Sunday, September 21, 2014

Raising the Panels

The Autumnal Equinox occurs this week which means the sun has hit the point where it is low enough in the sky that the angle of the solar panels needs to be changed to harvest the most energy from the sun.

Yesterday was a gorgeous day with the sun shining and the wildflowers blooming so Rick and our grandson Jack went up on the roof of the earthship to move the panels to their winter angle.

Meanwhile, SophieTom took a dip in one of the rock depressions on the edge of the canyon.


From the front of the house you really can't see the photovoltaic panels because the ground slopes down quite a bit before hitting the canyon edge. If you peer carefully between the two cedars you can see a little bit of the raised panels. The panels visible to the left of the trees are the hot water panels that keep the earthship toasty all winter with in-floor radiant heat. Those panels are not lowered during the summer because we don't heat the floor then.


I love our home!

Sunday, May 18, 2014

Status Update

Just realized I haven't posted in a very long time. Money got pretty tight with Rick and me both having jobs that evaporated. Last September I started working out of town and earlier this year we rented the earthship out to a good friend who is planning on building one and we moved into an apartment in an old log cabin.

We will be back. Meanwhile we remain dedicated to the tread lightly on the earth ethos of earthship life and are looking to build a tiny earthship near where I'm working which is about 80 miles away from our canyon, using all the things we learned from our life on the edge.

I will continue posting photos from the dozen years of building and living in our earthship.

One of the cool things Rick did last fall was to build his Happy Tractor Shed. He made it out of pallets and the cut off bark pieces from a saw mill. Good recycling effort.