One of the Locals

To reach our place you need to drive for about 1.5 kilometres along a dirt road which has historically only been used for sheep. This road is supposedly maintained by our local branch of government so when a tree fell and blocked vehicular access guess who had the chainsaw out?
There's always a silver lining though and here it was that day in the form of a very young stumpy-tailed lizard.

We've got the Power

After some investigation we discovered that power connection would cost us close to $100,000 and also mean a bunch of unsightly power poles dotted across our property. On top of that we would be spending a large amount of cash just to ensure ourselves of a regular and ever increasing energy bill.
We took the alternative approach and went for a Solar System which cost less than half what a connection to the mains supply would have cost.



As the sun isn't out at night we needed to store the power somehow and as my experiments in cold fusion weren't going anywhere we decided on an array of 24x2volt Sonnenschein batteries.



And for those exceptionally rare times when additional power is needed we have also installed a 9hp diesel generator. We chose diesel over petrol because you can actually run diesel engines on vegetable oils. It's a little known fact that when Rudolf Diesel demonstrated his invention at the Paris Show in 1900(1895?) he ran the engine on peanut oil.



And if anyone actually believes that the current spike in energy prices is a temporary aberration caused by instabilities in the market then I have a bridge you might be interested in time sharing with my alpaca.

Fantastic Sunrise

Sunrise 24 March, 2003
When the house is finished this will be the view that we wake up to every morning (except if it's overcast of course). How could you not love to be in a place that is this fantastic?