Off-grid yurt living in Vermont
Now that it’s summer and the sun swings high above our heads, we’ve been finding it quite easy to soak up the sunlight and keep our batteries fully charged. Our off-grid solar setup is a combination of PowerFilm Solar products for capturing the sun’s energy and a Goal Zero battery
Read More Our Off-Grid Solar Panel Setup: A Review of PowerFilm Solar Products
For the first year in this little off-grid yurt of ours, our sole light source was six small, inflatable, solar-powered Luci lights from MPOWERD. Now we’ve upgraded to two strings of LED lights, powered by a solar-charged battery. Though the Lucis were great and we still use them as reading lights
A small-scale maple sugaring operation like ours—basically, backyard maple sugaring—doesn’t use vacuum pressure to collect maple sap. Good old-fashioned gravity is our method of choice. There’s two methods to consider when deciding how you want to collect sap from your maple trees. First, there’s the picture postcard method: tap a
Read More Backyard Sugaring: Collect Maple Sap with Five-Gallon Buckets
We recently spoke with MPOWERD, a great company that makes affordable solar-powered lanterns (called the Luci), and the interview is now posted on their Bright Ideas blog. We’re so grateful for their interest in what we’re up to and how we’re getting by. We’ve been using one of their products, the
Read More I Love Luci: That Yurt Featured on the MPOWERD Blog
The Aquacera Traveler XL water filter is ridiculously easy to clean and maintain, and the ceramic filters themselves are easy to replace when it comes time. For starters, the filter is sturdy and solid but easy to deconstruct. The lid sits atop the top (unfiltered) reservoir and this top reservoir
TLDR Update, March 2018: We haul water from a spring using food-grade 6-gallon jugs and filter our drinking water using an Aquacera Traveler XL. *** A main consideration in selecting property on which to build the yurt was the presence of a year-round water source so that we could filter our own
