Posted on 05/14/2007 9:38:07 PM PDT by Dan Evans
Berlin, Ohio- A drive through the rolling hills of this Holmes County farming community 80 miles south of Cleveland delights the senses with smells of farm manure and sawmill resins mingling with limestone dust rising from the roads.
Amish farmers work the fields with horse-drawn plows while their beef cattle and milk cows slowly graze nearby pastures. Women tend laundry on sagging clotheslines as their toddlers play with wooden toys.
Weaving around horse-drawn buggies, a visitor might miss the sight that seems out of place here - a technology that most Americans only dream about - solar panels.
Designed to turn photons into electrons, the purple-black panels have sprung up in the last five years on the roofs of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Amish homes, barns and greenhouses.
Though still resisted by a few hard-line Amish denominations, this technology that NASA relies on for its most advanced spacecraft is being heartily embraced by more and more of the plain-spoken folk. They view it as a safe alternative to lighting their homes with natural gas, white gasoline or kerosene.
Organic dairy, beef and chicken farmer Owen Nisley on County Road 600 near Charm, describes solar as natural as nature itself - "no different from my cows eating the grass that has captured the sun's energy."
Nisley's solar panels generate about 500 watts of power.
"The initial setup was very expensive," he said, "but we love the solar, even in the winter when there are a lot of dark days."
The equipment has become so prevalent that Green Energy Ohio is organizing an Amish Country tour during the American Solar Energy Society's 36th annual convention, July 7-12, in Cleveland. About 1,800 people from across the nation are expected to attend the conference and trade show.
Squaring solar panels with Amish religious beliefs is easy.
"I am a Christian and I am Amish. But being Amish is not a religion. It's a way of life," said Jake Raber, co-owner of The Lighthouse of Ohio Distribution, Ltd., in nearby Fredericksburg. "Being Amish means being independent." Raber and his wife Betty ordered $50,000 worth of solar panels last year from suppliers in Michigan and Japan. They sold them all.
"Use common sense," he said. "You can fill a 50-gallon drum with white [clear] gas at $4 per gallon twice a year, or you can install solar. It's renewable. You can spend $600 on a solar panel, but it lasts 20 years."
In business only about five years, Raber and his son have sold and installed several hundred panels - mostly to Amish families who don't require massive amounts of electricity like their "English" counterparts (other Americans), and who typically have installed 12-volt wiring systems in their homes.
"We Amish are energy efficient," he said.
And inquiries from "English" are beginning to trickle in as well, mostly from homeowners worried about the environment and some from people fed up with high electric bills or fearful of the next blackout.
Installing enough solar power to free a typical Ohio home from electric bills could cost as much as $20,000 to $25,000 with today's technology, said Raber, who recommends starting with a blackout backup system and slowly adding panels over years.
"You can pay an awful lot of electric bills with that kind of money," he said. "But these panels last 20, 25, 50 years. What is your electric bill going to be in 25 years?"
The burgeoning demand had caught the attention of Keim Lumber in nearby Charm. Opened as a sawmill in 1911, the Mennonite family-owned business welcomed 2007 with the grand opening of more than 130,000 square feet of retail and is making a special display room for solar power equipment.
"The need is there," said David Beachy, Keim's head of sales, who like many of Keim's employees is Amish. "We are working with installers. The key will be to find good installers."
It's the same story at Suncrest Solar just outside Berlin where veteran installers Reuben Miller and his son Jonathon are working hard to meet demand. The two have done 500 installations in the last few years, and in the last two years have been doing a good deal of 12-volt wiring jobs for Amish homeowners.
"Gradually, people are learning what you can do with a solar system," said Reuben Miller. "You can use it for lighting but also for sewing, running mixers, blenders, sweepers, even washing machines."
Reuben, a furniture maker, started the solar business as a sideline about 15 years ago. Now solar is competing with their time to produce handmade furniture, said Jonathon Miller.
That the Amish are embracing a 21st-century technology, having skipped most of the 20th century, is not lost on the younger Miller.
"I guess we stumbled into it," he says pensively. "I would say what started it were the battery-powered buggy lights. After that, people started seeing what else they could do. It's about safety."
His father sees a bright future.
"I think as the technology improves - like being able to produce more electricity on cloudy days - we may be able to do even more."
For the Amish it is the power grid that is perceived to be more of a threat to their way of life than the electricity itself. The greatest threats to their community are considered to be the telephone (loss of face to face conversation and visiting); the automobile (ability to travel long distances from family and church); and public utilities (loss of independence and entanglement with the outside world).
The Amish have been very creative in devising ways of providing powering machinery without the power grid, including air and hydraulic powered machinery with the pumps supplied by diesel generator. Internal combustion engines are often permitted in stationary applications or to power a baler; just not for self-propelled vehicles. So it is not uncommon to see a gasoline powered hay baler being drawn by a team of draft horses.
