Transcript from video:

Courtney Brooke: Here’s our new ride, the club car. It’s a golf cart for cruising around Earthaven, but the news about it is that it’s got a solar panel on top so you can charge it with electricity.   But that’s pretty challenging to do when you live off the grid. So, Brandon, who’s over there digging around in the cover crop seeds, rigged up this solar panel to the top of it.  Let’s try to see the solar panel …. There, it’s like that!

So does that mean that means that you can basically drive it around and you don’t have to charge it at all?

Brandon: We’re hoping that it’ll just charge itself off of the it solar panel off the top. I got a charge controller hooked up. It’s is specially made for the golf cart. It’s is down there in the back seat box. Yeah, working it out.

Courtney Brooke: The toolbox? That’s not the charge controller.  Oh, that box. There it is. That’s the charge controller.
So you just got a solar panel. You got the charge controller. You need to hook it up.

Brandon: I got a fuse in my pocket. I just need a few more wires.

Courtney Brooke: Got a fuse in your pocket…

Brandon: Yeah. Then we just got to put the golf cart where it’ll be in the Sun, and then it’ll charge it, hopefully keep itself charged all the time.

Courtney Brooke: Awesome.

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Transcript from video:

Courtney Brooke: Here we are on the creek bank, of Earthaven EcoVillage, where there’s been some major erosion, since before we got here. The road before Earthaven was here was already very near the creek, which is understandable, but also a problem. So now there’s a solution.

Brandon: So, we put these concrete blocks into the edge of the creek, not really disturbing the creek too much. What we’re hoping is that on this outside bank and in flood conditions, sediment will get deposited on the edges of these blocks.
When the water is high, that there will be a bunch of turbulence and slowing down of the water, which will hopefully prevent the creek from eating in as it has been here in the past. That’s our hopes.

Courtney Brooke: So what are we going to do here? We’re going to spread cover crop?

Brandon: We’re going to spread some seeds, some annual rye grass and some rye grain to stabilize it temporarily. And then we’re going to plant some live stakes of a variety of different plants in there. It’s possible that we’re going to put some bamboo in this area to really stabilize the Creek so that we don’t lose any more sediment, which helps the Creek and helps us to protect the roads.

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The Hut Hamlet’s kitchen/bathhouse — central distribution area for the neighborhood’s Microgrid.

In June, twenty-two residents of the Hut Hamlet neighborhood became owner/users of the first electric Microgrid at Earthaven! Chris Farmer of SunWorks Electric installed an 8.16 kW solar array and power system to serve 11 huts, and the neighborhood kitchen and bathhouse. The system will produce, on an average day, 31.5 kWh of electricity, which is what the average American house consumes.

After Chris and fellow valley solar electrician Brandon Greenstein had to troubleshoot, fix, or upgrade too many small, old, self-installed systems, they decided that to install one new, state-of-the-art system wired to code for the entire neighborhood.

One of the greatest obstacles to creating a shared off-grid power system is the different levels of electrical needs, as well as levels of consciousness around usage, people have. How does a group deal with this fairly? The Microgrid has a metering system that records different users’ true impact on the system, and charges users accordingly. Earthaven resident Jake Ferina wrote all the computer code for the weighted metering system, as well as for an Automatic Generator Start program better suited to off-grid solar than any offered on the market.

One perennial question in off-grid solar design is how big a battery to install. Too small, and it’s almost useless. Too big, and without an appropriately sized array, the batteries will not adequately re-charge after cloudy spells, But if the array is large enough to keep the batteries well charged, during sunny spells much of the energy from the panels will go to waste. We avoided this conundrum by installing a Diversion system that diverts excess electrical production to a conventional electric hot water heater. This 1) protects the batteries while 2) providing a freeze-proof solar hot water system.

Before the Microgrid, some residents had enough power for a light and a laptop, while others had upgraded to power refrigerators. The new plan, which took many minds over many months to work out, plus weeks of disrupted phone lines and paths, has been running smoothly for a few weeks and the future of power in the Hamlet looks, well, …brighter!

For the list of components in the Hut Hamlet Microgrid, see this entry in the Earthaven blog.

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Brandon came to Earthaven in 1998 in pursuit of meaningful connection to Earth and Spirit. “When I discovered permaculture in Communities magazine, I realized organic farming, natural building and ecovillage lifestyle were what I was after.”

The following year, he returned to Earthaven with his partner, Brandi, and her daughter, Aurora. Along with two other young families, they settled into the pioneer life. “I wanted to live with people taking responsibility for our individual and collective impact on the world—socially, politically, energetically, spiritually. Also,” he admits, “I came for the Hut Hamlet, as unkempt as it was, because it felt like a fairy-tale place. It still does!”

“I got what I came for and a whole lot more: I got an education. Though I had the permaculture concept, I’d never reckoned with what it takes to build a house or create a farm from a standing forest, let alone provide infrastructure for a neighborhood. I learned so much about so many systems we all depend on.”

“What I learned at Earthaven, I maintain as a focus in my life. Being able to assist people in managing power and other home systems is a way of being of service that nourishes me. The lifestyles here represent many of my priorities, and my love and appreciation for the diversity of people has helped me work things out with most everyone.”

Though now living up the road, Brandon is an active part of Earthaven in many ways, meeting social and work-related needs among the members and community at large. He probably visits more neighborhoods in a single day than any resident.

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