After enduring three pretty harsh winters with no solar power to speak of we have succumbed.
Just last week we brought some armoured cable across the field and with it the wonder of energy.

With this modern marvel we are able to have a small oil radiator, we can charge up a radio and our phones and best of all we can have two small lamps on.

I don’t think we will ever take electricity for granted, particularly now we have lived without mains for so long. As this is our last winter in the yurt and as the last three have been so tough we don’t feel in any way guilty for this indulgence.

Why mains? We had considered alternatives however the only real alternative was wind. We had considered this carefully but positioning a wind turbine on our land is hard as there are so many hedges. There is one spot in the centre of our meadow, but we felt there could be issues with planning here so we opted out (for now).

In the future there is the possibility of hydro, at the moment it’s so prohibitively expensive we just cannot afford it (sadly). We are trying to do something at a community level but these things do always take time.

we are now entering our fourth winter in the yurt, I think if we’d known that we would be in it still we would have run away. The reality, however, is that the yurt is lovely to live in, though we do face far more challenges than in a house.

It’s funny, everyone worries about us being cold in winter, the true difficulty though is frozen water; whilst we remain cosy in our toasty yurt our water pipes solidify. If we’d known just how long we’d been here we would have sorted out something more permanent and buried the pipe in the ground.

The other difficulty in the depths of winter is the darkness. Our solar panel, which is great spring through to autumn, fails us on the short dark  winter days. Even when we get a bright day we barely get enough energy to keep a single  bulb lit. We have again failed to sort anything out permanently simply because the future has been so uncertain. We have talked about wind turbines or wires across the field. All solutions present their difficulties however and we still haven’t come up with an answer.

Now winter is peering over the horizon again and we won’t be out of the yurt for it. But don’t worry about us being cold in here, we’ll be down to our teeshirts when it’s ~16 outside. We will be bemoaning the fact we can’t see and we have no water however.