Friday 24 April 2015

Solar Power

What do the Amish, doomsday preppers, Bible translators,  4WD enthusiasts, round-the-world sailors and eco-warriors have in common?

An interest in living off the grid.

As I get organised to live in a remote village location, I have been gathering information and learning skills to make that life easier. I could just live like the locals, but then I would have no time to do the work I came to do. Subsistence living is a time consuming occupation. Instead, I look into ways to preserve food, produce familiar food from scratch, and power the equipment I need for my work. Along the way I have found myself on the websites of all the above categories, getting tips for off-grid living.

My most recent adventure in off-grid discovery has been in making decisions about what sort of solar set-up* I need. I’ve had a crash course in all sorts of specifics and technical details: panel sizes and types, battery sizes and types, solar controllers, wattage, amp hours, volts…

There are so many questions that helpful people ask but that sometimes leave me more confused. How much equipment do I have? How much power do they draw? What else am I likely to get? Will I want a 12v fridge? (probably not) Will I want a 12v fan? (sounds appealing) What is my budget? (limited). Argh!

I am thankful for the people who have helped me, explaining and re-explaining concepts to me, answering my questions and responding to my blank looks. They have sure helped me to make practical choices, and then they  took on responsibility for compiling the system.

When I fly to Gulf next, I will have with approximately 65kg of solar and radio equipment. I know the weight because I had to do an estimate for my aviation booking. This will give me 190w of power for a 100ah battery. It’s primary purpose is to run an HF radio with some LED lights for night as a positive side effect. Later I will also use it to power my computer, but for the moment my notebook is literally that, a notebook and a pen.

The Amish have not been much help in my solar quest, but when it comes to preserving foods, suggesting manual methods of doing commonly powered tasks and having catalogues of fun hand tools, they are the people to look up. I suspect it is not the Amish running these websites, but people marketing at the Amish and that they also provide paper catalogues for that market. I have been dealing with the more Amish side of village preparations, but solar had been the biggest challenge this time around.


*Others call it a ‘solar system’ but as I am harvesting the energy of the sun, not revolving around it in miniature, ‘solar set-up’ seems more appropriate. That said, I’m tempted to call my solar set-up ‘Pluto’, for although it is small and remote, it still deserves to be counted.

Friday 10 April 2015

Gemu Ray

I seem to accumulate family wherever I go. This has the wonderful effect of always belonging, but the harder effect of always being away from people you love.

In my recent trip to Gulf Province to start connecting there, I was adopted into a Kope family, the Aumaries. Although Aumarie himself is dead, I have a mama and plenty of brothers, sisters and kids to belong to. They look after me, giving me a place, identity and responsibilities, and I reciprocate that care.

It’s going to take me awhile to learn who my family is and how to best relate to them, as I have well over a dozen village-siblings and I’m still learning about the responsibilities of PNG relationships. There are also lots of first cousins who classify as siblings. Add in generational complexities and in-family adoptions, and I have an enormous number of family.  Still, it is good to belong.

My new family are all over PNG, working and studying in various roles and places. I doubt I’ll ever meet some of them, but we are still part of the same family.

Part of being adopted into the family was that I was given a village name, Gemu. This is the same village name as one of my sisters, a teacher in Goroka that I’ve not met. At the same time, people were struggling with the ‘sch’ at the start of my name, as it is not said like the ‘sch’ at the start of school. An easy solution to this is to use my father’s name for my surname, as everyone else does. All of a sudden, I had a totally new name: Gemu Ray.

It might take me awhile to remember to answer to that!


With my Mama, sister, niece, two sister-in-law and nephew.
I mentioned complex generations… the two babies in this photo are related
because the great-grandma of one is the sister to the father of the other!