 Well, the farm is called Frogpond Farm, and we have a organic berry patch, blue berries and blackberries, and people come and pick berries in the summer. And then we also have vegetables that are grown in spring, summer, fall, grow seedlings in the greenhouse back there for other people's gardens. One of the most important aspects of the construction of our house is that it is designed to take advantage of the natural heating power of the sun. It's a passive solar house. The placement of the windows is on the south side. The orientation of the house is to be able to capture more of the winter sun, in particular when the sun is passing low in the sky, and let that light penetrate the heat power of that light penetrate into the house and be absorbed into a concrete floor, thermal mass, that is important because it buffers the intensity of the heat of the sun coming during the day and getting the house too hot and then cooling off, so that the thermal mass allows that energy to be absorbed and then that energy is released over nighttime. So a passive solar house constantly takes advantage of that solar energy that's available, and it protects from the solar energy in the summer because there are overhangs and a measured overhang based on the latitude of Durham of our house that prevents that sunlight from entering the house in the summer when it would not be welcome. Our house functions just like any other house and there are a few features that you might notice a difference in, in that for instance we don't have a dryer, we hang our laundry on the line and that we have to adjust a little bit what we do around making laundry happen and when it will work best, but the house if someone came in I think would not realize that it is passive solar or that some of the energy efficiencies are there, it looks and functions like a normal house. We take our showers at any time during the year when that is an option outside, which means that the heat and the humidity generated by a shower happening happens exterior to our house and therefore there's less conditioning of the air inside that needs to happen for humidity or for heat reasons. I mean that house heats itself, we don't do anything to heat that house, we didn't even have a fire until January. We had all the way through November and December with no extra heat added to the house other than the passive solar and the solar hot water that was heating the floor. We have a renai which is an instantaneous hot water heater that supplements the solar hot water when we need it. The solar hot water system is powerful in that it has a controller in the hall that allows us to choose at what points the system shifts what it does. So the panels get really hot and we can choose at what point that begins to heat the water in the tank and at what point the water in the tank gets up to a temperature that we want to run it through the hot water through the floor and how much we want to save for showers so that we have some hot water at the end of the day for showers. That flips in the summer and the water that comes out of the well to irrigate the plants and the farm runs through the floor and cools the floor so that the house is cooler in the summer. It's a powerful tool for managing that resource, managing the solar hot water. More or less the electricity from the solar panels is equivalent to the amount of power that we use. We are connected to the electrical grid because that means we don't have to have batteries and batteries have their own toxic impacts and have to be replaced and are expensive so we could get more panels and no batteries. And when the sun is shining on a day like today and we aren't using very much power it would be inefficient to top out filling up a bunch of batteries. There's always somebody needing the power and so the power that we generate goes off onto the grid and then we buy it back when we need it. So it's a very efficient system. The battery is sort of a giant holding cell for the energy we generate. At the very beginning we kept a lot of records of exactly how much energy got generated by the panels every day. We'd come out and write it down. It's not an atypical enthusiasm at the beginning of the process and wanting to check whether the decisions we made were good ones and we knew that our electrical use was balanced with our generation. I would love to have the data of knowing how much we have saved over time in terms of lower energy bills and water bills and so on compared to what it cost us to build the house in the first place. I think the biggest technology is in our heads. I have to say that it it's about spending the effort and the time at the beginning of a process to understand what the long-term downstream effects might be and make a decision once that has a has a multiplier effect because that's going to happen forever. And then there's also the technology in your brain of of making decisions repeatedly. How do I make this choice each time I have to decide whether to do things one way or another to to repeat that process to to find a way to make a good decision. We entered the process with a strong belief that we wanted to live as as close to minimum impact as as close to sustainability as we possibly could. And that philosophy shaped the whole process. It allowed us to make decisions with a very clear set of priorities and goals. And that allowed us to go really deep into looking at what is the ghost load the phantom load of this particular appliance. How many light bulbs does somebody need over their mirror in their bathroom. All of the standard sets have three. We need one really. So there were little tiny choices and big choices that we made in the process because we had this overarching clear goal and set of priorities to to to build in sustainability and low impact decisions all the way through. North Carolina has one of the highest rates of solar power in the country and that stems mostly from the fact that there were people in the 70s and 80s who were very involved in advocating for tax credits and legislation at a statewide level that would encourage and subsidize people's venturing into this kind of energy generation. It it has had a long scale impact in terms of jobs in terms of energy independence for our state. And those those subsidies and tax credits have been eroded over the last several years. When we built our house there were credits at the state level for passive solar design to help us build a house and pay for some of the materials that were involved in the passive solar design. There were subsidies and paybacks at a federal and a state level for the photovoltaic electrical generation panels. And there were also paybacks for tax credits for solar hot water and also for solar more for solar heating which I think is more powerful because more of the energy in our house is is used for heating than it is for just hot water. And all of those credits have vanished over the time in between. So like our house where decisions needed to be made on big scale and on very micro scale of individual choices, we would benefit as a society if we had the big scale choices made that would empower and allow people to move forward together. And individuals also need to make those small choices every day and their driving habits and their building choices and their energy choices all the way through their daily lives. I marvel to think that we could build a one house or a subdivision of houses and we could simply change the orientation of the house by 14 degrees or the way the street ran so that houses would have the opportunity to do that and transform the energy sustainability of that whole neighborhood just with that idea just with that understanding and that concept and adopting it and believing in it and implementing it.