My Adventures with Home-Made Electricity

Now, as has been noted in other places, my ability to recall the exact time and date when something has occurred is seriously lacking.  So I will date this event by the usual old  wives’ method–by the age of my children.

When my oldest child was 15, my daughter was 10, and my youngest son was 7, we had a house fire.  We resided a few days with my in-laws, at the end of which time I declared that my ex could do whatever he wanted, but I was finding a place to live and I was moving.  I managed to get us into a rented mobile home by the time school started, but we all knew that this was not the residence we wanted permanently.

Consequently, we purchased a piece of unimproved land on the $100 down, and $100 a month plan.  By August of the following year, we had managed to build a shack, and moved on to the property.  We were thrilled with the land.  It was a long narrow bit, laid out over four modest hills and covered with trees.  (This is the property mentioned in my article on Wood Heat.)  It surely was not paradise; there were ticks, chiggers, snakes, and a wild cat lived back in the woods.  But it was ours, we could have animals and the kids had room to run.  (Well, that was how I felt about it, anyway.)

Getting electricity back to the house proved to be a bigger task (and a bigger bill) than we could handle.  For the first winter we used car batteries to run emergency trouble lights, with Kerosene lamps for back-up.  Those car batteries were real interesting critters. 

We had read all the books about generating your own juice, so my ex rigged a way to set a battery in the floor of the old truck and charge it as the vehicle was going down the road.  This involved a lot of hauling things about.  That wasn’t the worst of it, though.  One evening as we were going down the road, I felt something burning my foot.  I lifted it up, and found a smouldering spot on my shoe sole.  The wiring (just a light electrical cord–don’t get me started on my ex’s mental faculties; I’ll never get stopped) had burned through its modest insulation, was zapping the sole of my shoe and causing the floor mat to smoulder.  We stopped the truck, unhooked the battery just in time to keep from really setting something on fire.

That old blue chevy truck was in pretty bad shape when we got it (that’s another story–figure that if a vehicle only costs $300 it’s gotta have a lot wrong with it), and before too long something major went out on the steering and it wasn’t safe to drive down the drive-way, much less out on the road.  So we parked it, planning to use it where it sat to charge batteries. My ex wasn’t satisfied with the speed at which the batteries charged, so he started tinkering with the alternator, trying to improve the out-put, which made the alternator over-load and burn out.  So then we had a junker which was only good for storing stuff in the cab and loading the back-end with stuff we didn’t want to get away before it could be hauled to the dump.

I had been doing extensive research in the meantime, and had come across the company, Real Goods.  When the income tax return came in, we used a large chunk of it to purchase 5 solar collectors.  Unfortunately, we did not have the funds to buy the correct control panels.  My ex was sure, however, that he could rig something that would work.

It didn’t actually do too badly, as long as all you were doing was charging batteries in order to run lights after sundown.  The sun came up, the batteries charged; the sun went down, we had a couple of hours of light that didn’t stink or have extreme potential for burning the house down.  (I had put my foot down and insisted on real wiring, not recycled extension cords.)  Once a week, we had enough juice to watch Star Trek on a tiny portable television. 

The problem arose when we scraped together enough cash to buy an inverter so that we could run things that needed regular house current.  Ecstatically, my ex rigged it up, and plugged in our old 128 Commodore computer.  (The Commodore was only a couple of years old, and we bought it when they first came out; so those of you who are wanting to place these events in time, that ought to do it for you.)  It was going just fine till about 10:00 am when the sun really hit that collector.  The tiny diode he had put in to regulate the flow of juice went in a flash, we got a lovely surge to the computer; it died on the spot.

He hauled it off to be repaired, but it never ran just quite right after that. 

A few other things weren’t right either.  Eventually, push came to shove, and he absolutely had to go.  The children and I became very adept at cleaning batteries, attaching and un-attaching them (without that diode in there, the batteries would discharge at night if they were left hooked up), and generally maintaining our modest system.  I bought batteries, candles, and more kerosene lamps to use as back-up.

I lived on that bit of land with that odd little system for seven years–five of it with just me and the kids.  Eventually, the children grew up; I got a teaching job that necessitated moving.  Our back-to-the-land years came to an end. 

Those were hard years–freezing in winter, roasting in summer; but sometimes when the electric and fuel bills come in, I look back on those years with a certain nostalgia.  And I wonder:  with the knowledge from those years, and a little cash investment…sometimes, home-made electric just doesn’t seem like that bad a plan.