It's great to stay at home

Lately, It was starting to feel like I needed to be in a 12 step program for fossil fuel addiction. But at last, we spent two whole days at home, never cranked up the car. We worked on the gardens and workshop areas all day on Sunday and canned pumpkin on Monday. It felt good to be low energy, low fossil fuel anyway, for a couple of days.

However, the canning process certainly is energy intensive. Once we got through the prep work we had the stove going, sometimes all 4 burners for close to eight hours.We preheated some of the necessary hot water  in the solar oven but since we started early we didn't get that much out of it. I do hope to set up a small biogas digester at some point to cut down on gas usage for all cooking.

We hope to remove the gas appliances and have it shut off. We already have plans to get most of our hot water from the sun but will switch to electric for backup. We'll change to an electric cooker as well which will be offset by the woodstove in the winter and the solar oven, once I solve a few problems, all year. We'll heat with the woodstove as well. The gas company charges us $10/month just to be hooked up. That $120/year could be better spent elsewhere. Of course we'll need to do the changeover on the cheap to make it worthwhile.

I'll build an improved version of my solar batch heater for the solar hot water bit and electric water heaters are cheap. We may be able to get an electric cooker from one of our rentals when it needs updating. We'll have the woodstove by this winter. We don't use a clothes dryer so the gas hookup for that won't be missed.

Today we were back in the car, we went over to one of our properties to mow the lawn.