One thing that attracted me to our smallholding was the fact that we are almost off-grid. It is only the electricity network that we are hooked up to and even with that we hope we feed in more electricity than we use.

One drawback of this as we discovered around Christmas is the maintenance of some quite complicated equipment, one being the sewage treatment plant. Gone are the days when your raw sewage was allowed to flow untreated into the local river and a good thing too for the environment. We have a system called a "Condor Clereflo EP05" which …