A day in our new ‘good life’.

Well, here we are at home. Friday. Jen has 2.5 days work a week, I’ve just got the writing. 4.5 day weekends, then.

Today is a celebration. Finally, the gas leak in the ‘fridge has been fixed. It was a tight bend in the capillarity tube, which developed a flex crack. Nicely done now, the new unit is also a gas-filler port, the other one being a bit inaccessible nowadays.

Perhaps I’d better start at the beginning. To be energy-efficient, we didn’t want a fridge inside an extreme passive-solar house, where unattended, temps can go to 40 deg. The inside of a fridge, optimally, is 4 deg. The split between the inside temp and the outside temp, takes energy to maintain.

So we put it outside, on the South side of the house (for shade reasons, of course). To be more efficient, we used a top-loading freezer carcass (body) so that the cold air, when the door opens, can’t port down and out – as it does in an upright fridge. We built a bay-window-like outcrop in the kitchen, and only the freezer lid appears in the house, in the floor of the outcrop (imagine it as coming through the window-seat of a bay window).

Then we super-insulated the box, outside the house. 300 mm of polystyrene panel, by the time we’d finished. The whole thing is driven by a 12 volt compressor (Danfoss) of the kind you get in camper-vans and yachts.

We’ve been feeding it with ice, until the leak was fixed. Then last night, found the thermostat wasn’t activating. This morning, we found the loose wire in the spade-lug, and ‘presto’.

We have the coldness.

The pelton-wheel is more than capable of keeping up with it – I thought it would, but you never actually know what losses you might get in practice. Exellente. Free power, and free frostening. Life is looking up.

We’ve a new kitchen shelf, Jen is making lemon-curd out of courgettes, there are three fruit-trees (her farewell pressy from Port School) to plant, and more shelving coming. Later in the day, a second chook-perch – the tribe is growing, both in numbers and in age/size. And maybe a beach-walk with the dog.

Wonder what the other 95% are doing?

my ‘quote of the day’ from the oil drum

“Fundamentally, like much of Wikileak’s material – these secret, confidential, classified, government communications don’t really contain anything that a well informed, savvy, independent analyst couldn’t have worked out for themselves. The most interesting think about Wikileaks is how unsurprising they’ve been.

We need to get away from the idea of an ‘elite’, a bunch of people with a grand plan, operating from a position of greater knowledge and understanding that the rest of us. Everyone is just muddling along, you, me and the president of the USA”.

A doozie – the archdruid nails energy. Where’s Wolly?

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2011/02/energy-funds-energy-flows.html

an excerpt:

“Can we afford at this point to invest a very sizable fraction of what we have left in a project of the sort the World Wildlife Fund imagines? Not without a process of global economic retrenchment that would make the Great Depression – the last one, not the current one – look like a lawn party. Political realities being what they are, it’s not going to happen”.