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.
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.
Read all of the entries:
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.
This post is part of our Fridge Root Cellar series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
This post is part of our Fridge Root Cellar series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
This post is part of our Fridge Root Cellar series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
This post is part of our Fridge Root Cellar series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
This post is part of our Fridge Root Cellar series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
This post is part of our Fridge Root Cellar series.
Read all of the entries:
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!
September
gave us 6.2 inches of rain over 10 days. The days that didn't
rain were generally cloudy, so I put off doing laundry until we both
ran out of the essentials.
Tuesday, I gave in and washed anyway. Three big loads of laundry
later, I had filled up the clothesline and moved on to draping clothes
on the grape trellises. I didn't even get to our bedding before
running out of both laundry detergent and space on the line.
Four hours of clouds later, it started to rain. I scurried around
and gathered up damp clothes, then draped them all over the house while
a quarter inch of water fell on our garden. Wednesday turned out
to be the prettiest sunny day in a long time, so I carried all of the
clothes back outside,
flipping clothes over halfway through the day so that every one finally
dried all the way through. Just this once, I think if I had a
clothes drier I would have used it. (Good thing I don't have one!)
Despite the astonishing amount of effort required to get there, we have
enough clean clothes to last us for our entire week long
honeymoon. Most of the posts for the next eight days will be
auto-posted --- saved up topics we never got a chance to serenade you
with during the height of the growing season. The farm will be in
the able hands of my brother, and we plan to not even check email for
most of the time. So if anything looks funny on the site, I
promise I'll fix it when I get home!
Unfortunately you can't float across the
blue waters of the Caribbean with us, but you can give your chickens
clean water with a homemade chicken
waterer.
When installing the 2 middle posts for the new firewood
shed I decided to take a cue from the original barn builders and
use a simple stone support for each 2x3.
The tarp is a temporary addition for the next couple weeks to protect
several garden items from the rain as they cure.
Read all of the entries about
our Firewood Shed Building Project.
The project took a couple of afternoons and cost about $5.
The Walden Effect for me is a path from noise to nature and what
happens when you manage to surrender to the everyday beauty of life. My
understanding of its exact nature is a work in progress, although I think it's
safe to say that it has an emotional element that relates to dealing
with unresolved conflict of whatever one feels strong about.
Youtube user Holofractalist has made a clever edit of a Greg Braden
interview that goes a long way in explaining what I'm trying to say
here. I liked it so much I watched it twice in a row and I'll most
likely review it again and again. A fantastic 10 minute chunk of
enlightenment that I give 2 thumbs up.
We cut down a small sassafras tree today to provide a crude floor for
the firewood to be stacked on in the new shed. I think it's going to
work nicely.
The next step will be to install 2 middle columns to support the center
stack on each end.
We bought a large truck load of firewood
recently due to the fact that we were too busy to cut any this summer,
and we've decided the extra time we get will be well worth the price.
I believe it takes a certain amount of experimentation when contracting
out essential chores in order to find the most comfortable balance
point of having enough time and money left over to relax. I already
have a good feeling about the value of this wood pile and how much time
it will free up for a few projects
we have on the drawing board this winter.
Microhydropower.com has
some exciting new products that allow the common guy to harness the
power of a small stream for the purpose of generating electricity.
Their setup will cost you about 3 thousand bucks...and then you'll need
to figure out how to store it and get it where you need it.
Not a bad solution for home made electricity if you live close enough
to a steady stream of water.
The folks at pedalpowergenerator
have added some step by step videos to the free diy section.
This setup takes advantage of an adjustable V-belt, which will cost you
50 bucks. You take the tire off your wheel and replace it with the
V-belt to get maximum efficiency from the exerted energy. The
Duracell power pack functions as a storage unit with a built in
inverter and usually sells for a bit over a hundred dollars. The
generator will cost you more depending on which one you choose, and all
that's left is the charge controller and blocking diode, which can be
had for under 100. I almost forgot the bike stand....which could be
made from scrap material or you can just buy the industrial model.
I've been studying different versions of pedal
power over the years and would say this configuration is the
smartest one I've seen yet. If you add a small solar cell and reduce
your use you might just make enough power to get you through the day.
Hae-Jin
Kim has an interesting idea to harness the waste heat generated by
a typical refrigerator. It's not quite enough to function as a hot
plate, but 150 degrees might be able to dry a pair of socks or keep a
burrito warm? I wonder if this heat could be channeled to a small green
house structure for a steady flow of warmness as long as the
refrigerator is on?
Emily
Cummins is a 21 year old student/inventor who has come up with a
clever and simple way of using the sun to cool things like perishable
food and temperature sensitive medications. The concept works with no
electricity and can be built with materials like cardboard, sand, and
recycled metal.
