Power #1: We Build an Off the Grid Power Platform

(I welcome your comments and questions through the "comments" option below any entry. --Laura)

(Power Article #1)  This is one of several articles on this blog describing the power platform my husband built off the "grid" with skillful Alaskan service providers.  This article describes the building process (without power tools).  The other articles describe the cost and functionality of the components we installed (and what worked and didn't), and how much power we use. 
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Building it piece by piece

Want Power?

For many city/suburban people, the conundrum to overcome in installing wind or solar power is the upfront cost and pay back time vs current monthly utility bills.    On the other hand, in dilapidated towns in northern India, with, presumably, unreliable energy, every hotel we stayed in had solar powered water heaters dating back to the 1970s. For us, out in the bush, closer to Rajasthan than Rochester, we had fewer cost/benefit issues to debate.  Want power?  

Two choices: 

A: gasoline or diesel powered generator or B: some combination of wind and solar power.

 As a matter of fact, after we bought our remote property in South Central Alaska, the first building goal, before cabin, outhouse, or any other structure was power for communications. Since my husband is not retired, the determiner of how long we could stay out in the boonies was the quality of communication technology.  His goal was not heat but Internet, not water but a phone.  As the project evolved, it seemed like many a man’s dream:  he could pee behind a tree (well, a million of them) while checking his blackberry.  From a wife’s perspective, those are two of the worst scenarios combined, but I digress.

The Land is Prepared for Buildings But I'm Not Prepared for this endeavor

(I welcome your comments and questions through the "comments" option below any entry. --Laura)

Although my husband had the vision to anticipate what this property could become and what it would mean to him, I definitely didn’t.  Our first few seasons felt like the absolutely bleakest way to spend a summer, like some chain gang of convicts clearing swamps for future county roads to nowhere.  I was hot, sweaty, bored, humiliated, sore, and lonely, particularly when he would disappear for a week at a time on business.  I had absolutely no confidence that Bryan had any idea of what he’d gotten us into.  One day, when the weed whacker’s head spun off, sending in who knew what direction all the little screws and washers under ferns and devil’s club leaves, I sat down in the middle of the forest and cried.  “What are we doing here?  You don’t know anything!” 

We didn’t have any of the right tools and we invariably broke the old ones our neighbors loaned us, in what started to seem like a canny plan to get new replacements from hapless cheechakos, as neophytes are known.  We certainly were naïve.  Each replacement required expensive arrangements to fly them out by air-taxi, along with anything else we suddenly realized we’d need, although we as yet had no place to store them.  Weren’t husbands who bought land in Alaska supposed to intuit all this stuff?