Someday, we'd like to achieve energy independence through some combination of pedal, solar, and hydro power. Most of our progress so far has been in the heating department, using an exterior wood furnace and passive solar heat.
Start from the bottom of the page to read about our adventure in order.
The internet is chock
full of articles glowing about biochar's potential, but I seldom find
any useful, hands on information. The Abingdon
Biochar presentation
we attended delved into the nitty gritty.
Today's video highlights
methods you can use to make biochar on any scale. I was
especially intrigued by the idea of modifying a rocket stove to produce biochar while
cooking your dinner.
Our homemade chicken
waterer is a simple
DIY project that requires an hour or less to produce clean water for
your flock.
I
thought the drying
season had left us
behind, but this week the sun came back out and let me test a few
tomatoes in our automotive dehydrator. It tickles me pink to be
drying vegetables in a totaled
car, even if it is
running fine and useful for ferrying supplies back and forth rather
than being up on blocks in the front yard. My test tray dried
nicely, so today I'll add more tomatoes to the drier.
My
goal is to make Mark stop talking about our movie star neighbor's
sun-dried tomatoes and start talking about mine. Hollywood sun-dried
tomatoes (as I've decided to call the delicious concoction) are so
tasty you can't keep them in the fridge or they'll be gone
overnight.
Part 1 of the recipe is
simple --- slice plum-sized romas or other small, meaty tomatoes in
half, sprinkle the cut side with a hint of salt and pepper, and dry
until slightly moist (like a dried apricot). Stay tuned for the
taste explosion of part 2 once I have enough tomato morsels dried to
show you the steps.
Zimmy
and his wife rounded out their energy efficient home by producing some
of their own power. They live in northern Ohio where it makes
sense to supplement solar power by capturing the wind blowing down off
the Great Lakes.
The couple has been
building their homestead infrastructure
for about as long as I've been alive, so it's no surprise they've been
able to snap up good deals. "Almost everything we buy, build,
install, is seconds. We live in the world of surplus," Zimmy emailed
when I asked him the cost of his alternative energy system. He
went on to say that he has two different sets of solar panels as well
as the wind turbine.
The solar panels on the ground put out about
3kw. They came from a demonstration solar power plant in the
south California desert. After being cooked in the sun with
concentrating mirrors they were dumped onto the surplus market. I
installed them in 1994. I don't remember the cost, but it was cheap at
the time.
The panels on the roof were installed last year by Mary and I.
They are a 1.6kw array, and they came from http://www.sunelec.com/ as
seconds.
The [17.5 kw] wind turbine....well that's another story. It was
installed in 1984. The turbine was bought as a damaged unit that
was damaged in a wind storm. The tower was bought from a scrap
yard and they bought it from the local airport. I also found
other sections of the same type tower from another person.
The tower is 150' tall and I have 20' left over to be used for my water
tower when I get time. The turbine has been hit by lighting
several times, mechanical failures, electrical failures, modified and
upgraded several times. I have lost track of the cost, but I have
a spare alternator, gearhead, governor, blades, and spare inverter
boards. The turbine had some damage over the winter that cost
$3,500 for repairs but insurance paid for it.
Whenever
I consider alternative power --- beyond our simple
solar
backup --- I get caught up in the disposable nature of batteries
and
whether the unit will really pay for itself. Unfortunately, Zimmy
wasn't really able to answer my questions about the economics of his
grid-tied system. He noted: "I don't keep track of power produced
and power used. We use every bit of power we produce, and have
some amount of electric bill to pay. The utility co. is happy and
so are we."
Whether or not Zimmy's
system is cost-effective, I can tell he's had a wonderful time
tinkering. Keeping our eyes open for salvage and seconds is a
good lesson for everyone to learn.
I
can just hear Roland
now --- "All of this talk about insulating the
home is great, but you shouldn't be using electricity for heat
anyway. What did Zimmy do to lower his non-heat electricity use
before going off the grid?" Well Roland-in-my-head, I'm glad you
asked that, because Zimmy went all out.
Zimmy installed aluminum
bars on his baseboard heaters as a thermal
heat sink and bought a Geyser heat pump water heater. In the
kitchen, he put in a Sunfrost refrigerator, an induction cook top, and
a vent to channel excess heat to the water heater (or outside.)
He
switched over to Energy Star appliances, buying a new freezer among
other things. Finally, he installed a dual flush conversion on
the toilet to help save water.
I wasn't surprised to
see fluorescent and LED lighting on Zimmy's list,
but I did get hung up for a moment on what a solar tube is. These
special skylights use a combination of a domed "daylight capturing
surface" on the outside of the house and a lens on the inside of the
house to maximize the amount of sunlight you receive through a small
skylight. Solar tubes are sure to warm the inventive cockles of
Mark's heart, but at a few hundred dollars apiece, we won't be
installing them anytime soon.
Although
I usually think that buying insulation for the ceiling is the quickest
and cheapest way to improve heating efficiency, one
article I read
suggested that I was on the wrong track. They noted that
infiltration and air leakage are the most problematic causes of heat
loss in the winter, making up around 35% of all heat lost from the
average home. Windows and doors followed behind at 18 to 20%,
then floors at 15 to 18%, walls at 12 to 14%, and finally ceilings at
10%. Clearly, fixing any holes or cracks should be your first
priority, closely followed by dealing with windows and doors.
We
installed double-glazed windows in our trailer, but even the air gap
between those panes of glass is a drop in the bucket.
Double-glazed windows tend to have an R-value around 2 --- compared to
a preferred R-value
of at least 13 in walls. Is there a way to
make windows more efficient without living in a cave?
Zimmy made some quick
and easy window coverings to insulate his windows when they aren't in
use. He used foam board on basement windows and some upstairs
windows (top photo), then bought quilted window blinds for windows in
his main living space (second photo.) The quilted blinds run on a
track and seal
all around the window. I estimate that Zimmy gets an additional
R-6 from his foam board (although the gaps at the edge of the foam
board may drop this down some) and perhaps as high as R-7 for his
quilted blinds.
Maine
Home Energy has a
very well put together page about different window insulation options,
including price per square foot and R-value of each. They
recommend quilted blinds like Zimmy's (which they call "insulated Roman
shades") on south-facing windows since they are easy to open for
passive solar gain on sunny days, then seal shut for the night or on
cloudy days. Insulating windows has always been on our priority
list, but after reading the statistics on heat lost through windows,
then seeing simple how-to instructions for making our own insulating
blinds, I think this project will have to move closer to the top.
Adding
a roof and basement to his mobile home
made it much easier for Zimmy to insulate his house. We've tried
to wrap our minds around insulating our
trailer better, but since
Mark's head already almost brushes the ceiling, we would clearly have
to follow a similar route and we're not quite ready to embark on such a
huge project. Still, it's great to see how a trailer can be
insulated relatively cheaply once you have a roof and basement in place.
Zimmy didn't give me
figures on how
much it cost to build his new roof and basement, but he did say that
the
subsequent insulation job cost about $500. He managed to insulate
so cheaply because he spent some time
scrounging for materials:
The
local bargain paper had a listing of seconds 1"x4'x8' sheets of
foil-faced insulation board [$3 apiece] and rolls of fiberglass
insulation [$20 apiece] for sale so I just bought a whole truck load of
the foam board and another load of fiberglass insulation. I also bought
a load of door cut outs that are vinyl coated foam (haven't figured out
a use for them yet).
With his supplies
compiled, Zimmy and his wife ripped off the inside
paneling and installed 6 mil plastic as a vapor barrier, putting
drywall over that. They tacked an additional two inches of
insulated foam board to the outside of the trailer and coated it with
1/2" of plywood. The resulting combination of insulation in the
walls
now reached R26. "The roof already had
R19 of fiberglass insulation in it and the
company I worked for sold me at cost bags of rock wool insulation,"
Zimmy wrote. It was simple to add more insulation under the roof,
bringing the insulative value up to at least R60.
Zimmy made sure that I
knew he still planned to put vinyl siding over
the outside walls of the mobile home. I could tell that the
insulating project had been a lot of work, but I'll bet he and his wife
consider that $500 a very wise investment.
Since
our own solar
experiments are so
low-key at the moment, I thought you
might enjoy hearing from one of our regular readers who has built an extensive grid tied solar and wind alternative power system. Zimmy and his wife live in a 1974 mobile
home (14 X 60 feet):
...but [it] is no longer mobile.
We had a basement built underneath and a gable roof put over the metal
roof. Like most older mobile homes, the insulation was 3 1/2" in
the walls, 6" in the floor, and 6" of fiberglass in the roof. So
that would be R11 in the walls and R19 in the roof and floor.
I was intrigued to hear more about Zimmy's
project since we live in a
similar trailer (although ours is a third smaller and a decade
older.) We thoroughly approve of starting out with a living
situation that is as cheap as possible, then improving the efficiency
of your space over time.
Mobile homes are usually
barely insulated, but Zimmy proved that you
can turn even an old model into an efficient and beautiful living
space. This week's lunchtime series follow's Zimmy's journey to
insulate his home and then provide a good proportion of his own power.
I
got so excited when I read that you can buy a plug-and-play grid tie
inverter and pump the electricity from your solar panel directly into
the grid for less than a hundred bucks that I snatched up the first one
I saw on ebay. The theory is sound and would make small-scale
solar fit into the average person's price range...if it wasn't illegal
and potentially hazardous.
The dream is that you
can simply plug a solar panel directly into one of these small
inverters, and plug the other end of the inverter into an electric
socket in your house. On the level I'm interested in, there's no
way you'd actually be feeding energy back into the grid since
continuous loads in your house (like the computer, fridge, etc.) will
suck up all the juice you've created. But you would lower your
electric bill, and would also remove the most disposable part of a
solar power system --- the batteries. Without the repeated
purchase of batteries, I
figured even the solar panels you can buy at Harbor Freight for less
than $200 would pay for themselves before they began to
seriously lose efficiency.
The problem with the
dream is that utilities require you to jump through such a series of
hoops before tying into the grid that you might as well not even think
about it unless you're willing to sink a few thousand dollars into the
project. I contacted our local electric company (Appalachian
Electric Power) and found out that in order to plug in a grid tie
inverter, we'd need to:
1.) sign an interconnection agreement, 2.)
install a certified (UL 1741) inverter(s), and 3.) install a disconnect
switch (alternating current, accessible, lockable, with visible open
position) near the meter.
The employee I emailed
with (who went to great lengths to make his emails understandable by
the layman) explained that the existing disconnect below the meter is
not sufficient to fulfill step 3. In addition, more extensive
reading on the internet shows that a certified inverter costs around
$2,000, putting grid tie-in completely out of our league.
