A wee bit green living...

We are now full time living at the house and although the place is a complete mess, it´s great.  We had a few friends round for Tony´s birthday last week and cooked a Colombian potato stew on a wood fire and spent the whole day outside, took a walk down to the river too.

We now have ceilings as of this week - so if there are still bats, at least we cant see them - and indoor doors which is a nice improvement.  We also have a makeshift kitchen, bodged together with all the bits and pieces found lying around including an old kitchen counter from the hostel.  It´s a long way from perfect and doesn´t really inspire much culinary creativity amongst the mess but it´s great to be able to make a pot of coffee, fry a couple of fresh eggs. Washing dishes somewhere other than the wash hand basin in the bathroom is also nice.

The solar panels are working well and we seem to be using less than 25% of what we have each day.  There are a couple of issues with the regulator though as it can only handle peaks of up to 1800 and although our fridge has been doctored to a low consuption, when it boots up, there is a momentary peak which trips the system and sets off an alarm.  What follows is Tony scrambling about with a torch, positioning the ladder and wriggling into the roof cavity to reboot the regulator.  It happened at 3am this morning.  He says that he has found a system to fix that inconvenience so hopefully we´ll get that fixed shortly.

The water situation is close to perfect though, we have way more than enough water just from the rain - April is one of the rainiest months here though. There´s a bit of dust making it´s way into our tank but it falls to the bottom and what we pump into the header tank seems to be free of sediment.  The only real complaint I have at the moment is temperature!  We dont have our solar water heater yet and I´m a bit of a Jessie when it comes to cold water showers.  It´s not that cold by most standards but it´s definately not warm and even less hot.  If I feel tough, I shower there... if not, I take my soap and shampoo to the hostel.  Tony calls it invigorating and thinks it´s good for the health. 

We planted some more grass a couple of weeks ago and made a little platform, planting reedlike things around the edge and that seems to be coming along very well.

Tony has also started digging a pond to bring some more birds and maybe frogs to our garden.  It´s very hard work as the earth is very compact and is that reddish yellow clay type stuff but he has managed to make a pretty big hole.

Then, this weekend we visited some friends who have just finished their bio-pool which is AMAZING and now I wonder whether our pond is really big enough! First things first though... we should really have a shower with hot water before we think about bio-pools!