Why we've gone solar - photovoltaic power in NZ

They aren't pretty from the back - although I quite like them from the front - but there is a great beauty to photovoltaic panels.  We had twelve installed on our Hamilton roof just before Christmas, and they were switched on in early January (the delay was due to a wait for an electrical inspection).

The cost 

Just before we signed up for the panels, the main electricity companies dropped the price they pay to homeowners feeding power back into the grid. The drop was huge. We already knew, then, that this might not be a money earner for us.

The system cost $12,000 for a 3 kW system. Others will pay less for the same; we had the most difficult type of roof (concrete tile on one part, and tilt mounts on another) which hiked the installation fees, and we chose a more expensive microinverter system that cost an extra $2,000. Blame my house vanity for that. I didn't want the huge box that the cheaper string inverter system required in the house. (It can go outside the house if you have space near the switchboard.)

Our motivation

Despite the price, we decided to put our money where our mouths are, and chose not to think too hard about how quickly the cost would be refunded to us in the form of cheaper electricity bills (the payback period). If we think clean local electricity generation is a great idea, then we need to support the industry. If everyone stopped having systems installed because it didn't pay financially, the companies would go out of business. The great thing about solar panels is that they are on your roof where everyone can see them - you are advertising your principles. (Fortunately ours face the road.)

Plus, my husband loves them. He feels the same way about our panels as he does about his stack of firewood in the shed, and lying in front of a roaring fire on a cold winter night.

How we manage our electricity use

We had a short honeymoon period of having an old electricity metre that was wound backwards when we were generating more electricity than we used. It was brilliant. We even watched it continue to wind backwards when we switched on our heat pump as an air conditioner in the middle of a 28 degree day, then swing to spinning forwards when we boiled the jug. We got a rough idea of how much each appliance drew from the grid, and played around with things so there was as much backward winding as possible.

Now our import/expert metre is set up, we will be paid 7 cents per kW hour of electricity we feed back into the grid in summer, and 10 cents per kW hour in winter. We pay about 35 cents for each kW hour we buy in from the grid. So it makes sense to use as much of our required electricity as possible during the sunny middle of the day. We started generating about 7 am during the height of summer - although at that hour the amount was trifling - and it kept up for at least 12 hours on a sunny day. Now autumn is coming, the production hours are shorter.

So the dishwasher and washing machine should be switched on when the sun has climbed high, and if we get organised enough some cooking is also done then. It also pays not to use too many appliances at once - it's best to let the washing machine finish before doing the vacuuming, and finish the vacuuming before switching on the dishwasher. That way we know all our electricity is free; we won't use more than we are generating and have to commit that evil act of buying in pricey electricity from the grid.

Of course, that degree of management isn't always possible. We just do what we can comfortably fit into our routine.

Our clever move

Well, maybe it's not supremely clever, but instead of having all of our panels facing due north to maximise electricity production, we had three installed on a west-facing section of our roof. We generate less overall electricity this way, but we generate more in the late afternoon/early evening than we would with all north-facing panels. This, of course, is when we are more likely to be cooking the evening meal, so the generated electricity will be used, rather than sold earlier in the day for 7 cents and bought back in the evening for 35 cents.

Storing electricity

Ah, everyone wants to store what they generate at lunchtime so they can use it later. We can't do that yet - the batteries cost way too much - but we hope to be able to add that into our system one day.

The electricity bill

A snapshot from our first post-solar electricity bill.
Sorry the pic is so tiny: click on it for a bigger view.

Heh heh heh. We got a thrill when we received our first post-solar electricity bill. Here's a snapshot of it. Can you see the orange bar for this February, representing how much grid electricity we used? That's the almost invisible bar to the far right of the graph. It is minuscule. We generated more than we used, and got a credit to our account.

This did include a couple of weeks of the windback honeymoon mentioned above, when we were essentially getting a dollar's discount for every dollar's worth we generated. Plus it was an outstandingly sunny summer. I don't know if this lovely negative amount will happen again.

It definitely helps at this point to forget we paid $12,000 to be able to get this credit! But this is the first month of many more...

Our solar supplier

In case you're wondering, we bought our system from www.whatpowercrisis.co.nz. They were great.