The
electric company has a few valid reason to squash cheap plug-and-play
inverters. The biggest hazard from these inverters comes during
power outages, when the electric company shuts down the juice on a line
so that it can be repaired. Without the proper precautions, your
solar panels would continue feeding electricity into what is supposed
to be a dead line, and you could fry the linemen who come to fix the
problem. Granted, even the cheap power jack grid tie inverter we
found on ebay has anti-islanding protection, so presumably this problem
wouldn't occur.
I read an excellent
point on a forum that our grid tie inverter is inherently unsafe since
it has live electricity on the male end of the plug rather than
protected within a female plug. This is where my (very mild)
libertarian leanings come out --- we live in a household of two adults
who can remember to unplug the solar panel before yanking the inverter
out of the wall. We're not going to fry ourselves.
Many people buy these
plug-and-play grid tie inverters and surreptitiously put them to use in
their own homes. Chances are, no one at the electric company
would ever find out (although if you go the illegal route and have a
fire in your home, your fire insurance will probably refuse to pay for
the damages.) Unfortunately, breaking the law would keep me up at
night, so we've wasted $90 on a useless grid tie inverter and will have
to figure out a better way to harness the extra energy that doesn't go
into charging
our power packs.
Looking for a cheap homestead
gadget? Try our homemade chicken
waterer that will
never spill or fill with poop.
We still think that plug
and play is the way
to go for our cheap
solar backup, but
we've tweaked the specific components a
bit. We wanted to find a powerpack that we could pick up at a
physical store since powerpacks bought online have often been stored in
warehouses for years and have dubious longevity. We figure that
by picking one up locally, we can easily return it if it turns out to
be old.
The
5-in-1 power pack at Harbor Freight is the best we
could find at a physical store --- it's only two thirds as voluminous
as the Duracell 600 watt power pack, holding 216 watt-hours of energy,
but the price commensurate. And the reviews are quite good ---
one user notes that his powerpack is only starting to lose its gumption
after five years of use.
The 45 watt solar panel kit is really too big for our system, but it's
irresistible at the current sale price ($170 on Harbor Freight's
website --- print out the price page to use as a coupon at local
stores.) Since we've oversized our solar panel, we have to throw
in a $26 charge controller, bringing the total cost to just under $300
for the entire backup system.
On a sunny, summer day, our 45 watt solar panel will probably be
wasting quite a bit of juice, since it should pull in 135 watt-hours of
energy a day even in the dead of winter. I suspect that there
will be a way to capture that excess, perhaps by plugging an inverter
directly into the included power center to run electronics while also
charging the powerpack. Or, better yet, we might buy a (roughly)
$100 grid tie inverter, which would allow us to plug our solar panel
directly into an electric socket in the house and sell power back to
the grid --- no muss, no fuss, and easily detachable to plug the solar
panel into an inverter when the power goes out.
We'll update you as we experiment, but Mark is currently on his way to
pick up our components, so this phase of the project is now set in
stone.
Our homemade chicken
waterer is an even
simpler DIY project to make your homestead more self-sufficient.
My last trip to BFR
Mulch in Norton gave me a chance to ask the guy about delivery
options.
It seems they have a small
Mitsubishi 4 wheel drive dump truck that can haul 5 times what we can
do in the truck. The delivery fee is 30 dollars from Norton to Coeburn, which
is about the half way mark for us and why the guy guessed the charge to
be around 60 bucks for our zipcode.
Thanks
to everyone's great advice, I'm starting to narrow down our choices for
our power
outage solar backup system. First of all, Joey
and Roland (and the web) helped me figure out what size system I should
be looking for. I added up two hours run time on our laptops,
router, and two lights and came up with 150 watt-hours per day.
Using Joey's math, or just dividing by the 3 peak sun hours our area is
rated to receive in the dead of winter (from the map above), we would
need a 50 watt solar panel to achieve our goal. Since it's bad
business to discharge your batteries more than halfway, we would need
to buy two Duracell Power Packs and two 25 watt panels to reach this
level --- total cost roughly $450.
For comparison's sake, I
followed Daddy's advice and gave Backwoods Solar a call. The salesman
there was happy to walk me through my choices, even though he clearly
wasn't going to make much money off me. Here are the components
and prices he quoted me for a 50 watt system:
50 watt solar panel - $275
charge controller - $33
400 watt inverter - $45
2 RV or marine batteries (bought locally) - $180
He
also mentioned buying a tilt mount ($68), which would let us adjust the
panel's orientation seasonally for slightly higher output.
Assuming Mark could make our tilt mount, but that we would have to buy
some connectors not on the list, the total would come to around
$600. On the other hand, I suspect I could shave around $100 off
the cost by hunting down the components elsewhere on the web.
In other words, the plug
and play version and the real DIY version have a comparable price
tag. But do they have comparable longevity? I asked the
Backwoods Solar salesman what he thought of using a 600 watt Duracell
Power Pack as our battery, controller, and inverter. "That would
probably work," he said (and I paraphrase), "if you're just going to
use it very ocassionally as a backup. However, if you'd like to
take the laptop and lighting loads permanently off the grid and run
your solar system daily, you would be better off with a different
battery."
Now, I trust that he knows
what he's talking about, but I don't quite understand why he would be
right. My research shows that AGM batteries have a rated lifespan
of 4 to 7 years while marine batteries have a lifespan of 1 to 6
years. In addition AGM batteries are sealed, which means no need
for us to fuss over them, worry about fumes, or freak out when I
accidentally knock them over. Finally, they can be shipped, so we
can shop around and buy the ones at rock bottom prices on Ebay.
As far as I understand it, the main disadvantage of an AGM battery is
price, but the cost of the Duracell Power Pack seems to be roughly
comparable to a marine battery when you consider that the former
includes a charge controller and inverterter.
So, I'm opening up to
questions and answers again. Can anyone think of a reason that
the Duracell Power Pack would have less longevity than a different
system? Currently, I'm leaning toward trying out one 25 watt plug
and play system, doubling it later if all goes well.
Mark and I are in the
research stages of putting together a very small solar backup for use
during power
outages, and I'm
hoping that some of the more technical folks among you can give us the
benefit of your wisdom. During three power outages over the last
few months, we've figured out that running the generator for an hour a day keeps the
farm ticking along, but that we miss two major creature comforts ---
lights on winter evenings and more steady access to the internet.
Luckily, these gadgets
don't draw much juice --- about 25 watts apiece for our laptops,
another 23 watts for the router, and 13 watts for a CFL. We
figure that if we increase efficiency by buying a car charger for the
laptops (deleting the inefficiencies from converting DC to AC to DC)
and buy a couple of DC LED lights, we could coast along on very little
electricity, allowing us to work and play online for perhaps 3 hours
per day on a solar system costing less than $300.
A
simple solar system that doesn't seem to require much technical
know-how consists of a 600 watt Duracell Power Pack (basically, a 12
volt, 28 amp-hour, AGM battery; a controller; and a 600 watt inverter
combined into one unit, costing roughly $125) along with a 25 to 30
watt solar panel (roughly $150.) Many solar panels come with the
right connectors, so the system would be basically plug and play.
The flaw I see in the
combo above is that the solar panel might not fully charge the battery
in a single day of sun --- some websites say the system will charge up
in 5 to 7 hours, but other sites think the system will take 16 to 18
hours to charge. We can't just add a larger solar panel for
quicker charging since the manufacturer notes that you can't hook a
panel larger than 30 watts directly to the power pack without adding an
external charge controller.
So here are my questions:
Is it okay to shop around and find the cheapest 30 watt solar
panel, or are cheaper solar panels going to burn out quickly? Are
there solar panel categories I should be aware of in the low end,
consumer market?
We're willing to pay a bit extra for plug and play (and
portability), but don't want to be seriously ripped off. Would it
be smarter to do more research and buy the battery, inverter, and
charge controller separately?
If we bought an external charge controller and a 50 watt solar
panel, would the larger panel charge our power pack faster? My
very vague understanding makes me think it wouldn't, that the charge
controller would just filter out the extra power from the larger solar
panel since it's more than the battery can handle.
One website notes that this system would give us around 160
watt-hours per day. I'm not actually sure where people came up
with that figure --- does it make sense? Does that mean that I
could run a single 25 watt laptop for 6 hours?
Basically, these
questions all come down to one major one --- is this a bad idea?
We like the modular nature of the system, especially since Mark thinks
we could use the power pack with pedal power, a bit like this article describes. But we
don't want to spend a few hundred bucks on a dud.
DIY types will enjoy our homemade chicken
waterer kit that
allows you to build your own automatic chicken waterer in less than an
hour.
It seems like one of the more
expensive solutions out there, but might end up saving money in the
long run. The tower should be at least 6 feet square, 20 to 30 feet
tall with as much insulation as you can muster.
I wonder if this concept
could be scaled down for just one room instead of an entire house?
Image credit goes to the thefarm.org which has a well written article
on this method of sustainable cooling. They've also got a good section
on
permaculture in Tennessee.
I've always thought the
traditional pop up style campers had room for improvement.
The Yurtle will put an end to
your square lodge blues with a nice circular structure to rest within.
This portable model will run you about 6800 bucks, which seems
comparable to other new pop up campers. The Yurtle will take at least
an hour to set up compared to seconds on the pop up.
Seems like this might be a
great alternative to the FEMA trailers we heard so much about after
hurricane Katrina?
Go
to Laurelnestyurts.com for more round options and
details on their small community of 14 yurts. They've got a few
sections to their blog where they discuss permaculture and gardening,
topics that drove me to their site in the first place.
When we first moved to the farm here one of the chores was to haul
water from the creek in 5 gallon buckets to a small raised bed of baby
apple trees.
This
was before we were living here full time and pre-electricity. I
remember trying to run a small pump off the power of the truck in
desperation. This produced a small trickle and seemed to strain the
engine to the point where I figured it wasn't worth the risk of blowing
a fuse or worse.
Pictured here is the Q-Drum,
invented by Hans Hendrikse in 1996. It can carry 20 gallons with ease
thanks to the rolling nature of it's design. From what I can gather
it's only available in South Africa and cost around 500 Rands. This
invention might have been enough to hydrate those poor little apple
trees. The unusaully dry summer was a problem, but the real mistake was
not mulching. A couple of Q-Drums might have saved the day.
I've often tried to imagine what would be the ultimate water storage
container for a possible future where energy is scarce. This might be
it.
I wonder how much it would
take to make the inner walls glass or copper?
Tuesday rolled around and I
made a big mistake by topping it off with some old gas. I thought the
fuel was fine due to just using some in the lawnmower, but I guess this
generator is more sensitive.
My first solution was limited
by our local hardware store and the Dollar shop. They only had STP and
Gumout, which I think is the same thing. I added both with very little
results to show for it. It would start up...but putter and stall due to
what I assume was the bad gas or water in there somewhere? My second
mistake was not deleting as much of the old gas as I could before
adding the supplements. The next round of repairs
involved a longer trip where one can find a proper auto parts store. I
went right for the Seafoam and after a short consult with
one of the clerks was off to the gas station for some premium grade
petrol.
