Lucky to be here book

Virtually all energy comes from the Sun in the form of fire. It has usually been stored in everything from plants to trees, coal, oil, gas, and (in some form or other) radioactive materials. We “burn” these fuels to liberate the Sun’s energy stored in them. No wonder our ancestors worshipped the Sun – much more logical than most of the “gods” that we are offered nowadays.
Fire, however, is a double edged sword; it can heat us and it can burn us. From the beginning of my stay in Skiathos, we have used wood for heating. Originally, we had a fireplace with a few pipes welded on to the back metal frame of the firebox that (sort of) circulated warm air which was taken in from the bottom and then expelled above the firebox. The principal was sound, but (as with all our early projects) I had no real knowledge of how to do it efficiently, and only a little warm air trickled out. When I asked the king of the metal workers in Skiathos, Filaretos Filaretou, to make the metal back and welded pipes, he looked at me as if I was mad, but nevertheless made it up. On the island, you could get anything made, or repaired, by the carpenters and metal workers, and it was only recently that we became members of the “consumer society” as, before then, everything was re-used and fixed until there was no possibility of use left anymore. We have a cast iron Wok that had cracked having been put in very cold water when it was still very hot, and we had been told by various experts in Holland to throw it away and buy a new one, as it couldn’t be repaired. However, Filaretos told us there was no problem and welded it up with some special welding material. We are still using it to this day and in fact it is our main cooking utensil. But I digress. The back of the fireplace was filled with concrete and rocks and this acted as a heatsink and exuded warmth all night long. It was right next to our bed which was exactly behind the fireplace in a separate area from the living room. Lida used to snuggle up to the fireplace on cold nights rather than snuggling up to me.
We also had a very basic cooking stove, also fed by wood, with which we did most of our cooking and baking. It was a mini version of an Aga but nowhere near so well built and efficient. Nevertheless, it lasted us for many seasons. It did get hot cooking over it in the summer and eventually we invested in a gas cooker for the summer months, which we kept just outside our door to minimize the heat in the house. The cooking stove kept us toasty warm in the winter months and, like all the Greeks did, we led the pipes through the house for a few metres to garner more heat from the stove. The problem with this was occasional smoke leaks, but more often the pipes would get blocked up and then leak a tarry residue on to the floor (much to Lida’s disgust). It was an art to clean the pipes shortly before this happened but required a sunny (or at least not rainy) day, so timing was of the essence. The house was small, and often it could be too hot if Lida had been baking bread all day – but better too warm that too cold, I say. Wood was readily available as we had to prune the olive trees every couple of years (with some small pruning in the in between years), and we also took the odd overhanging branch off the plane trees which lined the stream beds bordering our land. We husbanded the wood supply and made sure that we never killed a tree by our heating needs. This we have continued until this day and we have actually planted many more trees than we have pruned, so that we should always have a steady supply. Last year, to supplement this, on the land which we used to use for the market garden, but which has lain fallow for some years, we planted 50 Ash trees. Ash is renowned for its fast growth whilst producing a hard wood which is among the kings of wood for burning. It can also be coppiced, thus growing more wood for a steady supply. Ash wood is also used as handles for diggers, spades, hammers and the like and maybe this will provide us with some small future income. One potential problem is the disease know as “Ash die back”, which has traveled throughout most of Europe destroying many old (and new) ash groves. I am hoping that, as we live on an island, we will not be affected by this, and even maybe, be able to re-introduce disease free stock back up north – but that is probably a pipe dream. Anyway, I always work on the principle of, “If you don’t try something, you will never know if it works or not.” Subsequently, we have also planted “Empress trees” also known as “Princess trees”, which are supposed to be the fastest growing hardwood tree in the world. One of our Albanian friends told us about them and has a large plot of land in Albania devoted just to them. The Latin name is Pawlonia Tomentosa but they got the name Empress, or Princess, trees because, apparently, when a daughter was born to a Princess in China (who could eventually become an Empress), some were planted at the time of birth. By the time the Princess came of age at 21, the trees were huge and could provide enough wood to make all the furniture the Princess would need to fill her entire home once she was married. That’s a lot of wood!
