Energy Matters
If my last post read like an article from the, now sadly defunct, Home Power Magazine, then consider the reason. We tend to take energy for granted, turn a light switch on, press start on the washing machine or dishwasher and something happens. That is until the utility bills arrive, and then it seems as though we are somehow being cheated by unscrupulous corporations, or maybe radical environmentalists bent on forcing us to change our lifestyle, to reduce our carbon footprint to save the planet. In reality, of course, there is a complex infrastructure that needs to be owned and operated in order to generate, transport, and deliver the energy we require.
Lest you think this is a problem of modern life, too much technology, I would submit that those who have chosen a Waldenesque “chop wood, carry water” lifestyle spend even more time and effort concerned with growing, harvesting, cutting, moving, splitting, storing, and seasoning wood, their primary source of fuel. Since good firewood requires drying and seasoning for at least a year, planning and storage is required. A source of trees is also required, and sustainable forestry practice also requires acreage and management. And that is just getting the fuel, using wood as a primary energy source still requires keeping the fire in one or more wood stoves or fireplaces burning, cleaning ashes, keeping chimneys and flues clean and in good working order. And even still, there a cold mornings where it is necessary to get out of bed to relight the fire.
Note also that so far, I have only described the electrical aspect of our energy, I did not mention how we heat our home (oil heat), heat our water, cook our food, and dry our clothes (propane, mostly). This is one of the lesser known aspects of living off-grid, at least outside of a temperate climate. While it may be possible to build an all-electric off-grid home, it is still very cost prohibitive. While batteries provide excellent short-term storage for a moderate amount of electricity, they are generally the most expensive part of the system and so are typically sized to hold hours or days of electricity, not the weeks or months that would be required to sustain an all-electric house through the darkest and coldest parts of the year in our far northern climate. On demand water heating is even more challenging in that it requires a large power input which is difficult for a battery system. Solar hot water systems certainly exist, but are complex to integrate and may require an alternative heat source on dark cold days, or when consumption exceeds hot water storage. For those who want to live closer to the edge, there are biogas generators, but this is beyond my comfort level.
Vanadium Future?
There are some technologies just over the horizon that could provide some relief. Ten years ago, I thought vanadium flow batteries would surely be available by now that would allow us to store a huge capacity of energy in tanks of vanadium sulfates in various forms of oxidation. In this system increasing the energy storage capacity is achieved by increasing volume of electrolyte. So, storing more energy, is reduced to a real estate problem. A few multiple megawatt hour batteries have been deployed to utilities, but nothing in a smaller commercial or residential environment where the power requirements are much smaller, but the storage requirement is still substantial.
But now on to something completely different
Over the past decade we have owned a fair number of animals. At any one time, we have a flock of 10 to 30 chickens, turkeys, and Guinea fowls. We currently have four goats. In the past we have had sheep and a pig in addition to more “normal” household pets, like cats, dogs, a tortoise, a cockatoo, fish, amphibians, and so on. Our animals tend to be more pets than livestock, although some are eaten, and of course the chickens lay eggs. When the snow melts, the goats are our mobile lawn mowers and ground crew, when the snow is covering the ground, the goats are, well, goats. Up until last year, we did not have any form of animal enclosure. The birds have a coop, but they are free to roam around. The sheep had a shack (aka wood storage shed) where they slept. The goats enjoy playing on top of a large boulder (called “turtle rock”) but were also free to roam. Now if you know anything about goats (and really, I did not), then you can immediately see a problem. Goats are cute, goats are funny, goats are curious, and they are also obnoxious. Want to plant a garden, forget it. Hang some baskets with flowers, goat challenge accepted; leave a bag of trash out, goat toys!
But wait, there’s more.
