"Balmoral Park" farm garden

Despite being surrounded by climate change sceptics climate change is a reality to us and one of the challenges we need to strive to meet. Our efforts to reduce our carbon footprint include; driving a small fuel efficient diesel car, using gravity fed rainwater for all our household needs, growing most of our own fruit, vegetables and poultry and installing a large Solar System that feeds into the grid. By the way we got out first cheque from Country Energy the other week, $464 for two months and no bill, our bill would normally be about $250 for this amount of time so we produced $ 714 worth of electricity in two months, months that were quite wet and cloudy at that. We are trying to reduce our electricity usage as well so will be interesting to see how this goes. We  were fortunate that we had installed this system while the feed in tariff was at 60cents kwh and it remains at this. On another level we are literally trying to change our climate. Our house is very hot and expos...

Our neighbour has gone into business installing grid connected solar sytems. We have been talking about doing this for a long time so it seemed the right time to go ahead with it. this system will generate more power than we use. The idea is we sell the lot to country energy, they pay us for it at a higher rate than we have to pay for what we use. We hope that in the future the battery storage technology will get cheaper and we will be able to be independent of the grid. but for the moment this is a good solution. We have so much sun here it will feel good to be using it to generate electricity. We are jsut waiting on the meter box to get connected. Peter with the Solar Panels In our kitchen there was an old fuel stove. we decided it needed rebricking but when Peter went to do this discovered it was all rusted out. there was a similiar stove in the shed so Peter put the two together. Clever man and voila! a beautiful stove! Cooking on the stove top!