by Ian Wright
When Ian and Maggie stepped fully aside from day-to-day operations of the business, they moved to live in to the log cabin adjacent to the original farm house. Built 18 years ago, It is a delightful place to live, with kaleidoscopic views to the coast, the sea and the mountains of Eryri - all good until the roof blew off...
Anglesey is a windy place! Situated as we are on the western fringe of Wales, in the Irish Sea, looking southwards directly to the Atlantic Ocean. It has always been windy in our 50 year experience and for the trees with even longer experience, bent to the prevailing South Westerly airstream, it always has been.
Storm Éowyn - in Jan 25 - was a particularly brisk event! Gusts in the 70’s really are not that unusual here and our ‘infrastructure’ is pretty geared to it, particularly if the direction is south-west as Éowyn was. Really, the storm passed without too much impact. - except on the roof of our cabin!
Structurally undamaged, the weather proof shingles had been blown seriously awry. Inspection of the roof revealed that the wood-stove flue flashing had been allowing slight ingress of rain over the years. This had encouraged a patch of wood-rot to create a weak point in the roof boards. The storm persisted for several hours, finally getting under the bitumen shingles at the weak spot and lifting sheets of them from the roof - it sounded quite dramatic!
Fortunately the team quickly formed and went to work. Damaged roof felt was stripped and replaced and the shingles repositioned, tacked down and secured. Mark, Chris and Bruce seemed to enjoy the task judging by the banter coming from the roof.
This was a warning! The Climate Scientists have been saying for years now - the planet is warming, this will produce more energy available for weather events and they will be more severe - Éowyn was! It blew our roof cover off. We should be warned. We have to expect these events and be prepared. We will repair the roof and remove weaknesses. Removing the wood-burning stove and its flue matches our quest to ‘Stop-Burning-Stuff’ - so that will go as well. Here at Outdoor Alternative we have believed the scientists all along. That is why we embarked on our decarbonisation programme after long trying to reduce energy use and keeping a close eye on how we used it. On the site we have increased solar PV production which we store in batteries, along with cheap night time grid power. We have long used Solar Thermal panels to provide hot water and we now store and control hot water production with ‘intelligent’ Mixergy tanks. We have installed Viessmann Air Source Heat Pumps (ASHP). All of this is part of quite a long story which we will later tell in more detail. All in all it is part of our attempts to make a difference to a very big problem - human-beings contribution to Climate Change. We now know it affects us!