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

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.

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.....

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.

Burglars

We went away for a few days over to Cumbria so we could have some R&R and also take in the HUFC match against Carlisle ( 1-0 to pools) but whilst there we got a phone call from a neighbour telling us that our house alarm had gone off. We came home a day early only to find that the scroats had tried to jemmy out the patio window but the security devices had held well. The galling part was that my neighbour telephoned the police and they refused to attend the alarm and asked her to check to see if anything was wrong. Like asking a middle aged woman to confront a ( probably drugged up ) burglar on her own. Cleveland police are the shits........ The green edge on this episode is that the burglar left a good quality garden fork as he legged it, obviously from a previous burglary but hell, I can use a good garden fork especially if I confront a burglar.....

We went by car to the lakes as we had a dog and two suitcases but it got me thinking that back in the 60's we also had a dog and cases when we went on holiday but we didn't have a car. The journey would take about 6 hours to get to the lakes by train but we managed it. Now I wonder how long it would take and if we could be bothered as the car is the easier option.

I want to get rid of the car but my wife points out the need for a car as I'm well disabled. Now if only I can find a solar powered granny scooter and a train time table........hmmmmm.....

What's in your bins?

As the title says, What's in your bins? Have you looked lately or don't you care ? Nothing wrong with just dumping stuff in the bins including the recycling bins but as this blog has a bit of a green eco bent then I feel that we all have a duty of care to look in our bins and see what we can avoid putting in there in the future.

Take for instance an Innocent plastic bottle full of lovely cool mineral water.

When you have downed the mineral water and (hopefully) put the bottle in the recycling bin then is that it for you or do you wonder where that plastic bottle goes and what happens to it ? I did so I phoned a few council departments and the general consensus is that it is shipped off to china or India s we don't have the facilities to recycle plastic that much in Britain. Apparently the bottle is sent half way round the world in bulk containers on ships and then chipped up or pelleted and then sent back to us in this form to be reused in making more bottles etc.

Now if you didn't buy that bottle in the first place you wouldn't need to be part of the pollution caused by this shipping pollution would you? You would be able to say that you are treading lighter on the fragile earth and if you think of it it's only one bottle but if you buy one a day it's 18.25 tonnes of plastic a year......

Also when you are shopping why do we need to put fruit and veg in plastic bags? We pick the produce from the shelves, we put them in bags and then put the bags in the trolley. When we get to the checkout we put the bags on the conveyor belt. Is it so hard not to use the bag in the first place? Try it next time and see if you REALLY do need the plastic bag.

Again this sort of packaging makes up about 60% of our household rubbish that goes to landfill according to Friends of the Earth.

The come back kids

Last night we went to watch Hartlepool United at home playing Huddersfield Town. Now we, as in all the family are home and away supporters dedicated to the cause and if you cut us we bleed blue and white. However this causes conflict with my trials at being more eco friendly because if we do every away match this season we will drive the equivillent in miles of half way around the world in a gas guzzler of a car. To that end we have decided to only do a handful of important games or niggle matches when we can get a "good atmosphere " going.

The trouble is that this season we are known as the come back kids because we always have to fight to get a point or 3. Last night was again no exception. The defence were crap and let in a goal. We came back with a goal of our own. Sure enough we let in another goal from a set piece free kick. Again we equalised....2-2. True to form right on the stroke of half time we let in a third goal... Rather dubious as it came from a dodgy offside decision and then their keeper took the freekick from the other side of the pitch no less !! this led to the goal so 2-3 at half time.

Still we Hartlepool supporters know better and that there is still 45 minutes in the second half. True to form we put 3 more goals past Huddersfield Town in the second half to end the game 5-3 to Pools. My trouble is that we let in so many goals. Including last night we have scored 59 goals at home but also conceeded 54.... Still we can't complain...... 3 points is still 3 points..

The penny drops........

Had nowt to do today, well that's not strictly true as there is always too much that needs to be done in this world but we decided that we would go out for the day. No place in particular so we ended up at a garden centre and a couple of electrical shops. The garden centre was a typical crass affair but I couldn't resist getting some raspberry canes, a red goosgog bush and a thorn less blackberry bush. Two cups of tea later the wife came back from the "Christmas department" which was set up in August by the way, and off we toddled to the electrical shops.

We need a new fridge and freezer purely on environmental and money saving grounds. The separate under the counter ones we have at present still do their job but hey are costly to run compared with the modern A++ versions.
Having worked out the running cost of the ones we have which is around 4 units of electric a day and the new one would be less than 1 unit a day we would save around 33 p a day in running costs.
Now 33 pence a day doesn't sound much and you are probably thinking that I'm a skinflint but over a year it is over £120 in savings. Granted the cost of the one we looked at was the thick end of £400 but just on the savings alone the new Fridge Freezer would have paid back it's cost in 3years and 4 months. Also being disabled the pain involved in getting stuff out of the fridge and freezer at the moment would be negligible. As well as this the current ones we have are over 10 years old for the new one we would then be quids in.

Also in the next shop along in the shopping parade we saw some new televisions. Flat screen, digital do dahs all this and that free cable or satellite boxes and home cinema systems etc. I, of course wanted the biggest TV on display, a whopping 60" jobby at nearly £2000 ( but you did get a free home cinema sound system and it played DJ Tiesto concerts in hi def...... but my wife dragged me away and as we were walking along the line of TVs she said....." but how much energy do they use?"

It wasn't until we were driving home that I realised what she said.... " but how much energy do they use?"For over a year now I've been battling with her to win over her mind and soul with constant talk about energy saving light bulbs, wood burning stoves, solar thermal heating and Photovoltaic panels not to mention how much electric and gas we have used on a daily basis, (I take daily meter readings) how much petrol costs in terms of CO2, Getting her to switch lights off, standby buttons are also banned and cooking is always "eeked out" a bit further such as putting a 1/4 can of water into the pan of soup, adding vegetables and lentils to mince to make it go further and of course reduce, reuse, recycle. Most of it I thought had landed on deaf ears and all to no avail but to my shock and horror she comes out with a blinder of a question " but how much energy do the TV's use?" Amanda, I love you !!

All my work is done....... Now where is that wood burning stove catalogue I need to show her.......

It's spittin......

It's spittin marjory... get the kids in.........

Got up early today, well 10 oclock which is early for me on a Saturday ready to dig over some of the garden with a rotorvator. Well actually I was going to make cups of tea and bacon sarnies and a friend was going to do the rotorvating, ripping up a good 2/3rd of the lawn to make a veg patch 8m long by 5m wide but it started to rain........ started with a little spitting rain then a bit more and eventually it is a torrential downpour and the wetherman said it would be fine today with heavy rain tomorrow, Sunday. The lawn is laughing at us now but come the next fine day that coincides with my mates day off and the lawn is a gonna.......