Update for the following month's bill

In the following (also sunny) month, we used $60 worth of electricity. Before we got the panels, it used to be about $150 worth, so we're obviously doing a good job of using the electricity we generate while the sun's shining. Happily, we also exported about $30 worth, so our bill this month was $30 odd. Nice.

Solar powered bread rolls

I'm building up to a post about our new photo-voltaic panels, lovely things that they are.

In the meantime, here are the details of some Very Good bread rolls I make quite regularly. Recently the rising and baking of these rolls in this house has been powered exclusively by the sun. I reckon that's so green that I might as well be hand-stitching a quilt of rabbit pelts harvested from my backyard rabbit farm. If I had one.

When I bake these I feel like Ma on Little House on the Prairie in her hand-built cabin, or maybe Milly Molly Mandy's Mother, sheltered by her thatched roof. How those women would have loved my breadmaker*! Not only would they have hand-kneaded their bread, but they would have had to light a fire to bake it, even in mid-summer. My weak arm muscles quiver at the thought.

This dough is actually a pizza base recipe from my friend of nearly 30 years, Sandra. (Sandra, how old we are growing!) The original uses all white flour and is definitely my favourite pizza base, too.

Solar Bread Rolls

(Of course you don't need solar power or a bread maker to make these; I am not that demanding.)
This takes about 15 minutes total effort with a breadmaker* (three bouts of five minutes). If you start at 10 am they'll be freshly baked for lunch.

1 3/4 tsp active dried yeast (not the breadmaker sort)
1 tsp salt
1-2 tsp sugar
3 3/4 cups of flour (making it as wholemealy as my family will tolerate, I use about 2 1/2 cups of wholemeal flour and the rest plain white)
1/4 c olive oil
1 1/3 cups water

You know, don't you, that the ratio of flour to water is crucial to making good bread? Therefore, you need to measure those ingredients carefully. Everything else you can be somewhat gung-ho with.

Place everything in a breadmaker* and mix on the fastest dough cycle. I have a Panasonic breadmaker with a pizza dough cycle that takes 45 minutes. Alternatively, mix it all together by hand, knead for 10 minutes and leave to rise in a warm place for 45 minutes or so.

Shape into balls with floured hands. Dip each ball into white flour to lightly coat it before sitting it on an aluminium baking tray. The flour coating stops the rolls sticking to the baking tray, making for an easy clean up. It's also very pleasing to the mouth.

Cover the dough balls and tray with a clean tea towel and place somewhere warm in direct sunlight: a sunny concrete patio or deck, a barbeque or even a trampoline all work well. Give strict instructions to the children if it's the latter. If it's not a verywarm day, place in an oven at 40oC.

After an hour or so the rolls will have risen beautifully. Remove the tea towel and place the tray in a 190oC oven. You can either preheat the oven, or put the tray directly in there as you turn it on. They should be baked within 10 minutes of it reaching full temperature.

These are good the same day and okay the next. After that they're chicken food, or you could freeze them ready to split and fill with garlicky/herby butter for when you want garlic bread.

*For a rave review about the gourmet and bank-account-flourishing benefits of owning a breadmaker, have a look at this post on my new favourite blog, Mr Money Mustache.

Please don't reward people with "stuff"!

I expect you've noticed that green is the new black. Recently I read an Australian home and garden type magazine, and every house boasted its eco-credentials. I'm a sucker for a gorgeous house, but most were about three times as big as they needed to be, and massively overglazed, but hey, there was the odd recycled brick wall and some lofty insulation, so the eco box was perfunctorily ticked.

Anna's school is on trend and all-for-eco, and have a new environmental scheme the children can participate in. These schemes are great! But sometimes I think that the importance of not rewarding children or adults with "stuff" gets lost. There's little appeal to "not having", of course.

When the school children have done enough nude-fooding, walking to school and gardening - among other admirable things promoted by the scheme - they can purchase a badge and a T shirt to show off their achievements. I wonder where the badge and T shirt come from, and where will they be in five years' time?

A random sample of the stuff littering Anna's room.
Yes, she loves it all, and no, we do not need any more!
Note the restored art deco dressing table: t's not in my "stuff" category.

They will probably have come from China, in a factory that pours pollution into a river, and produced by near-slave labour. (The same goes for almost everything in Farmers, Briscoes, the Warehouse, Kathmandu.... etc.) In a year or two most of them will be in the dump.

