Minnesota Econaut

Tune in next week and see the replacement for

2009-06-06T19:35:00.000-07:00

Your correspondent's adventures continue at coastcruz.blogspot.com.

Wrapup

2009-01-31T08:04:00.000-08:00

As of Jan 31, the Minnesota Econaut project is cancelled, due to um, lack of alignment with the mission of Happy Dancing Turtle. I would like to thank Happy Dancing Turtle for the opportunity to do a permaculture design for this cottage, and especially for their support of implementing the first phases of it. (Rumor has it that in permaculture circles, a lot more gets designed than implemented.)

The solar water heat system is moving toward completion. The plant bed system for wastewater processing is under construction in the green house.

It's the season for planning what to do for the coming growing season. My recommendations would be as follows, assuming the goals from last year are still current. Let's review them:

Campus-Wide Overall Purposes of Landscaping and Gardening:
Food production, long term, fruit trees etc - want to see focus here.
Food production, short term, just to eat right away.
Soil building
Water management
Beautification
Experimentation and research - proof of Permaculture or other types of creation of healthy soils
Education
Cut down on dust

If it were up to me, I would continue with the basic plan of establishing an edible forest garden on the 3/4 acre L-shaped area to the west and south. Actually I was going for a savannah mimic which is more open.

Priorities for the outside:

1. Plant more nut trees
The original plan called for several nuclei of nut pines, oaks, butternut etc, and plum trees on the north side of the south berm.

2. Annual garden along path
The pathway should be extended farther towards the parking area and another fork towards the buildings to the north. The primary annual garden area should be along these paths. These garden areas need to be fenced for deer protection. It might be a good idea to angle the path more to the east so as to run along the berm we constructed in the fall to insulate the septic line. It's currently thickly mulched with wheat straw. If it was top-dressed with compost and good dirt it might make a very good garden area. Sort of a hugelkultur. (The most productive area of the west field was an edge where straw and composted horse manure were churned together by a caterpillar track. Big turnips.)

3. Stabilize and beautify ground adjacent to cottage
Mix some super-soil into the ground within 10 feet of the cottage and seed it with clover and wildflowers. This ground is on top of the horizontal frost skirt. The soil is poor and shallow and very subject to wind and water erosion. (The area to the west of the front door is reserved for a constructed wetland for a greywater processing experiment.)

Here is a survey of areas near the cottage which could maybe use some soil amendment such as your supersoil or composted manure. Most of them are sandy and prone to wind and water erosion. I had good luck getting some clover established last year in a small patch of pure sand, by mixing a couple of inches of supersoil into the top. I think it would be a good idea to move the summer parking area for the cottage back out to the original trailer parking area, and reclaim the entire trailer site (assuming its not being built on this year.)

4. Let the west and south field continue their soil building
They could use more nitrogen-fixing plants (I have a list.) Nitrogen-fixers require full sun, these areas are open and poor in nitrogen, so it's the right time for it succession-wise. The clover got a pretty good foothold last season. The soil should be tested again around May 20-27.

5. Crater touch-up
A lot of the area on the north is rutted and lumpy, I was thinking about dragging it with the bedspring so that it could be mowed. It might be a good idea to drag and overseed the crater with clover mix, give the ragweed some competition.

6. Irrigation tank
The water tower should be upgraded to a true rain barrel by installation of a gutter and first-flush rejecting contraption on the north edge of the roof. (It is conveniently located for watering the aforementioned garden areas to the east.)

7. Septic line
Sensor data indicates the freeze protection on the septic line (provided by the berm, mulch, snow cover, and 2 kWh/day heaters) is maybe just adequate. If any more digging is needed it should be done very early in the season so that plant cover can be reestablished.

8. Cob the soffits

9. The wood behind the solar collectors could maybe use some protection.
It's just bare plywood, I don't know how you'd paint or side it with the collectors up there already.

Priorities for the inside:

Reconfigure upstairs for more usable space.
I'd put a ceiling over the kitchen, expand the two upstairs rooms towards the middle, and give them both doors. The loft bridge would turn into a hallway right against the south wall where book cases could be placed. The stairs probably stay about where they are but need to be widened and not so steep.

