My DH and I attended a workshop called: The Living Sustainably and Independently, Ready for Rough Times, Hands-On, Solar-Powered, All You Can Grow Workshop
at Cam and Michelle Mathers Off-Grid Farm. It was amazing! I am still thinking and digesting everything I heard and saw there. Most of it was familiar but it was nice to talk to other in-the-flesh crazy people like me...

Vanislemom asked for more details so I thought I would just continue this thread.

I have written about the woodstove/cookstove they have and I was able to see in living color on my blog here: http://www.adventures-in-country-living.blogspot.com/

Cook Stoves, Wood Stoves and Cam & Michelle Mather

DH and I had an amazing weekend away together. A break from our every day lives and something educational, brain cell stretching and totally different from our regular routine. (for now!)

I follow many different blogs but one of my favorites is Cam Mather's. Cam and his wife Michelle have a blog at http://www.cammather.com which is a sometimes humorous blog about some very serious topics like peak oil, organic gardening and sustainability. They share the happenings of life on their totally off-grid farm in Ontario and the how and why of what they do. Well - some blogs are really cool with lots of good information but Cam's is really cool with lots of great information and they live WITHIN-DRIVING-DISTANCE! When the opportunity came up to be a part of a whole day seminar on site DH and I signed up immediately.

So Saturday morning we got up early and headed out. The scenery along the drive reminded me of our many years of vacations up in northern Ontario. There was a hard frost covering the ground so it was barely above zero at 9am. Cam met us on the porch and opened the door as he welcomed us into his warm and toasty home - ahh - the wonderfully embracing heat of a woodstove. We quickly got acquainted with his wife Michelle and the others who were arriving.

As I entered the kitchen my eyes went straight to the latest-object-of-my-desire - drool! It was ALMOST the most beautiful stove in the world - a six burner gas Heartland Oval cook stove - but perfection as-you-know only comes in red. I nearly had to sit on my hands to keep from touching it but when someone else opened one of the doors I jumped right up to have a look - (OK -that may have sounded crazy but let me remind the male species that this is how YOU sound talking about a stupid car!) It was a thing of beauty. Sigh. I had stove envy really-really bad.

I always thought I wanted a wood cook stove up until this weekend. The romantic beauty of a wood fire, dinner bubbling away in a cast iron pot on the top and bread baking in the oven...but I learned a few things. Michelle pointed out that although a wood fired cook stove seems like a great idea it has a few drawbacks. One - it makes the whole house really hot - a good thing in the winter but not so great on a weekend like our last (30 degree) Thanksgiving weekend or during the summer - way too hot. Two - it's difficult to cook on a wood fired cook stove - apparently burnt cookies, bread and dinner are common place for a very long time till you get the hang of it. Hmmm…

I was also reading last week that wood cook stoves have to be installed a minimum of 24 inches from the wall - that was going to make it a rather tight squeeze where I had planned to put it. Gas however could be installed right up against the wall - double hmmm…

Leaving that subject for a moment…

We moved into the living room for the presentation where I laid eyes on the wood stove. It wasn't quite as pretty but it was pouring out the heat and it didn't take me long to warm up. Cam mentioned it was a Pacific Energy Woodstove and it was so efficient that it could be stoked on the coldest winter morning and the house would still be warm and it would still have glowing embers 12 hours later - a very handy feature when you need to leave home for the day and you can't leave the furnace on because you don't have one! He recommended the brand highly. I wrote it on "The List".

Ah but back to the cook stove. What to do! After some thinking on the way home we decided that the Pacific Energy woodstove made much more sense in every way. It provided heat in case of a power outage and could be used in lieu of running our oil furnace in the winter, it could be stacked with kettles and pots to provide "free" hot water and we could still cook on it - slow cooker style on the top and with some messing around inside the firebox too. Oh why does life need to be so practical!

We learned so much this weekend that I still feel a little overwhelmed. Solar panels, thermal solar for hot water - the proper way to say photovoltaic (ahem - had that one wrong!) wind turbines, generators - most of these technical details were a little over my head. Thankfully I bought The Renewable Energy Handbook by William H. Kemp - it will be my textbook for the next few weeks. I am determined to understand it better. It's available directly from Cam & Michelle by visitng their website http://www.aztext.com They have many other interesting books available there too - check it out!

More blogging to come about the rest of our day. Oh and by the way - I haven't completely given up on my gas cook stove - I'm just going to wait till we renovate and maybe I can squeeze one into the design...of course mine will be the red one.

Cam Mather's friend is Bill Kemp who wrote The Renewable Energy Handbook which is printed by Cam and Michelle's Aztext Press.

That book like a textbook for people like me who don't know the difference between an amp and a watt. I am a plug-and-play kind of girl BUT I am willing to learn and I am determined to learn more so I am going to study the book - not just read it.

Cam believes that peak oil is the major event that will change our world. Whether it is or isn't really isn't important because the current events are leading many of us to the same conclusion: we could be put into a situation where we need to find a way to heat and power our homes without the power grid.

He has a thermal hot water system - basically a solar panel that hooks up to his hot water tank. Between the thermal system and his solar system and heating water on top of his wood stove they will never run out of hot water!

Their solar array is capable of producing 15 kilowatts of electricity a day if there is good sun for 5 hours - that's a pretty conservative estimate for most times of the year. They use about 5 kilowatts so they often have "extra" power which is stored in a battery bank and used for days when production is limited by lack of sunshine. The average homeowner uses 35-40 kilowatts a day and at our property last winter we averaged a whooping 81 kilowatts. Our 150 year old farmhouse that uses oil heat - not even electric- and our need for running water in the barn made it very expensive to run. (I hope I got all the details right.)

Of course the best course of action is to make your home as efficient as possible because the cost of a solar power array large enough to keep up with us would be astronomical! (Hydro One sized!) So - read up on all the ways to save energy - switching lightbulbs to energy efficient ones - there was some talk about $9.00 LED lightbulbs that are available at WalMart that I want to check out. Insulation and all the other stuff you've probably heard of already - power bars on electrical equipment etc. Saving energy is good for all of us - whether you want to reduce your consumption to be able to use solar exclusively or just to save money! Thankfully we've already done many of those things so hopefully our electrical consumption this winter will be reduced a lot - a really big a lot!!

This area was by far the most interesting topic and new to me. We don't have a woodstove but it is within the realm of possibilities to get one installed. Solar seems a little more out there but an answer that totally makes sense to me. Of course I am not a millionaire so this will be a long term project but you need to aim for something!

The Renewable Energy Handbook is available through http://www.aztext.com and any major book store - totally worth the money!!

Damn..
just saw this now, I would have gone with you guys to this ... sigh...

They limited the attendance to 12 persons and it was filled up quickly. There were people from as far as Scarborough on one end and Ottawa on the other. A nice group of peeps that I personally would have liked to spend more time getting to know.

Cam has done these workshops for several years so he's really good at it and is a fount of information. We listened to him speak for awhile about solar, wind power, generators, woodstove heat etc. then we went outside and checked out the whole farm. After lunch he talked about gardening and food storage. They market garden in the Canadian Shield- if they can do it the rest of us have no excuse. He talked about peak oil quite a bit which was the first time I had heard it explained in detail.

He also presented the case for using your money wisely by investing in durable goods rather than the stock market. I already agreed with him on this point but he had graphs and data to back up my gut feelings.

As we were driving down the road towards their place we noticed that the hydro lines ended - they are really really off grid. Cool.

Sorry you missed it Wilde - that would have been a great adventure. They are going to do it again possibly in the spring. If you sign up to follow their blog you'll get the information as soon as it's posted. http://www.cammather.com/blog