There is no paying market, of course, for the true eco-mantras: Make do with what you have, and Stop buying Stuff! Most humans since the dawn of time have forcibly lived with those values; they have had no other choice. Now, quite suddenly really, we can update our wardrobes and houses with cheap crap every year or two. Just don't think too hard about how and where the crap was made, or it will be tinged with ugliness.

When my mother was born in the late 1930s, there were just over 2 billion people in the world. When Jack was born 11 years ago, there were 6 billion. Now there are 7 billion. I can't even conceive of one billion people, but I know they all like lovely stuff. What will it cost the planet to supply it, and where will it go when it's disposed of?

I think we need to be extremely choosy about what we buy.

Here's a call for creativity. How could the children be rewarded for their environmental achievements without giving them something that undermines those achievements? Anna scoffed at my suggestion of swan plants grown in home-made compost. A lunch-time sushi-making class, perhaps? An afternoon of making puppets, or a parkour lesson? A packet of seeds?

Beginners' parkour. No stuff required. 

(If you haven't spent twenty well-entertained minutes watching the 'Story of Stuff' video before, I totally recommend clicking here to watch it!)

Growing up - and a new growth chart to prove it

The children started back at school last week after a long, hot, happy summer holiday. Jack, aged 11, was off to intermediate school for the first time, which meant getting a uniform together.

This is Anna on the first day of school, not Jack!
 He has asked me not to put his photo on this blog anymore.

It's at moments like this that I catch myself behaving like the mother of a cuckoo chick. The cuckoo egg has been illegally laid in a nest, and the resulting chick begs to its forcibly adoptive parents. The poor parents, utter slaves to their instincts, work themselves to the bone to feed the needy chick, even when it's as big as them and looks nothing like them.

I spent most of the day before school started sewing a new zip into a second hand uniform jacket - and it had to look GREAT before I was happy with it. Putting in a new zip nicely is harder than you'd think. The week before that I'd bought him an expensive pair of black leather shoes that fit the uniform code yet are all the rage (I can't even mention the brand lest it feed the beast of fashion and put more parents under pressure). He wore them to school on the first day, got a blister so painful that he walked home barefoot, and has worn a second hand pair of roman sandals ever since.

My cuckoo mother streak is rivaled by my streak of frugality and environmental awareness. This time last year someone told me how much the uniform cost to buy new, and a fortnight after that I'd bought almost an entire uniform set second hand for a fraction of the price. Jack doesn't care about second hand, as long as his gear is stylish. Thank goodness.

The boy is growing enormously fast now. We've been keeping track of the children's heights the old fashioned way: pencil marks scratched into a door frame.

Our continuing hallway renovation (read dragged out and way overtime - we are thoroughly sick of it) means that the door frames are being sanded and repainted. We can't bear to lose the height marks, so I splashed out on one of these:

It's a gorgeous pin-up wall canvas - photographed here on the floor, although eventually it will hang on the hall wall - and it can be moved or rolled up and stored away whenever needed. It's made in Christchurch. You can read more about it here.

I made a final measurement as I was transferring the numbers and dates from door frame to canvas. Jack has grown 2 cm in the last two months.

With a child-to-adult growth spurt looming - or even starting now - he's going to be more like that open-mouthed cuckoo chick than ever.

Flowers and flops in the garden

It's the height of summer, and we're feeling pretty smart about some of our garden produce. Certain other attempts, however, have been distinctly shady.

Last year I got excited about growing flowers with the vegetables to encourage beneficial insects. Yet I forgot about the importance of sun, and the ability of flowers to grow tall and shade the very plants that were meant to be growing our food! In some patches the flowers grew so tall and healthy that the vegetable and berry plants were shaded, with a corresponding drop in production.

Sweet peas shading the blueberries.

Pest problems? We have none, probably because of those carefully selected flower species, alyssum, phacelia and buckwheat (the sweet peas are just there because they're pretty and fragrant). But actual capsicums or strawberries? None of them either. Well, there were just a few strawberries.

Phacelia shading the strawberries.

My reading and scheming has paid off in other areas. For the first time we grew great big, strongly flavoured garlic bulbs, and lots of them. We did it by the book, supplying plenty of compost, spacing the cloves a hand's width apart just before the shortest day, mulching them and keeping them weed-free. It's been a fantastic success.

