Well, Adam (my brother if you’re new here) is framing the Lodge incredibly fast. In mid June we arrived, and we’re now framing the roof. My job was getting the permits, county approvals and then the financing. That’s all done, so I’ve moved on to spinning up the advertising which includes the website, social media, and paid advertising, and finalizing the solar/battery/generator system.

I can’t take bookings yet since we’re still not sure when we’ll open. That, and it’s pretty hard to ask people for their money when you’re at the framing stage. I think you really need to get to the drywall stage before people trust that you’re going to get done when you say you will. Therefore, my focus so far has been trying to get potential customers to sign up for a mailing list, so I can inform them when I can take bookings. I’ve had really good luck getting people to my website. I’ve had very little luck getting people to sign up for the mailing list (please sign up below!). And I get it, it seems like most websites that I go to now, on the home page is a pop up that says something like “give us your email and you get 10% off your first order.” I never sign up for those things, I don’t know if I want to buy anything from the website yet, so why would I want to give you my email? I need to find a better way, if anyone reading this has a great idea, I would love to hear it!

Maybe I say something like, if you sign up now, you’ll get a deal that no one later on will get. I don’t know, does it really matter that much? Is this the best use of my time? That’s the hardest part of this, is figuring out what the best use of my time is.

The simpler issue that I’ve been working on, is the solar/battery/generator/heater system. We’re going to have at least one, 1000 gallon propane tank on site, probably above ground just to the side of the lodge. Everything in the lodge that can be run off of propane, will be. This includes the lodge heater, the water heaters, the range, the oven, the dryers, etc… As this lodge is at 10,400ft, we don’t need AC, so with all of the appliances that usually draw a lot of electricity being propane, we can get our actual electricity usage pretty low.

The bids that I’ve been getting for this solar battery system are actually really low, like less than 20k. Which sounds great, but Adam has built so many houses with solar battery systems that don’t have enough power, that he doesn’t trust the salesmen. And, this is going to be a very upscale lodge, if we’re charging people over $1000/night, can we have an unreliable power system? What we decided to do was to double the size of the system that Signature Solar suggested for us. So, we’re going to have forty 450W solar panels feeding into 2 EG4 12000XP Inverters. Those inverters are going to be connected to two 280Ah batteries each. This will give the lodge 100 amps of continuous power, which without AC or any 240V appliances, should be plenty. And to make absolutely sure we never have an outage, we’re going to tie into the system a 24kw Generac Generator that runs off of propane. Based on the research I’ve done, with all of that, I think we’ll have a power system that is just as reliable, if not more reliable, than being on the grid. If anyone that’s reading this has any wisdom to add to this, please leave a comment.

The bottom line is, with rentals that anyone can stay in, you just can’t have any mechanical systems that have to be messed with constantly. If you do, 9 times out of 10, the system quits working at 2am Sunday night and the people call me in a panic. I’ve had many a weekend ruined by water system issues at the Escalante Cliff House. It hasn’t happened for a few years now that the water system has been upgraded, but I think I have PTSD now from getting phone calls in the middle of the night and knowing that my guests can’t flush the toilet!! It’s terrible for everyone.