00:21I'm Bill Cave and I'm 75 years old I used to be an anaesthetist in the hospital down
00:29the road called Neville Hall Hospital. We came to live here in 1992 and we were looking for a
00:36property to buy for us and our three children to live in and we hit upon this place almost by
00:43accident it had been on the market for a number of years and nobody had bought it. When we came
00:51here
00:51we didn't appreciate the potential for the property to be self-sufficient but we as a family had come
01:01from having lived and worked at a fairly remote hospital in Uganda where self-sufficiency was the
01:08only way that you survived. So when we came here in 1992 we had the desire to live simply.
01:18The house is not like most houses in the sense that it does not have any utility supplies other
01:26than being on the national grid so it has no mains water we don't have gas the house has to
01:32be
01:33self-sufficient. The fact that there is always something to do was nice when I was working as
01:41an anaesthetist because it meant that I could come back from the hospital with the stresses of the
01:47operating theatre behind me and simply focus on practical jobs. After retirement it is still the
01:54case that having things to do here gives you an excuse to get out of bed in the morning.
02:01When the millennium was coming up we set ourselves the task of having a millennium project and decided
02:07that we would build a new barn so that building project was started in 1997 and it was completed
02:15in 2004 and that's what we call our millennium barn. Other projects that we've done while we've been
02:22here are to try and improve the driveway coming up to the house building a log shed for storing and
02:29drying the wood that we need for heating the house and the latest project that we've done is what we
02:35call
02:35the battery bunker which is for storing the lithium-ion battery which stores surplus electricity.
02:44It's taken quite a number of years to get to the point that we're at now. You might say that
02:51it's
02:51been a long obedience in one direction for many years and that obedience has been towards the ambition
02:59of being self-sufficient. So yes it's taken quite a bit of work. Life is always more fulfilling when
03:05you're aiming at something and then you achieve it. My estimate would be that we save two thousand
03:11pounds a year by not taking any electricity from the grid. Not only do we save not having to buy
03:18electricity from the grid but we get paid for the electricity that we generate and the income that
03:25we get from simply generating electricity is about one thousand five hundred pounds a year.
03:31So it's probably worth three and a half thousand pounds per annum. Our enjoyment of life living here
03:37comes from doing very simple things. We don't have a TV. We did have one briefly when we first came
03:44back
03:44to the United Kingdom but we very soon got rid of it. Once you've been bitten by a certain desire
03:51to follow
03:52a course in life it's not difficult to pursue it to its bitter end.
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