Dumping out the old gas and
adding the Seafoam helped, but it continued to putter and eventually
stalled due to what I'm guessing is some sort of blockage. I think it's
going to take running it a while for it to smooth out.
Luckily the electric guy
showed up with a chainsaw and a smile and cut down the offending tree
that was hanging on one of our power lines. It was touch and go for a
while as I watched the line hold the entire weight of the tree and
finally allow it to fall without breaking. I let out a loud
enough cheer so he could hear me and we had power restored within the
hour.
If you live near a lake or
some other source of cold water you could pump that water through an
old radiator and then blow the coldness out with a simple fan.
I've been interested in taking advantage of geothermal energy for
heating and cooling since I first heard of the idea.
The main problem is the high
installation and material cost.
After several hours of
research I finally found some comprehensive information on tackling a
project like this from an angle that won't break the bank.
Free home air conditioning
is a simple website that covers several details I wouldn't have thought
of. Like how important moisture control is and if you select the wrong
material you might create favorable conditions for mold to multiply.
I would not try to dig trenches like this by hand unless it
was an emergency situation. The time and energy a Ditch Witch can save
is what makes this project practical.
When we first started this irrigation
project the budget was a bit limited.
I'm sure it breaks every law
of proper electric wiring, but sometimes you've got to do what you've
got to do.
It's basically four 100 foot extension cords cobbled together and wired
so each pole is carrying 110 volts. I'm pretty sure this is close to
the maximum distance you should think about stretching these cords.
Electrical tape works well for sealing up the junctions where each cord
is plugged into.
We're going on the third year
of this setup. There was a problem in the
beginning with the pump connections, but I solved that by figuring out
how to make the contact points waterproof.
If you feel like you're
testing the limits of safety try picking up the
cord in question to see if it's giving off much heat while you have
your pump working. It's this heat
that can be dangerous and must be dealt with by making the distance
shorter or the electrical cord thicker.
If you had chickens 100 years
ago in America you would've most likely used a hand cranked corn sheller every day to keep your flock fed.
Thanks to Global Cycle Solutions
now you can give your hand a rest and get all your corn shelling done
with pedal power.
The device can be unattatched
so you can operate the bike for transportation or hook up another
clever gadget to charge your mobile phone or flashlight or whatever
else you can imagine that needs a little power.
The cost is 60 dollars plus shipping which seems like a bargain.
I think we've finally found a product that will help Lucy figure out
that she's not allowed to steal food scraps from the chicken pasture.
Just minutes after the new
chick made it back to mamma Lucy went sniffing around the fresh
chick trail. It didn't take her long to follow it to the chicken
pasture. I just happen to be watching when she got too close to the Zereba K9 lawn and garden
electric fence controller. The backward leap she made seemed to
break a few laws of doggie physics.
It's easy to set up. Just wrap each end of the perimeter wire onto the
wing nut at the bottom. It uses something called direct discharge
technology which eliminates the need for a grounding rod. With a
maximum range of 1500 feet the K9
electric charger makes an excellent solution to keeping unwanted
pets out of sensitive areas. Expect to pay about 25 bucks for the unit
and maybe another 20 to 200 depending on how long of a perimeter you're
protecting and the quality and quantity of the fence posts used.
Mike
Turner tells the story of hitting a deer with his AeroCivic in this
short video.
If you're inspired to learn
more about homemade aerodynamic automobile modifications then you'll
want to check out the Ecomodder.com
website. It's a community of above average people taking fuel effeciency into
their own hands by experimenting with aero modifications and sharing
their results.
I first blogged about Mike
Turner towards the end of
July of last year.
Imagine my surprise when I saw him and his AeroCivic at a farmers
market down in South Carolina this past Friday.
Turns out he's got some new
ambitions on adding an electric 5th wheel
to push the car under certain road conditions. At the moment it's not
economically feasible due to the high cost of good batteries, but it
might not be too long before some clever engineer comes up with
a better and cheaper battery that perhaps is somewhat environmentally
responsible to produce.
If you'd like to learn more
about Mike check back in tomorrow to see a short video interview I did
with him where he describes what happened when he hit a deer with the
AeroCivic and how it just dented the hood and flipped over the top.
He's also got an excellent
website which has a
generous supply of construction images while the
AeroCivic was being born.
We had a close call today.
The electricity went off, which prompted Anna to make some adjustments to the do
it yourself table top brood box to keep the heat in. Once the juice
came back on I went out to set the light back up, not knowing the new
upgraded light can not be closer than 18 inches from anything
flammable.
Fast forward about 20 minutes
and I'm smelling smoke. Luckily I got there in time to remove the
smoldering wood chips and adjust the lamp accordingly.
The chicks are fine, and I
learned a valuable lesson about heat lamp safety.
I found this car seat heating
pad at a thrift store a couple years back thinking it might come in
handy for something farm-related in the future.
There's an interlock switch
that tells the heater if anyone is sitting on it or not which needs to
be bypassed for this application. Hook up a 12 volt DC power supply and
you've got yourself a homemade do it yourself heating pad for
sprouting sweet potatoes and anything else that needs to be kept warm
during these cold spring nights.
Very simply put, everything that sits at a higher altitude in a gravitational
field has potential energy. The trick is to convert that potential energy
into something we can use, like e.g. kinetic energy that we can use or convert
into electrical energy. Kinetic energy is the energy embodied into something
that is moving.
Water is a prime candidate for tapping potential and kinetic energy, because
of its abundance and the fact that it is usually a liquid under normal
conditions. Either we use the flow of water directly (e.g. low head hydro,
or wave power), or we use the height of a body of water (the "head") to create
a high-velocity stream of water.
The crux of the matter is how do you get a flow of water or a large body of
water, since water doesn't flow uphill? This is what is called the
water cycle, or hydrologic cycle. Our friend the sun (again) heats water
and vaporizes it. The water condenses at cooler (higher) places and runs
downhill. So hydropower is indirectly solar power as well. The water (sitting
higher-up in the gravity field) is just a storage medium and carrier for the
energy.
Wind
Again it is ultimately the sun that drives the wind. Very simply put, sunlight
heats earth and water, which heats the air. Hot air rises, causing a flow of
air from colder parts. Of course there are lots of other phenomena at play;
the aforementioned hydrologic cycle has a large part in it as well.
Geothermal energy
The temperature of the earth increases with depth. This is known as the
geothermal gradient. It is mostly caused by the aforementioned nuclear decay
happening inside the earth. So ultimately this is also solar energy.
Now a peculiar property of heat is that the higher the temperature, the more
efficiently you can convert heat into mechanical energy, which is the most
used form to provide transportation and is the most-used precursor to electric
energy. In most places the gradient is between 25 to 30 degrees Kelvin (or
Celcius) per kilometer depth, which means you've got to drill a pretty deep
hole to get at the really hot stuff, unless you're near a geologically active
area. Of course you don't need a very high temperature for heating your
house. If you've got enough water of say 27 degrees Celcius (80 F) you could
very well heat your house with it. Of course, drilling a hole over a kilometer deep
is quite expensive.
These are (hydro)carbons (i.e. chemicals mostly built up out of hydrogen and
carbon) formed by anaerobic decomposition of buried dead organisms, over
geological timescales. Organisms can be plants, or creatures that feed on
plants, or creatures that feed on other creatures. If you follow the chain
back, you'll come to plants collecting solar energy and using it (via a
process known as photosynthesis) to convert carbon dioxide into organic
compounds, mainly sugars.
So essentially, fossil fuels are chemically stored solar energy! The problem
with fossil fuels is that we're currently using them at a much faster rate than they
are formed. Meanwhile, the carbon dioxide released by burning them influences
the climate.
Wood and other plant matter
Since these were the basis for fossil fuels, they hardly need explaining. If
they aren't dried before burning, a substantial part of their energy will be
consumed by evaporating the water in them. The energy in this water vapor is
usually not captured and is lost.
Ethanol
Ethanol can be made via fermentation or as a petrochemical via the
hydration of ethylene. Of course, only ethanol produced by fermentation can be
considered carbon-neutral.
Fermentation is the process where sugars from plants are converted into ethanol
by yeasts. The sugars in the plants, again, are formed by photosynthesis.
The problem with this process is that it results in a lot of biomatter that is
of no use to the fermentation process. For example only the grain seeds can be
used for ethanol production. Most of the plant is useless in this way.
Producing cellulosic ethanol would make this process much more
sufficient. Another worry is that growing plants to produce ethanol might hurt food
production.
But again, the root source of the energy embodied in ethanol is the sun.
Biodiesel / vegetable oil
These are lumped together because biodiesel is usually made from vegetable
oils or used cooking oil, via a process called transesterification. These
oils are pressed from seeds or fruits or beans of plants. The main reason to
make biodiesel is that diesel engines usually require modifications to run on
straight vegetable oils, while biodiesel requires little to no modification of
a diesel engine.
As with ethanol, only a small part of any plant can produce oil. And the same
oils that can be used for biodiesel are also used as food. The process uses a
strong base like NaOH or KOH as a catalyst, and produces glycerin as a by-product.
Since it is made from plants, the real energy source is again the sun.
So where does the energy we use actually come from?
Radiation
In stars, hydrogen atoms undergo fusion producing helium. A very small part of
the mass of these atoms is converted into energy which emanates from the sun
as radiation. This is one of the two basic energy sources.
Fissionable elements
The other primary energy source is also formed in stars, but in a different way. When a star
substantially bigger than our sun runs out of fuel, its core collapses and the
star explodes in a process called a supernova. During this process, very
heavy elements can be formed that release energy when they are split. These
are called fissionables, and they are the second primary energy source.
One should realize that nuclear fission happens naturally in every fissile
material. This is known as nuclear decay. Without this process we could
not exist, since it is this process that is largely responsible for the fact
that the earth's core is still liquid, which helps to keep us warm and
generates a magnetic field that protects us from cosmic radiation. The heat
flow from nuclear decay inside the earth is around 30 [tera][]watt. (30 000
000 000 000 Watt!)
At least one instance has been found where a
natural nuclear fission reactor has existed and run for a few hundred thousand years.
Before we speak about energy, it is useful to lay some groundwork to
understand it better. Most people, when talking about energy sources, are
really talking about energy carriers. Think about gasoline, coal, ethanol,
water, wind. Where does their energy actually come from?
The conservation of energy law and the first law of thermodynamics
state that energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only change
form. Einstein showed that mass and energy are equivalent, leading to the
famous equation E=mc².
So physically, there are no "sources" of energy, because it doesn't just come
into existence. It just looked that way to us before we understood what energy
is. What we see as an energy source is just energy being taken from a carrier
and transformed from one sort into another. But since the use of the word
"source" is so ingrained, I'll not confuse you be being a stickler for accuracy.