It takes advantage of conduction and convection to create an
evaporative cooling effect. You place what you want to keep cold in the
interior chamber and either some sand, wool, or soil in the outer
chamber that gets saturated with water. The sun warms the water soaked
material...the water evaporates, reducing the temperature of the inner
area to 43 degrees Fahrenheit for days at a time. To recharge you only
need to add more water once your material gets dry.
We had another flat on the Club Car golf cart yesterday. It was on the
only wheel without an inner tube. That's 3 separate trips to the tire
guy in the span of a year.
The lesson to learn here is if you're going to use a golf cart under
heavy farm conditions then you might as well install inner tubes in all
4 tires and save yourself some time and energy.
The Boing
Boing crew pointed me towards the amazing results achieved by Mike Turner and the new aero
modification of his 1992 Honda Civic.
He's spent around 400 dollars and 250 hours of his time making the car
more aerodynamic. The inspiration came from some of the older designs
from the past that help to streamline air flow while decreasing fuel
intake.
This bit of tinkering has changed his drag coefficient from .34 to .17,
which can equal 90 MPG on a good day!
He claims that hitting a deer with a car like this scoops them up and
over with minimal damage to car and deer. That would make it worth the
400 bucks right there. Watch this 8 second video
if you have any doubts.
I jumped in the thousand gallon tank yesterday
morning to give it a good scrubbing, the only maintenance it has
received in months.
We get our drinking water from a well, but we use the creek for most of
our other water needs. Most folks who don't connect to city water
install a pressure tank, but we've found that a gravity system is
simpler and requires very little electricity.
When the tank gets low every month or two, we turn on the pump
for a few hours and top the water off. After that, gravity pushes
the water to the house to fill our sink, bathtub, washing machine, and chicken waterers.
We started out with a little 50 gallon tank on a tower by the house,
but we used up the water awfully quickly and were disappointed by the
pressure. A thousand gallon tank slightly uphill gives us much
better water pressure, approximately equal to what you'd get from city
water.
It seems like folks have been merging these two pastimes for several
years now. I'm intrigued by the inventive nature of pedal power being
used to cut grass, but our lawn is so bumpy and rough that it's just
not an option at this time.
What happens when you combine a small motor with some scrap tin and a
power source? Hopefully a new type of contraption that will make the
deer think twice before they enter our perimeter.
We finally solved the deer in
the garden problem, and the solution was so elegant we gave it a new
website. Check out our deer
deterrent website for free plans!
Dawn Rivers Baker has an excellent blog on microbusinesses
that pointed me towards a post on bootstrapping that I thought would be
worth sharing.
Tim Berry sat down with his wife recently and came up with 10
lessons they've learned over the last 22 years of running their
business.
At the top of the list was learning from your mistakes. It got me to
thinking how much we learned a couple of years ago from a failed
attempt to video tape and sell footage of local parades. We lost money
on the deal, and spent a lot of time producing each product, but those
lessons gave us some confidence and we were able to translate what we
learned about marketing to our next business idea. The contacts we made
along the way also helped to introduce us to the area and the people.
Looking back now I can clearly see how those early failures were necessary steps in the quest for a microbusiness that fits our lifestyle.
The June/July issue of Backyard Poultry hit the
streets on Saturday and I couldn't be happier with how Anna's full page
article on page 36 came out.
We've been getting some good feedback on how much happier chicken
chores can be with this new concept in backyard poultry watering.
It's exciting to see an idea go from the drawing board to reality in
the span of a few months. I was thinking today that our operation is a
level below most small business set-ups, which inspired me to call it a
micro-business. The name has been around for a while, and Lloyd Lemons is one of the
top sources for all things related to these smallest of businesses.
All four colonies are thriving and doing everything they should be
doing. The sugar water free ride is coming to an end as we've decided
it's time to stop feeding and let them get all their nutrition from the
local ecosystem.
Flickr user Kevin
Borland captured the amazing image above that still has the gears
in my head turning. This Amish family seems to have evolved to a sort
of steam powered solution to farm machinery, which seems brilliant on
multiple levels.
The homesteading community could learn a lot from observing how the
Amish solve problems in such simple and innovative ways. These casual snap shots provide us one of the few looks into this interesting culture due to their clever rejection of big chunks of
the world.
The C-realm podcast is an
evolving expression of a dynamic guy by the name of KMO. The C stands
for consciousness, and he has a way of choosing words and guests that
really take you down roads mainstream media could never even dream of.
I'm still going through his archive of shows and have really been drawn
in to the story that's unfolding. He seems to
be open to new ways of thinking when it comes to such subjects as
the re-location of community and agriculture. I think people who read
the waldeneffect might enjoy his show and I encourage everyone to give
him a listen. His new shows, which come out every week on
Wednesdays are something I now look forward to.
