Permsteading.com

Hello to all. I just joined. I'm a 66 year old retired electrician from GM living on 17.5 acres 75 miles north of Detroit. I'm into gardening (veggies and fruit ). I'm not off grid but do have 2300 watts of solar that will allow me to run offgrid. As it is now the solar runs 2 refrigerators, 2 freezers, and some smaller circuits. In winter it has to be supplimented with grid power here in SE Michigan as the sun disappears then. I'm a vet from a long ago war married to a wonderful French Canadian girl. 2 children and 2 grand with one on the way. We heat with wood and I recently purchased something I've wanted for a long time, a sawmill. Looking forward to playing with that a lot. There you go. A little bit about me. Happy trails to all.

Well hey there Snuff! I hope we get to see pix!

Welcome to the group, Snuffy! Glad you found your way here, and we are looking forward to hearing more about you, the family and your permaculture projects.

Welcome Snuffy, glad to have you with us. There are several of us old timers here getting back to the land. I am sure you will enjoy the conversation and be able to add many pearls of wisdoms from your years of experience.

Welcome Snuffy, glad to have you here. Looking forward to hearing more about your place and projects, and I'm really happy to see another fella here with real world solar power experience. I'll be picking yours and Manny's brains as I develop my solar stuff here, which I intend to do eventually.

Thanks everyone. We're growing several varieties of apples, red haven peaches which took a beating this last hard winter, Bartlet pears, 2 varieties of apricots, 3 varieties of cherries, European plums, hazelnuts, strawberries, raspberries, black berries, blueberries, currents, gooseberries and some other varieties of fruit and nuts that haven't started producing yet so I can't count them. The veggie garden produces many of the common veggies grown in our zone. Can't figure out how to post pics.

I think you need a photobucket account over here on Matt's site to post pix. You just upload them to Photobucket and then click on the "direct link" option for your pix there... then come over here and click the little image icon when you're replying and paste that link from the other site in. Or email them to someone else and make them do it for you. Lol

My array

Welcome Snuffy! That's great, it's so good to see yet another person taking advantage of free energy! It's really neat to see how people all kind of configure these things to fit their own personality and needs.

Your array looks like they are at a low angle... are they adjustable? Mine are set at a fixed angle. Someone that lives near by me recently installed a system that tilts to the sun and I noticed that theirs are almost always much flatter than my array.

So, are you just running specific circuits in your house at 12V or are you tied into the grid? If I were to build a house from scratch I would just wire it all at 12V and just learn to accomodate that. I think that would make it easier to live without all those electronic gizmos when 110V isn't even an option.

I've got a 4700 kW system, but it's powering 2/3 more energy than I'm using just to send back to the power company. At some point when it makes sense financially I'm planning a battery system and cutting that umbilical cord to the grid, but I have little incentive to do that right now.

It sounds like you're well ahead of many of us in your food production. It's pretty inspiring to see what you're doing. I've been planting like crazy for a couple years now but still realizing that many of the perrenial crop trees will take a while to really start producing. Keep the updates and photos coming!