Recovering, rethinking, redesigning, rescheduling

OK, we’ve had a complete change of plan, and the schedule has gone to pot. We were going to miss the window for building anyway (straw bale walls need 3 months to settle before the first frosts) due to Ali’s illness, and now that he’s recovered we’ve been having a rethink about the design.
Because [...]

You’d think it would be easy

We haven’t even started on the house itself yet: we’re just focusing on the retaining wall, which should be a relatively simple thing to construct, but we’re having long and intricate debates about how exactly to do it. This is probably a good thing: better than just going at it thoughtlessly and getting it wrong. [...]

Sneaky tree

I thought there was just a willow tree here, but can you see the elder growing with it?

I was quite amazed when I spotted it yesterday. I think the elder will have to come out.
Well, I spent another two hours battling with the undergrowth:

and carting it away:

It feels like I’m not really [...]

Hero son

Best thing a computer-addicted son could say to his mother, when she’s worrying about how to power his new off-grid house (heard yesterday):
“It’s ok. I’ll just read books.”
Bless! He would, as well. For a while.. then, when the novelty wore off, he’d want his old bedroom in the original house here keeping as a computer [...]

Don’t read this if you’re eating

… or otherwise squeamish.
In fact, if you’d rather not think about anything to do with toilets, do yourself a favour and pass this one by.
If you’re quite sure you want to stick around, I’ll tell you that I’ve been reading about sewage systems and composting loos, in an attempt to work [...]

A highly technical plan (NOT!) and some more grass. And some books. Maybe.

Here’s our latest, highly untechnical layout plan for the field, cobbled together by Tom and me on a whiteboard during a conversation yesterday about what might end up going where.

We’re working on the bit to the left up until next summer. The fluffy cloud shape in the middle of that section is the tree [...]

I mowed the new grass!

Albeit in a very on-grid kind of way…

That’s 100m of cabling coming from the house. It works very well on that frame and reel, except that you need three hands to roll it back up again, going home. Hmm. Maybe I should change the name of this blog to On-Grid.
As regards making some off-grid [...]

And then there was light

We made some electricity! Tom got an old washing machine motor and wired it up to a bulb:

Then by turning the shaft very quickly, he could make the lightbulb flicker:

Now we just need some rotor blades. And a tower. And some gears… etc. etc..
But the journey of a thousand miles starts with a [...]

Lessons learned, decisions made and lots still to decide

Lesson number one: When clearing land, do not simply pull out all the top growth of a big area, then expect to be able to go back and only have the roots to deal with. Because by the time you get back to the beginning, the top growth will be right back where you started [...]

The grid in our heads

Working in the field yesterday, listening to the radio, I heard that our government is about to sell most of our future power grid provision to the French government. I don’t know much about the French government, but a couple of questions spring to mind: what is it about our power industry that makes it [...]