My blog posts have always been written using renewable energy  because that’s the energy I have – we use a home made wind turbine and a photovoltaic array to provide our electricity.

I was always keen to have this blog hosted on a server that also uses renewable energy however it was not easy to find a solution that I was happy with – until now…

The first floor joists were put in this afternoon and it is really satisfying to see them sitting on the beams that span the “stilt” style foundations. We have a very sloping site and so the southern face of the house will be close to six foot off the ground on sturdy stilts which are on concrete pads. The concrete pads are set about three foot into the very solid clay subsoil.

We really would have liked to avoid using concrete however we really could not afford the alternative of cut stone and there is no stone naturally occurring on our site. There are some compromises which we find we are making, mainly due to budget constraints – our budget actually being almost non-existent!

Our floor design will be a little unconventional - quelle surprise! We are fixing galvanised chicken wire between the tops of the sturdy beams and on top of this we will spread a breathable fabric which will in turn be fastened to the tops of the beams. The floor joists will then sit on top of this fabric, nailed to the top of the beams and the spaces created will in time be filled with insulation and the floor boards screwed down to the joists.

We will not be adding the insulation just yet for two very good reasons – firstly we need to get the roof on in order to keep the insulation dry and secondly at the moment we do not know what sort of insulation we will use.

The second consideration will depend on budget – if we win the national lottery – highly unlikely but not impossible – if only we remembered to buy tickets!! I digress – if our budget changes we would love to use sheep’s wool or something similar.

What is more likely is that we will source some local timber and use our free electricity and an electric planer to create wood chips which we could mix with lime and maybe some hemp hurds and a little water to create a sort of woodchip insulation.

Any suggestions about alternative, easily sourced, environmental insulation will be most welcome

No, I don’t mean Billy the Kid or the Great Train Robbers, what I mean by out-laws is that we now have the assorted ex-in-laws.

We have our own ex-in-laws, if there are children involved and we are lucky we may have a reasonable relationship with them. Then we have not only our new partner’s family – the in-laws, we have the ex-in-laws and that relationship in whatever state it is. To top that we now also have our siblings’ ex-in-laws and possibly new in-laws as well. Phew, who has a big enough table for that family gathering?

With the best will in the world it is hard to maintain good relationships with all these new “relations”. Family responsibilities may become very confused and boundaries are ever more difficult to maintain – ah! There is the “wild west” motif sneaking in again – fence wars, boundary problems!

For many of us healthy boundaries within our immediate family may be quite enough to concentrate on, let’s face it – not many of us learned about healthy boundaries whilst growing up. By immediate family here I mean our partner and whatever children we may have between us, for some even this distinction is not clear.

I recently had a conversation with a sibling who assumed that by immediate family I meant my siblings, I was quite shocked and so was my sibling. You can imagine the conversation – sibling: but we are your family; me: yes, of course you are still my family, I now have a bigger family and more immediate family priorities with my partner and my partners children; sibling: where do we come in?; me: I actually left that unanswered and I’m still trying to figure it out, hopefully my sibling is also giving the matter some thought…

Family responsibilities are not clear and easy to deal with for many people and now with all the added family it has become even more difficult.

It may be the case that because of a particular skill you possess you may have taken on the role of doing certain jobs or having certain responsibilities within your first in-law family. When divorce or separation enters the picture that role may not be as clear as it was.

It may be that you wish to continue providing that skill to the now ex-family and there is resentment coming from others in that family, on the other hand perhaps you would prefer to keep very clear boundaries and withdraw from that level of family involvement and other family members resent you for doing that!

It’s even worse if there is simmering resentments or bitterness in the out-law family, not necessarily from your ex, sometimes these resentments come from your ex’s siblings and that can be very difficult to deal with. These feeling can sift downward in the generations, perhaps becoming exaggerated as they do and then affect the children no matter what age they are.

Even trying to write that is confusing, never mind actually trying to live it. Think I will put the kettle on and have a nice cup of tea.

I hope your day is not filled with confusion…

No, we have not gone mad and had oil fired central heating installed but we have improved the heating which we get from our wee stove.

We live in an open plan space – kitchen, dining and living room, which is heated with a small stove. It’s a narrow long space which is not well insulated and the stove is at one end which results in our being cold at the other end where the couch is, so recently we bought a small desk fan and attached it (safely) near and above the stove.

Now when the stove has warmed up the air around it and of course particularly above it, we switch the fan on to a low setting and the warm air circulates much better than before.

Interestingly enough when we bought the fan from our favourite small family run electrical shop the shop keeper asked what we were intending to use it for. No, she is not especially nosy, it’s just that she knows that we live off-grid and are not wasteful of our electricity and also that we, like herself and her own wonderful husband, are resourceful and might not always use things for their original design purpose. Also, of course, it’s winter and not many people are buying desk fans in the cold damp Irish winter.

When we told her what the plan was she said that someone else that week had also done precisely the same thing! Great minds think alike (never mind the rest of that saying – I am sure it’s not true that fools seldom differ!)