While we were rebuilding our house (around and on top of the “A” frame), Christo offered us his old wood burning central heating stove, which he was replacing with a more modern, diesel burning system. I was happy to accept this and Jacques, Christo and I manhandled it into a small truck and put it in place next to the house. The thing weighed a ton but with levers, ropes and lots of cursing (“ella malaka”, and the like), we got it in place. We had built a small boiler room for it at the rear of the house and, initially, just had a few radiators in the main room, the bathroom (luxury, luxury), and the girl’s bedrooms. This stove took quite a lot more wood than we had used before (but it was heating a considerably bigger volume) so we had to cut more wood than before. There had been a forest fire above Koukounaries and Troulos the winter before and there were many burnt pine trees which were available for the taking – if one was prepared to scramble about in the forest with a chain saw and rope to drag the trunks out! Pine wood is not good for burning as it creates a lot of tar and has, naturally, a lot of resin. This would slowly clog up the central heating stove and chimney and it was a major job to clean it several times per winter. Once, when I was too late with doing this, we had a chimney fire which frightened the life out of us. Fortunately, the chimney was on the far side of the boiler room and there was no danger of the house catching fire, but it did make me rethink the pine wood burning process, and eventually we also switched to a diesel (oil) burning system. It has always been against my hippie principles to use materials that cannot be replaced so we still tried to heat with our fireplace as much as possible. Jacques and I had made a fireplace that was built to specific measurements (high with sloping sides and back and a narrow throat) which had been developed by a certain Count Rumford two centuries ago. It was very efficient (for a fireplace) but, as we discovered, like all fireplaces, it actually took heat out of the room with its updraft, so the central heating was working harder than it should have been. We have finally fitted an enclosed cast iron insert which has a double wall and which circulates hot air around the body of the cast iron and (assisted by a fan when wanted) throws it out into the room. As it has a glass door, we still get to see the flames, but it is not drawing hot air from the room and throwing up the chimney. We hardly ever use the central heating now and are finally close to becoming carbon neutral with our heating systems.
For three months of the year, heating is not the problem, cooling is! In June, July and August, it can get very hot in the house and all the extra insulation that we have added to the roof over the years keeps the heat in at night, which we definitely don’t want. We have a A/C unit installed but I hate using it as again, we are using fossil fuels, and I suspect that it is not very healthy for us. So, I am trying to come up with a way to introduce cool air (from underground?) into the house and create a “chimney like” effect somehow to draw all the hot air out. The Internet is great for finding out things like this, but at the moment; this project is still in the planning stage.
As I mentioned earlier, the other side of fire is its destructiveness and we have seen (and experienced) the effects of that. Shortly after we moved to Zorbathes and built the first house, the Town and County Councils decided to open a rubbish dump in the forest land in the hills above us. It started on a very small scale and we were not bothered by it at all – until it caught fire! Spontaneous combustion happens in all landfill type rubbish dumps, particularly if the rubbish is not being covered very regularly. True to form, after a couple of years, it burst into flame and continued to smolder until it was finally shut down some 30 years later. Fortunately, this fire was small and did not get into the forest. However, subsequently, we had three large fires which started in the dump and did get into the forest and, driven by strong winds, burnt various parts of our valley. The worst was the first one in 1986 which burnt all around our land, up the forest which was next to our house and singed the side of the house badly. How we didn’t lose the house we will never know, as the chicken coop that was only one meter away from the back of the house, burnt completely to the ground. This all happened so fast. I was out on a windsurf board when I first saw the flames, the girls were with some friends, John (my then partner in the garden) was off at another beach, and Lida had been asleep in the house but left as soon as she saw the first pine trees explode into flame. It had been so hot that day that I had gone down to the beach in only my beach shorts with not even a pair of sandals on my feet. By the time I had laid my hands on some clothes and shoes, the fire had long passed our land. When I got to the house, everything