Growing My Own Heat

Reader Contribution by Cam Mather
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I love having those “light bulb” moments when I finally “get” something. I’d lived off-grid for a number of years before I experienced a revelation about solar power. I had been watering our ever expanding garden from the dug well nearby. I would throw down a bucket on a rope, pull it back up, dump it in a bucket that held two of the smaller buckets, and once I had two of the larger ones filled up, I’d hike off into the garden, a bucket in each hand, to where I needed it. It was a brutal amount of work, and a stupid use of my energy, but I loved it. Michelle likened it to Mickey Mouse in Walt Disney’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” in “Fantasia.” Mickey uses brooms to carry tons of water in buckets up the stairs. I was one of the crazy brooms.  

Eventually Bill Kemp heard about this system of watering my garden, and he set about designing a better system by drawing some plans on a napkin at one of our meetings. Next thing you know I had a solar panel, a DC pump and a simple car/trailer plug, and the sun was doing the work for me. I put a foot valve on one end of the pipe that I put down the well, and I put a garden hose adapter on the other end of the pipe. This $80 pump (and 75Watt panel which was about $500 at the time but much cheaper today) can pull water from 10 feet down in the well, and pump it a good 300 ft. It can even lift it up about 40 feet to the rain barrels that are raised on a cedar crib I’d built. It’s brilliant. And it was the first time I finally clued into how much work a solar panel could do for me. In our house I didn’t have a point of reference. Solar power keeps my fridge running, but I’d never spent the winter cutting ice off a lake and storing it in sawdust in the icehouse to put into an icebox, so I can’t appreciate what’s it’s doing for me. And I’ve never had to wash my clothes on a rock, or with one of those old washing machines with the rollers that squeezed the water out of clothes.

But I had carried an insane amount of water around in buckets, and this solar pump displaced that human effort and I could truly appreciate how much I was accomplishing with the sun. It was very cool.

I had the same light bulb moment the other day when I took down a poplar tree out front. This tree was in a group of coniferous trees I’d planted 10 years ago. Pines and spruce love this soil and grow like weeds. Hardwoods are very slow, but poplars do really well here. But this lone poplar looked out of place and was getting too big to be that close to the house. So I cut it down. As I was cutting it up I was amazed at how big it was. I planted this 10 years ago and now I had a pretty good pile of firewood. In fact I started to think about how much “heat” was in this little pile.

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