Tuesday, November 25, 2008

making sense of things

I got to thinking today whilst the decorators were in and I had nothing to do and i was thinking what pure, total self sufficiency would be like. Indeed what is self sufficiency ? I want to be self sufficient and this came about because of the power companies taking up for a ride and the government not having the balls to do anything about it. In France EDF is the major supplier of power. It is 51% government owned. The French government will not allow competition in the utility sector and EDF are only allowed to increase prices by the rate of inflation so I'm led to believe.

In Britain, EDF is a major player in the power game and can raise prices by what they want. Are we in Britain subsidising the French power system ??

Anyway, what is self sufficiency?

To me it would be total Independence from everything and everybody. You would be self sufficient in power, food production, transport and housing. This is not every one's idea of SS but for now lets expand on these ideas.
1, Total Independence of the power companies.

To achieve this you would certainly need to be all electric as you cannot produce your own gas. (we will come to wood soon) Well you can but that's just because you ate too many beans and you cannot use methane very well. So to live a 21st century lifestyle with computers, Ipods, TV's et al you will need to have a hefty bank of solar Photovoltaic cells on the roof. The average household uses 4800 kwh of electric per year. I think the average falling on the Uk is 900kwh per year per 1KW panel. Therefore to get 4800 kwhrs out of your system means you will need to install panels to the value of 5.5kws. This would cost in the region of £12000 to £15000 so you would need a lot of roof space also as a basic 130w panel is about 1.2m x 2m so to get 5.5 kw you will need around 43 panels.... quite a roof space indeed and it would need to be facing south.

2, Food production.

Like many people, I like to grow some veg in the back garden but could I become self sufficient from the main shops like T****'s and Asda ? I certainly couldn't keep any animals in the back garden so I would need to become a veggie again ( I was veggie for 9 years until fish and chips summoned me in Whitby one day......

So if I were to become a veggie again what could I grow to keep me healthy all year round. I've done some research and I'd need a garden at least 40 ft long by 80 ft wide and the research offers a proviso that the land would need to be "worked hard" to produce enough to keep a couple and 2 small children.

We have nearly as much garden, ours is 45 x 60 but there are trees, a pond,flower bed and dog running area to think about and we don't have any children at home... well one darling son comes home from Uni every now and then when he has no food but plenty of washing, lol. So, I would be down to 4 deep beds of 6m by 1.2m ( see post below where my wife is going to make these).
So if I had enough land I could be self sufficient in food providing I was veggie and didn't drink milk or eat cheese.... life would cease to exist without cheese.... but then eggs would be a problem so I'd have to keep chickens which, if you read all the magazines is a wonderful thing but cleaning chicken crap out on a morning in December is still cleaning crap out and when they get diseases etc, which even with the best husbandry I suspect they will still get red mite and worms etc they will cost money to cure in either self medication or vets bills. If you buy good stock chickens you are looking at £15 each so for 10 birds you are looking at an outlay of £150 without a house for them, food and other bits needed. I worked it out in the summer and I would need to spend in the region of £800 to set up a 10 bird egg line but then asked how much organic free range eggs cost and to get my initial outlay back I'd need to keep the chickens laying eggs every day of the year for nearly 2 years. In reality the timescale is probably more like 4 years so that's out of the question. As for working the land hard. .. Oh I forgot, I'm quite disabled so working the land hard is out of the question.......

Water

We all need water to survive, no doubt about that but to be totally SS you need your own well or spring water source. I was reading the latest edition of Home Farmer and this excellent magazine has a feature on water supply which was quite revealing. We, or at least I do take water for granted. I turn the tap on and it's there. That's not to say I'm not frugal with it and I have even trained my wife to switch off the tap when brushing her teeth and only taking a 4 minute shower. Although we are not on a water meter yet I'm confident that I could at least save a bit of money if I were to go metered. I'm saving water at the moment and have over 2000 ltr of it ready to fill my garden pond up when I get to clean it out later this month. I was going to sink a large tank into the ground to collect the rainwater properly and then use this for washing the clothes and toilet flushing but money isn't there yet for this project and whilst our mains supply is still quite cheap it makes no sense to swap.

Self Sufficiency is a great idea and one we could all aspire to but one that only a very few could ultimately achieve.






....... to be continued

Monday, November 24, 2008

renovations

For a while now we have needed to have our house renovated. It's served us well over the last 17 years but now it needs updating and revitalising.
So because we want to reduce our dependency on the major power companies we have lagged the floor and outside stair wall as in the blog ...insulation below.

The update of this is that the plasterer has now been and gone, the walls have dried out and the decorator is coming on Thursday followed by the carpet fitter on Friday. Already we have seen a reduction in the amount of gas used and the house is far too hot for my liking at the moment as we have had a new radiator put into the hall. It's a smaller one than the one we have replaced but the output is massively improved so the heat out put is heating all of the hall and stairs.
The rest of the rads have been bled and as I say the house is too hot for me but my wife is what is known locally as a cold arse, lol.

