This week Ed Milliband launched the UK government’s Low Carbon Transition Plan and on balance I think it could have been a lot worse.

At 228 pages it’s a weighty tome but thankfully you don’t have to trawl though it all as Transition’s own Rob Hopkins has done that for you in his excellent summary of the plan.

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Ever since I started my beginner’s cabinet making course I’ve been intrgiued by the differences between modern woodworking techniques and the the more traditional methods such as Green Woodworking (like chair bodging).

Why use green wood?

Well Mike Abbott who is, as you’ll read, the guy that ended up teaching me explains in his article of the Summer 2009 edition of Permaculture Magazine that:

Green wood is wood that has not dried or seasoned. Green woodworkers usually start with a fresh log rather than a dry plank for a host of very good reasons. They can be categorised as follows:

• Enhanced strength and quality.
• Better workability.
• Simpler and faster seasoning.
• Much lower cost.
• Numerous advanteges to society.
• Many environmental advantages.

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I found out today that I’ve been accepted onto the Renewable Energy and the Built Environment MSc course at the Centre for Alternative Technology Starting in Sept. I’m really chuffed as I don’t have a degree so I had to rely on my commercial experience to be accepted onto it and it’ll also allow me to right the wrong of dropping out of my Computer Science BSc course many moons ago.

I’m doing it over 2 years part-time so I can juggle it with community work, family life, some fee earning external work too.

If all goes well then this qualification coupled with what I learn as we try to take Trelay off-grid should give me enough experience to set-up as a renewable energy consultant in the coming years. I suspect it’s the sort of role that will become more and more in demand as time goes on…

I spent the weekend with the twins at Trelay for a ‘new wave’ weekend where all stage 1 members like us got together to discuss many things relating to our possible lives together there.

It was really exciting to see that all of the new members share similar aims in terms of sustainability and resilience and also comforting to find them all to be nice, warm & really interesting and skilled people in their respective fields.We had a judge, some professional gardeners, a woodsman, a nurse and a (sustainable) heating engineer plus of course someone with really useful skills like web development, erm, no…. wait.

5 couples were fully or partially represented (Ackers was in Weymouth doing the unpleasant job of sorting out her recently deceased gran’s house) so should they all move on site full-time as we intend to then Trelay’s population is going to almost double.

We discussed a range of topics on our own and with existing members including conflict resolution, managing community work, where we’d all live and plans for the eco hostel amongst many other things.

We all agreed that it was really luxurious being able to discuss these important but relatively simple topics knowing that the foundations for the community were already in place and working.

I came away exhausted – it was like a 3 day job interview whilst being responsible for two six year olds -  but also positive and hopeful in equal measure that it’ll all work out and we’ll all be moving in this year.

Today I packed our lounge’s LCD TV and all the AV equipment into the car ready to deliver tonight to my sister in Bristol. This will mean we have zero ability to receive a terrestrial television signal so we can cancel the TV licence.

We’re getting rid of the telly for a number of reasons the main ones being:

• We don’t use it. We’re mostly reading, talking or listening to the radio if we’ve the time to be hanging out in the lounge;
• There’s no temptation to allow the kids to watch it. Our boy has a bit of an addiction and can get really cranky after even half an hour of usage so this way he knows there’s no possibility of getting a fix;
• What it represents. It’s a symbol of mass consumption and, frankly, we’re embarrassed to own it;
• Space. It’s huge (40″) and we’re likely to be living in a small house soon;
• Power. It is power hungry;
• Asset value. Whilst it is still worth something we thought release that cash back into our pockets;

It might take a few days to get used to not having it anymore but I can’t see it being a big deal. Should there be something that we really want to watch there’s always the laptop and iPlayer.

I recently posted that our ambient home electricity usage was obscenely high at ~ 900 W with nothing being ‘used’. Well for #earthday I’m very pleased to find that I’ve managed to make my initial < 300 Watt target and as I write this the CC meter showing around 280W usage.

How did I do this?

