My apologies: Caught up in hassles with my off-grid Water project

(005320.38-:E-003569.93:N-HO:R-SU:C-30:V)   

My apologies to everyone for being quiet for the last 7 days! This year I had 2 personal projects now that I am at home. In March/April I was trying to get my Solar project going. This is to help me survive power outages so I can run smoothly regardless of how our power goes in my suburb. On the whole its been good. But in the last few days we had 2 outages. In one, the local electricity substation caught fire AGAIN when the oil burst into flame! (You can’t believe how these blacks run things!). There’s a huge story around this and the wastage and incompetance in my suburb alone. But this fire resulted in 4 suburbs being without electricity. But that’s not what affected me.

I’ve mentioned in my newsletter that I have a little “engineering project” at home. That little project is another off-the-grid idea I have. But unlike Solar, this is not something you can buy equipment for. Since I’m a Rhodesian farm boy, I remember a few things, and I had an idea in recent years that my friends and family thought was insane. Last year during the winter (which is our dry season), I carried out a very nutty experiment at my house which worked and my friends and family were astounded by it.

I have a problem that I don’t have anyone to help me with this, except one person who might not be available after this year. So I decided that I must just dive in and take the experiment from last year and try to turn it into something workable for myself.

So battling with a lack of tools, knowledge, experience in this; I had to improvise and hunt around. The person helping me was also unexpectedly unreliable. All sorts of things went wrong. Human and otherwise. And the last 10+ days I’ve really struggled to save my little project from disaster. My project is extremely dependent on the weather and I can’t let it slide or everything will be lost. I’ve also not done this much manual labour in my life. I think in the last 3 weeks I’ve probably done more manual labour than I’ve done in all my life.

I managed to turn things around and hopefully this weekend I’ll finish most of the 2nd and final phase of this project.

I’ve shown my close friends and family what I’ve done. I’d have liked to tell you all more, but let’s leave it at that for now. This is an experiment. When I complete this work I can study the results over the next year to see how my plan has, or has not worked out.

As you can see I’m knuckling down for the long term here in SA. We mustn’t quit easily. We have problems and opportunities here that we’ll never get anywhere else. I intend learning everything I can when the opportunity presents itself. We whites must survive – everywhere!! BY HOOK OR BY CROOK, WE MUST LIVE AND SURVIVE!!!

I’ve been missing my videos and my website and you’ll be hearing from me again more regularly now that much of the problems are off my back!