A small wind turbine will produce enough electricity to light the average home with 3–4 bedrooms.
ENERGY
Are you aiming to go off-grid and do without mains water, gas and electricity?
Are you going to look to the past and manage without electricity? Or are you going to look to the future and go for high-tech solutions?
Are you going to have a wind turbine?
Are you going to have a geothermal plant?
Are you going to super-insulate your home?
Are you going to give up your car in favour of some other transport, or perhaps downgrade your present vehicle for something less fuel-guzzling?
Are you going to have a borehole or well?
ANIMALS
Are you going to keep livestock such as chickens, pigs or bees?
If you are not going to keep stock, how will you nourish your land?
Are you going to keep the stock primarily for your food – eggs, milk and meat – or do you want to sell any surplus?
Do you have enough space for stock?
If you are aiming to keep stock (say a cow for milk), have you considered the implications – feeding, animal welfare, milking, 24-hour care?
The benefits of self-sufficiency
What is in it for me?
The benefits are so all-encompassing that they will touch every aspect of your life. You will eat better food, with no chemicals, preservatives, taste enhancers, artificial colours, herbicides or pesticides. You will feel more in tune with nature. You will use less (non-renewable) fossil fuel. Your fuel bills will go down, your stress levels will go down, and generally you will be living a healthier, more exciting, more enriched, more satisfying and more caring life.
ENERGY SAVINGS
One look at the average home will demonstrate that not only are most of us incredibly greedy in terms of energy – we want bigger homes, bigger vehicles, bigger appetites, bigger everything – but, even more illogically, a good part of the energy that we do use is wasted. Our homes and lives are leaking energy at every seam. If we did no more than look at self-sufficiency from a very narrow money-saving viewpoint, it is pretty obvious that most of us could quite easily and dramatically reduce our spending on energy, simply by bunging up a few of the leaks.
If we look carefully at our spending – heating, cooling, lighting, water, waste, transport and so on – and then apply the self-sufficiency mantra ‘little in and little out’, it is plain to see that the best way forward would be to minutely examine our energy needs, and see if we can attack the problem from both ends – meaning reduce both the initial need and the resultant waste. It would be wonderful if we could afford to make huge dramatic high-cost changes, but for most of us the best way of saving energy is to make lots of small modifications. You should not try to change everything at a stroke, either; it is much better to tackle one problem – say lighting – and then to move on to the next one.
So, for example, we could all cut our heating costs at a stroke simply by wearing more clothes, having thicker curtains, settling for a slightly lower level of heating, and living a more active lifestyle. Of course, this advice is rather simplistic, but I am sure you get the point.
ENERGY STATISTICS
Energy costs will of course vary depending upon your individual needs.
Insulation – Every household spends about 42 per cent of its energy budget on heating and cooling. In the knowledge that most of this energy leaks through the structure of the house, we could make huge savings simply by insulating our homes.
Wind turbines – Every household spends about 36 per cent of its energy budget on lighting and small appliances. If every household did no more than fit a very small, low-cost 1 kW turbine, use energy-efficient light bulbs, and reduce lighting to a sensible level, then lighting bills could be halved.
Geothermal energy – When it comes to geothermal energy, it is very difficult to quantify savings. All we can say is that, in terms of coefficient of performance (meaning how much energy is used set against how much energy is produced), while a fuel like coal is about 70–90 per cent efficient, geothermal energy is 400 per cent efficient. Even if we discount these figures as being wildly exaggerated and settle for geothermal energy as being twice as efficient as, say, coal and gas energy, then heating/cooling costs could be halved.
Solar energy – There are so many options with solar energy – passive heating and cooling, solar collectors heating water, solar photovoltaic cells producing electricity, and so on – that really it is almost impossible to say that any particular way is best. Nevertheless, if we brought together passive insulation and passive solar gain, we could at the very least halve our energy costs.
THE ENVIRONMENT
The average person in a developed country throws away about 450 kg (1,000 lb) of rubbish every year. The easiest way for us to make a difference to the amount of energy used and the amount of pollution produced would be to cut both consumption and waste. If we buy fewer throwaway items – short-life goods and packaging – and if we recycle goods, we will take weight off both ends of the consumption-pollution seesaw. With efficiency and conservation being key components of energy sustainability, the best advice for us as individuals is to tackle the problem by nibbling away at our initial need for grid energy. The truth is that if we all did a little the problem would be well on the way to being solved.
Many people who are new to self-sufficiency find it difficult to stay focused and balanced. For example, I know of one couple who are doing their best to be self-sufficient; they keep chickens for eggs and bees for honey, they grow fruit, they run courses, and so on. Yet, while they are so desperately concerned about every aspect of the environment – cars, fossil fuels, organic food – their neighbours drive huge, fuel-guzzling cars, and are champions of unrestrained consumption. The question is what to do? The answer is beautifully simple. We live in a free society where each one of us is entitled to do what we like within the law. These neighbours are perfectly entitled to lead their lives as they think fit. My advice to this young couple would be to quietly lead their own lives – certainly they should not preach or in any way start telling the neighbours how they should lead their lives. The best that they can hope for is that things will slowly change around them – smaller cars, incentives to recycle rubbish, and so on.
ORGANIC FOOD
Even the most ardent anti-organic growers and producers – those people and organizations who were once pulling up hedges, spreading artificial fertilizers and spraying chemicals and pesticides everywhere – are now coming around to the fact that the
