The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Starplate snow load observations

starplate roof snow load observations

Our Star Plate roof seems to handle snow a little better than the barn.

The steep angle produced twice as much clearing when the barn roof tended to accumulate more each snow episode we've had.



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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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this made me remembmer a question I had. the star plate was, I thought, originally intended for the chickens. Now that ìt is the goat palace, where are the poultry keeping themselves?
Comment by deb Fri Feb 27 20:51:31 2015

I was wondering how you fared in the storms- I took the kids up the inlaws in Wise the night of the 20th, and the playing in the snow turned in to damage control as another foot of snow (not predicted) dumped on the foot already on their horse barn roof, then turned to rain making it very heavy. We worked for about two hours clearing that, many carports etc caved in. Then the basement started getting water in when the snow slid off the house roof and against the split level garage door and had no where for the melt water to go.

I was worried the roof of your old mobile home would go in or the rising creek would sweep you guys away. Then you didn't post a couple days....your followers were concerned. Do you have local neighbors to check on you?

Comment by Eric Sun Mar 1 09:45:59 2015

deb --- We actually have two other chicken coops. We use the one that gets the most sun (on the other side of our core homestead) for chickens in the winter and use the others for new sets of chicks in the spring (since life is easier if you don't mix chickens of different ages). We may or may not need the starplate coop for a second round of spring chicks --- we'll have to wait and see!

Eric --- Sorry we worried you (although I don't recall actually missing any posting days?)! Don't worry --- we've been in touch with some local neighbors, and my mom would never let a day go by that she didn't know all was well over here on our farm. :-) Luckily, our roofs seem to be holding up fine so far, despite not having shoveled any of them.

Comment by anna Sun Mar 1 10:07:44 2015





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