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.