How do we live?

Simply, in a word.

No electricity bills - but an overcast week or two limits what appliances can run, especially if one neglects to fill the fuel container for the generator when one is in town! Yes, I did a LOT of jigsaws over the Christmas/New Year break.


For example, one has solar panels - this is a 100 Watt array, consisting of 5 x 20W panels that came (cheaply) as a kit that Dave made a frame for and did all the wiring for.


The solar panels charge a battery - we have a truck battery in this photo, cheaper than the "proper" deep cycle batteries, won't last as long but it'll do for now. Actually, we have two sets of panels and two batteries set up at the moment, another set of 5 panels waiting for Dave to put them together and hook them up. Then we attach an inverter to the battery/ies, run an extension (power) cord into the house, turn the inverter on and run our standard 240volt appliances - will run laptop, stereo, tv, video/dvd player, blender (slowly!), etc. For power-hungry things like the washing machine (twin tub), iron and vacuum we run the big generator (at the top/left of photo) - makes a helluva noise though so we don't tend to use it for frivolities. When the batteries are low, we hook the battery charger up so generator charges them. Needs petrol in the genny though..... Had a little generator 750w but it's in outpatients awaiting attention.


Water? Well, we catch the roof water directly into the squat tank on the northwest corner of the house, then use the pictured fire fighting pump to move the water up a (buried) pipe to the little header tank up the hill, which then gravity feeds back to the house - so we only need to use the pump once every week or so but the rest of the time the water obliges by falling down the hill to our taps with no electrical assistance.

Bought a new camera a while back, and went wandering one frosty morning, testing out the macro/super-macro,etc.

Here's my favourites - looooove frost :) even though it's murder on some of the vegie plants. That is, when I've got vegies growing!

Frost photos from a winter wander

Bought a new camera a while back, and went wandering one frosty morning, testing out the macro/super-macro,etc.

Here's my favourites - looooove frost :) even though it's murder on some of the vegie plants. That is, when I've got vegies growing!

Skip a bit ...

One, two, skip a few, 99, 100!

Well, I have a memory stick with me with some 2009 photos so we're skipping all the intermediary stuff and have fast forwarded to July 2009 and onwards.


Here's the concreters doing the slab for the shed - we bought a kit for a 2-door garage with barn doors (as opposed to roller doors) because we didn't plan to park cars in there.


The blank slab, with the (very envirofriendly, only one tree - that we didn't really want in that spot - died for the purpose) custom-designed clothesline in the background, is going to have the carport kit built on it. Some day.



And here we have Pa (my dad) and Dave putting the shed up. It is a thing of great beauty to my eyes, because it holds lots of stuff!



Shed's all finished now, although the downpipes haven't been set up to run the roof water to the tank yet. With all the rain we've had the tanks have been overflowing so we're not anxious enough to be motivated to hook it up.