While it is possible for most kinds of energy to be transformed into other
kinds without loss (e.g. dropping something converts potential energy into
kinetic energy perfectly), it is impossible to convert thermal energy into
other forms with 100% efficiency. This is usually called the
second law of thermodynamics; systems tend to evolve towards larger
entropy.
In mechanical systems, friction usually consumes a part of the energy put
into the system, and dissipates it as heat. That is why machines are not 100%
efficient. The ubiquitous ball bearing uses rolling resistance to reduce
friction. But by using fluid bearings it is possible to reduce friction
considerably more. Small machines are usually less efficient than big ones.
One
of the most popular topics among homesteaders is alternative
energy. We've done some thinking in that direction ourselves (and
recently posted a series on assessing your
site for microhydro.)
Unlike gardening, though, which is largely intuitive, really
understanding alternative energy requires some grounding in
physics. My high school physics is unbelievably rusty, and I
suspect many of our readers may be equally out of practice, so I
thought it would be a good idea to bring us back up to date in a
lunchtime series.
This is where Roland
came to the rescue. Regular commenters have
probably noticed lengthy, well-thought out comments by Roland in the
past, often correcting our engineering mistakes. (Oops.)
Roland is a design and manufacturing engineer in the Netherlands, and
when I asked him if he might be interested in writing a lunchtime
series about energy, he quickly whipped off a primer on the physics of
energy sources. I have to admit that I'm beyond impressed at his
writing skills since English is not his first language --- I barely
cleaned up what he wrote at all. If you're similarly enthused,
maybe we can tempt him to write another series for us in the near
future.
This short video provides an
accurate yet boring picture of how the
rental chipper cuts a rug.
Our share ended up being 1/3
of the weekend time which worked out to be
65 dollars.
It was a great opportunity
that would not have been possible without
our neighbors' suggestion of sharing the time and the aid of their
tractor to pull the thing all the way back here. Well worth waking up
early tomorrow morning to drive it back to it's home in the big city.
I imagine this might be the
closest thing we have to participating in
an old fashioned barn raising which is too bad because this neighborly
cooperation thing is a pretty darn good feeling at the end of the day.
The
final step of assessing your stream for microhydro is doing a bit of
math to determine the creek's power. I'm simplifying a bit here
because you will lose some power due to friction as the water rubs up
against the inside of your pipe, but this formula is good enough for
estimating whether your creek is worth looking into further.
Power
output (continuous watts) = Flow (gpm) X Head (ft) ÷ 10
If you'd rather have
your estimated energy output in kwh/month so that you can compare it to
your electric bill, continue on to this formula:
Kwh/month
= Power (continuous watts) X 0.72
So, it's finally time to
see if our little creek passes the test. She puts out 20 gpm of
water and has a head of about 3 feet. So:
Power output = 20 gpm X 3 ft ÷ 10 = 6 continous watts
Kwh/month = 6 continuous watts X 0.72 = 4.3 kwh/month
Sadly, our little creek
failed miserably --- that would be enough to keep the lights on in our
house, but nothing more. As a rule of thumb, you need either a
large head or a large flow to make microhydro appealing, and our little
creek had neither.
On the other hand, we
have several other possibilities on our property that look more
appealing. If we were willing to pay a lot for a run of the river
system, or to build a big dam, our primary creek would definitely
provide all of our power. On the cheaper side, it's possible that
it would be worth our while to tap energy from the spring that comes
out way up on the hill, although it does stop flowing during dry
weather.
Finally, I'm curious
whether there would be a way to make electricity from the water running
off the barn roof if we installed gutters. I envision using tanks
as a storage system and just letting the water leak out slowly, rather
than buying expensive (and environmentally unfriendly batteries.)
I estimate that nearly 4,000 gallons of water flow off the roof each
month, but I guess that's only 0.09 gpm. Back to the drawing
board....
The
other important measurement to take when assessing your creek for
microhydro is pressure or head. The two terms are different
measurements of the same thing --- potential energy just waiting to
turn your turbine and make some power.
Many homesteaders pipe
water from a spring down to their house, and the energy in the water
line can be tapped for microhydro power. To measure pressure
directly in such a situation, install a gressure gauge in the line and
read the dial.
If you don't already
have a water line in place, you're better off calculating a stream's
head
rather than measuring pressure directly. Head is simply the
change in elevation between the highest and lowest points of a stream,
and it can be measured in several different ways. If you have a
gps or watch with an altimeter, this can give a rough measurement of
the respective elevations, but I found the water level method (outlined
in the embedded video) to be the
simplest.
To measure head using
the water level method, find an inflexible length of pipe and start at
the stream's highest point. Completely submerge the pipe, then
slowly lift the downhill end out of the water. Creek water will
flow out of the pipe's downhill end until it is raised level with the
uphill end, at which point water will stop flowing. Measure the
vertical distance between the downhill end of the pipe and the ground
and you have the change in elevation between the two points. Now
scoot the pipe downstream until the uphill end rests where the
downhill end used to be, and repeat your measurement. Lather,
rinse, and repeat until you run out of shampoo...er, reach the end of
the stream. The head is the sum of all of the elevations measured
along the creek's length.
The downfall of our
property's creeks is their valley-bottom flatness. Our small
creek has the largest head, and even there the total change in
elevation is
barely over three feet. Granted, microhydro applications can work
with as little as 2 feet of head, but the setup becomes much pricier if
your head is less than 50 feet.
Last
year, a couple of friends teamed up and bought us a dozen beautiful blueberry
plants in honor of
our wedding. We were sorely unprepared, so we only managed to
whack down box-elders and open up the canopy, then roll the logs out of
the way and plant the bushes in new ground. This oversight caused
a lot of problems since I couldn't really get the lawnmower around the
logs, and by the middle of the summer, our blueberry patch had turned
into a weed patch. Luckily, the blueberries survived the neglect,
and I promised them a more weeded existence this year.
We
spent the morning Wednesday clearing up the tree carcasses in the
blueberry patch to make this year's mowing much easier. Mark's
hard work with the chainsaw netted us half a cord of
firewood, now drying in the woodshed, and my branch piles are growing
too. Our chipper rental date is tentatively set for
this weekend, but Lucy didn't want to wait --- she did her part to
increase the farm's wood chip supply while we cleared the brush.
We're finishing up our series
on homemade chicken feed over on our chicken blog
this week.
Despite
wanting to consider energy efficiency first, I was still curious
whether the copious water on our farm would be a good fit for
microhydro power. The first step in assessing a site for
microhydro is to measure stream flow. Scott Davis suggests two
easy methods.
The
weir method
is used in
large streams or rivers. The water flows through a notched weir
that forms a waterfall. You can use various tables or formulas to
determine the flow rate of your creek based on the width and depth of
the water in the weir's notch. I didn't feel like constructing a
weir, so I moved on to option 2.
The
container method
consists of finding a spot where all of the creek's water runs through
a culvert or pipe, then sticking a five gallon bucket underneath.
Time how long it takes for your bucket to fill up, then use the
following formula to determine your stream's flow:
Flow
(gpm) = Container size (gal) ÷ Container fill time (sec) X 60
As you can see in the
embedded video, I found a spot where a
huge root mass had channeled all of our smaller creek's water into a
waterfall, so decided to try out the container method of estimating
stream flow. I couldn't fit a five gallon bucket under the
waterfall, but a one gallon cook pot slipped right in between the roots
and filled up in 3 seconds. Our flow in that creek is
approximately:
Flow
(gpm) = 1 gal ÷ 3 sec X 60 sec/min = 20 gpm
Our
smallest creek's flow is pretty low, but is definitely within the realm
of microhydro power. In fact, Scott Davis notes that you can get
power from streams running as slowly as 2 gpm (gallons per minute.)
hydro2Power usage numbers were the first part of Microhydro that caught my
attention. Scott Davis considers a
system rated at 50 to 100 continuous watts to be the bare essentials
level (running lights and small appliances). This equates to only
35 to 70 kilowatt-hours per month! The
amount of juice put out by even the so-called modern conveniences level
seems
inconceivably low at 75 to 125 kwh/month.
For comparison's sake, the average American household uses 936
kwh/month. During our lowest energy month ever (this past June),
we
came in at 270 kwh. Running a household on 75 kwh/month seems
almost
inconceivable to me.
But Scott Davis makes the excellent point that artificially low
electricity prices in North America have led to extremely wasteful
behavior. Specifically, he notes that electricity should never be
used
for making heat --- since you lose a lot of power every time you
convert energy from one form to another, burning coal to make
electricity to make heat is a bad idea.
His example household
that
runs all of the modern conveniences on microhydro deletes any heating
appliances from the mix. Clothes driers, of course, are replaced
by
the good old solar
clothesline. Rooms are heated with wood or passive
solar while water is heated with solar hot water heaters in the summer
and coils around the wood stove in the winter. Finally, cooking
is
done on propane (or, I would add, on a rocket stove.)
As always, the best and
cheapest way to save energy is to become more
efficient, so I think we'll do some basic efficiency tricks before
saving up for an alternative energy system. Our biggest energy
hogs are clearly our electric stove (which heats our water as well as
cooks our dinners) and our back-up space heaters, so these seem like a
good place to start.
Microhydro:
Clean Power From Water
by Scott Davis is written at a sixth grade reading level...and that's a
good thing. I'm far from ready for an installation guide;
instead, I just wanted to know if microhydro is feasible on our farm.
Although most people
with an interest in alternative energy go straight to solar cells,
microhydro
can be a much more economical option if your terrain is right.
I've read estimates suggesting that consumer-level microhydro systems
are between 5 and 40 times as cost effective as photovoltaic systems,
in large part because water is much less intermittent than the sun so
you don't need as many batteries.
Scott Davis divides
microhydro systems into five levels, only two of which are of interest
to me. The bare essentials level will run lights and small
appliances (like a microwave, radio, telephone, blender, stereo, and
laptop) while the modern conveniences level adds in efficient
refrigerators, freezers, and well pumps. A microhydro system
running the bare essentials can be put together for as low as $2,000
(or possibly even less if you scrounge some parts) while the modern
conveniences level can cost two to three times that much.
Finally, an alternative energy source that wouldn't put us into debt!
Somewhere in the middle
of the morning Thursday, the homemade
storage
building began to
feel like inside
rather than outside.
I could tell because Mark went outside, leaving the door ajar, and I
came along behind him and closed the door to keep the room warm.
And it was warm inside. Despite
being snowy and barely above freezing outside, once Mark fired up the
wood stove, the building heated up surprisingly fast. We don't
even have the insulation up in the ceiling yet, but within an hour we
were shedding our coats and working in our indoors clothes. I
guess we've been losing a lot
of heat from our exterior wood
stove to the outside!
I wonder if,
rather than saving up for an efficient
wood stove, we
should instead
make another small building and install two small wood stoves,
relegating the trailer to summer use. Not this year,
though! The garden is already starting to pull at my brain,
begging me to finish up winter chores and start the pruning.
