I am 48 years old, married and have two children. We live in a cottage in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland powered by the wind and the sun. We are not connected to the mains electricity grid. Our home is heated with wood grown in our own sustainable, coppiced woodland and insulated for the most part using natural materials. We have plans to harvest rainwater, to build a composting toilet, grow our own food, amongst other things and become totally self-reliant: not connected to any outside service except a telephone line. We have achieved a lot but intend to do much more and we do recognise that the practical realities are different for everyone.

Our aim is to help others to become inspired as we were and to share what we have encountered and learned along the way. We want to show that it is sometimes not easy talking about and acting out these philosophies. People very often thought we were mad; many still do, but at least the tide is now turning and efforts in this field are more appreciated. Others may feel they could only recycle their rubbish but if all of us do what we can and moreover are prepared to try, the world will be a better place.

Changes in society take brave pioneers to impart knowledge and strong people to show the way so that others may follow. Whether we are one of those pioneers or whether we are strong enough to make a change is for others to judge. Only time will tell.

Well, where do I begin?

Do I start during my teenage years when I first picked up a book called The Autonomous House, a book that has inspired me throughout my life? Do I start with the dream that one day I would live in a house which was not connected to any outside services or drew upon any non-renewable resources, that had no bills or other running costs? Or do I start with the realities of the present day with its financial burdens and compromises? There are realities of life that simply don’t appear in dreams. Since the progress of all of our lives depends upon the experiences of the past, the first of these seems like a sensible place to start.

The Autonomous House written by Robert Vale is a book originally published in 1975, which describes a house that was completely isolated from the outside world. The ideas were fairly new then, such as using renewable energy and the notions of conservation and building with natural materials. Reading this book introduced me to ideas that had just not occurred to me before. I thought, perhaps with ideas like this the planet was not doomed after all. Over the next few years I started dreaming on these ideas and how I could implement some of them into my own home.
I met Karen in 1980. After two years, she became my wonderful wife. Because Karen’s family are Irish I visited these shores for the first time in 1983. I immediately fell in love with County Fermanagh and soon realised that it was the ideal place to put into practice those dreams that had been fermenting in my mind since reading ‘the book’. Karen was also very interested in environmental issues so we very much worked together on our various long and short term goals.

One early change to our lifestyle was altering our buying habits. We started looking at the ingredients list on the side of food containers long before ‘E’ numbers were generally talked about and we clearly remember feeling very self conscious about others staring as us in the supermarket – wondering what on earth we were doing. We nevertheless persevered in the hope that others would eventually follow. Now awareness of ingredients and the harm some of them can do, is thankfully much more commonplace. Additionally the use of supermarkets themselves has added a considerable burden to the Earth’ problems so we try to avoid shopping in them as much as possible.

Along came two lovely children, a successful business and all the other normalities of life that conspired to delay our arrival to live here until 2001. We had. however spent our holidays here every year and in time bought an old cottage. It was then our dream started to come true. We installed our first wind turbine. It was really lucky, maybe fate, that we had been looking around a car boot sale near where we lived in England. We suddenly spied what looked to us like wind turbine blades. Upon further investigation it turned out that the mangled heap was an old beaten-up Marlec 50-watt wind turbine, manufacturered in the nearby town of Corby. It was in such a sorry state that the owner seemed genuinely pleased with our offer of £5.00. When we got it home I stripped it down completely, changed all the bearings, repainted everything that could be repainted and reassembled it. Total cost including paint £39.00. What a bargain!

The next time we visited the cottage we brought the turbine with us. We had already spoken to a supplier who had kindly delivered the correct galvanised steel tube and all necessary fitting. So, the first day of our holiday was spent erecting the tower which I had decided it was best to attach to the back wall of the cottage.

With the turbine duly connected to our new batteries we waited for the wind to pick up. It is difficult to express the immense feeling of achievement we felt when later that night, we touched the switch and the lights in the cottage blazed into life! We were using energy that had come from the wind and not some oil-guzzling, coal hungry, gas- breathing, turf-eating, power station. We couldn’t get the smiles off our faces for the whole two weeks of the holiday. It was brilliant!! But this was only the start.

It is all very well having a wind turbine but what happens when the wind isn’t blowing? What do you do for electricity? Well you get a solar panel of course! We scoured the Internet for the best deal we could get on a 64-Watt Photovoltaic panel and placed the order. We timed delivery for our next visit to the cottage and it duly arrived in one piece. We had also arranged for some slotted racking (Dexion) to be delivered. Rather like a Meccano set, we assembled the pieces and mounted the panel on a near South-facing wall. Once connected to the batteries, free electricity flowed into them like magic and not just when the sun was shining but even when it was a cloudy, yet bright day.

This system performed really well, except for two tiny problems. The first was not really the fault of the system, rather a fault with the designer of the system, i.e. me. As mentioned, I’d mounted the turbine on a metal pipe fixed to the rear wall of the cottage. We had already thought about potential noise problems and had used rubber mountings to stop any vibrations. However this was not enough. We found that when the wind was blowing hard and the turbine was really going well, there would be an unbelievable din echoing through the whole cottage. The fabric of the building seemed to act as an echo-chamber, amplifying the sound. During the day it was bearable but we had to turn the turbine off at night if it was windy, just so we could sleep. It was hardly an ideal situation.

I mention this because I notice that there are firms advertising modern turbines that are designed specifically to fix to the gable end of houses. I have no idea how quiet these are but with my experience it would take a whole load of convincing, with a real life demonstration in high winds, before we would consider having a turbine fixed to our house again.

The second problem was slightly more serious. The turbine had been in for a couple of years working perfectly when one night (it was Halloween evening), a really strong storm blew up. We were watching the frightening film ‘Halloween’ on the television and the wind was howling outside. Feeling very tense, when suddenly there was a big bang on the roof. The whole cottage started vibrating, making the most terrible noise. We ‘climbed back down from the ceiling’ and rushed outside to see what had happened.

The Marlec turbine was a six-bladed design and one of those blades had disintegrated and flown off hitting the roof. The resultant imbalance was causing the turbine to shake so violently, that under different circumstances it would have looked quite comical. Under these circumstances however, it was not only dangerous to us as more bits fell off, but also to the cottage if the whole thing came crashing down on the roof.

There was only one thing for it. Taking my life in my hands, in the howling wind and rain and almost pitch dark, I stood underneath the whirling dervish above, undid all the fixing bolts to the tower then ran to one of the guy-ropes which held the whole thing upright. Gradually I managed to lower the turbine away from the cottage: not a moment to soon! Upon inspection three of the four fixing-bolts, holding the tail on were gone and the last came away with just another half a turn. We had had a very lucky escape. Cold and wet, we went back indoors where we reflected on the whole ordeal. But after a few strong drinks we began to warm-up, relax and it all seemed rather amusing. After all, it could have been very much worse.

In the next installment I’ll tell you about the trials and tribulations of how we purchased thirty acres of farmland and turned it into sustainable, broadleaf, coppiced woodland.