Things I'll be learning in the near future
1. How to make my own music.
2. How to tell a story
with animation.
3. How to make our own
electricity.
4. How to be more in
touch with nature.
5. How to fly a
powered parachute cross country.
6. How to grow more of
our own food.
7. How to meet people
as weird as myself.
8. How to sail a boat
to Mexico.
9. How to make a Hobbit
cave. 10. How to be an alchemist.
I would also like to know who
really shot JFK, what really happened on September 11th 2001, and why Huckleberry never seems to be satisfied.
Image credit goes to coverbrowser.com
for sharing the secret of perpetual motion.
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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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Here is a great source for free books http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/. You can search by title or author. Sometimes I just roam through the catalog. Here is one for you-- The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 by Popular Mechanics Co.http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12655, another go to http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/titles/e and scroll down to electricity. Many times the subject is part of the title which makes finding specific subjects easier. Knowing authors names is the biggest help, but just browsing finds many things.
Pick a letter under title or author and start scrolling, you'll be amazed at what is there.
Have a look at Lister-CS derived low-rpm diesel engines powering an AC generator. Most of them can run on vegetable oil. Several companies in India and China are building clones. Search for "listeroid engines" and you'll get a lot of relevant links.
One could envision a scenario where you could grow enough oil seed to power the generator year round. Of course you'd have to figure in the power needs of an electrically driven oil expeller. According to this article, a listeroid engine driving a generator will consume about 1/4 of a gallon of oil per hour when delivering 2000 W of electricity.
This would be a carbon-neutral power solution. In essence you'd be using stored solar power. I'm not sure what the total efficiency would be like; I don't have a clue about how much acrage you'd need to grow enough oilseed.
But you can run the engine when the sun doesn't shine, and you could pump the coolant water a radiator in the house to help heat it in the winter.