Best of luck pursing your dream. Living it is great, but the plotting and planning is huge fun too
We have a variety of eco things here. We are a community of 20 adults living on a 32-acre holding in North Cornwall. We have a plethora of solar panels, storage batteries, ground source heat pump, air source heat pump. One of the holiday cabins has a wood-fired hot tub! The panels on the large barn plus storage batteries run a shared electric car and several of our freezers, plus a washing machine, hot water and camp kitchen for our camping business, a woodworking workshop and a car maintenance workshop. Our sewage system is septic tank and so-called reed bed (they’re
rushes I tell you, rushes! Lol), we are planning a new vertical reed bed. (Still rushes
)
We all strive to improve our eco credentials year on year, but we’re not hair shirt about it, and we all recognise that each of us has particular passions and at least one Achilles heel!
Using grey water for flushing the loo might be a good compromise for you and your wife? Regular loos are ecologically unsound primarily because they use treated water, aren’t they?
We occupy an old farmstead, in which the old farm buildings had been converted to holiday cottages (with full residential planning permission, luckily for us) before we came here. So retrofitting grey water is a big job, we think using rainwater directly might be a best next step for us. We don’t lack rainwater in winter, although this is shaping up to be the second very dry summer in a row :/
We are currently looking at increasing the priority of an irrigation pond, taking the water from the holiday cabins’ hot tubs and using it for watering the veg plot. I calculated we might have used 60,000 litres watering our outdoor veg crops last year
. And we’re not anything like self-sufficient in veg.
Look, you got me started. Let that be a lesson to you. lol