Sootypaws News – Page 13 – News from off the grid

Spring in the Woods

General | Woods
May 6, 2016

We had a dry April mostly with above normal temperatures. We weren’t complaining because it is spring.

Molly began her garden plan in late winter and started tomato and other seeds indoors. In late March into April she’s been planting onions and potatoes in the garden along with seeds and this weekend she hopes to plant her indoor-started plants in the garden.

I’ve been taking walks when there’s been a chance and one day I noticed that the redbud trees were blooming. This is a small redbud tree on the edge of the garden. In the background the large shed and the shack can barely be seen.

Along with buds there are bugs!

And flowering dogwoods of course.

This is a patch of wild dwarf iris on the county line road south of our home. I hadn’t noticed this patch before. There is another patch across the road from our house and even more iris in the hollows. The iris is flowering now.

We’ve had a week or more of rain and it’s cooler. The rain encouraged the trees to leaf out. Last week we could see our garden from the house, now we can’t because of all the green.

Lights in the Addition

General | Off the Grid
October 16, 2015

Our solar electric project is proving to be lots of fun. We have lights in the main part of the house and we are finding we can do a lot more in the evening — it’s just a lot easier to see than before with kerosene lighting.

The next step was to wire the addition and install lighting. We did the wiring in the attic, dropping wire through conduit into the addition below for switches and plugs. Everything is on a single 15 amp circuit.

We also installed four downlights (LED like all our lighting). We tried to put the lights in activity centers in the addition. Our hope is to install a new wood stove, next year, in the addition and be able to use this as a year-round living space like the main part of the house.

We have also been working on upgrades for the solar power generation — extra batteries and a new MPPT charger found on eBay are already installed. More panels are next.

Solar Shed Update

General | Off the Grid
March 19, 2015

We have begun the process of connecting the house to the solar shed. The first stage has been to dig a ditch over 200 feet long between the shed and the blacksmith shop.

That’s the shed in the distance on the other side of a bit of woods. It took two days to dig the ditch by hand for the cables. There was no way we could have used a ditch witch to do this.

We’d cleared a path through the woods last fall — cutting and removing parts of fallen trees and clipping all the briars. The path to the shed zigzags a little because of all the trees. Since we will be using inexpensive inverters which only have 15 amp outlets we are running three separate cables, each for a 15 amp circuit. One circuit will be for lighting and other purposes (such as charging cell phones) in the main part of the house; the second circuit will be in the addition. The third circuit will eventually be used, when we upgrade the system, for a small refrigerator. The cable has 8 gauge wire because of the distance.

Near the road we ran the ditch near two large hickory trees. We excavated under the roots rather than cutting them. Several of the roots were quite large. We ran the cable through a piece of plastic pipe under the drive from the ATV shed.

We crossed the road just north of the garden and ran the cables under a second piece of pipe there. A piece of plywood covers the ditch so people could use the road. Rick and Kevin were staying at the camp near us this week so they could tap maple trees and harvest sap.

The ditch is filled in now but there’s still a lot of work to do. We’ll be putting in boxes for the cable in the shed and in the shop. And we then need to run cables from the shop to the house. And there’s still a lot of work to do wiring the lights and outlets in the house.