You may recall that I mentioned that we replaced our old generator, partially because it was beginning to overheat. It had several issues with its cooling system that had been replaced and repaired over the years. In addition, our ventilation fan in the generator room had failed years ago, so we had set up a kludgy system of box fans, open windows, and kept the garage door open when the generator was running to prevent overheating. This was made easier (?) since the relay that controlled the auto-start function on our inverter had failed, so we were required to go to the garage to manually start the generator daily anyway. This meant that people were going in and out of the garage on a regular basis, mostly leaving the door open to allow for cooling. The goats (and to be fair, birds and sheep) were curious. They could easily enter the garage unimpeded where they discovered that a warm enclosed space was available in the winter, and a shaded dry place was available in the summer.
Due to supply chain issues caused by the pandemic, lead times on new generators was long, 9 to 12 months, so I submitted an order and was given a delivery date in August. I did have some trepidation that the old generator would not make it through another cycle of winter, spring, and summer, but I had no choice but to wait.
Now, as I said before, we had never completely finished unpacking from our initial move ten years ago. Or rather, we had unpacked everything we could use, or find a home for. There were still plenty of boxes of broken parts of furniture, musty old paperback books, obsolete computer and networking books, parts for cars we no longer owned, dead batteries, cables, old hard drives, broken blenders, a crutch, damaged Christmas ornaments, discarded or unused appliances, and so on. That is, the usual flotsam and jetsam that washes ashore in garages and attics over a lifetime. This was always on the list of “something we should do something about someday” but never rose high enough in the priority list.
Now this waste land of ephemera that we were hording, waiting for a future archaeologist to discover and catalog (and I so wish I could see the paper generated by this find, and only hope that it would include the several mummified chickens buried around the property complete with sarcophagi inscribed with Middle Egyptian hieroglyphs, Tibetan prayer flags, bone trumpet, and crystals), while out-of-sight and out-of-mind for the human inhabitants of our property, was a playground for the animals, and particularly the goats. In short order they trashed the place, covered the floor in their droppings, ripped insulation from the walls and, in general, relived the party scene from Risky Business. It became clear that Something-had-to-be-done and done quickly before the generator could be replaced.
We had inadvertently created our own version of the Augean stables, and it seemed pointless to even attempt the Herculean task of cleaning. We were in a catch-22 where we had to leave the door open to keep the generator from overheating, and we could not replace the generator with a new one until we cleared a path, which was next to impossible because the goats just would not stay out of their playground, our garage.
Goat Pen!
And so, as the snow melted and summer arrived, we knew we needed to build a goat pen. We made a few half-hearted attempts using metal fence posts, but the goats just pushed them over. Any attempt we made to contain them, they took as a challenge to ram with their horns. In desperation, we finally hired a contractor to build us something more sturdy, and that they did. We asked for, and we received, a Jurassic Park style animal enclosure with 4×4 fence posts embedded in concrete surrounding the goats favorite toy (the aforementioned Turtle Rock) and connected to the sheep shed to provide some coverage from the elements. The first thing the goats did was try to destroy their new home, ramming the fencing material with all of the might, but to no avail. They were now contained.
Now, I do not want to leave the impression that our goat pen was a piece of finely crafted carpentry, built to exacting standards that anyone would feel proud to have in their yard. It is certainly better than I could have built myself, but that is setting the bar pretty low. I don’t think that there are any right angles involved at all, nor am I sure that there was much measuring. I am not even certain that our contractor owned a level. But it is stable and while perhaps over-engineered (in materials used, if not design) it certainly gets the job done and adds its own primitive aesthetic to the property. It did take much longer to build than expected, primarily because our contractor dumped a bunch of material off, vanished for a days at a time, and then would show up in the late afternoon or evening to put in a few hours of work before taking off again, I suppose to work on other jobs.
Garage
By the time the goats were safely ensconced in their new home, we only had a week or two left before the generator was set to arrive. I asked our contractor if he was interested in bidding on cleaning out the garage. He agreed, and then outsourced the job to a series of laborers who showed up for a few hours or a day, did some work, and then left. Yes, it was a dirty, messy job, but finally was more or less completed the day the generator arrived.
