(Hunter)

It's a beautiful, crisp morning on the homestead, and the family is breathing slowly and deeply, sniffing the air. We're not enjoying the fragrance of the Alaskan morning, we're testing for smoke!

As we gathered downstairs in the cabin this morning, we were happy to see that the wind had come up, driving the wind generator hard and charging our battery bank after a few days of heavy draw. Moments later, we smelled smoke. At first we dismissed it as something spilled on the burner, but we quickly realized we smelled an electrical fire. A quick check of the electrical control center revealed a thin line of smoke coming out of the wind generator control box.

Wary of feeding oxygen to a fire by opening the box, I unlatched the metal lid and opened it carefully. Gardener had my back, ready to spray the area with a fire extinguisher if need be. I also flipped the switch to brake the generator, realizing too late that I did it without checking the amperage meter, which would indicate if the prop was moving slowly enough to stop without burning out! To our great relief, the generator stopped, even though the amp level was above our "safe" value. That was a problem for later—identifying the source of smoke and accessing damage to the controller came first.

When the brake engaged, the smoke stopped. I couldn't see any damage. I couldn't even see any smudges from the smoke. We had caught the problem early, and saved our electrical system.

I scratched my head over it a moment, trying to figure out what might have happened. Then it came to me: I had replaced one of the system's three diodes a few days ago, and had skipped a simple step.

The replacement diodes come coated with heat transfer paste on the back side. The instructions for replacing the diode specifies that this paste is very important, and stresses making sure the diode is seated firmly in the paste. Unfortunately, when I replaced the bad diode, I grabbed an extra from our assortment of parts, and installed it based on my memory of a previous replacement. I remembered that the paste was an important component, but forgot just how important it was, and decided the residual paste from the bad diode was adequate.

Not so. When this morning's winds got the generator going strong, the lack of paste allowed the diode to heat up, and begin to burn the paint on the metal box! The paste literally transfers the heat generated in the diode to the back of the box, where it is dissipated by the U-frames on which the box is mounted.

Once I realized this, I was able to switch out the diode with one that had a good slathering of heat transfer paste. When I next go to town, I'll look for a tube of the stuff to keep on hand.

Of course, in switching out the diodes I made a second mistake. Each diode is connected to the system by four wires. Usually, I pull off the nut holding the diode, pull it out, then remove the wires. This time, I followed the replacement instructions, which call for removing the wires first, then the diode. As I pulled the diode through the four disconnected wires, its blades contacted some of the wires in the wrong places, and surprised me with a big, loud-popping spark! No damage occurred. Once again, we seem to have dodged the bullet.

The wind blew even harder than it had. The back of the box warmed, but did not overheat. We smelled no smoke. An hour later, we decided we could stand down.

I am not an electrician. I know very little about electricity. I survived a whole career based on the use of electronic equipment without either electrocuting myself or becoming more comfortable with or knowledgeable of electricity. I managed to get along, even to the point of taking apart computers to install hard drives and other risky activities, but avoided it whenever possible.

Then we moved off grid. I suddenly became the owner of two wind generators and a bank of intimidating batteries, all of which needed maintenance and repair. Later we added a solar panel array. It was time to come to terms with electricity on some level.

So far we've done well. We've moved the battery bank and control center inside, completely rewired it, added the solar components, and even overhauled both wind generators. It hasn't been easy, but we've survived. And for all this tinkering, I have to confess, I'm not much more comfortable with handling electricity than when I started.

This has been a radical lifestyle change—perhaps the most radical, rivaling even the transition away from indoor plumbing. As Americans, we are not used to taking responsibility for our own power. We take for granted that electricity comes to us from elsewhere, and we use it as much as we want. Sure, there are outages, but when those happen, someone else brings it back. All we have to do is pay the bill and keep from sticking things we ought not to into the outlets. On the homestead, we take all the responsibility. We maintain the system, repair it when necessary, add to it when we can. We watch the weather, tracking the daylight, watching for wind. It's not always easy or comfortable, but we can do it.

The bottom line: if I have had such success with it, it must not be very difficult. There was a time, before the Great Depression and the Public Works Projects that created the country's power grid, when most residents of the Great Plains owned and operated similar systems, many of them with less education than mine.

Now, as we enter a new era of power use and generation, I'm confident that many of us who, like me, felt they could never manage their own electrical generation can, in fact, do just that. If you're considering augmenting your home with solar or wind power, or even freeing yourself from the overburdened, overpriced, and in some cases failing power grid, now is the time! It's not going to be as hard as you might think.