Simple Living in the Southwest
(Page 2 of 4)
June/July 2007
By Susan Lahey
I was, in many ways, completely unprepared for this adventure. I didn’t really understand how to work the solar-electric system or the pump that sucked water from the cistern and groaned deafeningly, like a cranky garbage disposal that’s caught hold of a fork.
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Fortunately, I have smart and curious children. By reading the owner’s manual and playing with the switches on the DC power box and inverter, we learned which ones turned on the water pump, and which turned on the outlets. We saw that if the indicator light was green, we were good to go. If it turned yellow, we were getting low on battery power and if it turned red, we were in danger of zapping our batteries entirely.
We made a few mistakes. I knew that refrigerators were energy hogs, but I didn’t realize that so is anything else that heats or cools. One day, feeling bold, we plugged in the toaster oven and tried to make a piece of toast. The power indicator on the inverter looked like the stock market ticker on Black Monday. After that we made toast in the propane oven. Working has been another challenge. I need my computer to write, so when the power is too low to run my laptop, I drive 30 minutes to an Internet cafe in Taos.
But learning to live with very little electricity was easier than I thought it would be. One doesn’t, it turns out, actually need a food processor, microwave oven, television, blow dryer, or any of those other things that are part of a “normal” household.
Living without privacy was something else. My oldest and youngest children are boys and my middle child is a girl. We plan to add a small straw bale addition this summer, which will give us additional bedrooms, but we needed something in the meantime. I thought of the pioneers who rigged up bedrooms using sheets suspended from the ceiling, and decided to make a wall comprising bookshelves, my dresser, a set of glass-front kitchen cabinets I’d bought at a salvage place and a wonderful old quilt. This divides the front of the house, with the sink, woodstove and front door, from the back of the house, where we have the shower enclosure and the beds.
Also in the back of the house we have our chamber pot, of sorts. I knew we wouldn’t want to travel to the outhouse in the middle of the night — bears, mountain lions and coyotes all live around here. So we built an indoor toilet, based on a design I found on the Internet. It’s a box with a removable lid, and a toilet seat that sits on top of a 5-gallon bucket with some wood shavings in the bottom. My children are appalled if, while buying the shavings, I make any reference to how we intend to use them. For the benefit of anyone in the store who might be listening, I am supposed to pretend we have a gerbil.
