Archive for the ‘Energy’ Category

Along with much of the East Coast, we just endured a record-breaking snowstorm. When you live on a homestead with livestock, weather is a big deal. The livestock need to be cared for every day, and that means getting to them, and making sure they can get around, no matter what the weather. As we […]

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Here is another post we started when we were in the town-house about 2 years ago but it never was published. We have continued to air-dry our laundry almost exclusively in our new homestead, using the dryer only for large items that are urgently needed. Original Article For several months now we have been primarily […]

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The installation of our wood stove brought about a new need, firewood. The first round of wood we struggled to get to our house in the back of our jeep. It took about three trips to get the wood seen in the picture here to our house. That clearly was not very efficient, though the price (free) was right. Now that we had the wood we had to split it. After a few tries with our ax we realized that another tool was needed.

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Wood Burning Stove

Last summer we were researching alternate home heating solutions, well we settled on an option! We decided to go with a Jotul Wood Burning Cast-Iron Stove. We were able to pick up a floor model from a company that recently changed locations for a steep discount. We hooked it up through our existing fireplace and obtained a fire/heat resistant floor mat to place in front of the stove to keep our floor from melting.

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We are about to get new windows!  We had a few replaced last year, and this year most of the rest. Here’s a picture of one of the windows we’re replacing:

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So one of the benefits of being self-sufficient and doing things yourself is not being restricted by what’s available on the market.  Last summer we hung up curtains in our living room.  The curtains that matched our style and color scheme were pretty flimsy, though. They weren’t lined, which we wanted.  We bought them anyway, […]

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After receiving this wick material and these wick tabs I was anxious to start making candles! Here at Independence Homestead we try to reuse as many materials as possible, so I had the idea that we could make candles in containers using repurposed glass food jars.  We have quite the collection of baby food jars, […]

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We needed to melt down the beeswax in the comb so that we could use the wax for candles and other potential crafts. George did some research, and found that it was common to use solar ovens to do this. We had been wanting a solar oven for other reasons so it was a good opportunity to go ahead and build a solar oven!

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For a while now we have been wanting to build a solar oven.  This summer we’ve made it happen! First we did some research on solar ovens.  There are several different configurations one can build.  We went with a box cooker design.  This is not the type of solar oven that gets the hottest, but […]

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This afternoon George and I had a discussion of whether or not to pursue solar energy options.

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