Joe Yoder’s Bio

Chris’s Solar Series

AltE Company

Sun Catcher

Solar Hot Air Collectors

Living the Good Life

The Earth’s Best Story

*Intro and outro music are from an original piece by

Carl Zukroff of The Blue Hotel

SunCommon

Green Energy Times

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You have stumbled onto another episode of Get your FILL- Financial Independence and Long Life, where we explore ways to achieve those joint goals. The music you’ve just been listening to is from an original score by Carl Zukroff of the band, Blue Hotel. Check them out at TheBlueHotel.net.

In 2011 after tropical storm, Irene, left many Vermonters scrambling for generators, today’s guest moved forward with his idea to create a company that would sell very small, very affordable, solar electric systems and related materials. Tiny Solar Vermont officially launched in 2014. TSV specializes in electrifying tiny houses, yurts, camps, or just providing those who have a need for reliable backup power.

I met Joe Yoder at the Vermont Tiny House Festival. In less than a minute, he challenged all my paradigms about solar energy, which I thought I knew about because I did a whole blog series and he made me feel good, he made me like and trust him pretty instantly, which is not an easy feat but I am willing to bet that you are gonna feel the same way about Joe.

I asked Joe to come on the podcast for two reasons: one is because I wanna learn more about personal solar and also because I could see that Joe is living his dream. He’s working for himself and pursuing his passion and having a great time, which is what all of us want in our later years.

Joe’s complete bio is on the website, GetYourFILLPodcast.com along with the video of our conversation, links to his website and links to all the books that we talk about and anything else that I think might be interesting and relevant to today.

Because Joe is such an interesting person, we ended up talking for over an hour so we’re breaking the interview into two podcasts. The second half of the interview will air when we get back from Holiday Break on January 5th.

C: Joe, thank you so much for joining me today. So, tell me how you got into solar, originally.

J: Well, pretty early on, really right out of high school, I was very interested in the environment and nature. The first Ecology course I took was in the Air Force, actually. It was an evening course when I was in the Air Force – not exactly a bastion of radical liberals but even there I could see my God, nukes are nonsense. And we really need to quit polluting so much. And just sort of the basics. I didn’t really help to kind of form my personality.

I was in Boy Scouts as a kid too, camped a lot and I had a lot of camping skills and appreciation for nature, but to make a long story short, I ended up in Vermont for my last two years of college – I came up here for the Social Ecology program at Goddard College – finished school, began working, raising a family ever since, so I’ve been in Vermont since the 70s. I’m originally from Ohio. I have always been really interested in environment and trying to see what I could do to do things right.

I attempted to homestead in Danville in the early ’90s on 12 acres of land on a private road. That was kind of rough. I would say largely for financial reasons, actually. There was a recession then in early 90s and that and some other factors led to a split up of my first marriage.

While we were there, we wanted power and I was inclined to just get a generator, but the electrician we talked to said, “Hey you might wanna try solar.” This was in ’91. We did put together a solar system. I started learning about it, I had to learn how to use it. We were w