The end of the month is coming soon so I will be able to update my blog on the amount of fuel used and I am hoping that it will be substantially reduced although I must take into account the fact that there have been workmen in and lights, drills and all manner of other tools have been used, many of them using electric.

Once this is done my wife is going to make some deep beds for the garden. She doesn't actually know this yet but when the scaffold boards arrive and I show her how to hold a hammer and nails or even screws and a screwdriver for the posh version she will soon get the hang of it. After that she will also learn how to plant broad beans and garlic........lol.

Scared

A few years ago I was walking home from town when two drugged up scroats thought they were more entitled to own my I -pod than I was. The major word here being "thought". I had saved up for a long time to get the money for that I- pod and I was buggered if I was going to give it up to these two who would swap it for a £10 wrap.
Anyway the upshot was that they were both put in hospital and 3 years on one is still on crutches which brings me to the point of this blog message.... I'm being followed.......Yeah !!!!

Not in a bad way of course but on this blog.

Hi Rick and Pat and thank you for following me. Rick and Pat are living the good life in Portugal and long may they continue. I'll delve into your welcoming site more over the weeks and hopefully pick up some pointers as to how to have a great blog like yours.

I'm new to this blogging lark so I don't know what will be of interest to you but I will enjoy being followed this time I'm sure, lol.

Friday, November 14, 2008

Insulation

It's been 13 days since I last blogged...... if that's the correct word nut I've been busy and ill at the same time.

As I said in the last post I was getting the inside of the outer walls lagged with 2" of insulation and then plaster boarded over. This would then be skimmed by a pro plasterer. As it happens the bloke I had organised to do the work decided not to turn up and repeated phone calls fell on deaf ears or rather a voicemail..... bloody mobiles.... you can't have a decent whinge these days, humph.

So I decided to do it myself..... can't be that hard, it's only a bit of wood and insulation..... 3 hours and my spaka back got the better of me along with my shoulders, neck, and legs giving up the ghost I decided it was time to call it off as a bad idea. I got another bloke in and the pro plasterer is coming on Monday.

So it's taken 13 days of rest and massive amounts of pain killers to repair the damage of 3 hours work.... Mind you it has given me time to think about things whilst I was in agony as I'm a great believer in occupying he mind as if you don't it will occupy itself and not always for the better.

So in my thinking I got to the point of catching up on the daily meter readings. Whilst i was out of it in bed my wife took it upon herself to read the meters for me, good lass so we have got it down to an average of 1.8 units of gas per day and an average of 6 KWh for the leccy so the cost so far for November is around £9 for leccy and£12 for gas and we are nearly at the half way stage of the month. I know the weather has been a bit warmer for this last week but maybe the insulation is doing it's job in a big way. If I can get away with around £30 for gas and £20 for electric for the month of November I'll be well chuffed as I was paying £157 a month at the dearest time last year with Eon.

So to recap, I'm feeling a bit more normal, well as normal as one can when doped up on all sorts of pain killers, or rather pain modifiers as the tablets never actually "kill" the pain off but just dulls it a bit. My staircase is lagged and ready to be plastered by Nick the Plasterer.... who is a thoroughly good bloke and a demon plasterer to boot. Then it's off to take the wife to look for a arpet in time for chrimbo and that's another year more or less done for.....

Saturday, November 1, 2008

The cold snap snapped......

Well the last few days of October certainly let us know that winter was just around the corner. It were bloody freezing in our house!! As in my last post I said we were away for 3 days so being on a bent to reduce our dependency on the large immoral power companies I switched of as much as I could including the heating.

Our average heating for a day was around 2 therms so a saving of around 6 therms was achieved but by the house was cold when we came back. i mean not only cold enough to chill the bones but the fabric of the building, the walls and floors were cold to touch. It just goes to show how much heat is sucked out of the buildings by the walls.

The upshot of it all was we had to leave the gas heating on for a lot longer than normal to reheat the house and in the end used 6.2 therms of gas but suffered for the day until it warmed up..... which brings me to another point. We are getting the walls and floors insulated on the inside as it is a cold house so hopefully by next winter we will see a significant reduction in our energy useage and be as warm if not warmer than now.

Our actual gas useage for the whole of October was 51.2 therms of gas which when converted into kwh it works out at 1642.33 kwh and we pay 2.86p per kwh so that equates to £46.97. We also used 350 kwh of electric. The electric I am particularly well chuffed at as we used to use 18kwh per DAY in June which would have increased to around 24 units in October so to reduce this overall down to an average of 11.29 a day pleases me a lot. As we are on Ebico, a charity power company www.ebico.co.uk we only pay 11.41p per kwh so our electric for October came out as £39.94 inc vat.