Thoughts on being environmentally friendly

Hello everyone,

Today Ngaire (pronounced Nigh-ree) and I had a long conversation about local organic food that made me consider a lot of things that I hadn't before. I will talk about that later, but let's warm up by talking about energy efficient life on this farm a little bit.

The whole farm is solar powered. They have solar panels on the roof of the open kitchen and three hours of direct sunlight completely fills the batteries connected to the panels. This has some interesting implications; It is ideal to do laundry on a bright sunny day, when the panels are picking up more sunlight than they can store.

Other electricity is pretty limited. Because the temperature is pretty awesome and we have a good mix of sun and shade with the trees, there is no heat or air conditioning, just really big screened in windows. So for my little dorm room cabin there is a power line that comes up from the kitchen with two plugs for a desk light and a larger lamp over my bed. I generally don't used the desk light and just charge my laptop there (which is totally cool to do). The phone either gets charged in the kitchen while I am cooking and eating, or in the plug that would be for my bed lamp. There is wifi, which is very awesome. I can't explain the mystical powers behind that one.

The stove is gas powered and we turn off the gas between meals. It turns out that leaving the pilot lights burning 24/7 actually uses a lot of gas. So I am getting really good at lighting pilot lights.

There is also an outdoor shower. Oh man is that cool. Definitely one of the things I know I am going to miss most at this point. However, hot water is definitely a limited commodity, so showers need to be pretty quick.

The Outhouse that is basically for myself is really cool also. For starters it has a real toilet that really flushes. Outhouse doesn't usually have that connotation in my experience. In addition to that it has some crazy innovative system that was the result of a Workshop, where the toilet flushes into a tank that then nurtures plants on the farm. Yes, I have questions about the mechanics of that too, but it works and that is pretty awesome as a means of dealing with waste.

What else? The open air kitchen has running water, though I haven't used the hot water yet. It also has a special tap for filtered water. Fancy. There is also a former freezer now super efficient refridgerator. No microwave though. I am still working my way around figuring out how to reheat food... All in good time.

Oh! We also have an electric fence for keeping the wild pigs out. That is also powered through the solar panels. One of my first tasks was clearing around the fence so that plants that were touching it weren't pulling energy. Alright, alright, we turned the fence OFF while I was clearing.

Well, thanks for taking the energy tour with me. More anecdotes and adventures to follow.
<3
Lauren