It's been a week now, since we officially moved Off-Grid!
The power situation is still a bit of an issue, we are running on one cheap battery. Our phones haven't been charged 100% since we got here, and we can't seem to be catching up fast enough. The lights are pullin a lot of juice and the LED bulbs I ordered 3 weeks ago are lost in transit.
I started looking into it last night a little more and found out the new marine or deep cycle battery that came with our Off-Grid Mansion is of course, one of the cheapest out there. Some people don't really even consider it a true deep cycle battery, because it doesn't have an Amp Hour (ah) rating... it may be a kind of hybrid battery, one you can use for starting up a motor as well.
We need solar system and a wind turbine ASAP (yes, yes with a real battery bank)!!!
Right now we use the car to plug in to... This is a method I had heard of on Jack Spirko's The Survival Podcast, he was interviewing Steven Harris who is one hell of a teacher when it comes to alternative elecricity systems. If you want to learn about solar systems and batteries or eating ice cream as the first item to eat when the grid goes down, Steven is your guy!
So, I have this 800 watt inverter hooked up to the car battery
A 15 amp extention cord runs from the inverter to this yellow 30 amp adapter, attached to another adapter that fits the 50 amp cord that goes to the RV
50 amperage hook up, done!We only turn the car on for about 30 minutes every hour we really need juice to charge our batteries (RV, tools, phones, dvd player and blue tooth speaker). The inverter still works during the 30 mimutes that the is turned off, we just can't forget to unplug or run the car again.
On another note, our new home is taking shape. Shelves and cupboards have been filled, ideas are flowing about what to change and customise to our liking. We've picked out some paints to live in a more vibrant and colorful space, those campers are all sort of stale in their color schemes... and the outside of them, what's with the big swooshes they seem to all have? I always found them very unattractive!
Oranges, yellows, blues and greens! We want to feel like we're in a cabine somewhere in Mexico or some other very colorful world! Like the feathers of a parrot sitting on the shoulder of pirate ship's captain.
I managed to bottle my kambucha in the midst of the lawless unpacking. It felt like a great accomplishment, even though all it took was but a half an hour, boiling water to sterilize the jars, pouring the fermented tea into each jar and finding a place to put store them while they keep brewing a little longer...!
...And we started a bit of a garden. Picking the spot was hard, because I didn't want our tomatoes to be too far away from us, but we wanted more sun. We situated ourselves so that we wouldn't be in full sun for this summer, New York gets just about as hot as the tropics in July and August!
The French in me had to, of course, wonder about this little guy... yummm!
I started one of those old school wattle fence which will be a project for later to finish properly... but the tomato plants I had started in Brooklyn are looking good here!
It's definitely tougher than I thought, but that was expected and it feels good having a lower carbon footprint! What I didn't anticipate was our time management... Our little human is wild out here and we are constantly worried for poison ivy. We also don't want to be working all the time... got to play sometimes too!
I am a proud passenger of the @EcoTrain, have a look at what other passengers have to say... we're all in for making the world a better place!
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