If you’re a boater or caravaner, or like us live off-grid, you might have come across these fine pieces of electrickery.  For those of you who still feel clueless I’ll explain as best I can.  My apologies in advance if you are a physicist.      DC or direct current is the sort of current you get from a battery, picture it like a straight line please.  AC or alternating current is the current that feeds all the electrical appliances in your house, this is an altogether more wibbly-wobbly affair – o.k just picture a wavey line, or sine wave to give it a proper name.  What an inverter does, is to convert that straight line of current stored in batteries into a wibbly-wobbly current that can power household appliances such as lights, TVs, and computers.

This is something that revolutionised  our quality of life. You might remember my post on how wasteful our generator is, (see Genny Tales: The Dark Ages) well the good news is that now we can do our housekeeping at a sociable hour.  When the generator is running the inverter is busy using all that excess energy that might other wise be wasted to charge up our battery bank consisting of twelve two-volt batteries.    This means we can arrange our lives a little more conveniently, no more traipsing to and from the genny room with washloads at ten o’clock at night.  We can run the generator for a couple of hours during the day if we need to and make use of high draw electrical appliances such as washing machines and dryers during this time, knowing the batteries are charging up for the rest of the day when we might only be using a few lights, a TV or a computer.  Most people can no longer tell that we don’t have mains electricity, there is some minimal tell-tale light flickering when we change over from genny to batteries.

We are of course, still using the genny as much as we used to, but we are getting more out of it, it is less wasteful.  The important thing is we now have some of the equipment in place, batteries and inverter, needed to make most forms of renewable energy work on a domestic scale.  For many domestic settings, the cost of  wind turbines or electric solar panels plus the inverters and batteries, means that  householders could wait years to recoup their expenses.  We are already half way there however, and when we last made enquiries, about a year ago, it was estimated it would cost us £45 000 to have mains electricity installed.  Time to research wind and solar power I think!   

I’m gradually getting over my allergy of candles and learning to love them again.  I’m getting much better at looking pleasantly surprised when people who don’t know about my days in the dark ages buy me a candle as a gift!      

 We have an F.G Wilson 1800 kilowatt diesel powered generating set.  It will not, as I’m fond of telling passers-by light up Blackpool, it will of course only light up 18000 one-hundred watt bulbs.  But my point is, it’s wasteful.  Imagine if all the electricity you are using is just a bedside light to read by, you really don’t want to be burning up all that diesel.  There are only certain times of year, usually late summer after Sam, our farming neighbour, has had a chance to cut the grass in his fields, that we can get a tanker down to deliver fuel.  One of the aims of this project is to do everything we can to lessen our dependence upon diesel supplies, whilst still maintaining some semblance of a civilised existence.

 Once upon a time we lived in a lot of darkness because of the wasteful nature of the generator.  We would only turn it on when it got so dark it wasn’t possible to see, and then there would be a mad, late night flurry of electrical activity – hoovers, washing machines, tumbler dryers, stuff that needed drilling and then we might treat ourselves to watching TV or using a computer by bulb light.  After our weirdly timed house-keeping rituals were completed, it was a toss up to see who was going to go slipping down the slippery slope in their pyjamas and wellies to turn the generator off – if you were quick enough it was possible to run back to the front door before the lights completely dimmed and you were pitched into utter blackness.

Living like this was an education.  We learned that you could still do a lot of stuff without electricity, we certainly learned not to take it for granted – even now, flicking a switch and something happening is a cause for delight!  We learned to be extremely careful with our water supply, because without the genny running the pump wasn’t running – so we had to eke out what was in the tank until we next switched on.  Having to fill a bucket with canal water on a cold day so you can top up a toilet cistern,  undoubtedly  makes a water conservationist out of you.

While we may have learned a lot about what we could do without, I don’t think we considered it an ideal way to live.  I would like to think this project will convince people that a sustainable lifestyle is in fact a desirable lifestyle, and that’s going to take more than a love of candles.  There is, also,  no denying that however little diesel we were using we were still using something irreplaceable and we were still upping our carbon footprint.  We knew something would have to change and it certainly did.  For starters, Goldilocks was born which definitely changed things, and shortly after her arrival the inverter arrived – and then there was light!