Everyone that lives in Florida knows we have an occasional "milder" day or even a brief drop in temperatures. But .... what the heck Florida? This is just outright horrid!
So I thought I should give you an idea of how the past 2 weeks went here at Luna Roaches. On January 13th we've ordered a Multizone Mini Split ductless system for our barns, it arrived the day we had to ship out all orders in one day because it was too cold the two days prior. i.e no time to install it. The idea behind this was that maybe we can leave the house for more than 2 hours before having to rush back home because Florida went from "Jackets in the morning" to "Flip flops in the afternoon", meaning we have to switch from Heat to AC. The following day Chris started unpacking the Units, laid out everything nicely, spent the day reading a novel of instructions, and went to work drilling holes for cables and hooking everything up. Two days later, everything was in place. The big moment arrives ... aaaaaaaaaand NO HEAT OR AIR! Instead, we had created a very effective room fan that would circulate the temps nicely.
Racing the time to beat Mother Nature that was coming like a freight train with 29F towards us, we tried to troubleshoot everything. And BAM, the freezing front was here and here we were with a non-functioning unit, turning on 3 heaters each in our barn and adding another one to our Chicken coop because the Chickens wouldn't be doing well below 40 just yet (after all, they are still only teenagers). Side note: We have a Sensor Push temp monitor in each barn and it alerts us when the temps hit a certain low or high threshold. The alarm is that of a Tornado siren and at precisely 3:23 am that night, it went OFF because the barns were at 65F.
The following morning we bundled up, dug Ice from the now frozen Chicken Waterers, and went back at it. After countless hours of YouTube Videos, calls for help to the AC company on Social media, left Tech voicemails and frustrated emails, someone finally called us back. It seems, that Chris switched one hose and us hooking up every remote they sent along (this is ultimately a wi-fi controlled system so that we may regulate the temperatures from anywhere on the planet with an internet connection) the remotes were all sending confusing signals at each other. These are all the remotes that came with this!
As of last night, we finally got the heat and air working and were able to keep the barns between 81 and 82 F all night! (Although now we have to address the humidity levels LOL)
Today's task, figuring out how to get the Wi-Fi hooked up to not interfere with the remotes and we should be in a good place before the next freeze arrives this weekend! Or so we hope... - the way the last 2 weeks have been going who knows if we will ever figure that out, you know?
Evaluating the aftermath of that temperature drop, we lost quite a few Adult winged roaches as they tend to be a lot more sensitive to temperature swings. Our son took on the task yesterday to go through all 160 plus bins to remove said carcasses. But in the end, there is nothing we can do to change what transpired and we can't bring them back to life :(
Anyways, as we're about to head outside to go feed our Chickens, stay warm, this is not over yet and we're expecting another freeze this weekend! Hopefully, we're properly prepared this time... and remember, while we can't ship right now, you can always ask to come pick up an order :)
Mel & Chris
Luna Roaches
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