Battling the elements

[oldjerry]

And the bad ones just stay fat?....

[Green Aura]

Careful now!

[Odsox]

What you need Maggie is a little greenhouse inside your tunnel, like the one I posted on here a week or two ago.
http://www.selfsufficientish.com/forum/ ... 8&start=20
Even if you don't heat it you will benefit from the added insulation and you could clad it with sheet polystyrene to make it warmer, plus you can add a grow light for 8 hours a day for very little.
Mine now has a 24 watt grow light ready for next winter, which would run for 5 x 8 hour days on a unit of electricity, and it's amazing how much you can grow intensively in 8 square feet.
I use several grow lights, an ex-aquarium 16 watt tube for my light box (also on here somewhere) for early seedlings and a 40 watt CFL that hangs over my heated propagator for my early tomato seedlings. You can also get grow LEDs at a more reasonable price now, probably thanks to the wardrobe growers, that run off a 12v DC supply.

Actually, apart from winter temperatures our winters are not that different, you get less light from a low sun angle and we get less light from having thick cloud cover for weeks on end.

[oldjerry]

That's roughly the lines along which I was thinking.As for the wind turbine,when we lived on a narrowboat (while looking for this place) one of the boats had a small turbine about 5ft high which folded flatfor tavelling and was used to power a couple of lorry batterries for lighting etc.(this apparently is a reg set up for canal boats)Well if you folded it flat when the wind was too strong(I don't know how much storage capacity you would need,but Tony's figures suggest not that much) and had some mains backup,there's no reason with grow lites and that Crystal Palace affair you've built,why you couldn't grow tons off stuff.

[Green Aura]

I've just had a quick look at turbines for canal boats. The Rutland 913 got mentioned quite a lot so I looked it up - erm, it may have to wait until we've sold the gal's house!

[gregorach]

Actually, apart from winter temperatures our winters are not that different, you get less light from a low sun angle and we get less light from having thick cloud cover for weeks on end.

What, you think we don't get thick cloud cover for weeks on end as well?

And it's not just the low angle in the winter - it makes a surprisingly large difference to the length of time the sun is above the horizon. You get right up north come mid-winter and sunrise is after 9am, sunset is before 3:30pm.

Seriously, even here in the relatively balmy latitudes of the central belt, between the late sunrise, the early sunset, the low angle, and the thick cloud cover, some days it barely gets light in the winter at all. And there are quite a few places in Scotland where, because of hills to the south, they actually never see the sun in the darkest months.

[Odsox]

What, you think we don't get thick cloud cover for weeks on end as well?

You don't apparently, according to the Met Office, Leuchars got about 80 hours of sunshine in January 2012.
Maggie on the other hand got about 30 hours in January and I got about 1 hour per day, which works out to umm ...

[gregorach]

What, you think we don't get thick cloud cover for weeks on end as well?

You don't apparently, according to the Met Office, Leuchars got about 80 hours of sunshine in January 2012.

It was rather exceptional this year... The long term average is rather poorer.