• Got rid of my power hungry Dell XPS desktop and took it to work. This also allowed me to sell my work Mac pro for a tidy sum. I now use my laptop at home.
• Freecycled an always-on home development server leaving just our one file server
• Put all of the lounge AV devices onto a single extension lead and religiously switch that off at the wall every night
  • Actually soon after I did this I decided to get rid of it all completely so we’re soon to have no telly at all now but this is primarily a lifestyle choice rather than being driven my energy usage concerns.
• became really anal about turning off all the lights when not needed. Those little halogen down-lighters are the worst culprits

It wasn’t very hard at all.

Next is to remove the file server and replace it with something like a NSLU-2 and see if I can disable some of the halogen down-lighters (we rent so I can’t change the fittings).

Ackers bought me a Current Cost Cc128 for my birthday and I’m absolutely stunned to see that we’re using ~ 900 Watts ambient. Obscene.

Shutting my home desktop down, something I never do (!), reduces it down a bit but I’m sure we should be < 300 Watts as a default. Switching the electric oven on spikes it to over 3 KWatts.

Methinks a massive audit on our electricity usage is needed, urgently.

*all optional items switched off.

Building upon the 10 week introductory carpentry course that I did up to Christmas I’ve just booked onto a City & Guilds course in ‘Basic Furniture Making’ at the Malvern campus of Worcester Tech.

I enjoyed the intro course immensely so am hoping to keep the momentum going with this one year, two evenings a week course.

If I get my own way this is one of the first steps towards a new career as some form of woodworker although if that’s not realistic then at least I’ll have the skills to make some kick-ass hobby pieces.

I am feeling very inspired after attending a LILI course on Low Impact Smallholding over the weekend. It was held at the LILI HQ which is a community called Redfield in Bucks and was run by Simon Fairlie of Chapter 7 and author of Low Impact Development.

It was a very detailed course covering things like planning law, how to choose a plot, what to do when you’ve got it and how to derive an income. All very essential information and delivered by someone with intimate knowledge of the subject in a very relaxed and informal manner. It was also good to hang out for the weekend with other people also looking to do similar things to us.

It was quite frankly superb and my heart has come away urgent for us to move onto our own plot of land and start planting. Head says that having three kids one of whom isn’t one year old yet it’s probably best to wait.

Either way it has become much more of a feasible option now with the biggest challenge being to find somewhere in this country that is even mildly affordable…

If you’re seriously considering setting yourself up with a  smallholding I’d highly recommend this course.

We’ve just come back from a weekend visit to an Intentional Community that’s a cross between an eco village and a co-housing group. The place is called Trelay, in Cornwall and it has totally thrown us; could we really move somewhere like this? It’s too weird to do something like that, right?

We came across the concept after seeing some reasonably priced flats for sale on rightmove that came with 10s of acres. Upon further investigation it was clear that the flats were a in a large subdivided house and that all residents had a share of the grounds that they were expected to help out with maintenance.

It turns out that there are loads of them around the world and plenty in the UK of varying ideological basis (religious, vegan, eco, singing etc) some of them are hard-core communes where you share facilities an income and others are a collection of private spaces with shared resources and a common view of the future.

Trelay fits into the latter camp. It’s a 30 acre farm with approx 12 private living spaces ranging from 3 bed houses to 1 bed log cabins) plus a barn and a range of outbuildings. The residents – who are all ‘normal’ – have an optional communal evening meal and share the work of managing the farm. Individual families have their own pet projects (for example the pigs, chickens or the sheep) whilst the allotment is shared labour. They have woodland, pasture and recently planted an orchard. It’s a new community so there’s still much to do but it’s clear that the people there are passionate about preparing for their future.

After three rather intense and busy days there we’re really not sure what to do now. The place was amazing and the thought of living somewhere like that near the sea and being able to share the burden of running a holding really appeals but do we want to move in with a  bunch of strangers?

More investigation needed. I’m attending my small holding course next week, also at a community, so that should give us some more insight.

UK related links

• UK co-housing network
• Diggers and dreamers
• Community network UK