Paul Stamets is an interesting guy with a
genuine desire and belief that he can help heal some of the damage
humans have done to the Earth with the help of mushrooms.
If you don't have time to read one of his 6
books, then I suggest a recent interview
by Frank Aragona as an excellent introduction to the wonderful world of
mushrooms.
This is an exceptional 2 part interview from Frank's podcast archive at
agroinnovations.com, which is
totally free of charge. You'll learn how Paul got started with
mushrooms, his work with the government and petro-chemical industry,
and a great breakdown of the history and evolution of mushrooms and how
important they are for survival.
I've heard several podcasts lately and this one really charged me up
like no other. Frank posed some great questions and Paul took the ball
and ran a few enthusiastic miles with it.
Jock Brandis has turned his inventive mind from being
a Key Grip on B grade movies like the sci-fi comedy Normanicus to
helping poor folks discover a more efficient method of shelling peanuts
and other material.
The design
is simple and solid and can be built for around 50 bucks. The bulk of
the invention is two concrete cones, which can be formed with a set of
fiberglass molds that Jock's North Carolina company
provides. The latest incarnation uses pedal power to get the grinding
done while producing a fan effect that helps to separate the shells
from the nut.
Someday I'd like to build one of these and try to adapt it for the
heavy walnuts that drop from the trees around here.
How do you
make an air conditioner fit into a window that's just too small?
Samuel: Beckley, WV.
Delete the old window, put it away for safe keeping. Build up the empty
space layer by layer. Most folks will mount their unit in the middle in
an attempt to be symmetrical. I did this last year and missed out on
not having a window I could open.
The picture shows an alternate method of tucking it into the corner,
which provides more stability and just enough room for a small
window/door on the side. Building up the space in layers allows you to
use up pieces of scrap material, which keeps the price of this project
under the cost of a cup of coffee.
I made a discovery recently in my search
for some accurate and free pedal power details.
Pedalpowergenerator.com is a one stop shopping spot for everything
pedal power. The prices seem fair, and the pictures and diagrams are
easy to follow and understand.
We acquired an old exercise bike recently and I'm sure we can modify it
to produce small amounts of electricity. Thanks to pedalpowergenerator.com
I'm a few steps closer to understanding why a charge controller is
important and where the 15 amp blocking diode is wired. The guy who
runs the site is Brad, and he only requests a few pictures of your
project if you use his plans, and to be safe and take normal
precautions.
I've been having some trouble with the chainsaw and was ready to take it in for a tune up. Anna mentioned how she
read in the Nov/Dec 2008 issue of Countryside magazine that
fuel with a 10 percent ethanol mix was not good for 2 stroke chainsaw
engines. I checked at the gas station and sure enough it had a 10
percent mix of ethanol. It seems like most gas stations around here
sell the ethanol enhanced fuel, but I got lucky and found one outside
of Gate City on route 23 that advertised non-ethanol fuel.
Some folks will say it's not that important, but all I did was empty
out the 10 percent ethanol fuel and mixed up some 2 cycle fuel with no
ethanol and my problems went away. This guy
suggests that the problem can be avoided by using the high octane
gas, which tends to cancel out the ethanol effect. My chainsaw is of
the older generation, and I'm going to keep ethanol away from it if
that's what it tells me to do.
Dmitry Orlov came out with a book last year
titled "Reinventing
Collapse" where he compares the collapse of the Soviet Union with
what's going on now in the United States.
His attitude towards this bleak version of our future has a surprising
upbeat tone to it. He points out some simple things we can change now
to be better prepared for what he envisions as a tough ride.
I got attracted to his way of thinking by watching this very
informative interview
on Russian television. His blog
has even deeper articles he's written on the subject, including a
radical way of using sail boats to solve some of the problems he
predicts are already unavoidable.
We gathered another load of manure Tuesday afternoon. Last winter
at this time, our pickup truck was working and we hauled manure in the
truck and on a trailer behind the truck. I shovelled a lot of
that manure four times --- into the pickup, out of the pickup into a
heap on the ground, into a wheelbarrow, and then from barrow to
bed.
Phew!
This year,
without a pickup truck, we're instead shovelling manure into five
gallon buckets. Given our ultra-fuel-efficient car and the one
mile drive from farm to farm (8 cents per round trip), this method
actually seems to work better. We only shovel the manure once,
into the buckets. After that, we can lift the buckets into the
golf cart, and then pour them individually onto our garden beds.
But an even better way is on the horizon --- we ran into another
neighbor who told us that if we help him shovel out his barn he'll
drive a whole flatbed dump truck load to our garden. If Mark had
a more envious disposition, he would have been jealous at the lust
which leapt into my eyes....
March dawned cold and wet --- I hope the month
remembers to go out like a lamb. We scrambled to come up with
firewood, lucking upon a fallen Black Locust snag which was dry and
burned hot, though split only with much effort. Warmer weather
had better come soon or we'll be out of seasoned wood!
