agriculture, self sustainability

Every year in January, we spend one evening dreaming of greenery and raiding nursery websites. Then we forget all about it and random trees & shrub show up in the mail through April and May.

7 plum trees, 2 apricots and a few more shrubs not pictured here

We are starting to have a lot of fruit trees around. We try to pick a good spot for them all, but some just don’t make it. Since we put an emphasis on variety, we couldn’t possibly know and cater to all the optimal conditions needed by all. So our strategy is more on the carpet bombing side, imprecision and loss are part of the equation.

I rarely post about the garden as it has mostly become Nicole’s project, but it’s starting to be seriously amazing. I’ll have to post more pictures of it this growing season.

self sustainability, solar power

With our recent solar upgrade, we are able to produce much more than our charge controller can take. In fact, on days of perfect sun (full exposure, perfect angle) we need to turn off half of the array or the charge controller, which can only take up to 80A shuts off. This sounds silly, but on cloudy days, having all these panels is invaluable. So right now we’re a bit in a manual mode of turning panels on and off based on the weather.

3 years ago we had a brutal heat wave which sent us away from our house. I vowed then to have some sort of A/C capabilities before the next one. One of the nicest thing we’ve done to ourselves was getting a “regular” fridge. While at the time, it pushed our solar install to the limits, today it’s really not a big deal to keep going, even though it’s by far our biggest consumer of electrons. So we bought an 8000BTU A/C unit, I was expecting it to be maybe “a couple of fridges” worth of power consumption, but let me tell you… This thing is 7 fridges put together! Ouch!

We’ve been testing it now to make sure we won’t have any bad surprises when the heat comes.

We’ll never have the battery bank to store and supply 70A through the night. Also true, when the Sun shines, the solar panels can most definitely keep 70A coming and more. We’ve gotten good with stove heat, at managing not heat itself, but how to buffer it in the house, to buy us time through a cold night. It looks like we’ll have to do exactly that, but with cold. Run the A/C all day while the Sun gives us more energy than we can do anything with, to buffer the house as much as possible against the heat. Nights usually provide respite from heat in the Summer, in the Winter this is also true but it’s the opposite of a respite when you are fighting the cold :).

So our panels are more than enough, our storage is essentially null for the purpose of A/C, and our charge controller is too close to its limit of 80A to funnel all the panel energy to the A/C while doing the few other things we need electricity for.

I think this tells us we need to upgrade the charge controller. This way we can have a more pleasant Summer, and more specifically mitigation of heat waves.

All for free, money wise and carbon wise. Amidst these mundane concerns of solar system design to tackle such a juggernaut device as an A/C, it is easy to forget how beautiful and elegant it is that the hotter the Sun is, the more we can turn it into Cold. How often are problems their own solutions?

maple syrup, self sustainability

We only had 1 good week of sap flow this year, and only boiled 1 batch. It just wasn’t a maple syrup year. We still made 5 gallons which is enough for our family’s yearly consumption, and we still have 2 gallons left from last year. We’ve been experimenting with making granulated sugar with it. Last year we tried maple candy, and that was delicious but it was a lot of work. Granulated is much easier to make and to substitute in recipes. We will try to ramp up our sap production next year.

It’s cleanup time.

 

The loot

I.T., plotters

I’ve heard from several people building their own PlottyBot but it’s the first time I see a picture of one :). It truly is a great honor.

Built by Jeff.

aesthetics, plots

I finally tuned the plotter a bit to make it perform faster. I was trying to make it move faster by increasing the stepper motor speed, it turns out optimizing the pen up/down action was really where all the slowness was and makes everything appear to run faster. It’s quite spiffy now and I’ve been plotting non-stop this past week.

Snowflakes courtesy of llemarie @ turtletoy.net.

maple syrup, self sustainability

Sugaring season is around the corner and so I’m giving us paths through the woods. No sledding 35 gallons of sap, no stuck ATVs. One hard lesson after another, we now know what to do and when. We also know how: I didn’t even get the tractor stuck and made quick work of it all. It’s so nice for these things to have become evident.

miscellaneous

The kids don’t need to ask twice, I absolutely love riding and hearing giggles the whole time.

 

He discovered doughnuts.

The gifs came out a little faster than the actual actions, we’re not that reckless, we hope to remain wreckless.

First year on the ice and she’s doing quite well already.

 

Our family is a net positive on the ice.

miscellaneous

Work from Home = Work from a Snowglobe

Soon to be used sugarhouse & blue jays.

 

Trogdor was a boat. I mean he was a snow fort dragon boat.

Girls help the weakest, boy throws himself over the wood piles and eats snow unconcerned by others.

nature encounters

An interesting thing about the birdfeeder is how birds species time share on it. Blue Jays, when they descend on it, will take over all the surrounding trees. Several dozens of them raiding the feeder for 20 minutes. None of them were there before, none left after. They act as a group, are punctual, and expedient.

self sustainability, water

Our lives just took an enormous leap in comfort as we now have running water. It isn’t fully installed yet, and I’ll post more about the pump when it is.

I estimate that in the past 5 and a half years, We pumped and carried 248,930 liters (65,760 gallons) of water from the well 100ft away. I’d love to know how many joules this represents, and how much ingested Ben & Jerry’s this translates to, but I don’t need to go down this rabbit hole right now :).

It isn’t yet perfect, I’m still figuring out a few things around priming and proper plumbing. But it’s still an enormous improvement. Running water, which we took for granted most of our lives, is the culmination of not only all the projects surrounding it (well work, frost lines, piping, et cetera), but also all the projects surrounding electricity. No wonder it took 5.5 years to get here with our starting point being zero understanding of any of these things. We often run into the people we once were, who have no concept of the fact water can move outside of pipes, in buckets for example. It seems evident when you read it, but I can guarantee we were met with confused looks more than once.

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