ECO - Tradition

A friend of mine once said to me "its not how much you earn, it's how much it costs you to live". My friend lives on a small holding and runs his own business and he by most standards lives very well. Now it also helps that he is a very capable "entrepreneur" but in essence that's the gig. Living economically is a key part of what we want to achieve in France. It's also a happy coincidence that economic and ecologic are pretty well aligned, and this as we all know is the latest fashion. Now I've never been an eco warrior, hell I used to own a 4x4, but it is clear, and has been for several hundred years that we are increasingly making the planet uninhabitable for ourselves and the species we take with us. So whilst I have little faith that economies in general will be able change sufficiently to make any difference, I will at least have saved some money.


One of the key elements in this is my aim to go off-grid if possible. Today this seems like a big step, but lets not forget that less than 100 years ago, very few people had electricity. This brings me to the second point in this blog - Tradition. When my French house was built there was no 220v. People burnt wood for heating, put another jumper on if it was cold, burnt candles at night (or went to bed) and had countless mechanisms for keeping warn without the need to wack up the central heating. The ESSE Ironheart is going to be the centre piece of my plans to keep warm: