The Struggle Continues

One of the struggles with going off-grid is that we tend to look to mentors for advice but also as a gauge to how we're doing.

First problem you encounter there is that mentors are rather thin on the ground. There's not a lot of them and those that there are tend to not be very vocal or plainly evident.

Once that problem is overcome you run into the next depressing challenge. You constantly compare yourself to people who have been off-grid and homesteading for years, if not decades. It's easy to forget that all of the problems you are facing have already been mastered by those others and you tend to get discourged if you're not wary and prayerful.

I've talked to a couple of folks about solar power now and I think I understand the basics, but I can't find a store I can walk into and actually browse the components I need. I don't want to spend thousands of dollars only to discover that part A doesn't work with part B. The kits I find aren't very good either. They're very low use kits meant to power perhaps a light bulb. I would have exhausted the battery power in one of those in the first paragraph or two of this post!

While some of these things seem insurmountable at times, I'm coming to grips with the fact that we've only been really doing this for a few days now. The first 2 weeks was spent dedicated to getting a roof up over our heads. Certainly we'll soon come up with a better solution than the generator charging the batteries we have now. We keep depleting the batteries to the point where they won't power anything at all.

Transition times are difficult, but we persevere.