Village Winter

Winter in the village doesn’t stop anything and often gives us opportunities and in late 2023 we added another water turbine and upgraded two more as this was necessary to allow other projects to continue.
December saw many residents trimming their trees which is late in the season and this late is very unusual and the willow trees were significant as they give good logs for closed fires, but the whips are of more importance as we put them through the shredder and it goes into bags for drying which takes about 3=4 weeks at which time they go into large 200L barrels and sealed.
These whips are excellent for fires as we put them on the bed of a fire and as they ignite and burn they do this for a very short time and then smoulder for hours, therefore they are a good base which produces heat and ignites further wood loaded onto the fire.

Other wood gets ground down into larger pieces as this quickly seasons and again this is dried and put into barrels for storage and id kept in a large heated shed until it is needed which is usually for greenhouse fires.

Enter Craig as he is related to a village resident and is a lovely guy who designs electricity grids and has recently expanded into small local networks supplied from alternative sources and his first job was to install our power charging station as this charges all the villages batteries if the mains fails and works simply. All residents have battery packs and most feed a 12 volt home grid to provide lights and some have inverters to run their freezers and the battery packs are made from several individual cells or batteries and when one goes flat and need charging while the power is still out the water turbines still provide power to charge them and they simply rotate them around until the power is restored. This system charges both lead acid and lithium batteries.

We have our local mains grid installed through OUR OWN meters and half the village is now connected to the new turbines and this means they are all permanently fed with electricity and due to our intended expansion they get this limited to 2 Kilowatts 24/7/365 unless demand id low and they can get up to 2.75Kw for a limited time. Craig has modified the consumer units and if it is switched off you can unplug our feeder cable and plug it into the next socket which solely feeds the fridge/freezers and the gas boiler if you have one so you have heating. There bills are now much lower as this 2Kw is used first before drawing from the mains

We make our own wood pulp logs from a mixture of paper, sawdust, and cow muck and contrary to popular belief it doesn’t smell and produces a lot of heat and we make these through the summer so they will dry and store them in a large shed with a small wood burner to keep them dry as they absorb moisture if left unheated, then they are distributed throughout the village as everyone has a log burner or open fire and they are ideal as they don’t spit.

Another planned project already started is our metal separator which separates steel and aluminium cans and drops them into a press and when it fills they crush and compress the cans into blocks which are sold as ingots by weight and the cash funds other projects.

We have decided to continue our food classes which are basically cooking foods and developing recipes; growing foods and storing and preserving foods as they are always over subscribed and village women (and a couple of men) run these classes as even the most idiotic person can grow some of their food and many simply want the chance to learn without being ripped off for money. Our bread making circle will continue as they make dough in huge quantities and freeze some of it and cook some of it.

Our pallet recycling will continue as we split them down and rebate the boards so they fit together to make greenhouses and local companies become over run with them and they bring them a van full at a time, to us, where they get turned into greenhouse framing kits for a lean to 10’ X 5’ greenhouse frames ready for their polycarbonate sheets. Karma played its hand a couple of weeks ago when a local builders merchant who has a skip for builders to return their used 1 tonne bags and they promptly give us the undamaged ones said one of their polycarbonate sheet suppliers had a lorry load of damaged ones and did we want them. When they arrived as production run length which is 12M long they were unloaded and it was only the ends which meant cutting less than 1” off for a good sheet.

We now have the potty pensioners and the decrepit disabled and apparently they want more of our home made compost to fill their salad bars and stay in our seed circle to get seeds in bulk at huge discounts and made an executive decision to pay us £3 per wheelbarrow of compost as they say we make it, we deliver it, and as we made their salad bars and provided them for free they feel they should help this scheme expansion. We currently have about 350 tonnes on the ground ready for use.

Wonderful ! So much value from what others call waste.

urchinatheart wrote:Wonderful ! So much value from what others call waste.

Waste is easily defined as something someone doesn't want and is surplus to requirements and often they think it is easier to throw it away and one mans waste is another mans treasure, this is why recycling is so lucrative and the sheep pay their council tax to have their waste removed and the council take their recyclables and make money from it and you are seperating it for them.