My Work: Living on Soilar Power - Part 7

January, 1998

We survived the ice storm. Trees and power lines down everywhere and the military was called in but our private power didn’t skip a beat. Our radio phone was out for two days because the ice was so thick on the antennas that it prevented any transmissions. And the kids were delighted to have four days off school .

I worked happily in my office for my corporate clients. As I looked out the window, it was bright sunshine and we were making power. What weather. It sure was nice to be snuggled up with our cookstove and solar modules. At least we never had to worry about running out of power or heat.

The grid was fragile. There were people in Eastern Ontario who didn’t have power for weeks in the midst of the following cold snap. Livestock fell and froze in the feedlots without food or water, it was really something. I guess we all remember the ice storm of ‘98.

June 1998

Time flies like an arrow and, as Groucho Marx would say, “Fruit flies like a banana.”

Our second spring arrived with the redwing blackbirds and blew in a fresh breeze of plans and projects revolving around livestock.

We cleaned under the electric fence of the pig yard, a job that got easier every year as we gradually gained mastery over the weeds and brush. We bought eight purebred Yorkshires and they ate like pigs. They enjoyed the sun the first two days and got sunburned so Susan penned them up during the brightest part of the day. We were thinking of bathing them in olive oil to get a head start on the marinating. Then we installed a 270-gallon water tank in the second story of the barn and pumped it full from the pond with a gasoline pump so we wouldn’t have to carry water to them so often.

Our 20 laying hens (Barred Plymouth Rock), our 50 meat birds (White Rock) and our Scottish Blackface sheep arrived. The sheep’s owner ran a small magazine and I wrote an article for her on mad cow disease in exchange for the sheep. However, sheep meant that we had to build over a thousand feet of split-rail fence. We started looking for rails.

We set up an anemometer to check the feasibility of a wind turbine, but calculated that solar modules would produce as much power at a lower cost. More modules it is! My neighbor and I welded together a rack to hold six more. It swiveled 360° and tilted so that the modules would always directly face the sun. The kids and I dug a hole six feet square and five feet deep, then we set the base of the rack in the hole and covered it with rocks and 50 bags of mixed cement. Once the modules were bolted to the rack and wired together, we doubled our power production again, now up to 900 watts peak power.

The neighbor (who sold me the truck), his stepson, and a friend and I all went to Ottawa to pick up 5,000 pounds of NiCad batteries for our system. A fellow there was upgrading his batteries and offered to give me his old ones if I would haul them out of his basement. They were four to a crate, and each crate weighed 175 pounds. What a slug. I gave my friend 20 for helping and we now had 100 more batteries for the cost of the rental truck.

We spent the next day hooking those batteries up to the ones we already had, plus we installed 20 of them in the barn so we would have lights, power for the pig fence, and the block heater on the tractor. We built cabinets fronted with old windows for the new bank.

Then we cut a hole in the side of the house and built an insulated cabinet vented to the outside for our new electric fridge that had been sitting on the porch in its box for the last month. We could finally get rid of our old propane fridge and have ice cubes, ice cream, and a freezer door that opened without falling off. An electric fridge may seem like a trivial luxury, but it typically uses half the power in a house. It was a great improvement that we couldn’t hope to have without the additional modules and batteries.