I spent most of the weekend lounging on the couch with the cats,
engrossed in my forest gardening book. Sunday evening, I pulled
my head out of the clouds long enough to walk Lucy, catching a glimpse
of a sleek mink by the creek which slipped into a hole before I could
get the camera out of its bag. Back inside, I checked out my
broccoli and cabbage seedlings, which are growing well (though a tad
leggy). Most have one true leaf and this one is already working
on leaf number two.
I rudely evicted what seemed like hundreds of
ants from a cozy piece of firewood I was chopping today.
It was a Gulliver
like moment where I felt briefly rotten for causing such a huge housing
problem for this little colony of ants.
That feeling lasted about 10 seconds and was quickly deleted with the
help of our roaming chicken and her appetite for all things small and
insect like. The warm fire in the wood stove also went a long way in
soothing my ant guilt.
If I had to choose one type of device that was
the most labor saving for us on this farm it would have to be our
collection of three submersible pumps.
We've had the Ridgid
1 horsepower sump pump for close to two years now and it's really
living up to its name. Our first pump was only a 1/6 horsepower which
was purchased for around 80 dollars, and it did a good job, but for a
little over 200 the Ridgid puts you in a whole new class of water
pumpage. We started out using it for garden irrigation and now have it
doing duty in the hand dug well helping our drinking water make it to a
set of filters inside.
I've got ours adapted to fit a typical water hose and each time I
fiddle with it I'm reminded of the early days when we first got to the
property here and there was no electricity. The baby apple trees needed
to be watered by carrying 5 gallon buckets from the creek, which was
not all that close by. It was a tough job, but a good memory. It's hard
to describe just how great it feels to be a part of testing and building
such an integral part of our infrastructure. I grew up always having
running water just a faucet away and took it for granted every day. Now
I get a rush of accomplishment whenever I hear the trickle and slush of
water making its way to wherever I direct it.
I spent the better part of an hour today
arguing with the nut to the far left here in the picture. I wanted it
to break free and turn freely, but it kept its arms crossed and
insisted on not budging.
The main problem was the lack of leverage. The nut is at the end of the
positive side of the flow and the fact that it wasn't stationary made
the job that much more difficult. After much inner debate I decided to
relent and let the nut stay where it was. I then squashed what was left
of its precious copper connector and bent it in a way so as to fit
snugly in the slot where the bitter end of a thick wire would go in the
new connector. Once tightened down the new configuration seems solid
enough to last another 250 thousand miles.
Electrolyzed
water is gaining some credibility with today's L.A.
Times report. It's still looked down upon in most circles like some
sort of snake oil, but Japan and Russia have been using it as an
alternative to toxic cleaning chemicals for decades.
It costs about a penny a gallon to produce with a machine that will run
you anywhere from 600 to three thousand dollars. The device takes a
small amount of electricity, normal tap water, and some dissolved
salt and produces hydrogen gas and hydroxide ions. One of the resulting
products is 10 times stronger than bleach without harming people or the
environment.
The down side is that it can't be stored for very long and it needs to
be measured to make sure it's at an effective level. The Japanese are
making the most progress by testing its ability as an air filter and
Sanyo is talking about a washing machine that promises to get your
clothes clean without nasty detergents.
Maybe someday in the future we can all replace bleach and other toxic
cleaners with this technology?
In what ways has the "Walden Effect"
life differed from what you originally had envisioned? What was
romanticized that turned out to be totally different or more difficult?
What unexpected pleasures did you find?
--Everett The concept of "Time Ownership" is one of
the unexpected pleasures that first pops to mind when I think of that
question.
It has taken some considerable distance from my previous corporate
life to fully realize just how little of my time I was able to
save for myself and how much of it was traded away for a paycheck and a
parking spot. I fixed copier machines full time...the words "full time"
being the operative point I'm trying to illustrate here. My time was
full of an endless list of chores that always served the greater good
of the company. My time off always seemed to have an edge to it because
deep in my mind I knew Monday morning was only a day or two away.
Before long you adapt to the less than healthy pace and forget what it
was like to own 100 percent of your day. You eventually convince
yourself that 48 hours on the weekend and a couple of weeks a year is
all you need to survive.
I think I'm in the last stages of my corporate de-programming and
sometimes it's a struggle to decide which hours go where for which
goal, but it's a beautiful struggle that fully belongs to me and at the
end of the day a by-product of that struggle can be felt in the form of
a warm fuzzy feeling in the pit of my stomach as I reflect back on a
noise-free day of getting things done on the farm.
The future looks brighter when you fully own your present, and I believe you
fully own the present by seizing all 24 hours of each day. Maybe that's
what those Latin folks were talking about a thousand years ago when
they were yammering about Carpe Diem?