The Blog

Every New Year brings a sense of excitement as the old cares of the year can be ignored and forgotten and the chances of fresh beginnings in the New Year ahead show promise. I guess everyone will be pleased to forget a lot of 2020 and be looking forward to 2021 as a new beginning. As always I have plans for the coming year and a “to do” list that already runs to pages and keeps getting additions. Living a relatively isolated life up the hillside it’s quite possible for us to

A bright and sunny start to the day with not a breath of wind so after a slow breakfast and jug of coffee K and I made a start out side. My first job was a periodic check over the wind turbine. Basically a visual check on the guys and all surface nuts and bolts. There are 3 cables that bring the electric from the turbine, down inside the tower and across to the connection to the main power system. The turbine top is free to turn around to catch the wind which means that the

Over the years I've had visits from a number of folk who wish to "go off grid" the last being in August this year. I have recently put together a few paragraphs of thoughts and ideas on the subject as an aid to my last visitor and it occurred to me that they might be of use to others so I post them here for general use. I make no claim to expertise except that in 20 years we've very rarely had a power cut and I've reduced my use of red diesel for the genny down from 250

We awoke this morning to find 2 inches of snow lying and news on the radio of power cuts in parts of Wales and no doubt in other parts of the UK. Living off the grid as we do of course we are unaffected by this and our life style demands a resilience in both the systems that we depend on ( ie power, water and sewage) and also a mental resilience to what life and the weather throws at us. In the event that we should have a catastrophic system failure there isn't an equivelant

When I first met Katherine back in 1983, along with her MGB GT (chrome bumpers) (the car that is) came her terrier dog George. I wasn't really a dog lover then but George was part of the package. In our lives dogs' have been a constant but they have always lived out side. A consequence of that is that they want to be inside and the back door of the house suffers accordingly. This is what our back door looks like after about 10,years of dogged canine abuse. What you can't s

January 2020 January 2020 was wet, wet, and more wet and our ground was oozing, with water lying in pools and seeping out of the hillside. The new camping field had to have some fencing to divide it up and Fred the fencer came for a couple of days, complete with tractor plus dog and his Bro to hump and fetch. At the same time my mate Bernie came over and set about levelling of the old quarry below the base of the wind turbine to create extra parking spaces. His JCB was missin