(The photos above show
what I've been up to while Mark
was putting in the door --- covering the walls with a nice, smooth
plywood. I find myself getting lost in the swirls of the wood
grain.)
Remember
our huge pile of
firewood? We
ran through it unbelievably fast --- first the power was
out for two weeks
and we had to keep a big fire going just to keep the trailer above
freezing due to lack of a fan. Then we had two weeks of below
freezing temperatures and again had to keep the fire raging to keep us
warm. The result is that the 1.75 cords of wood that we thought
would last all winter lasted a mere month.
So in January, we went
back to electric heat. I hated to give in to the coal-fired power
plant, but our firewood supplier took our $50 down payment and dropped
off the face of the earth. Due to major environmental guilt, I
keep the trailer between 40 and 50 degrees when heating with
electricity, which is really quite comfortable if you wear layers (and
are used to it.)
That's all a long
explanation for why Joey
came in his truck last week instead of his car --- he wanted to drop
off a load of firewood for his poor, freezing baby sister. The
firewood was much appreciated, but the truck got stuck due to
completely treadless tires. Rather than calling a tow truck to
haul Joey out, we called our mother and begged her to come pick Joey up
so that Mark and I could take advantage of this opportunity to haul
gravel for our driveway. (We ordered some of that from our hauler
too, but we really haven't heard from him in over a month....)
On Monday, Mark babied
the truck out of the mud (now thawed and thus a bit less precarious)
and took her to town to get new tires. We thought the two back
tires we needed to replace would come to about $300, but Mark came home
with a receipt for only $140 --- he had discovered the wonder of
retread tires! If you, like me, have never heard of retreads,
you're in for a treat. Old tires end up in a factory where
they're tested for safety and have the old tread buffed off, then a new
tread is is applied. The end result is nearly as good as a new
tire (and every bit as safe), for a fraction of the price.
Apparently, at this time, only big tires (R16 and greater) are
retreaded, so most of them end up going to large-scale trucking and
bussing fleets, but farmers are also retread fanatics. If you
have a truck that needs new wheels, retreads seem like the way to go!
Check out our ebook about
living simply and quitting your job.
We've had a really good test
for the storage
building roof today
thanks to a steady stream of rain. No leaks so far while we begin the
process of measuring, cutting, and installing the plywood that Anna
worked so hard to bring in yesterday.
Kristie
Lu Stout has an interesting post about this exciting new product
that will allow everybody to generate their own hydrogen from water and
store it in a safe, low pressure battery-like container. No word yet on
how much it might cost, but plans are to have a tabletop model
available by the end of 2010.
Getting off the grid with
solar or wind has always come back to battery storage. If this
technology improves, it could replace most of those expensive and toxic
chemical batteries and bring alternative energy within the reach of the
common homesteader.
As
part of my continued obsession with lower-energy cooking, I
decided to try to make a haybox to cook my chicken carcass down into
stock Sunday. Someone (Heather?) had emailed me in response to my
Dutch
oven post,
telling me that you can bring a pot of incipient soup to a boil, wrap
it in towels, and leave it alone for the afternoon. The cast iron
and towels will hold in the heat, and the soup will cook itself.
While researching rocket
stoves,
I stumbled across a mention of hayboxes, which seem to work on a very
similar principle to Heather's idea. You fill up a box with hay
(or other insulation), put in your boiling pot, and leave it alone for
several hours. I've seen figures suggesting that using a haybox
with long-cooking recipes like chicken stock will save 80% of the
energy you would use to simmer the stock on the stove. You should
leave the pot in the haybox somewhere between once and twice as long as
you would have left it on the stove. If you're worried about
bacteria, bring the whole thing back to a boil for a few minutes on the
stove before serving.
So how did my experiment
go? I brought my carcass and water to a boil and tucked it into
an old comforter in a cardboard box. (The image on the left shows
the pot before I bundled the rest of the comforter over the top.)
Our house temperature was low on Sunday --- 50 degrees Fahrenheit ---
but when I peeked in six hours later, the pot was still steaming and
the stock was a lovely yellow. Success!
A
few of you were as intrigued by the rocket stove
concept as I was, and Roland's comments sent me searching the web for
more information. Basically, I wanted to know if I could design a
slightly modified rocket stove made out of found/bought materials to
simplify construction. I was also interested in any updates to
the design that might maximize efficiency.
Preheating
the combustion air
The drawing shown here
is Roland's suggestion for preheating the combustion air to increase
efficiency, in much the way that efficient
space-heating wood stoves
work. A search of the web turns up contradictory pages --- folks
who have tried similar methods are split on whether it increases
efficiency or not. Many sites suggest that the conventional
design already preheats the combustion air by passing the air intake
underneath the burning fire, so I think I'll stick with that.
Insulation
Insulating the burning
chamber is another important factor in rocket
stove efficiency. The official Aprovecho design calls for making
your own fire bricks, which are rated at about R10 when fully
assembled. Roland's suggestion --- perlite --- has an R-value of
2.7 per inch, so four inches of loose-filled perlite placed between an
inner and an outer wall could be a much easier option than making our
own fire brick. (For future reference, other folks mention using
materials such as vermiculite (R2.08 per inch) and pumice (R2 per
inch).)
Body
materials
I've seen various DIY
rocket stove options using found or bought
materials, and the ones that caught my eye used nested stove
pipe. The image shown here is my revised version of the official
design made out of one big stove pipe, two pieces of smaller stovepipe,
and an elbow to connect the smaller stovepipe pieces together. As
Roland mentioned, the bigger stovepipe might be replaced by a metal
bucket --- otherwise, I'd have to add some kind of cap to keep the
perlite from coming out the bottom. I'm envisioning the pot
sitting on pieces of rebar stuck through the exterior walls rather than
welding anything together.
There's a bit of math
involved in deciding how high the interior
chamber should be and how much air space should be left between the pot
and the skirt -- more on that later!
Our homemade
storage building
continues to be a learning experience. When we started out, I
blithely said, "Let's put in as much insulation as possible despite the
cost," and Mark agreed. What I didn't realize is that you have to
plan for your insulation needs from the get-go.
The map and chart at the
top of the page show EPA's insulation recommendations for new
wood-framed homes when heating with gas, heat pumps, or fuel oil.
(They recommend more insulation if you heat with electricity, and don't
even give you an option for heating with wood.) We're in their
zone 4, which means we should have at least R30 in our ceiling and R13
in our walls. The latter is easy, but the former is a bit of an
issue.
Assuming
you're using fiberglass insulation (which fits our wallet and
our remote setting), you need thicker wall or ceiling cavities to fit
more insulation. A typical 2X4 wall will hold up to R15 --- if
you try
to cram R19 in, you compress the insulation and, I believe, actually
get less insulative value than you would have with a lower rated batt
of insulation.
Our original rafters are 5.5 inches deep, which
would only allow us to put in R19 insulation up there --- makes me
chilly just thinking about it (although I think the trailer ceiling has
about R13.) So we extended our rafters with some two by fours,
giving us the space to increase our ceiling insulation to R30.
For future reference, here is the cavity depth you need for some common
insulation r-values:
3.5 inches --- R13
6 inches --- R19
9 inches --- R30
12 inches --- R38
Most of our building
project has been very forgiving of my learn-as-we-go mentality, but
insulation requires some forethought. For those who might want to
try their own hand at building --- shun the fault I fell in!
Check out our chick waterers, perfect for day old
chickens.
While
I'm on the subject of more efficient stoves, I wanted to do some
research into efficient wood stoves for space heating. Our exterior wood stove
is a good choice for heat on our farm since wood is a renewable
resource (and is cheaper than most other options), but I'm still
concerned about the pollution that comes out the chimney.
Luckily, scientists have been plugging away at building a better wood
stove and have developed models that can eliminate 90% of the smoke and
use only about half the wood.
The new,
energy-efficient stoves come in two categories. The first, shown
to the right, is a non-catalytic stove that increases its combustion
efficiency using firebox insulation, a large baffle that extends the
gas flow path, and pre-heated combustion air (which is actually a lot
like the reasoning behind the design of the rocket stove.) Wood stoves with
catalytic converters (shown on the left) can cut emissions of even the
most efficient non-catalytic stove in half, but they don't seem to use
less wood. Although I'd love to be polluting less, catalytic wood
stoves aren't the best choice for most homesteaders. The $100 to
$200 catalytic converter wears out within two to six years, and you
need to be relatively adept at tinkering to keep it in prime operating
condition. The startup costs are also higher
So how much does a new,
energy-efficient wood stove cost? From what I can find online, it
seems like new non-catalytic wood
stoves start around $1,200 and go as expensive as you can
imagine. In 2009 and 2010, there's a 30% tax credit in effect for
buying wood stoves with at least 75% efficiency, which is a great deal
if you can use it. If you buy and burn a lot of wood, a more
efficient wood stove might pay for itself even without the tax credit
--- I estimate that we'd start saving money after about 4 years if we
bought the cheapest model.
Although efficient wood
stoves seem like a good idea, I'm still not ready to take the
plunge. I'm very curious about whether our current wood stove
could be retrofitted to increase its efficiency. Has anyone tried
that out?
Rocket stoves are currently
being
introduced to several third world countries to help lower the pressure
of firewood harvesting on native forests. The stoves are designed
to need very little wood in order to heat up your
cook pot, so trees get left in place. I love the concept, but
can't help wondering --- why don't we promote rocket stoves in the U.S.
too? I'd never tell someone in a third world country to institute
environmentally friendly measures I wasn't willing to put into practice
in my own life.
Before I knew it, I'd penciled a rocket stove onto our ten year plan
and started researching. First, I discovered that you can't use
rocket stoves inside because they're basically an efficient
hearth. So, in practice, they'll probably be part
of a summer kitchen in our long term plan --- something I want anyway
because I always dread turning on the stove on a sweltering summer day.
The video I've embedded above is well worth watching if you'd like to
build your own rocket stove. It looks like we could probably make
one quite cheaply, though it would take quite a bit of trial and error
to figure out certain parts. The sheet metal looks an awful lot
like a stovepipe to me, suggesting that we might not need welding
skills (the part that scared us off building our own initially.)
Alternatively, we could buy one pre-made for around $125.
Have any of you built or used a rocket stove? What did you think
of it?
It's
been a beautiful week of spring, with temperatures above freezing and
highs in the low fifties, but winter is returning this week.
Until finishing our
water line moves its way to the top of our list, we've instated a new rule
--- fill the thousand
gallon tank
as soon as it empties halfway. This is harder than it sounds
since there are usually only a few days a winter month when the ground
is thawed enough to pump water and the creek is clean instead of
flooded brown. We got lucky and stocked up on Sunday.
Meanwhile, I've doubled
the number of milk
jugs of drinking water we keep on hand
--- now we've got twenty eight gallons. We should be okay on both
drinking and washing water for at least two or three weeks regardless
of flood, freeze, or lack of electricity.
