Homesteaders

[RTFchickens]

I have been living on my own since age 16, and taking care of my son since I had him one month after I turned 17.
Our mortgage payment on our suburban home is reasonable, and the only debt that we have. I feel confident leaving him home alone for the nights I'm not here after the age of 16. I'm a nurse at a local hospital (near our suburban home). It takes me about 20 minutes to drive there from this house. It takes almost 2 hours to drive there from our homestead. My work schedule is 3 days a week, 12 hour days in a row. If I add 4 hours of travel time (2 hours each way) to that 12 hours it will get exhausting. So I'm planning on keeping suburbia for a while and staying there for the 3 days a week that I work. My son goes to his dads every other weekend, and will probably come up to our homestead every other weekend. So he will only be alone for 2 nights a week. Also my brother lives with us here in suburbia, so he won't really be alone at all...
When my son goes off to college, I will retire and leave my job. We will live off of our investments, and our income from our farm.

 

[rancher hicks]

Looks as though you've got things worked out and I wish you the best for sure.

 

[RTFchickens]

Thank you so much!!!
Now we just need to get off the grid. Our only utility now is electric. We ditched propane, and we are looking into a wood stove. We have a wood burning stove for heating the house, but we need one for cooking. We are also going to put in a hand pump well inside the house once the ground thaws.
Our final non electric issue is refrigeration. We will have a root cellar, but do you guys know if that stays cold enough in the summer?

 

[stonykill]

Thank you so much!!!
Now we just need to get off the grid. Our only utility now is electric. We ditched propane, and we are looking into a wood stove. We have a wood burning stove for heating the house, but we need one for cooking. We are also going to put in a hand pump well inside the house once the ground thaws.
Our final non electric issue is refrigeration. We will have a root cellar, but do you guys know if that stays cold enough in the summer?

At roughly 10 feet below ground the temp is stable. No matter the temp outside at 10 feet below ground the temp will be 40 to 60. This can be accomplished by digging a 10 foot hole or a 6 foot hole and covering it with 4 feet of dirt removed from the hole. A spring fed Pretty good link here.
http://www.greatnorthernprepper.com/food-prep/food-refrigeration-techniques/

Now I can't find the link at the moment but if you have a spring or can divert some running water a great outdoor fridge for summer use can be made . I'll have to look for that.

 

[RTFchickens]

Stonykill,
That was a great article! We have looked into solar panneling and such, but the price is high! We are figuring that a little manpower is the better option with hand pump wells, and cold storage etc.

 

[stonykill]

lots of good info out there if you sift through the obvious bad ones. We picked up a small solar setup. Need a battery or 2 then we will hook it up for lighting, tv and charging the laptops, powering the modem etc. Little stuff. For a few hundred including battery's (2) you can set yourself up with a starter solar setup and learn, and have basic power in an outage.

 

[RTFchickens]

Do you prefer solar energy over a gasifier? We have tons of trees on our homestead, which blocks out a lot of sun. And we have more trees then we know what to do with! We need to take some down for our garden, and we have some questionable trees near our houses that can potentially fall on the house.
We had a tornado come through last summer, and uprooted many of our trees. Some of them were as big around as my husband is tall (6+ feet!) We are using that wood in our burner to keep the house warm, but there is more wood then we can possibly use in one season.
It's nice using the fallen timber vs cutting down good trees just to heat the house.

 

[RTFchickens]

Here is one picture

 

[stonykill]

I have researched gasifiers. I really want to build one. Have not yet. I think a combo of solar, gasifier and a small $400 windmill combined are the way to go personally.

 

[RTFchickens]

Having multiple sources of energy is a great suggestion.