I've also been delighted with the Tomaccio tomatoes from Egmont seeds. Five bucks for two seeds? Worth it! They are the sweetest and most productive cherry tomatoes we've grown.

We're also picking beans (loving the sweet cobra runners from King's Seeds), cucumbers, spring onions galore (always too many spring onions), zucchini (we like slabs of it cooked on the barbeque) and soft buttery lettuce grown in the shade of the cucumber plants. Egmont's gourmet lettuce salad blend is delicious, and very affordable at $2 a packet. In the consistent heat we're having (it's 28 degrees C as I write), lettuce lasts about three weeks in the shade before bolting, so you need to sow new seed about that often.

And the poppies... Anna and I have fallen in love with them this year and have grown plenty. None have been shade culprits. My favourite is Kings Seeds' Icelandic poppy, and their peony poppy (which I'm told is an opium poppy) is stunning too. Happy days.

Icelandic poppy

Peony poppy

What the photos above don't show are my ever-present gardening companions. They join me each evening in the garden, which is the only time it's cool enough to be out there (I have another project filling the cool mornings).

These ladies are always keen for snails and greens.

My friendly and patient pal who decorates wherever
he is so beautifully.

Oh, and the sandflies and mosquitoes. They're there too, wanting a taste of my sweet tomaccio-red blood, and deterred only by clothing or insect repellent.

The most beautiful island

Over the summer break we were lucky enough to go to a stunning island. It is one of my favourite places in the world, because it is so wildly beautiful and there are no roads or cars. If you want to go somewhere, it's walk, paddle, or stay put.

Although it was peak holiday season, there were very few other people there, and they were great company. It made it such an easy place to be.

The only entertainment devices we took with us were books and a kayak. No screens, and yet the children were happy and content, as in love with the place as us, clambering over rocks, swinging on the rope swings and skimming stones. They could hardly believe that this wonderful place was their backyard for a few days, and they could roam free. (They were on the ipad within minutes of returning home.)

One of the best parts was cooking great food over a fire, all the while listening to the song of native birds (this is a predator-free island). My favourite was the parroty screech of kaka. I also loved my encounters with an old friend of mine, the North Island robin. Another one appeared every twenty or thirty metres when we went walking.

We also roved to New Plymouth - a lovely town of beaches, bush and rivers - and Auckland, where we went up the Sky Tower and to the Auckland Art Gallery. At the art gallery was a collection of intricate, inspiring lego buildings, which anyone and everyone could add to and modify. And add to and modify they did - it was a happy, absorbing hive of activity. (Alert to creative and frugal families: I think it's free to get into this part, but it might pay to phone ahead and check.)

The art gallery was full of things that people had created to be beautiful and interesting. It struck me that no matter how hard we try, we cannot compete with what nature provides, slowly and blindly.

The African tinge to my mince pie baking

Usually while I'm doing Christmassy things like baking fruit mince pies, I dial up some Christmas carols and delight at the voices of boy sopranos. Instead, today I was feeling my African roots, so I listened to Shoshaloza on You Tube. My African roots are no stronger than any other freckly white person's. I mention them because our mitochondrial DNA shows we all come from Africa originally, and I really love African music and dance.

I listened and danced to about ten versions amidst the pastry, tins and fruit mince, with an ipad propped up at the edge of it all (plus my usual kitchen bench accompaniments of school books, art equipment and little girl novels... oh Anna, Anna, you do spread yourself around the house).

I loved them all. A favourite, though, was the Drakensberg Boys Choir's version - make sure you listen to the especially magic second part, you will be smiling and dancing! This version has my requisite boy soprano in it. For pure sound, the winners were an absolutely stunning Swedish choir (N3A of Kungsholmen Gymnasium, the title says).

The Swedish version is kinder to white people - there are no black singers among them to show up their stilted white movements! (This is a song you have to move to while you sing.) I don't know why dark-skinned people move so rhythmically, but I envy and admire them for it. I've seen it repeatedly in Africa, Melanesia and Polynesia (plus of course in Maori people here in New Zealand.)

We spend a lot of time, money and energy on Anna's dancing. She loves it and 'feels' the music, which not everyone with white skin does. It feels important to us. I'm usually sitting on the parents' benches at the side of the class doing the seated groove. Maybe my resolution for next year should be to get up and dance when the music takes me, no matter what the other mothers think! Some might join me! I hate the thought that singing, dancing and playing music is being replaced by listening to and watching other people do it, usually on a screen or sometimes a stage. Why not in our streets, our gardens, our houses?