The temperatures rose above
freezing at last, and the month-old snow began to creep back toward the
hill. The first daffodil leaves peeked through the soil in the
sunniest spot, and an amorous cardinal started to sing.
I celebrated by washing
our laundry, pumping water down the hill from the thousand
gallon tank since our water line is still frozen. Then I
turned off the pump...and water kept right on flowing. Gotta love
capillary action! Now I know that I only need to use electricity
to get the suction started --- after that, water will flow four feet up
out of the tank all by itself!
The team at KMS
woodworks has made some interesting progress in bringing together a compact solar charger that can be used for several low
end power needs like a lap top. They are still in the testing stage,
but it looks like they might make them available for sale in the 300 to
350 dollar range in the not too distant future.
It would be worth that much to me if it could power our modem and both
lap tops for a few hours per day, especially during a power outage.
I really like the idea of having a portable off the grid option,
especially one that can be taken on a back pack to provide the power
for blog posts in some random ancient megalith site or more Mayan ruins.
Using this utility pump to fill a proper water container feels like a
huge improvement over last
year's 5 gallon bucket method. The biggest downside was lifting the
bucket back out once you filled it as full as you dared.
10 years ago I found this hand cranked radio in the discount bin of a
Radio Shack just after the Y2K hype was settling down. Most hand
powered devices use a small dynamo that charges an even smaller battery
that will eventually stop holding a charge over time. This unit uses a
medium sized spring that slowly releases its mechanical power after the
energy is stored in the form of hand cranks. It will hold up to 40
cranks, which equals about 20 minutes of power.
The radio is very basic
and also works on a little solar cell that is embedded in the top, but only if
you place it directly in the sun. I like to have it on hand as a back up
power source and someday dream of building a larger version that might
be more capable of powering something like our modem and router
and maybe a laptop or two. It only produces enough electricity for a
small flashlight, which can be considered night time entertainment
during a power
outage.
The
University of
Michigan has made some impressive strides in the area of human
generated electricity.
Their latest prototype is a knee brace that
harnesses the energy normally lost when the knee is bent. It can
produce up to 5 watts of power, which would be enough juice to run 10
mobile phones.
It would be interesting to see how much electricity the average person generates
over the course of a day?
(I know Mark has already told you some of
this, but it's so momentous I wanted to post about it too!)
Mark and I finally got away from the farm Wednesday to visit my family
in Bristol. When we got home, we were thrilled to see the
powerline back in place atop its poles! We scurried into the
trailer...only to discover that the juice was still off.
Remember how I
lost faith on day 1 of the outage? Now it was Mark's
turn. When the electricity was still off on Thursday morning, I
could see his spirits plummeting into his (cold, wet) boots. It
was too rainy outside to heat anything up on the wood stove for lunch,
so we shivered in the kitchen, eating cold chicken sandwiches and
bemoaning our fate.
Then I gasped.
"Oh, no!" Mark responded. "What's wrong now?"
Speechless, I pointed down the hall to where our CFL had flickered into
light. "Look, Mark! Electricity!!!!!!"
We stared in rapture at the glowing bulb for a couple of minutes, then
jumped into action. Mark plugged in the stove fan and freezer
while I started up the fridge and internet. I turned on the
drinking water pump and filled
up our emergency milk jugs of water, then we headed out to pump
water from the creek to fill the thousand
gallon washing-water tank. (We'd been caught, very
unfortunately, with it nearly completely empty, which really made the
outage more difficult than it should have been.)
Next, Mark plugged in the
golf cart while I filled pots of water to heat on the stove.
Near instant hot water, and plenty of it! After skimping for
nearly two weeks, washing each day's dishes in a scant gallon of melted
snow, I was so
excited that I filled our sink with gallons and gallons worth, even
though there weren't really that many dishes.
Before I was able to calm down enough to check my email, I had to twirl
around outside in the snow, singing at the top of my lungs,
"Elec-tri-ci-ty! Light! Heat! Water!"
My weather-forecaster buddy warns that bitter cold weather is on its
way tonight, with all next week slated to stay below freezing.
Right at this instant, though, I can't muster any doom and gloom at all.
We got our 5th visit yesterday from the electric company. I tried
appealing to this guy's sense of duty by casually mentioning that we've
had four other
visits, each ending with a bit of looking around and head
scratching at how deep our creek is.
"I didn't come all the way from North Carolina to just look around," he
calmly stated. His confidence filled us with with a newfound hope and
sure to his word the lines were back up before he headed back home last
night.
We spent the morning waiting, trying not to think of all the obstacles
that could be keeping the flow of cheap electricity from coming back to
our trailer when all of a sudden the hallway light came on and the
power outage of 2009 was officially over.
I spotted this small crew off in the distance while I was working
outside on the do it
yourself storage building project. It gave me a glimmer of hope
that something was going to get started today, but that was not
meant to be.
Maybe they're getting everything ready for an early start tomorrow?
This post is part of our Two Weeks Without Electricity series.
Read all of the entries:
After
a week of hunkering down and getting by, we went back to work on Monday
morning. The first order of business was to clear the rest of the
driveway of fallen limbs. Last week, we just cut through the ones
between the car and the road, but I wanted to be ready to drive the
golf cart from the cars to the trailer to ferry in supplies. So
we pushed and pulled tree-sized branches out of the way to clear our
path.
Later, we scooted across
the creek on a log to keep our feet dry. In the neighbor's field,
we ran into two more power company employees, scouts who promised that
the chainsawing guys weren't too far behind. I'm not quite sure
why it takes two separate on-foot scouting expeditions and a helicopter
to assess the damage, but I'm not complaining as long as the real
workers aren't too far behind!
The Ford
Festiva stalling issue came back when the gas tank hit the 1/4
level point. Something the chainsaw repair guy said after he tuned up
our Stihl recently got me to thinking. His comment was that he had to
use his special carburetor bath 4 separate times to get all the gunk
cleaned out. This prompted me to give the Festiva another Seafoam
treatment, and it took over half the tank before the problem finally
went away, but it's running like it should now and it's all thanks to
Seafoam.
The snow is almost gone, which means mud, mud,
and more mud.
My mom gave us some baby crib pieces back in the summer left over from
an emergency turkey transport she was constructing which have really
worked out well as a catch for my wood splitting station.
It was a real
bummer to watch a nice dry piece of firewood
split its way directly in the mud.
We
had hoped to visit my mom for Christmas, but I awoke to rain. The
water melted the top layer of snow, and by mid afternoon the creek was
over its banks. This has really been a crazy month
for floods!
Instead of going visiting, we celebrated Christmas with a full day of
generator
power. It felt as sinful as living in a mansion,
running a hot water heater 24/7, or buying an SUV --- a guilty
pleasure. All day long, I was able to peruse the internet, try
(in vain) to get our new camcorder working, and fill up drinking
water jugs in anticipation of colder weather. The trailer got so
warm from all of that fan action
that I stripped down to my t-shirt and even managed to wash up for the
first time in far too many days!
Over the course of the day, we discovered that the generator runs much
longer on a tank of gas than I'd previously reckoned. The tank
holds four gallons and the generator runs for about twelve hours on a
full tank, so electricity by generator costs about a dollar per
hour. Definitely not an every day splurge, but feasible on a
special occasion.
Want to splurge? Check out our microbusiness ebook
which you can download for just $4.
This post is part of our Two Weeks Without Electricity series.
Read all of the entries:
We had a visitor from the sky come out this afternoon just before
dinner. It seems like this iron bird was inspecting our downed power
lines, which gave us hope that we might get our power turned back
on before next year.
This post is part of our Two Weeks Without Electricity series.
Read all of the entries:
Someday, we'd like to be off the grid by
choice, so we've considered this extended (and still ongoing) power
outage as a useful dry run. It's been very helpful in giving us
an idea of infrastructure we need to be adding to the farm, and
reminding us which aspects of our electrified lives are really just
optional.
Here are the top
electricity-free items we've added to our wish list for next
year. Some are to buy, but a lot can probably be made from the
parts at hand.
DC fan to keep the wood stove blowing hot air while the
generator's off. (Daddy suggested that we look into the fans that
cool off car engines --- we might be able to get one cheap at a
junkyard.)
Alternator setup to get juice out of the golf cart so that we can
run low electricity items (like the fan and maybe a router!) for much
longer periods.
Rocket stove (which we might be able to build) and a real Dutch
oven for easy cooking.
A second sub-zero sleeping bag so that we can both stay toasty
during short-term emergencies.
Solar LED lighting. You'd be amazed at what a difference it
makes to have enough light to read by on long, dark, electricity-free
nights. Flashlights have served us well, but we'd really like to
take some of those solar yard lights you can get so cheaply in the big
box stores nowadays and turn them into indoors lighting with the solar
panel outdoors for charging. Even though our current bulbs are
CFLs, I suspect that this would lower our electric bill during our
on-the-grid times too.
I also need to remember
to keep more library books on hand --- I'm starting to run a bit low,
which is a pain since the creek has flooded as the snow starts to melt
so I can't get to the library. We would have had a much easier
time with water, too, if we'd had the water line completely buried and
the big tank all the way full. Still, all told, I think we've
done pretty well so far.
When Mark mailed our
week's chicken waterers (made without the benefit of
electricity) this week, he overheard a lady in the post office
complaining about how difficult the power outage was since she couldn't
do her dishes. I feel so lucky that Mark's ingenuity has enabled
us to want for very little during this power outage!
This post is part of our Two Weeks Without Electricity series.
Read all of the entries:
Despite
the phone dying again on Monday night, Tuesday was an outstanding
day. By mid morning, the sun started to poke through the clouds
that had kept the sky white for the last three days. Solar
radiation quickly started melting the snow, and it only took a bit of
hoeing to work our way out of the driveway.
On the one year
anniversary of our marriage,
we ended up in the parking
lot of the same courthouse...but this time we were poaching
wireless. Our goals for this trip to town were really quite
simple --- we wanted to fill up some big jugs of gas so that we could
continue to run the generator an hour a day and I wanted to upload all
of my past posts (thus the poaching). While we were out, I
figured we should also stock up on some other essentials --- citrus,
chocolate, and flashlights.
Back home, we thawed out
the top of our wedding cake on the wood stove and ate it along with
some chicken cooked in my homemade
Dutch oven.
And then two miracles! First, an electric company employee came
wandering through our yard. He was lost and needed help reaching
the road, but the mere fact that he was scouting the downed power line
gave us hope (even though he said it may still be a week before we get
juice.) Finally, halfway through our generator hour, I picked up
the phone and heard a dial tone. Internet at home! Rapture!
You
all have been astoundingly patient with my shut-in, run-on blogs.
Now you're up to date! Starting tomorrow, we'll be posting in
real time (and will hopefully have a video to share with you.)
Meanwhile, check out our microbusiness
ebook for some Christmas reading.
This post is part of our Two Weeks Without Electricity series.
