It took me a while to realize a few key things about my new situation.
Firstly, the face-to-face social aspect of work is overrated. For me, anyway. Our new Exede satellite internet link meant I could teleconference weekly with my new colleagues from my cabin in the woods. To be honest, I didn’t miss sitting in a stuffy conference room drinking watery coffee. It was much nicer to chat over GotoMeeting, knowing that, after the teleconference, we could just get on with our work, unimpeded by office politics.
Secondly, my social life outside of work, which had been rich and rewarding (perhaps slightly too rich and rewarding) was completely absent in the country. I had, for all intents and purposes, stopped drinking and, when your social life revolves around bars for the most part, that’s quite a shock to the system.
Thirdly, I realized how unfit I had been. I’d never been one for enforced regimes of exercise and had managed to keep fairly fit when I lived in Copenhagen, in Denmark, by the simple expedient of cycling everywhere, as you do in that city. But the idea of cycling in San Francisco filled me with fear. After living in one of the most cycle-friendly nations in the world, cycling in San Francisco seems more like an opportunity to remove yourself from the gene pool permanently rather than a viable means of getting from A to B. I’d grown podgy, pale, and, clearly, sicker and sicker over the year. After a few weeks of swimming daily in the neighbor’s pool, I realized how unfit I’d been before and, better yet, how fit I was getting.
And finally, I realized how much work living off-grid entailed. Nothing could be taken for granted. Nothing was provided by a council or any other organization. Not the water, not the power, not the sewage, not any other waste disposal. Everything either had to be found on the land or among available natural resources, brought out to the land, disposed of on the land, or taken away from the land. Location determined everything.
I also noticed how much opportunity there was for technology to make that last point easier to handle, especially for my stepmom and dad, one a mobility-impaired senior and the other a soon-to-be senior. I’d already built a simple wireless remote-start switch for their 8.5 kilowatt propane-powered Kohler generator, which sits at the foot of their steep gravel driveway, about 400 feet from the house. The Kohler has a remote start connection, allowing an inverter to switch smoothly to generator power in the event of low battery power, for an on-grid home to switch to backup power in the case of a blackout, or to manually start and stop the generator remotely. I’d previously installed a run of wire, dug into a trench, connected to the Kohler at one end and a switch at the other, back in the house, which would allow them to do precisely that. It took many hours of electrical work and digging to get it finished, and I was so proud when it worked: it saved my stepmom either a long walk or a short drive to manually turn the generator on and off.
It’s boxy, but it’s also noisy
Then, after a few short months, the generator stopped working. I couldn’t figure out why. I did a continuity test on the wire, which showed that there was a break in the line — somewhere. Maybe a rat or a gopher or a small earth movement had severed the cable. I toyed with the idea of doing a binary chop to figure out where the break was — digging up the wire half way, cutting it, doing a continuity test on each half, doing the same on the open-circuit half again and again and again until I found the break — but the idea didn’t fill me with joy. One evening, I wondered if a low-cost wireless on-off switch could be bought online, and indeed, it could — up to a 1500 foot range. Alibaba.com is a good source for these, ordered directly from China. I ordered one switch and two remote control handsets, disconnected the remote start wire, connected the wireless switch to the Kohler’s remote start connection and its 12V battery, and voila! The generator could be started and stopped with the press of a remote control button, and better still, there were no wires to break.
Emboldened by this success, I wondered what else would benefit from this approach. Two obvious ideas that sprang to mind were remote measuring of water levels in the storage tanks and monitoring power levels and other electrical statistics, like power consumption.
Measuring the tank water levels manually required someone, increasingly my stepmom, to walk the three-quarters of a mile round-trip up and down a hill to bang on the sides of the tanks to judge how full they were or, if they were getting critically empty, to balance precariously on two stacked logs to unscrew the top of the tank and peer cautiously inside with a flashlight. It’s neither precise nor convenient. When you have the time and inclination, this wasn’t too much of an onerous task. Indeed, it can be a pleasant walk. But there are times when it’s quite nice to know if you’ve got enough water to take a shower or do the dishes without a half-hour hike beforehand. So, if you’ll pardon the pun, flush with the enduring success of the second version of my first Wired Woods project, I began designing a remote water-level monitoring system.
How deep is the ocean? How blue is the sea? Do we have enough water for me take a relaxing soak? The next installment puts the “bath” into this bathetic question and describes the technical challenges that need to be addressed to answer it satisfactorily.
Brilliant and fun. Great picture of you too!