Where are our roots, people?! Shoshaloza will remind you why they matter.

The mince pies I make are ugly little beggars compared to the others I see. They look like my grandmother's did, because I use her recipe and method, and even her tins! But oh, the taste... unbeatable. They're a really important part of this family's roots.

Unseasonable wonders in the garden

I suppose humans everywhere talk about unusual climatic events, and have done so ever since humans could talk. Still, humour me by reading this tale of passionfruit, cucumbers and black soil.

It's only just got hot here, really, and at last there are summer sheets hanging on the line, being freshened up ready to replace warm winter sheets later today. Now our passionfruit vine is flowering, and as usual the flowers are over-the-top beautiful and intricate. We even have a few baby fruit, which is normal for early summer.

But normal has meant nothing to my mother's garden in Tauranga, that city of sea and sun. When we visited in July - mid winter! - her vine was flowering. During our visit in September we were actually eating the passionfruit. The vine was simultaneously flowering, ready to go again for summer. Madness, delicious madness!

My own little boast is of cucumbers. We have been eating them for a month, friends. Cucumbers in November just do not happen in Hamilton, especially during a spring with such cold nights. Last year at that time I was struggling with little plants dying of cold. This year they were starting to climb the teepees I made them and dangling their delicious green fruit, which the children gobble up delightedly.

My secret? I'm not sure, but possibly it was the tremendous start the seedlings got. I planted the seeds in late August into little pots on our north-facing porch, and brought them inside the fire-warmed house each night. By October they were flowering and looking like bursting out of their pots, and I was too jaded with repotting tomatoes to do the same for them, so they went in the ground. The soil was well enriched with compost.

In fact I've planted some more seeds, which are just bursting now, for a second burst of cucumbers in late summer. Following the advice of Clare Jackson and Alice Bulmer in their e-book Growing Great Seedlings (just $3.85! And Alice is my friend...), I'm watering them from underneath so as not to disturb the seeds. Sprouting is going well, very well.

Finally, black soil. As I've planted trees and buried possums down in our local block of bush, I've drooled over the soil in a certain area. I'm told it was an old Maori garden site, and certainly it's a flattened area below a well-known pa site. Those Maori gardeners certainly knew what they were doing. Apparently they enriched the soil with ash from their fires. I'm sure they could give us other tips as well. How could any plant not thrive in this soil?

How is your gardening growing?

Restoring the bush: the big reasons to do it

We live in a city, but close to a beautiful patch of native bush with a boardwalk running through it. It's next to the mighty Waikato River. This morning I walked along the river's edge, rounded a corner and there was a harrier hawk taking flight - I had frightened it away before I'd even spotted it. Its senses were so much better than mine. It was big, graceful and totally silent - a contrast to the noisy flight of ducks and tuis. Just gorgeous.

It had been in the shallows of the river. Perhaps it had caught a fish? There was nothing to see among the ripples it left behind. I walked on, and a minute later I came across a small broken blue egg speckled with brown, either hatched or eaten. Another minute or so later there was a blackbird on the ground, far closer to me than usual - was it sick, perhaps? It jumped away from me, but didn't fly. I walked away, not wanting to harass it.

I find peace and joy in encounters with nature, and I'm not alone. It's good for everyone, it turns out, and there are now many studies showing that people have better physical and mental health when they spend time in nature. Children learn better, too. Nature is not just a 'nice to have', it's essential to humans' well being.

(Although once I knew a woman who was moving to New York. She would be delighted, she said, if she never saw a paddock again. Mind you, I don't like paddocks, either. I didn't ask her about native bush, rivers and beaches, but I'd be surprised if she'd be happy to see them receding as she looked out of the plane window. Or maybe her nose was deep in the latest fashion mag.)

Four or so years ago this was mostly weeds.

I'm involved with a group that's helping to restore our local patch of bush to its former glory. We dress in unfashionable old clothes to do this rough work. Stunning and biodiverse as our bush is, there are terrible weeds and pest animals amidst the beauty. For the first time this week we wandered down on a Wednesday evening to start a series of weekly working bees to get on top of the weeds. Usually we do monthly afternoon working bees, but this is a cooler summer alternative.