Read all of the entries:
Monday
night as we read by solar flashlight, the telephone rang! I'm a
confirmed phone-o-phobe, but that sound was the nicest one I'd heard in
days. I leapt up and pounced on the receiver, then enthused in my
father's ear, called my Mom and sister, and even talked to my equally
phone-phobic brother.
Earlier that day, I'd
resorted to putting a letter to my mother in the mailbox to assure her
that I was alive. When I got her on the phone, it was clear that
Mom had been worried, but she also told me how she'd often been snowed
in at my childhood farm and unable to contact her own mother for a
solid month. "No news is good news," Mom said...then admitted
that she'd emailed two of my neighbors to check on me.
Daddy gave me equally
good words of wisdom. "Isn't it nice to go without so that you'll
really appreciate power when you have it?" I have to admit that
in the past I've wished my ancestors hadn't opened up Pandora's box of
industrialization. But living without for just three days, I can
completely understand how we ended up in our current era of modern
conveniences.
Tuesday morning, the
phone was once again dead. Farewell, civilization!
One
of these days I'm going to get up to date, really.... For now,
though, enjoy reading our backstory, then check out our microbusiness ebook.
This post is part of our Two Weeks Without Electricity series.
Read all of the entries:
When we learned that
electricity was a long way off, I decided it was high time to start
really cooking rather than hastily heating up leftovers and hot dogs in
the wood stove. Our exterior wood stove is singularly ill-suited
for cooking, with a sleeve around the stove providing hot air to be
blown indoors and also preventing the surface from reaching cooking
temperatures. The inside is generally far too hot to cook in
without charring.
But I had nothing else
to keep me busy, so I decided to create my own Dutch oven. I dug
up an old roasting pan out of the barn, set it up on a cinderblock, and
filled it with hot coals shoveled out of the wood stove. A pizza
pan fit well on top, and a big lid enclosed the heated surface. I
had moderate luck "baking" chocolate chip cookies but great luck frying
up bacon. Maybe the latter tasted so good because of the bit of
leftover chocolate melding with the bacon juices?
Meanwhile,
I was starting to get worried about our water situation. We still
had seven jugs of drinking water, but I could easily see us running out
and the dirty dishes were stacking up. I was pleased to discover
that packing a pot full to the brim and then half again as high with
clean snow melted down to a nearly full pot of warm dish water in three
hours on the wood stove. I added a bit of bleach for safety and
revelled in the feel of warm water on my hands as I cleaned up the
dishes.
In a pinch, we probably
could have gotten away with drinking the melted snow, but our generator
made that unnecessary. We've allotted ourselves an hour and a
half of generator time every evening, plenty of time to turn on our
drinking water pump and UV light to fill up another dozen or so milk
jugs. And time to feed my blogging bug!
This is the last installment on the Monday CD. Stay tuned for more details soon (I hope.) Meanwhile, check out our microbusiness ebook.
This post is part of our Two Weeks Without Electricity series.
Read all of the entries:
Monday
morning, I was bound and determined to get to town, if only to let my
mother know that we hadn't been wiped off the map. Mark and I
both geared up and filled our backpacks and hands with the bare
essentials --- chainsaw tools, mixed gas, empty gas jugs in case we
made it to town, my laptop for the same reason, two oranges in case we
got stranded on the way, and the chainsaw. We only have one pair
of waders between us at the moment, so Mark had to cross the creek,
change into his work boots, then toss the waders back across the cold
water to let me cross. I was very glad that he has a good
throwing arm.
The driveway was just as
much work to clear as we'd thought. It took a couple of hours of
hard sawing and dragging to move the pines that had fallen across the
road, but the work was for naught. We got in the car...and
watched as its tires spun vainly on the icy snow.
My
next thought was to walk to the neighbor's house a quarter of a mile
down the road and beg the use of their phone. The public road had
been plowed, but was seriously icy, making me glad that our little car
hadn't made it out of the driveway. Along the way, we ran into
another neighbor who gave us the bad news --- everyone in the area has
no power or phone. The electric company is hoping to restore the
juice by Christmas to those on the main road, which I figure leaves us
looking at New Years. Time to hunker down for the long haul.
We bought the Champion 3000 watt generator about a year ago for back up power. I took it out of the box, made sure it was all there, and
installed the wheels and handle and pretty much forgot about it till
this past Friday when our power went out.
It was a great relief to feel its gas-powered throaty engine come to
life. We only have about 4 gallons of fuel on hand, so we decided to
ration our generator time to a few hours in the evenings. This way we
can alternate between the freezer and refrigerator, giving them each
about an hour of cooling off time, charge our laptop batteries, and
power the blower fans that send heat from our exterior wood burning
stove to the inner sanctum of the trailer. The new stove configuration
is able to keep the back room heated during the night without the fan
as long as we keep it fed with fresh firewood.
We've got a bit of kerosene, and nearly a full tank of propane as back
up for heating and cooking, but I don't think we'll need it if we're
able to get out tomorrow and top off our generator fuel.
I was most impressed with how easy this generator started. I barely
have to pull on the rope and it springs to attention.
I'm not sure when we can expect to have our electricity fixed, so I
guess I'll be expecting nothing and gearing up to be ready for anything.
This post is part of our Two Weeks Without Electricity series.
Read all of the entries:
Our
first full day without power brought us back to basics: animals, water,
food, and shelter. The animals, luckily, weren't too hard.
Huckleberry and Strider came bounding up to the trailer through snow
over their heads (nearly a foot deep now, but finally slacking off) and
Lucy pranced and played in the drifts.
The chicken tractors
were completely covered, and one had half-collapsed under the weight of
the snow. I brushed the tops clear and saw hungry hens eager for
their breakfast...once I'd shoveled out the tractor so they wouldn't
get their feet wet.
Without electricity, the
fan on our exterior wood furnace doesn't run, which means that most of
that heat dissipates into the great outdoors. Mark first rigged
an ingenious setup using a DC fan and the golf cart's battery banks,
but the plastic fan quickly melted out of whack and stopped running.
At this point, I gave up and curled myself under a sleeping bag on the
sofa with Huckleberry and a book. But Mark wasn't deterred.
He dusted off the generator, and soon we were back in business!
Lights, power, action! Heat! Even electricity to top off
the cold level in our fridge and freezer and keep our food safe.
Luckily, we had drinking water stored up, but food was going to be
difficult since we cook on an electric stove. It took most of the
next day for me to figure out how to cook in and on the wood stove,
ending up with food that wasn't charred at one end and cold at the
other. But at least we had the basics we need to keep the farm
rolling along.
The
trees started splintering before sunset on Friday. Heavy snow
weighed down their limbs and kept falling, heaping up four inches
deep. By dark, the wet snow took down an electric line somewhere,
and suddenly the trailer powered down. Off went the furnace fan,
the computers, the fridge. I called the phone company and was
informed that power is off all over the county and that they expect it
back on by Sunday at midnight.
The snow kept
coming. When we went to bed, it was already six inches deep, and
all night gunshot-like cracks heralded trees crashing down. I
slept fitfully and was out at dawn to assess the damage.
During power outages,
I'm constantly expecting a miracle --- the lights will flicker, the
fridge will hum, and we'll be powered again. At first light on
Saturday, I discovered that wasn't going to happen anytime soon.
Our powerline was down straight up the floodplain, across the garden,
and then up the powerline cut going the other way. I called my
mom to share the excitement, hung up, and then picked the phone back
up. It was dead.
These new peel and stick solar panels are more
efficient than the fragile glass panels and cost about 300 bucks less.
This new design allows for more robust applications, such as on the
roof of a golf cart without the fear of your expensive panel breaking.
Having the sun constantly charging your batteries prevents the sulfates
from building up and extends the life of the battery bank by a minimum
of 25%.
Since a golf
cart is sometimes considered an electric car by the IRS you can
deduct a nice 30% of your solar investment and you may even qualify for
a few hundred bucks per year as a battery credit. These kits usually
cost about 1600 dollars, weigh about 4 pounds and take about 15 minutes
to install.
Add an inverter and it can double as an emergency back up power system
for your home if you can manage to park it close enough to reach an
extension cord to.
Since Mark
now has our wood stove up and running, I figured it was high time
to gather some kindling. The windy days last week knocked down a
lot of dead, dry branches out of trees in the floodplain, and it only
took a few minutes to pick up a heavy hauler load.
Last winter when the chainsaw wasn't working, we discovered that the
miter saw makes short work of small and medium-sized branches.
First, I broke all of the small branches over my knee, then I sawed
through the larger branches.
I was a bit shocked at how small one heavy hauler load of kindling
becomes once sawn to size --- the resulting pile was only about knee
high. That should be enough to start a week's worth of fires,
though. Warmth sure does make me happy!
We now have the exterior
wood burning stove operating in the half finished storage
building. This must be what it felt like when early cave men
figured out that keeping your woman warm equals keeping her happy.
Although people used to live on our farm
during the Depression, the farm's only drinking water supply is a
shallow, hand dug well that tested positive for coliform
bacteria. Granted, many people drink from shallow wells and
springs just like this around here. You build up a tolerance and
tend to do just fine, but if you give water to unsuspecting visitors,
they get sick.
To avoid this problem, we spent our first year or two lugging drinking
water back to the farm. My mom would rinse out empty milk jugs
and save them for me, then we'd fill them up at her house when we went
to visit. Other times, we'd fill up our milk jugs at various
other friends' houses closer to the farm. Sometimes, we were able
to haul the jugs of water back to the trailer in our four wheel drive
truck, but a lot of the time the truck wasn't working and we'd just
carry them in --- it's not too hard to haul a jug of water in each hand
while walking Lucy in the morning.
Water feels more precious when the supply is limited. We cooked
and drank the special water, going through about a gallon a day between
us. For everything else, we used creek water, treated with some
bleach when we did dishes, but plain for other tasks.
Then we splurged on our water
filtration system and were blessed with unlimited, safe drinking
water. I felt like we'd moved from a third world country to a
second world country!
The only flaw is that we still haven't quite gotten our water line
all the way buried since my wrists can't take much heavy digging and I
tend to set Mark on tasks that seem more important. So this week
we fell halfway back to our third world country. I dragged all of
the old milk jugs out of the barn, rinsed them out, and filled them up
with our treated water. By Friday, the freeze set in and we
started dipping into stored water.
It's funny to read on other peoples' blogs about disaster preparedness
--- people filling up empty milk jugs just in case the world comes to
an end or a heavy storm knocks out their power for days on end.
It doesn't really feel like a disaster to be pumping our drinking water
during thaws and drinking out of jugs during cold snaps. I guess
it's all a matter of perspective....
In addition to lacking space,
China has a serious shortage of wood. Even a hundred years ago,
King noted that trees were scarce and small, and even those trees were
heavily utilized by cutting the lower limbs for firewood.
