Soap is part of our life

I suppose you could call it wholistic business.
How we make our soaps and run our business is truly a direct extension of our life as a whole.
Here is a short  slideshow that gives you a glimpse into our business, our power system & life.
 


As always, find our soaps at SimmonsNaturalBodycare.com

Who we are... Simmons Naturals

What our soap shop looks like today, 2/29/12

Somehow life's whirlwind  has kept me preoccupied & I've neglected this blog.
In the spirit of a new beginning, I wish to start here with the story of our business, as that is pretty much the story of my life right now...

Here at Simmons Natural Bodycare it is our mission to provide for the basic needs of our skin and bodies in the best possible way. We strive to create luscious soaps and basic skin care that will Make EveryDay Special.

Since 1979, when we first began crafting soaps for our own family, we have always chosen the purest, highest quality oils & other botanical ingredients for their simple natural benefits. The basic care we provide works by assisting the natural processes of renewal and protection that keep us healthy and beautiful; care for everyday needs as well as for special needs such as dry, chapped skin, skin irritation, allergies, or congestion.

However, at Simmons Natural Bodycare, what we make is only half of the story.

We believe, practice, and promote a philosophy of sustainiblility. This encompasses the use of renewable energy sources and ingredients to create our products, and doing it in a way which does not degrade the environment or cause harm to us and its other inhabitants.
It is not so much the idea of 'doing the right thing', but simply that it is the right thing to do.

Our soaps

This is why we use minimal packaging incorporating as much recycled and recyclable materials as possible.. Even the beautiful handmade Thai papers that wrap our soaps are from trees harvested in a sustainable manner, limbed, so the tree keeps growing. And this is why our ingredients are biodegradable, renewable, and mostly organic, and why we do not test on animals.

Simmons Natural Bodycare is part of a self-sufficient family homestead in the rural mountains of far northern California.

The electricity for our home and business is self generated using solar (PV) panels, a 1kw wind turbine, and a small hydro-power system. Our goal is to live and run our business with as little impact on the planet as possible. The business began by crafting natural, nontoxic, soaps & body care products to ensure the mildness needed for our own family's sensitive skin. It now provides for our family as part of a working homestead in conjunction with our large organic vegetable garden, orchard, and poultry.

Our Solar PV Array

We contribute to our local community and the world community through volunteer work and donations. We have donated 2% of the sales of our bars soaps to Heifer International since 2004 and support other small businesses through our website. Since 2006 we have been 100% Carbon Neutral as we planted enough trees worldwide to offset our carbon emissions through Trees for the Future. In addition, we double our offsets annually by donating to CarbonFund.org to support renewable energy and energy conservation projects, and we continue to plant trees, 1 for every 12 of our 4 oz. bar soaps sold, over 4500 to date.

Please visit our online store and see what we have. 
You can take a short photo tour of our soap shop here.

Solar Power - it's simple!

You may have seen our previous posts describing how our business and home are powered by on site, self-generated and renewable energy sources (see: Power in the Storm and Earth Day Every Day ).
Wind & water power are pretty obvious: the wind spins a propeller which turns a rotor inside an alternator which creates electricity; water turns a water wheel which does the same thing.

Solar power comes from Photovoltaic panels which work in mysterious ways.
Be mystified no more - here is a simple explanation of how they work:

Snow Day - Power in the Storm

Weather report: 2/17/11

While much of the country has been inundated in snow this winter we have managed to avoid it. Until now. It has been snowing for two days and is forecast to continue for a week. Must be our turn.


Big storms of all sorts wreak havoc in our rural mountains just as they do in towns. The roads can be closed, flooded, or dangerously icy. The wind will blow away what's not secured. And wind, snow, trees, auto accidents, wildfires and other incidents can interrupt electric power. That's the case in this storm. I found out via a phone call from someone, otherwise we would have never known. 
This is when the power independence of our self-sufficient lifestyle really stands out.

Hydro-system, Pelton wheel inside barrel

Right now we are running on micro-hydro power. Not as lucky as those with a year round creek, our system relies on rain and other precipitation. 
The rain and runoff that started before it got so cold got our hydro running, and the snow is now building up a reserve on the mountain above us that will last long after the storm is over. Generally our main winter season power source, running steadily 24 hours a day, hydro-power is almost decadent in its abundance.

The wind turbine from up the hill

Every time a storm blows in the power of the wind makes electricity with our small scale wind turbine. 
Located on a point above a river canyon, it gets wind morning and evening most of the year, but it really kicks into gear in stormy weather. 

Looking up at our wind turbine

This is the most fickle source of power in our locale, where wind is neither steady nor reliable every day. Yet it still fills in the gaps to keep the batteries charged that run our home and soap business.

