Village Life

Its been an interesting couple of weeks in the village and the nice weather has bought out the birds and our large water pots need topping up daily and I hope people are putting out water for the animals; we have a young blackbird who likes bathing in the fullest pot and splashes water everywhere.

My additional generators are installed and these are compact water turbines and the other village houses are connected to our local area network and each receives around 2Kw and if surplus is available they get more for up to 15 minutes so we are energy secure and our freezers run so we have food and can draw more if the freezers kick in to keep them cool and this constant allocation has kept peoples electricity prices down.

We acquired some batteries, well lots of very large batteries and each house now has these and they are over 5Kw and they power 12 volt home systems for lights and now most have the capability to charge laptops and mobile phones and at times of low demand they are charged with our electrical guru's home built digital chargers and they are large enough to run inverters for mains electricity if required.

We have been preparing for winter and as we all have log burners getting fuel is a must and all our seasoned timber has been cut up and everyones wood store is overflowing so everyone will have heat in their homes and a basic ability to cook. In addition we have our home made logs made from waste and our recipe is 2 parts old newspaper, 2 parts sawdust or wood shavings and 1 part best cow muck and these are put into water to break the fibres of the wood and paper down and once broken down they are put into a large mixing tank and the cow muck is blended and mixed with it. We use hydraulics to compress this mixture into moulds and ours are round and have hollow centres as we have galvanised 20MM conduit in the centre with 1mm holes drilled into it and as they are compressed the excess water drains through the central tube and is reused, we can now compress 96 logs per compression and a seperator is dropped in and they are refilled and compressed for another 96 logs and refilled again after spacers are added and compressed and we end up with 288 logs which are put under the benches in peoples greenhouses to dry thoroughly and do so quickly in this weather. Once dried they go into a home built storage shed which is heated by our synthetic logs and they are kept dry.

Diesel prices high? not around the village as several years ago I built a transesterification plant and we make our own bio diesel from waste cooking oil and currently we are paying £1.90 a litre for diesel and our transesterification process costs around 35p per litre so we are getting 2 litres of diesel for £2.25 or £1.13 per litre and this coupled to the fact most cars in the village are diesel and can run a 50:50 mix of bio diesel it has been a busy time for producing our bio diesel, particularly as a also run a tractor and telehandler on it.

Our food education classes have taken off and as we provided lots of home built planters and produced a lot of compost we now have so many growing their own which started with growing salad crops in containers and has reinvigourated the older generation, inspired the younger generation and pushed those into the middle into gowing more of their own and the older generation love the real flavour of unadulterated foods like they used to have and from growing to eating within 10 minutes cannot be bad especially as it has no chemicals on it.