"This is better than blobbing out in front of the telly after work," said one man as he sawed down a weedy privet tree. "Usually I feel like doing nothing when I come home, but once I get into it.... this is GREAT."

So we worked, not out of a sense of obligation. (I think we do have an obligation, though. Who brought all the weeds and pests that ravage this stunning country? Our forebears.) Rather, we're excited about the beauty we're creating, stoked by our sense of achievement, and happy to be getting in among it. We're in awe, too, of what we are in the midst of - this week we found a little patch of exquisite native ferns growing next to a heap of weeds. Nature creates such lovely things.

In many ways, though, it's not just about the bush. We're connecting with others in our community. We're being useful. These are things that are well known to make people happier and healthier.

I got a bit excited about the importance of nature after hearing Richard Louv speak a couple of weeks go. He's the author of the best-seller Last Child in the Woods. He pointed out that because most of us live in towns and cities these days, creating nature-rich urban areas that we can get to easily is vital if we are to have the well being we all want. Urban ecological restoration, it's called (well, it's restoration if you're restoring what used to be there before people came on the scene).

It made me feel proud of our slice of goodness, and the way we nurture it - it's not just for ourselves, or for the bush and creatures that live in it, but for anyone who wants to come here.

Cheap and simple rat control in an elvish forest

Recently my family and I had the pleasure of visiting the most gorgeous lifestyle block owned by a clever and resourceful couple. It made us long for more land - for more flowers, more vegetables, more space for chickens, and most of all more space for our children to play in. Our urban section is quite small.

However, the drive in and out of town wouldn't work for us. Too much petrol, too much time. We like being able to walk and bike daily to many of our destinations. Plus I don't think we have the energy or time for maintaining a large block.

The current owners are doing forest restoration and pest control in an adjacent patch of beautiful kahikatea forest. It was a magical place. Kahikatea trees thrive in swampy ground. The land around here has been drained for farms now, but the trees' crazy above-ground roots remain. The forest felt a bit elvish and secret, like a magical, mossy, fern-filled world in which the trees should have windows.

I noticed that the couple were using the cleverest and cheapest little bait station for rats that I've ever seen, using old icecream containers. They told me they'd invented them and that they work really, really well.

You can read about how they work and how to make one on my other blog, www.keepingchickensnz.com.

I also noticed these ferns that have made a home of a fencepost - amazing!

Our friends gave us a bag of freshly dug new potatoes for our dinner. Yum... what a nice ending to a lovely afternoon.

Dreaming of HenPower for the elderly

The lovely blog of Melissa at tinyhappy has thrilled me this week with its link to a story about HenPower.

An image from the Telegraph article about HenPower.

Consider a group of elderly people, in a rest home or retirement village. The demands of their own homes and sections have gone or been hugely reduced, spouses have died, and for some of them gaping holes have been left behind.

Enter HenPower. A chicken coop, and some hens or even eggs in an incubator that hatch into delightful little chicks. (I know not the fate of the roosters.) What happens?

It turns out to be tranformative for some of the elderly people. They say things like "‘My life has been a lot fuller since we’ve had these hens. I think I’d be lost without them." The chicken-keeping tasks lead to social interactions, a point of interest, and a sense of purpose and fulfilment. In turn, there are reduced amounts of antipsychotic drugs in rest homes and all sorts of other good outcomes.

The project started with bare-bones funding, but last year they were awarded £164,000 of lottery money to extend the project to different parts of the United Kingdom.

There's also a lovely seven minute video on the project called Hen Men here. In it, one man hasn't seen his family since 1980 and didn't talk to his neighbours until the project began. Now the local chaps get together over their chooks. (If only I could interpret the other 70% of what the men say - the accents are strong! Which is quite fun in itself - my son was gobsmacked.)

It would be fantastic if something like this could get going in New Zealand. Wouldn't it be a lovely thing for the old people to show visiting grandchildren? I can even imagine local kindergartens going on field trips to see the chickens and collect the morning's eggs, and the residents being delighted by seeing the children. Some of the children would probably start wanting their own hens at home...  what a wonderful ripple effect it could have. HenPower indeed.

I also wrote about HenPower on my chickens Facebook page and blog. If you're missing chicken posts here, please visit the other sites, which are where my chicken writings mostly are these days.