“Sunshine Barakaat”

In May of 2011, Sister Jann McClary and her husband Tariq moved from the Washington DC metropolitan area to establish a new home in the mountains of Colorado, building it from the ground up as part of their plan to become free of the spiritual and physical stress of modern urban life. Sister Jann is documenting her experiences for the Muslim Link. See her earlier installments at www.muslimlinkpaper.com by searching for “Running for the Hills”. Make sure you select “Exact Phrase” in the search options. –  TML 
 
Allah subhana wa ta'ala in His Magnificence has positioned this little blue orb we call Earth just so perfectly distanced from the brilliant orb we dance around every day, that we don't get hot enough to fry to a crisp, but instead get benefit in myriad ways. The sun is one of those amazing favors which you can't deny. We get heat from it. We get light from it. Some of us tan our little pale selves brown with it. A plant processes energy from it and then passes it on to us when we eat it. Energy from the sun is silent, efficient, and without moving parts. Solar energy is a fantastic ni'mah from Allah.
 
That's why we decided early on that we wanted to go with solar energy to light our home and power our stuff. When you don't have stuff that needs to produce heat, solar energy is one of the most efficient ways to get power. If you have stuff like, irons, microwaves and toasters, anything that has a heating element, it's probably one of the worst because it takes too much power from your solar panels and becomes cost-inefficient. But if you can manage with doing all your ironing just once a week to save energy, popcorn made on the stove top and bread toasted in a pan, then solar is right for just about everything else. What can you power with solar? Lights, computers, cell phones, stereos (remember those?), blenders, mixers, washing machines, power tools, refrigerators, water heaters, boats, and the list goes on. But wait a minute, you say, how can you power a hot water heater with solar? Isn't there a heating element in there somewhere? Ahh, dear reader, there are such contraptions as solar hot water heaters. They range from the tech-heavy DIY projects utilizing copper coils filled with some type of antifreeze liquid as a heat exchanger and solar heat collector panels, over to the plebeian heavy duty black plastic bags oriented toward the sun, on down to metal reflectors bouncing sunlight onto your water storage container. What you use depends on your time, money and technical ability. We plan to keep our solar panels to generate electricity for lights and household appliances for now. And since we're not so tech-savvy yet, for the time being we'll be using the caveman technique of heating water with our wood stove. 
 
Another thing you can do with solar energy is cook. Yes, you can bake, stew, boil and steam with a solar oven. It's the coolest thing! It's basically a wooden box lined with a reflecting material like foil, and painted black on the bottom to retain heat. Add a glass plate on top of the box, and four moveable reflecting flaps around the top edges of the box. Orient it to face the sun, put an oven thermometer in there and you can make rice, veggies, pies, cookies, bread and more – as long as the sun shines, of course.
 
And that is where it gets a little tricky. As you know, the sun is not always beaming down happily on us. So the heart of a solar system is not the panels, but the batteries. These are what stores all that energy the panels collect. A good system should have the capacity to store enough energy to last through three to five days of no sunshine. OK, so that's all well and good except, what do you do if there are more than five days of cloudy weather? Then you make sure you have a generator for backup.  Sure, it's a little noisy, but at least you won't be sitting in the dark and the fridge will run for a while longer. And what happens when the generator runs out of gas, Miss Homesteader? Well, then you break out old school with the back up to the back up; lanterns and candles. Don't laugh, every homesteader's got a mega supply of both.
 
Basically what it all comes down to is making sure your situation is covered. Anas ibn Malik reported: A man said, “O Messenger of Allah, should I tie my camel and trust in Allah, or should I untie her and trust in Allah?” The Messenger of Allah (sallallahu alaihi wa sallam) said, “Tie her and trust in Allah.” (Sunan At-Tirmidhi). You can have a lot of cool machines, gadgets and systems in place to help
 you handle that “camel”, and help you as a homesteader be self-sufficient. However, as Muslims, and now as homesteaders, we see that none of us is ever truly self-sufficient no matter what amount of backup we have. In Surat-ul Al Alaq Allah says “Nay! Verily man does transgress. Because he considers himself self-sufficient.” All that we have and are able to do is only because of the Mercy of Allah 'Azza wa Jal. So the fact that we can get electricity from the sun has nothing to do with us and our solar panels, even if we like to think we're providing our own power. We're just harvesting more of Allah's provision. One watt at a time.