Low Impact Living 1

Energy and wheelbarrows.

When I first went up to Abergeirw in the mid 1980s, to meet Nesta and ask to join her Welsh class, I was invited in for a cup of tea with her and her partner, Gwilym, who very sadly is no longer with us. Gwilym, a bright eyed, wild-haired genius, picked up a Thermos flask from beside the cooker, emptied the contents into the kettle, added a bit more water from the tap, then stuck it on the gas ring to boil. When the water had boiled, Gwilym made us all tea and when done, he poured the hot water that was left in the kettle back into the Thermos flask, ready for the next time.

Gwilym's easy action in saving the hot water displayed the traditional frugality of an isolated, rural community. It was the sort of action that Satish Kumar [footnote? Editor of Resurgence magazine] would have described as one of elegant simplicity. The farmhouse had never had mains electricity. I was impressed and knew immediately that there was a lot I could learn here.

In 1992, we got the first temporary planning permission to live on our land and embarked on our own journey into the world of low impact, off-grid life. Given the cost of living crisis today and in particular, the high price of energy, I though it might be useful to recount some of our experiences.

Assessing our energy use when we first moved up to our place was dead easy, because we had to carry it all from the gate. The track that led from the Council maintained minor road to our barn was still grassed over after years of disuse and it was all too easy to spin the wheels on our trusty Reliant Robin. So If the weather was wet, which it often was, we'd leave the car at the gate and I'd use a wheelbarrow to transport the various, newly acquired resources the few hundred yards to our home.

Let's set the scene; in 1992 there were no mobile phones, Tim Berners-Lee had just invented the internet, though most folk in Britain didn't even have a computer yet. Facebook and Google didn't exist. Rechargeable batteries had appeared but were expensive and needed a mains charger, (it wasn't until the digital camera really took off, a decade or so later, that rechargeable batteries became commonplace, along with charging from car lighter sockets). LEDs were looking promising but were largely restricted to instrument panel lights, rather than general lighting. Caravan lighting at 12 volts was limited to re-purposed car lights or small strip lights running at about 12 watts, either or both of which would flatten a small car battery in an evening or two.

Having bought a green field site in 1986, we'd already sorted our own piped water supply and a storage tank but when we moved onto the land in 1992, that was it- no mains electricity, not even a landline. So as well as the food and household goods, the barrow from the gate also had to carry our energy, a very obvious and at times, heavy load. Here's what the barrow might contain.

A weekly purchase was one box of six candles. These were proper, six hour candles for use indoors at night, at about three quarters of a candle per night. We selected candle sticks and holders for safety reasons foremost, rather than aesthetics (wide base, stable etc.) and were very careful where we put them (not where they're going to get knocked or where there's anything above them etc.). A candle is fine for reading by for one person, excellent for listening to the radio, music, audio books and just talking.

above: a good candle stick- all metal with a wide, heavy base so its very stable. Its also got its own snuffer so no need for singed finger tips.

One gallon of paraffin every fortnight or so; this was fuel for our paraffin lamps which we used for outside stuff at night, like fetching wood, feeding livestock and milking a goat. They provide a reasonable amount of light (enough to milk a goat!), can be hung up safely and easily and will only blow out in a very strong gust (so keep a means to relight them with you when using them!). If they get knocked over when lit, they're likely to keep burning while the paraffin leaks out onto whatever surface its on. The leaked paraffin won't ignite without a source of ignition but even so, be careful. We didn't use them inside because of the fumes they give off- its a petroleum product after all.

A set of four Rechargeable 1.5 volt batteries, size A, fully charged at a friend's house. These powered our radio, giving about a month of use before recharging. The radio became our main source of news, information and entertainment.

When we'd rented a cottage in Llanelltyd, the village down the road, I thought we had become telly-vision addicts. We had a 30cm cube that Lyn's mum had won in a competition- black and white TV, radio and cassette player combined and it would run off a 12 volt supply. Our son Sam, at primary school age, would get up for breakfast and stick the thing on first thing. When he'd gone off to school and Lyn to work, I'd wash up with the TV on in the background then tidy up and vacuum before turning it off and heading up to the land.

I'd be back at the house for four when Sam came home and turned it on again. It would stay on for the rest off the evening, often till midnight or beyond. It had become such a presence in our lives, (East Enders had not long started and we'd never missed an episode...) , that I wondered how we'd manage without it, if we couldn't get a signal at the land. Shock horror! So when we finally left for good for the land, one of the last things packed was the TV, an aerial and the spare car battery, fully charged and ready to go.

Weirdly and encouragingly, we'd been living on the land for two weeks before we even remembered the telly! I was amazed at how totally it had disappeared from our conscious thoughts now that we had more interesting things to do.

After remembering that there was such a thing as television, me and Sam wandered around the land for a while, not very enthusiastically, carrying the TV, battery and aerial on a stick. I was much relieved when we failed to get any sort of signal. The aerial and TV went the way of unnecessary things and the battery got re-purposed.

Our only other need for electricity at that time, apart from the radio, was a small electric fence unit, so the car battery went on that. Electric tape fencing proved ideal, particularly in the early stages of developing the holding, as various field boundaries could be tried out and adjusted.

The first renewable energy device we got was a small 10 watt solar panel for the battery/fencer combination. This proved really useful, reducing the need for recharging the battery on the mains to once a year, if at all. That first solar panel cost £40 so £4 a watt- compare that to the 50 pence a watt I paid in 2015 and you can see how much prices have come down and its even cheaper today.

A considerable weight in the barrow would be a 13 Kg bottle of LPG gas, about once every couple of months or so. This was for the gas cooker which was a tiny, caravan stove with three burners, oven and grill, old but solidly made and well insulated. We learned to steam vegetables, often several layers of them, over potatoes, on the one ring.