around it was blackened and burnt. Not only the forest at the back of the house, but all the vines, trees and shrubs that were growing around the house were burned to the ground. It was like Mordor! We didn’t, at that time, know the resilience of nature, as the forest, the vines and some of the trees grew back from the roots and it only took a couple of years for the valley to start to look almost as green as it had been before. I had always wanted to clear some of the forest behind the house as a protection against exactly this happening, but the Forestry Department had always wagged a finger at me and told me I couldn’t touch it. However, after the fire, the then head of the Department told me to clear a bit around the house. Needless to say, (in true Greek fashion) I cleared a much larger area around the house while I had the opportunity. (For years, the local Greeks had been saying. “Just clear a metre or two every year. The Forestry will never notice.” But I, being an Englishman, more or less used to obeying the law, and not wishing to cut down trees and scrub, had not done so – more fool me!) I did keep any surviving pine trees though and quite a few of the more beautiful of the wild bushes whose colloquial name is “Strawberry Tree” as it does not catch fire so easily. We have had two more fires since then when we were actually at the house and I can tell you that there is nothing more frightening than a wall of fire being pushed along by 6 to 7 Beaufort winds. Luckily, the last two fires didn’t get close to our house but the very last one came to within one meter of the diesel tank at the back (and next to) our Farmhouse Villa. I was at that particular time in a wheelchair and couldn’t walk, and if it hadn’t been for a few of our Albanian friends running back and forth from the swimming pool with buckets of water to dowse the flames, we would have lost the villa. Bless them! So, as you can imagine, we have a very ambivalent relationship with fire!
We have long heated our water from the sun. Starting with a very basic collector of some copper pipes braised on to a copper plate that circulated water into two black oil barrels, we have worked through ever more sophisticated systems until we now have probably the most efficient kind using vacuum tubes and sensors that circulate only hot water through an exchange coil to heat up a water boiler. Since the advent of solar electric panels (photovoltaic panels) I have always wanted to try to generate our own electricity. We had looked into the possibility of wind generation, but, being in a valley with rather erratic winds, it didn’t seem economically viable. A photovoltaic system was eminently possible, particularly as our roof faced almost due south, and was at the right angle for good production. However, I could never afford the initial capital to put a system up and didn’t want to borrow money to do so as I hated the very thought of being in debt. In the early spring of 2011 my beloved Aunty Winnie died at the ripe of old of 94. She left a modest inheritance which was split up between her three nephews and nieces with some of that past on to great nephews and nieces. It wasn’t a great deal but it was enough to let me put up a photovoltaic system on the roof. Fortunately, the Greek Government were then giving subsidies (in the form of a premium feed in tariff) to encourage home owners to develop solar power, so I signed up to a 25-year contract with the main power producer, and proceeded to have an expert install a 10 kW. system – some 42 panels – on our roof. Dimitris had been involved with solar electric projects for many years, installing small systems in remote areas for weather and geological information gathering, and what he didn’t know about these systems wasn’t worth knowing. He and his sidekick did an excellent job and within a few days we had turned our house into an electricity generator! We now produce more than we use but sell it all to the grid and then buy back (at normal prices) whatever we need. As our roof is very shallow, you don’t see the panels so we have satisfied our need to keep everything as esthetic as possible. We plan to put more solar water heaters and solar panels on the roofs of our two rental villas as soon as we can afford it. If I can manage to afford an electric car as well, I will be totally happy, as we will then have achieved not just carbon neutrality but should be on the plus side of the equation. Both Lida and I feel strongly about the damage that we (as a specie) are doing to our (finite) planet and we have always tried to do as little damage as possible to our environment and even, if we can, enhance it by planting trees and bushes and generally working with nature, and not against it.

Addendum: Some years later, we now have solar water heating and photovoltaic panels on all our roofs producing hot water and electricity, for our 3 main houses. We have also invested in a hybrid, electric car, which has cut our petrol bills down by at least a half.