But the real workhorses of our system, despite being the only ones with no moving parts, are our solar Photo Voltaic (PV) panels. 

Patched together over the years (there are 3 slightly different styles in our array), if there is any light, they are producing some power. And, since there is far more sun here than other weather overall, I think I can safely say most of our annual electricity comes from these panels. 
On top of that we have 2 smaller PV panels that pump water from our spring up to a holding tank, another small panel that runs the pump on our solar hot water system as well as an attic fan, and a tiny panel that runs a fan in our garden's greenhouse.

Our solar PV electric array

In fact, it is solar energy that runs all these systems, as it is the sun's influence on our planet that creates the weather and controls the water cycle that makes the other methods work. 
Even on a dark blizzard of a day like this one.


I think I will go have a hot cup of tea and warm up!

9/2014 Update: This spring we added 5 new Solar PV panels to our system, bringing us to a full 4 kilowatts of charging power. We bought them a year ago when we had the money and the price was good. That almost never happens at the same time! And we finally had the opportunity to build a rack for them and add them to our array this year. It's wonderful to have the extra power.

Earth Day Every Day

Happy Earth Day!
For us the idea of Earth Day is an everyday affair. It is our passion and our challenge and, likely, our duty to the future, to keep our planet healthy. Being "Green" is a way of life, not a one day a year experiment. Our recent big project was finally upgrading our electric system and completing our Solar PV (Photo Voltaic) panel array.

We have been working on our power system here since 1977. When we moved to this very rural property and began to build our home the electricity diverted away from the highway and up over the mountain, about a mile before it got to us. The price to get the power down to our location was way out of our reach. No problem, we had spent plenty of time living and working with kerosene lamplight, we were young, our eyesight good, and we already had a propane refrigerator and wood heat and cook stoves.
This served us well for a few years, until our oldest daughter, then 9, wanted to read to herself and her siblings in her bedroom. We got wall mounted kerosene lamp fixtures for her room and then realized that one pillow fight and the whole house could burn down! We became the lighting police and worried constantly. As a result we soon rigged up a car battery to a 12 volt interior lamp from an RV. This worked great but the battery did not last long, so we collected several and then, when we made the long drive to town in our pick-up truck, charged all the batteries with a jumper cable from the truck battery that came out the hood and wove through the mirror and passenger side door handle into the back of the truck where they were hooked up. You had to be careful not to forget when you went to get out of the truck!

Once the early PV panels became available we were able to get some of the used Arco PV panels that had been removed from some huge installation I believe AmTrak or some such had dismantled. If you know any off-grid "Old Timers", chances are they have had some of these Arco panels. Thus began our love affair with off-grid renewable energy.

It has been a long and adventurous road since then. The technology has changed and improved dramatically over the years and it is amazing to see what you can do setting up a new system, off-grid or inter-tie, these days. For those of us who are just upgrading it is a bit more difficult. Since we often have to match our old equipment (preferable to discarding it and starting anew) finding compatible PV panels and parts to fill out an existing system can be challenging. Luckily we found a great deal on used panels from - you got it - a large project that had been disassembled! It is like coming full circle.

What we have achieved is a system big enough to power our home and business without having to check if the washing machine is on spin cycle before we use the soap cutter or laser printer. We switched from 12 volt to 24 volt and got a bigger inverter to convert the power to 120volt. Now all we have to do is rewire the 12 volt house!

The system has 8 - 75 to 85 watt BP PV panels, 7 - 80 watt AEE PV panels, which match perfectly and are alternated on the array, and 5 new panels (on lower left), slightly larger Solec 80 watt panels, to fill it out. These, along with our Whisper H80 wind generator, charge the 8 deep cycle Rolls batteries that actually run the house. A new OutBack 3.5KW 24Volt inverter rounds it out, although there are other misc. charge controllers and gadgets as well. We also have a small pelton wheel for micro-hydro power but, until we switch it up to 24 volt as well, it is off line.
Even though we are now more power - full than ever, we still have to be mindful of our power usage. Living on batteries is sometimes quite limited. Particularly when it is cloudy, windless weather. Powering down everything when not in use, from lightbulbs to this computer, is essential. Everything with a standby load is on a powerstrip we can turn off.

But since I cannot tell an Amp from an Ohm, that is the sum of my "Tech-Talk". I just love being able to reap the benefits - like writing on this blog on my solar electric powered iMac!

Want to reap a little solar power from us? Try a bar of our "solar powered soap"! All the ingredients came from plants powered by photo synthesis, and all the machinery involved runs on our alternative energy system. Go here to see our soaps.