500 Year Vision

Experiments with sustainable technology in South Bohemia, Czech Republic. A British couple renovating a country house & thinking about our environment.

The Nový Mlýn Sustainable Housekeeping Manual

January15

I have been thinking about how to record what we are learning at Nový Mlýn.  It would be really useful to have a written guide of how the house operates through the seasons; jobs that happen once a year or every day. At present, this repetitive work occupies a great deal of my time – taking time away from all the ongoing projects – things that would make a quantifiable improvement in our standard of living. This indicates that I need to improve my management skills. As visitors are with us for sometimes as little as a week, Joann suggested that I need to have more information written down.

Housekeeping is a shared task at Nový Mlýn, and every visitor can choose one task each day. We have a rota for housekeeping and meal preparation as we discovered that without a rota things just didn’t happen. “We’ll just make it up as we go along” = one person will have to do all jobs nobody else thinks about. What I want to be doing is this and in fact end up doing:

Now I need to remember that along with the jobs themselves, the recording of how they are done is an additional task to be added.

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Rain Lights – wet days converted into light.

January2

So, the issue of micro generation has been at the back of my mind for some time. The standard arguments about it are that if you are going to have a home generator of some description -  solar cells (ridiculously expensive at present), wind turbine or water turbine, you end up with a lot of maintenance and a payback time which is uneconomic (ie the amount of embedded energy needed to create the system will take too long to be made up by the equipment during it’s lifetime).  Dedicated enthusiasts and those who have serious amounts of money to invest can create their own personal electricity supply. Read the rest of this entry »