Short thankful days
By Christine Tailer
HCP columnist
The skies have been gray and the days shorter. This is that time of year when I light the oil lamps in the evening and look forward to colorful skies and longer days ahead; though in truth, the glow from the lamps sheds comfort all throughout our small home.
This is that time of year when our solar panels look longingly at sky. Their semiconductors lie quietly. There are barely any photons, those small bits of sunlit energy, to shine down on them and cause them to release their electrons, creating electricity.
That electricity is then carried through wires in the panels, to wires we laid underground to the battery bank in our battery house. More wires then lead from the battery house to our log home. When Greg designed our electric system, he thought it wise to house the batteries in their own space. That way, should they catch fire, our house would be safe, for when batteries burn, they burn until they burn no more. Battery fires are just about impossible to quell.
Our solar panels are made with silicon, a semiconductor material that crisscrosses a metal frame covered with a clear glass casing. When the silicon is exposed to the photons in sunlight, it releases electrons that flow through the panels' wires as a direct current, or DC, that we store in the battery house batteries.
When the sun shines, we live directly off the sunshine, but in the evening, and on overcast days, we live on the electricity that has been stored in the batteries. Our lights, ceiling fans, fridge, and deep freeze, are all 12 volt DC, but when I do the laundry, or we decide to watch a television show, or I use the microwave oven, we turn on our inverter, and convert our DC energy into alternating current, or 110 volt AC.
All throughout this season of short, gray days, we check the state of our batteries' charge frequently. I confess that when their charge runs low, we do have a back-up generator, that also lives in the battery house, and after three days of no sunshine and no incoming photons, we might need to fire it up for a few hours of battery boost. It can run for five hours on one and a half gallons of gas. That is over three hours per gallon. Not bad for a boost.
I find it easy to forgo using the microwave, or doing the laundry, or watching a show in the evening, and we actually enjoy living with our oil lamps. We don't, however, want our fridge or deep freeze to lose power. Our food would spoil, and so we conserve, and use the generator only when necessary.
It’s evening now. The forecast calls for sunshine tomorrow, but the sun is low on the horizon this time of year. Those precious photons pass through more of earth's atmosphere and causing them to weaken before they reach our solar array, and so I look forward to those longer more colorful days when I don’t need to wonder about the state of our batteries’ charge. Today, when we came inside after working out and about on the farm, it was shortly after 4 p.m.
The sun had already passed over the hill behind the cabin, and it was dusk inside the cabin. I lit our two oil lamps. Their light reflected off the logs and our cabin world felt warm and comfortable. I settled in on the couch to snuggle with the dog, and it occurred to me that we can live quite well without those photons, at least for a while.
I really am so thankful for our creek valley life, and I am so thankful to be able to share it with you, dear readers, both near and far. Best wishes for the holiday. Happy Thanksgiving.
Christine Tailer is an attorney and former city dweller who moved several years ago, with her husband, Greg, to an off-grid farm in south-central Ohio. Visit them on the web at straightcreekvalleyfarm.com.