of fresh water. This might be because we froze the Well House and the Studio in our first winter; the Well House systems were not permanently damaged, the PVC supply plumbing serving the Studio was shredded in its entirety, and that is not an exaggeration. If you have ever heard of or seen a “spiral fracture” of bone, that is what each and every bone in the PVC skeletal system suffered. Suffice it to say, the system was not the least bit resilient. Read more
Our home was built in the early 70’s, and I have to say, it’s infrastructure, particularly the foundation, crawl space, attic, septic system, electrical system, plumbing, and HVAC systems, were not well thought-out, executed, or maintained. So far, the only item on that lengthy list that we have not at least substantially addressed, is the foundation. The HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) was particularly inefficient, unreliable, and costly. Sustainable heat: Not. We inherited from previous owners, an old propane-fired forced air heating system, using two package units (you usually see these used industrially, the entire heating and air conditioning apparatus is outside the house, only ducting and wiring connecting it to the house), with installed electric baseboards as “back-up,” I suppose you could say. The first time the propane-fired forced air system failed, due to operator error I might add, we learned that the electric baseboards were not capable of bringing the house up to even 45°F; they’ve not been energized since. So what have we done, and what are we doing, to improve the sustainability and resilience of a system for providing sustainble heat? Read on for the details. Read more