Life Is Good

The Zeiger Homestead is back. Last night the wind rose to steady northerly, and charged our battery bank to 100%. This morning we’ve got lights on, we’re playing the radio (instead of a battery powered boom box, which we’d relied on all week) and we’re charging recyclable batteries as fast as we can. Michelle is working from home via computer. Life is returning to normal.

Zeiger family morning

A pleasant morning on the Zeiger Family Homestead (photo: Mark A. Zeiger).

We weathered another period of Low Power. Now, as seems typical, we’ve put the brake on the wind generator before a northerly gale develops later this afternoon. We don’t expect much sunshine, so we’ll need to turn it back on after the gale passes.

But, what a sweet morning at home! After an excellent breakfast, we drifted to our own projects: Michelle to at-home work, Aly, who packed her gear for work a full hour before departure time, sat down to knit. I got on line to write this post. The cat settled into Michelle’s lap. I brewed a second cup of coffee . . . .

Life is good. All is well. To quote my favorite line from George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (paid link): “Things are as they are, and I am a part of them.” Who could ask for anything more?

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Low Power

We’re weathering a “perfect storm” of . . . calm weather.

In the middle of January, we can’t rely on the solar array to power our homestead as it does most of the rest of the year. Instead, we need the wind generator to cover the gap caused by seasonal darkness. But, if we hit a run of cloudy, calm days, we lose out.

That’s our current situation. We’ve had breezy days and nights, enough to spin the generator just below the 9 m.p.h. lower charging limit. Occasionally, we get a bit of charge. To make it all the more maddening, our local breezes trended the exact opposite of the forecast wind: while we were supposed to have northerly in the morning and southerly in the afternoon, our generator faced south all morning, then switched to north in the afternoon!

Currently, our battery bank registers 77% of charge. That’s well above our total shut down limit of 50%, but we try never to run down to 75%. So, in order to reserve remaining charge for emergencies, we’ve gone “primitive.”

cabin by oil lamp light

A low light morning. The room is better illuminated to the human eye than the camera’s eye. Since it’s morning, two lamps in this view are not lit (Photo: Mark A. Zeiger).

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