The fan works very well and does not use much power. We switch it on when feeling chilly  and turn it off when the room is fully warm.

It is a very simple solution, we are only sorry that we didn’t think of it years ago…

We are part way through building our own turbine and may take advantage of the workshops to do some work on our turbine, it would be good to have it up and spinning before the winter gets any darker.

Because we are depending solely on photovoltaic panels for electricity at the moment we would appreciate having a turbine for the deepest part of winter when the days are short. We are not generating as much power as we would during longer days and we are of course using more power for lighting and more computer use in the long evenings.

We use gas for cooking and heating water at the moment and we have noticed a big difference in the price of a barrel of gas over the last few years. During the winter when the stove is lit I often use it to cook on, its great for stews and thick winter soups cooked in my favourite cast iron pot, the one I bought for himself in a second hand shop the first Christmas when we were dating.

Recently we bought an electric steamer so that when we have the turbine up and spinning we can cook using free energy. We plan on having an electric slow cooker in the kitchen when we have finished building our house and also two electric hot plates along with a gas hob.

It makes sense to us when our electricity is free that we should make as much use of it as possible and reduce our dependence on other fuels such as gas. Quite often during the summer we have more power than we can use, it’s a great situation to be in.

Wishing you good energy…

I found some of my articles backed up on a usb thingy and put them up on the blog a few evenings ago and then I discovered last evening that most of my blog was still saved for me on my google reader – hurray for google!! I have spend the evening copying and pasting my entries back into the blog so very little has now been lost, isn’t technology wonderful after all?

As I write this i am looking at the rising moon out of the window and I have to admit that it is very difficult to stay focussed on the screen, my eyes are constantly drawn to the wonders of nature outside the window.  There is a storm forecast for tomorrow with 110mph wind so we will have more wonders of nature to observe. We will be visiting friends who have a wind turbine and the wind will certainly test it tomorrow, hopefully everything will stay where it is supposed to.

Sleep well and stay safe…

We used to have a wind turbine but we took it down late last year to make a larger one so we are relying on our solar pv system for power.

The PV system has brought us though the winter with flying colours, it was installed by a local Leitrim company Eirbyte who do systems design and installation. We were really happy with their work and they are nice people too who also live off-grid.

We do have a back-up diesel generator as do most off-grid people and luckily we have not have to use it often. The pv panels are on a tracker so they get the most out of the sun available on any given day.

What does it mean to me? I find it hard to define clearly and succinctly but it has to do with living and using earth’s resources in a manner which does not have a negative impact on future generations or the earth herself. Ok, that was my first go and already I can see that I need to edit it to – striving to live and use resources in a manner which does not have a negative impact on future generations or the earth herself.

I have read quite a few blogs where the two terms are loosely used to mean the same thing, where there is an assumption that people in the “simple living” community (to coin an Americanism) are living sustainably. Some of them probably are but many people who are practising simple living are doing so primarily in order to reduce debt. There is absolutely nothing wrong in that, debt avoidance and debt reduction are very powerful ways to take responsibility for your life.

However it means that these people are making solely financial choices and thinking only in terms of money and how to reduce their living expenses. If this results in their buying fewer toxic chemicals to clean their houses or growing their own veg then that is a great result but the benefit is purely incidental.

Hopefully, for many of these people there will be a change of mind set as they realise that the benefits are not just financial and so begin to look at their life choices (and buying choices) not just in terms of money but in terms of the environmental impact and the impact on their children learning to be more thoughtful consumers.

Taking a little more time to think carefully about buying a product can be very empowering. There are often many things to consider. Where was it produced? How well are the workers paid? Is there a Fair Trade product available? If so can I encourage my local store to stock it instead? Are there lots of toxic chemicals in this product or were nasty things used in it’s production? Do I need it or just want it?

Not buying as much “stuff” does reduce negative impact on the environment in many ways, check out The Story of Stuff.

What does sustainable living mean for you? I’d would love to hear what you think…

This is Ireland, we don’t have huge mountain ranges to cross or dangerous deserts, the vehicle didn’t even have a tow hitch so pulling large horse boxes wasn’t a good reason to have a 6litre engine.

It’s not as though I drive an electric car (yet) or even a hybrid myself, I am no transport angel with my 2.5litre diesel work van. I think that I was just a bit amazed and I admit to still being a bit amazed and confused by an engine of that capacity.

Perhaps I noticed the vehicle because I had recently read a blog post somewhere about transport and oil (sorry, can’t remember which one it was, read too many that day, if you recognise it let me know) and on reading the post an SUV driver had been offended.

He commented that drivers such as himself were an easy target and perhaps he is right but I think that if you drive to the shops in a 6litre gas guzzler that really you are not doing yourself , or the planet, any favours.

His excuse for continuing to use the big tank (suv) was that if he didn’t use it the suv would end up in a landfill (perhaps he hasn’t heard about metal recycling) or that some other person would be driving around in it. He also stated that if someone were to give him a hybrid car he would drive that – nice of him!

I reckon he could always do what we used to do with old cars in Ireland before we discovered the environment (!) – leave the car in the field and use it as a hen house…