Dan Isbell - "Living Sustainably: An Iowa Family's Story"

I first began to dream of being a solar peasant during my college days in Iowa City in the late sixties and early seventies, but it wasn't until the early 1980's, when my wife, Kim, and I moved to our home on the banks of the Cedar River downstream from Vinton, Iowa that I began to do anything about those dreams.

We built solar food dehydrater from plans we got from Mother Earth News, built a greenhouse porch onto the southwest side of our cabin using old storm windows purchased for a $1 each from farm homes being torn down in our area, and built a solar heat collector that thermosyphoned up into an insulated heat storage rock bed beneath the greenhouse porch.

In 1987, we tore down the cabin and built a two-story log home on the same foundation, and used the Y2K year as our excuse to finally jump into photovoltaics, wind generation, small-scale hydro, wood heat, solar hot water, and solar cooking.