The Small Farm Future Blog

Off Grid-ish

Posted on June 11, 2015 | 7 Comments

Time to bring it all back home today, with a sneaky behind the scenes virtual tour of Small Farm Future’s corporate headquarters.

The picture at left gives an overview of the complex, as seen from the lofty throne of the outdoor compost toilet. Funny that in these days of retro fashion the backyard loo hasn’t made a return to every hipster’s homestead wishlist. Ah well, more evidence that SFF is ahead of the curve.

So let me walk you through the various accoutrements visible on the edifice’s southern wing. At left is the satellite broadband dish through which my jeremiads about the false god of progress are beamed instantaneously around the world – and who would have thought that possible just a few short years ago? Up and right, at the back of the roof are our solar hot water tubes – mighty sentinels surveying the farm from the lordly height of their tin roof. Nothing very lordly about their performance in the darkest depths of December, however, so fortunately we have backup in the form of a wood burning stove with backburner whose chimney outcrops cheekily between the footings of their rivals. The Small Farm Future cabin is moderately well insulated for a prefab that’s only supposed to see us through 3 years of temporary planning permission. It does require a bit of space heating in winter from the wood burner, but surprisingly little. Heating water is another matter, though. Just as well we planted a veritable forest on site ten years ago, which pretty much serves our needs.

Prone on the roof beneath the tubes, you’ll observe twelve PV panels which provide the bulk of our electricity, via our 3kW inverter. 3kW would have been a fine thing indeed in the winter, but now that it’s summer we’re on electrical easy street, despite the odd cloudy day. At far right you’ll see our 1kW wind turbine lurking in camo colours in the lee of the building. Dang thing hardly turns at all where it is, especially now I’ve tied it with baler twine. Getting it generating will be a project for the autumn.

On the facing wall the attentive viewer will notice more solar panels – in this case for the dehumidifier, which blows warm, dry air into the cabin on sunny winter days. Far right is the Vallis Veg propagator, allowing us to flood the global market with an endless stream of cucumbers, tomatoes and aubergines – but with a night time power drain of 150W through its warming cable, it’s a bit of tease to our electricity supply. Through the window you may even be able to spot the nerve centre of the Small Farm Future publishing empire, the very locus of its awesome creativity, known affectionately by staff as ‘the dining table’. Such wags.

Mercifully out of view around the deck on the left are our 19kg propane cylinders, used for cooking and occasional heating. “The great thing about the propane cylinders” I opined airily to Mrs Spudman one dark December Saturday, “is that, unlike the solar panels, if we run out we can just go and buy some more”. Sure enough, it did run out the very next day. And my desperate search for replenishments among the garages and hardware stores of Somerset proved wholly fruitless. I’d like to say I was sleeping on the sofa that night, but in fact it was Mrs S who was sleeping on the sofa – it was a lot warmer in the living room. I now have several spares.

Regarding water, other than the magnificent plenitude of the Somerset skies, we currently rely on a mains pipe – though I did have to spend a merry week in January in an open canopy mini digger laying the pipe to the house. Now there is household talk of boreholes and reservoirs in the longer term. Another alliance with Mr Yanmar beckons.

Off grid-ish, then, but not off reliance on the wider world. No sir, I’m all too well aware of my position somewhere near the end of Mr Putin’s tailpipe, which is not where anyone really likes to be. Still, let me try to draw some wider conclusions from all of this in keeping with Small Farm Future’s general brief. Perhaps the first one to note is that technological progress such as LED lights and photovoltaics allows us to live a pretty congenial off grid-ish lifestyle which previously could only have been funded by a large diesel generator. But it still requires a certain amount of care from us – doing the laundry only on sunny days, equalising the batteries regularly, rationing hot water and so on. Not massive sacrifices, but things that connect us a bit more to the potentialities of the natural world around us, and also lower our energy use and our carbon footprint a bit.

Now, I’m not one to brag about the size of my carbon footprint. I’ve come to think that human beings seek ever new arenas in which to best their fellows – bigger house, newer car, angrier blog, more LinkedIn connections, lower carbon footprint, whatever. I can’t say I’ve completely succeeded in overcoming the need to play this childish game, but I reckon I do a much better job than most people in not comparing myself with others. So I really don’t want to make a big deal about what I’m doing as some kind of exemplary sustainable lifestyle. Given our particular circumstances this approach made the most sense to us, but it’s probably not a widely replicable model. Nevertheless, what I like about it is the fact that it does impose occasional limits: if the sun ain’t shining, the laundry stays undone, and so on.

There’s a lot of talk about the way that technological developments enable more efficient use of given resources – for example, a 4W LED light can now provide illumination equivalent to about 60W from an old incandescent bulb. But this relative decoupling of resource outputs from resource inputs only really matters if it helps achieve an absolute decoupling – less total resources used. And when you look at global resource use, most notably in relation to fossil fuels, this just isn’t happening. It’s all very well me postponing the laundry until a sunny day – meanwhile, they’re pumping water up a Welsh mountain at dead of night so that everyone can have a cup of tea after watching Coronation Street. Rebound effects abound.

So maybe my point is this: it’s often more efficient to produce a good like electricity, or public water, collectively, but the danger is that it is then undervalued by the public, who demand – from the government, from ‘scientists’, from ‘civilisation’ – that the spigot must be opened ever further. I’d argue that there’s something to be said – no more than that – for more people to have the chance of being responsible for an area of land and figuring out how they’re going to produce food, water, energy and other necessities from it, especially when there’s a carbon price or other long-term environmental cost as well as a fiscal price attached to their decisions. It concentrates the mind.

Wrapped up within that point is a set of issues about public, private and collective control of resources, which I want to address in my next couple of posts on the matter of commoning, past and present. Until then, it’s goodbye from Small Farm Future HQ: don’t forget to turn out the lights.