They fear the things that electricity might bring. Someone asked an Amish farmer why they will use propane but not electricity. He replied, "Well, let me ask you this: Have you ever seen a TV that runs on propane?"
Some Amish have been using solar panels for more than 10 years.
We recently drove by an Amish home where a generator sat running outside the kitchen door with a power cord extending into the kitchen. I still speculate about what the woman of the house was using; a fan? Vacuum cleaner? A large Kitchen Aid mixer to knead a batch of dough?
That little house at the end of the lane that looks like a phone booth, is a phone booth.
I just hope she wasn't watching Oprah.
LOL I had the same thought! But it was much earlier in the day.
My guess is that it won't. They have much more discipline to do without certain amenities than the typical non-Amish person. That's just my personal observation of them, though.
Having worked with Amish when I was in the Logging business in Ohio back in the early 90s, you’d be SHOCKED at their homes.
They are as modern as my home. They use a gasoline genset to power an air compressor to pressurize the water in the home and solar panels to charge banks of 12v batteries for lighting all night. Much heating is firewood but they will use propane tanks for the occasional cold snap and some for cooking.
Having grown up around Amish for many years, I didn’t know these things until I actually got to know some of them very well. I figured their homes were cold, dark and miserable in the winter and found it to be quite the opposite. Was warm, cozy and bright and there was always something wonderful baking. They never did invite us to dine with them though.
I think so too, but the problem is with the younger generation. I read about one Amish teen who was collecting cars and TV sets. He hadn't joined the church so he couldn't be excommunicated.
But sometimes you wonder, why not just ban TV sets instead of of banning electricity? The answer is that your neighbors can see if a power line is connected to the house but not necessarily if you have a TV set.
They like to remind us that they are "just like us" meaning they can be tempted to break rules too. The idea is to avoid situations (like have a house wired for electricity) that would lead them to temptation.
You're lucky to have had a glimpse of the interior of an Amish home as insular as they are. Actress Kelly McGillis somehow was able to live in an Amish so she could do research for the movie Witness.
But it seems that one thing they all have in common is that they are all different. Every church has its own variation of the rules.
I guess it depends on the individual Amish family. We stopped by one family's home in Iowa last fall to buy winter squash they had for sale and in our conversation with them about their lifestyle my brother asked them what a person could do to experience the way they live. They offered to let him stay in an extra bedroom as long as he would pull his weight work-wise. They seemed very hospitable.
How does one embrace a product whose origin lies in the accumulation of almost all preceeding technology without also embracing all the preceeding technology? Does that fact just get conveniently ignored?
The Amish are not a homogenous sect. Each “church district” headed by its own Bishop determines its own permutations of the code of conduct, yet this is done in consultation with other Bishops. There are some strange variations which seem very inconsistent, like the gasoline powered baler drawn by horses or the telephone in the wood shop (to deal with outside customers) but not in the house.
I want one of those propane-powered TV’s. :-)
I think this decentralized system is one of their major strengths. A new code can be tried out by one church and the others can observe the effect before they try it too. Also, if a church becomes corrupt it won't be as likely to affect the others.
There are some strange variations which seem very inconsistent, like the gasoline powered baler drawn by horses or the telephone in the wood shop (to deal with outside customers) but not in the house.
The rules aren't so strange once you know why they have them. Gasoline powered tractors are suspect because they could be used to easily drive into town for frivolous reasons (like to have beer at a tavern). So they might allow gasoline powered vehicles as long as it has steel wheels that can't be driven on roads.
Likewise with telephones in houses where people might get into the bad habit of idle chatter or gossip. But they allow isolated phone booths outside the house where they can't hear it ring. I read about one guy who was allowed a computer but he had to keep it in a shed outside the shop.
Most of the rules seem to be about avoiding temptation.
I don't see why preceding technology should have anything to do with it. We have banned or discarded all kinds of old technology for reasons of economy, safety or environmental concerns. The Amish are only different in that they reject technology on moral grounds.
There are some third-world countries that have never used mainframe computers or had a land-line telephone network but are now using PCs and cell phones.
“delights the senses with smells of farm manure”
Ah,yes. The senses get delighted, the shoe soles get coated, and the flies get a meal. Why, it’s a shame to even clean it up!
And the rancher says, "That's the smell of a lot of money, son".
But they are dependent upon "the rest of American society" to make the solar panels.
We are all dependent on each other to one degree or another and the Amish are no different. They just try to keep dependence on outsiders to a minimum. Using solar panels makes them less dependent because instead of having to buy gasoline for lamps every year they buy solar panels once every thirty years.
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