As a result of the wood
shortage, most buildings were traditionally made out of straw and
clay. Although the straw and clay tended to need frequent
replenishing, the old building materials were perfect for throwing in
the compost pit.
Farmers were also very
good at utilizing other types of plants for fuel. Woody vegetable
stems (especially rice straw) were frequently burned. Although I
approve of making full use of the resources at hand, King's description
of the cooking fire requiring one person to constantly feed it small
bits of straw sounds like a bit too much work.
Otherwise, King made the
Chinese traditional agriculture system look so rosy that
I find it hard to remember that, a century later, farming looks a lot
different. If you're interested in what's happened in the last
hundred years, you should check out the overview
on Wikipedia.
It should only take a few hours to dig back out, and the new plan is
to add a small roof like the one on our home
made firewood shed to prevent this from happening again.
We had a slight problem with one of the
retaining walls for the refrigerator
root cellar. It seems like a sturdy metal bracket will be needed to
secure the wall to the side of the refrigerator.
You might notice a
faint circle of melted snow around the chimney output. This was more
noticeable a couple of hours ago, which is a nice way to illustrate how
warm the air must be that's coming out.
We decided to fill the wall that gets the most sun with windows
we've managed to salvage from a few different places. Thanks Bill B.
The landfill can be a good place to find used windows for a project
like this if you don't have generous neighbors who've cleaned out their
barn recently. New construction sites have also been known to provide
the frugal builder with discarded windows if you know where to look and
who to talk to.
This post is part of our Building a Storage Building from Scratch
series.
Read all of the entries:
The refrigerator
root cellar is now generating a cool and damp atmosphere which
needs to be protected from insects looking for the perfect home to ride
out the winter.
It was easy to secure down the lower vent screen with several small dry
wall screws. They drive straight into the plastic without the need for a pilot hole.
The top vent was just as easy. Cut some scrap screen material to the
desired length and use some electrical tape to fasten it down.
This post is part of our Fridge Root Cellar series.
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The gaskets on the refrigerator
root cellar are old and don't quite seal up the two doors. A simple screen door latch is all it takes to solve that
problem. I installed them a little on the tight side in order to pull
the door firmly closed with no gaps. The refrigerator latch required a
piece of scrap wood behind the handle for the eye to bite into.
This might work for a low budget fix to a working refrigerator that has
a weak gasket. I've often heard a new gasket can cost nearly as much as
a good used refrigerator.
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I was almost going to buy one of those heavy
PVC caps for the refrigerator
root cellar chimney, but when I walked past a foam faucet cover I
stopped in my tracks, looked at the PVC cap in one hand and the foam
cover on the shelf and weighed the coolness factor of the foam geometry
along with the fact that it was only a buck compared to the 6 dollar
price of the PVC.
Anna thinks it adds a sort of mother ship look to it and I agree.
The next step will be to drill some holes in the side towards the top
of the chimney and then attach some screen material to keep out any
unwanted bugs.
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We dream of someday leaving the mainstream
electricity grid behind and becoming energy independent. Although
solar panels or hydropower have been top of our list in the past, Jerry clued me in to the Jean
Pain method --- a technique of converting wood chips into methane,
heat, and compost. We're nowhere near taking the plunge to that
level of production, but maybe it would be a loftier goal than saving
our pennies for solar panels?
It took both of us to lower the refrigerator
root cellar into its new home below the earth. Once it was in place
I decided to make some side panels from a couple of 2x4's and some
scrap wood. It seems to be helping by keeping the dirt away from the
hinge and door opening as I begin to bury it.
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Two drill holes and a few minutes with the jig saw was all it took to
create the new chimney hole for the refrigerator
root cellar.
I also removed the foam and plastic barrier that separates the freezer
from the rest of the refrigerator. One of the metal shelves slid right
into its place, which will provide plenty of open space for the cool
air to flow while at the same time working as a sturdy surface to store
apples on.
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After thinking about lowering the refrigerator
root cellar into our new hole I decided to see just how hard it
would be to strip off the metal coil from the back of the unit. It
turns out it only took about a half hour to take everything off
including the compressor and wiring harness. I think it's going to make
sliding down the hole a bit smoother and safer.
I'm planning on mounting some screen material over the new holes in the
bottom. The good thing about this approach is that it will be easy to
add more holes if we think the air flow needs to increase.
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We decided to dig the refrigerator
root cellar down a bit deeper to accommodate a large cinder block
in each corner. I thought two
post holes in the middle might help to increase the cold surface area
that will hopefully stream a steady flow of cool air up through the
refrigerator and out the soon to be installed vent pipe.
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The new chipper/grinder
seems to have a problem with sticks and branches any bigger than
what you see here in this short video. It's sort of a hassle to stop
everything and flip it on its side to reset it once you send something
through that's too big.
It still might find a place here on the farm, but today the verdict is
too small and wimpy for the level of mulch production we are looking
for.
The old gas powered chipper/grinder got moved up to the front of the
get fixed line this week in an effort to increase our mulch
production. Its 50 year old Briggs and Stratton engine won the
first battle yesterday afternoon, but today I figured out exactly what
to do with that stubborn motor.
Delete it.
The first step was to remove the four bolts that hold the engine to the
frame. Then it's easy to lift out. Next fabricate some sort of
vibration plate for the electric motor to be attached to, I used a scrap piece of 2x6. Once you get the pulley
lined up secure the whole thing down to the frame and wire up a switch.
The Spud Buddy is a device
that gets mounted to the side of an old broken freezer or refrigerator
and uses a fan and a steady supply of water to keep the inside
temperature and humidity where it needs to be in order to function as a
root cellar.
I've never seen one of these in action, but the concept seems solid
enough to work. Expect to spend about 160 bucks on the unit, and maybe
some extra pennies per day for the additional electricity.
I was experiencing some power trouble with the
Ford Festiva last week. It stalled out three separate times during a
short trip to town. My first thought was that the repair
last year with a dab of silicone to the ignition coil was giving
out, but then I decided to try a 10 dollar can of Seafoam. You put this
stuff right in your tank and top it off with whatever fuel you usually
use and presto...I noticed an immediate improvement. I could now get up
hills with only dropping down to 4th gear instead of 3rd or 2nd.
Technically speaking something happens that cleans some internal stuff
to make things run smoother. No more stalling! I'm now a believer in
Seafoam.
This week's theme has been biomass
transport. Mark, the innovator, tripled our leaf productivity by
changing our collection method. I had been raking up leaves that
fell on the driveway, stuffing them into our leaf
bag, and driving back to the garden to spread them one bag at a
time. Mark figured out that we could put two to three leaf bags'
worth of leaves into the heavy hauler with some judicious smooshing and
a tarp tucked on top.
He also figured out that we could rake the leaves down off the hillside
above the driveway and get scads of leaf matter for very little
effort. There's a chance the bared soil will erode some, but I
have to weigh a little bit of erosion that will never reach the creek
against extra transportation (aka, coal burned in the nearby power
plant to pollute our air and water). Some days, it feels hard to
be human --- no matter what we do, it causes harm somewhere.
The good thing about the hillside leaves is that we get some duff with
them, which helps solve our
nitrogen problem. Meanwhile, Mark has started peeing on some
of our leaves to give them an influx of nitrogen and help them
decompose faster. Suddenly, the garden feels under control!
We topped all of the beds in the mule garden this week, which means we
only have about two to three times that much garden left to put to bed
for the winter.
Want a free golf cart?
Move to Oklahoma! A federal tax rebate currently allows people
buying street-legal golf carts to write off $4,200 to $5,500 of
the cost. Add in the state rebate in Oklahoma and your golf cart is
free. (Although Oklahoma may have figured out this loophole and
be working to fix it.)
Even if you don't live
in Oklahoma, now might be a time to buy that golf cart for your
homestead. We've been thrilled at the way our
electric golf cart acts as a utility vehicle on the farm, hauling
leaves, firewood, and bodies (living, of course.) It runs through
the mud with ease, only has to be charged every month or two, and
hardly ever breaks down.
Right now, I believe the
only types of golf cart that fit the federal subsidy are made by
Tomberlin and Star, the cheapest models of which can cost as little as
$2,000 once you take your tax credit. It sounds like a great
deal, but some folks suspect these cheaply bought but sturdily
constructed golf carts will be available used starting next year for
extremely small sums. So maybe it'd be better to wait and save
even more....
At the end of last winter, Huckleberry tore
apart the air pipe that channels heat from our exterior wood
furnace into the trailer. Then the stove pipe rusted
out. We were trying to hold
off on lighting our wood stove until the end of the week when we would
hopefully have the floor of the shed up and could just move the stove
there, rather than fixing it in its current location.
All weekend, I shivered in a house that barely reached 50 degrees,
baking large dinners to warm up the kitchen. Mark had a space
heater in his room, but I didn't want to break down and use
electricity. Finally, Monday morning, the interior temperatures were in the
thirties. Yikes!
So sweet Mark threw
together some short-term fixes on the wood stove and lit us a
fire. By mid morning, I took off my winter coat, sweater, gloves,
and second pair of pants. Ah, wood heat!
As a side note, you can see that our wood shed is already halfway
full. It looks like we may run out of space before we run out of
wood and will have to build a second shed. A good problem to have!
The Club Car continues to be a work horse for
hauling in heavy loads, even during this wetter than usual spell we've
been going through.
I think it's time to consider building a frame towards the back to
upgrade the carrying capacity from 2 full golf club bags to something
more farm appropriate.
Mark wants to live in a
round house some day, and I have to admit that the idea has merit every
time I go visit Joey's yurt. The circles and lines in the yurt
always capture my interest and I end up taking photos that could almost
be abstract, like the one on the left.
Joey considered taking the yurt down for the winter, but instead he
bought a Two
Dog Stove, specially designed for safe use in tents. The
stove is so small that Joey was able to carry it in by himself soon
after our most
recent flood. Setup took mere minutes with the ultra-cool
telescoping stove pipe --- no need to laboriously fit pieces together;
just grab both ends and puuuullll.... I'm curious to see how well
the stove keeps Joey warm during his wintry visits to the farm.
I was struck by a throwaway sentence in Good Farmers, a book about traditional
farming practices in Central America and Mexico. The author
noted that traditional farmers usually lack heavy equipment and funds
to pay for lots of hired help, so they have to take a process-oriented
approach to big tasks rather than being project-oriented. For
example, if they have a steep hillside that they'd like to terrace and
create farmable ground, traditional farmers are more likely to put in a
spare afternoon here and there building the terrace bit by bit rather
than renting a bulldozer to get 'r done.
Homesteading is slowly teaching me to slip out of my project-oriented
mindset and enjoy the journey. For example, the wood we bought
was delivered to our parking area, half a mile from our house. At
first, I was considering just taking a day and making golf cart trip
after golf cart trip to bring the wood back to its shed. But
instead I've been taking in a load of wood whenever I need to drive the
golf cart out to the cars anyway. A week later, our shed is
already a third of the way full!