Preparation

There are many aspects of a project like this for which Kyle and I are not really sure what to expect. Personally I think that's part of the fun of it - who wants to live a quiet, comfortable life anyway? However that does tend to lend itself to a bit of risk. We don't want to get to the point where we're lying awake at night ravaged by thoughts of "what if?" (well, not too much).

What if it turns out we're no good at earthbag building after all?

What if we can't find all the pre-loved materials we need for the build?

What if the banks won't give us a mortgage on land for a project like this?

Most of these big "what if's" we can deal with in advance by doing our homework and being careful about what we commit our resources to before we move to the next step. But sometimes doing your homework on what others have done before us isn't enough. Sometimes, we just have to get obsessive about the details.

What if we can't actually survive on solar panels?

Quite some time ago I had assumed we'd need to build our own fridge eventually as part of this project, so we weren't particularly concerned about having to ditch a few appliances. It does seem necessary, though, to be able to quantify our electrical needs to work out whether we need to replace core appliances with models that place less load on the system.

Enter our new electrical usage monitor:

Obviously I've got our electrical bill for the past however-many years we've lived here, with its helpful little graphs comparing our 2-person household with others in the area, but the value of this information is extremely limited as it includes things like heaters and fans, the use of which will be very limited in the new house, and the inefficient light fittings that our landlord refused to let us replace. So, over the next few weeks I'm going to track our electrical usage in as much detail as I can so that we have a realistic quantitative picture of our electrical usage in preparation for the switch.

Maybe it's the science teacher in me, but I never feel like you can have too much data.