One further item to mention here, matches, to light everything. We tried different things like lighters but they run out of gas and can be a pain to refill. There used to be a type of camping lighter which we really liked- basically like a crude set of tongs, with one arm holding a standard lighter flint. Squeezing the arms together resulted in the flint striking a spark from the other arm- simple, no fuel needed and nothing to replace except the occasional flint. Can we get hold of one now? Not a chance but there's plenty of gas filled plastic wands...

Pushing this often heavily laden barrow back to our home was hard work, particularly on the steep bit, especially if it was raining and blowing a gale. It did give me time to think though and consider the contents of the barrow as I struggled onward. Back then, all the inputs to our new system, our new home, were made very obvious to me, in that wheelbarrow. In some ways, my work ever since, over the last thirty years or so, has been and still is about reducing the load in the wheelbarrow.

Firewood did not go in the barrow...for this the trusty Reliant Robin and trailer was employed, on dry days when I could be assured of getting all the way up our track. I'd been cutting wood for space heating our various homes since 1980 and after making a woodburning stove in about 1984 and being gob-smacked as to how it transformed cold, damp, draughty houses into warm, dry, comfortable homes, I was hooked.

To begin with, all the fuel wood came from off-site; there simply wasn't any timber resources to spare on the land. There were various options available; it was still possible to purchase a ticket from the Forestry Commission that would allow you to scavenge timber from a nearby clear-felled site, very handy; power companies and BT would cut trees under their lines and usually leave the material where it fell so if I was quick I would have that; Lyn's farmer boss would also let us have a wind blown tree now and then- many thanks!

It still left me with about two tonnes of firewood to haul onto the site every year so one of the first things I did back in 1986, was to establish a small tree nursery to supply the holding. Rather than planting a firewood patch, which is what a fair few folk do (and nothing really wrong with that), I built up functional elements in the system which involved trees and made firewood a bi-product of management for that function. So for example, these elements include our northern shelter belt, the fodder strip and the marsh causeway system, (you can find more details of these elements on my website).

I stopped counting after planting the first 1000 trees in. By about 1998 I was thinning out overcrowded patches, felling conifers, starting to coppice and pollard and found we were producing enough firewood on site, though I still keep an eye out locally for easy pickings. Since then we've had some wind-blown trees and disease (phytophthora spp, ash dieback) has taken a few so currently there's more firewood here than I can use.

We stuck with candles and paraffin for our lighting for a good few years. Lyn's Dad, Jack, bought me a smart torch one Christmas and it was such a novelty, I delighted in its beam and ease of use- just a simple switch to turn it on, what fun! However, it drained rechargeable batteries in days and soon sat unused on a shelf. It wasn't until the appearance of LEDs and decent rechargeable batteries that electric torches became really practical and even then, they had severe limitations.

above: current solar power control and distribution. Not as complicated as it might look. I remind myself regularly that all this, however useful it may appear to be, is not as important as my garden.

When people (friends, visitors) heard that we lived off grid, many gave us torches as presents but after over thirty years and literally dozens of torches, only one has lasted for more than a year and even that gave up before the second year was up. What fails? Basically, although the LEDs might have lives of thousands of hours, with the hard use torches get with us, the switches don't and usually fail before the first year is up...Duh!

This is made worse because manufacturers seem determined to offer multiple options for the torch, so you can have a dim, energy saving mode, a bright full-on beam or somewhere in-between, chosen by pressing the switch a number or times. In other words, to simply turn the torch on and off, you might have to press the switch four times, every time you use it. While doing livestock rounds early morning and evening and hauling firewood, going to the outside loo etc. a torch here might be turned on and off a dozen times a day or more- that's at least 48 operations of the switch, every day, 15,000 to 20,000 a year. Add to this the fact that rather than being the big, chunky switches of the torches of yore, the modern switch is a pathetic, tiny thing, soldered onto a bit of circuit board and hence extremely difficult to replace. Aaargh! (Rant over).

So how has the barrow emptied over the years? Well, quite well in some areas but there's still some hard ones. Though we're now completely self sufficient in terms of firewood and electricity, the bottled gas keeps on coming. We've reduced our use through adding in a wood-burning range to heat water and do some of the cooking in the winter but its still far too convenient to whack a kettle on a gas ring for a brew.

LPG has been somewhat insulated from the latest energy price hikes staying at £44 for a 19.5 kg bottle from 2020 through to 2022 though its recently jumped to £48 but really that's all beside the point- its a fossil fuel and I need to get off it. Choices include upping the renewable energy generation to match an electric cooker, going along the lines of rocket stove and cooking outside, in the summer but what I've really been waiting for, for some time, is for someone to develop a small, household sized bio-digester to produce gas; might have to be me..

above: oil lamps. Much brighter than paraffin; the one on the right is almost too bright- they’ll often have an additional glass shade to go over the chimney. Be extremely careful! Oil lamps do not necessarily go out when they fall over and can spill burning oil, quickly. The green one on the left is the sort of lamp a wicked cowboy would smash on the floor to start a conflagration in the old Western movies. Again, be careful what you put them under; heat come out top…

A final word, if you do find yourselves turning to candles and paraffin or oil lamps, wood burners and the like, do be extremely careful; fire safety is not something that is drilled into us in this society. Fire is inherently destructive and potentially extremely dangerous. Close calls we have had include Lyn putting on make-up by candle light and setting fire to her hair (short period of panic and bad smell but no actual harm done), a cat getting too close and self-igniting (same result) and me leaving a towel hanging on a flue support bracket, then lighting the stove (same result); this latter is the closest I've come (so far...) to burning my own home down... Do make sure you have some sort of method for extinguishing unexpected flames!

That's it for now. Thanks for reading and please keep your comments and suggestions coming in- they're much appreciated. Hwyl!