Branching Out

Yesterday, this blog branched out a bit: I contributed to a great homesteading Website, The 104 Homestead.

My first post there summaries my feelings on solar power, I Sing the Solar Electric.

Michelle found The 104 Homestead on line through a link from an article she read. As soon as she got on the site and looked around, she said, “You need to talk to this lady!”

She was right. Jessica Lane’s site provides a lot of resources and reading for people interested in injecting a little or a lot of homesteading into their lifestyle. Unlike our blog, which strictly focuses on this family’s activities, The 104 Homestead collects and presents information from a wide variety of people interested in becoming more self reliant.

I struck up an email “conversation” with Jess, which led to the article above. Later this week, we’ll appear on her site’s Inspiring Homesteads page.

So what does this mean for this blog? Will our faithful readers need to chase around on the Internet to collect all our pearls of wisdom? Not really. In fact, contributing to The 104 Homestead may make this blog better.

I’ve never denied that I write what I think about. That can be problematic for me. I often feel as if I’m beating favorite topics to death. Occasionally saying something new about a common topic doesn’t hurt, but I don’t want to become repetitive.

I’ve written this blog over 6 years now, so I’ve had plenty of time to chew on some of these topics. Even so, I’m not always ready to move on. I often want to go back and rewrite some of these essays, to try saying what I said in a different way. The 104 Homestead gives me that chance. I can encapsulate and summarize my thoughts on topics that I’ve devoted many posts to here.

Further, my contributions will hopefully bring more readers to this blog. That might mean more sales of books and other products from our Store, more views of the ads on the blog, and higher visibility. I do this out of love, but we also hope to make a little money from it, after all! With any luck, maybe the blog will finally start paying for our Internet connection.

My posts on The 104 Homestead will not be duplicated here. Even so, you’ll find my posts there familiar. And, hopefully, a bit better written? We’ll see.

As my essays appear on The 104 Homestead, I’ll let you know through Twitter, Facebook, and notes at the end of the nearest posts here on our blog.

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2 Responses to Branching Out

  1. Mark says:

    With your solar power arrangement, if you have several days of rain and clouds, how well does it keep up with your power demands?

  2. Mark Zeiger says:

    Hi Mark, we have found that we reach full charge almost every day, regardless of the weather. We fall short on days that are really socked in, with a ceiling of less than 500 feet. We’ll lose daylight at a rate of about 5 minutes per day up to the winter solstice, so we won’t always have as good a charge as we’ve seen.

    Mostly, it’s been a lesson in patience. My habit, when we depended mostly on wind, was to get back to %100 as soon as possible. I’m learning to use the power in the evening (which is our peak period) and wait until sometime the next day to return to %100. I get a bit anxious if it takes longer than noon, but I’m learning to wait till evening to see if we need to run the wind generator a little bit to make up the difference.

    We have our Trimetric set to alert us if we fail to reach %100 charge within 5 days. That’s a very conservative setting. I think we’ve seen the alert flash twice since we started using the solar array almost exclusively for power.

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