Reduce the electric dependence of the cottage
or at least giving it a low-power mode. I believe there is a plan to add a solar electric system to the cottage but this should be accompanied by a load reduction plan. The nearly-completed solar heat system goes a long way toward this. The next step would be to change out the electric stove for gas. It could use a good recirculating range hood with carbon filter also.
There is a lot of other stuff that could be done. I still like the idea of

an upstairs water tank for passive shower capability,
and of

rigging up some way to use the outside cold for refrigeration.

Air-sealing
It would still be a good idea to do a blower door test and tighten up the air leaks.

Operation Biofilter

2009-01-14T19:24:00.000-08:00

Well it finally cooled off a little, sheesh, I was wondering when that was gonna happen. The air is pretty soft with any kind of positive double-digit Fahrenheit temperature. This week it's mostly subzero which has a nice crispy bite to it. Crunchy snow. When the sun's out and there's no wind -20 really isn't that bad. Sun down and wind up, though, you'll be like, Tommy Lee Jones what planet is this? Where's my space suit?

Well, with Phase Drainback of the Solar Water Heat Project nigh complete, the next project for the cottage greenhouse is plant beds for tertiary treatment of the "overflow" from the compost toilet bin. This is an upgrade over the current method of dealing with the overflow, that is, hucking it out into the yard.

The next phase of the Solar Water Heat system is hooking the solar tanks up to the domestic water heater and the radiant floor system. Phase Heat Me, if you will.

I had a dream about it last night. In the dream I tucked fifty benjamins under my pillow at night and waited for the Sugar Plumber Fairy to show up.

Dear solar water heat industry

2009-01-08T10:40:00.000-08:00

I think it's fair to say that on the solar electric (photovoltaic) side of things, that industry has its act together for grid-tied systems without battery backup, in that you can buy the panels, and one electronic magic box, and that's about it. From my point of view these systems aren't really satisfactory because if the grid goes down you don't have power, no matter how sunny it is out.

I was working on planning a grid-tied battery-backup system for myself. This was getting a bit complicated as there are several major components interconnected with various safety devices. These are kitted in different ways and I was trying to figure out what was the most cost-effective combination and how much of the work I wanted to do myself. It all became moot when I had to sell my PV panels to pay an insurance bill, ha ha, ain't that the oughts for ya.

Anyway I was pleased to see that the solar electric industry is getting its act together on grid-tied battery-backup. Outback has introduced a new product called SmartRE, which is the do-everything magic box, just add PV array and batteries. It won't be available until the second quarter of this year.

On the solar water heat front, I think the industry has its act together on solar for domestic hot water. You can buy a package. Not so for domestic hot water plus hydronic space heat. The solar loop part seems to be mostly figured out, drainback is the way to go. But they do not really know how to size the storage tanks. There is disagreement on system architecture - it seems there must be an anti-scald thermostatic mixing valve between the solar storage and the domestic hot water, but it's not clear whether the water for space heating should be the mixed water or the full-temperature storage water. Also, as far as I know there isn't a controller smart and flexible enough to control this kind of system. At the cottage here the system will have three pumps and three controllers to make it work. The cost of these controllers adds up. The installation requires a lot of skilled labor. I wouldn't want to do another one the way we did the HDT cottage, with one contractor doing the solar loop and another for the rest of it. It would be better to offer the whole thing as an integrated system.

Just to complete the system is costing about $14000. Throw in what it must have cost to put in the solar panels and the radiant floor tubing and I would bet you're up to $30000-40000. I think the Passive House people are right, insulation and air-sealing are a cheaper way to solve the heating problem. Unless the solar hydronic space heat industry gets its act together with slick package systems, I think in the future it will be a small, high-end niche business.

Ditzy gizmotronics

2008-12-30T11:40:00.000-08:00

Lately I've experienced a rash of failures in basic electrical equipment which really ought to be bulletproof at this point in history:

The Honeywell Winter Watchman line voltage thermostat locked on and overheated the root cellar after I changed the light bulb. The thing rattles a little when you shake it and it may be sensitive to the angle at which it's resting.
One of the two Stanley Heavy Duty outdoor timers which are running the deicing cables in the septic line keeps forgetting its programming. It's never really worked.
The compost bin vent fan quit. I suspect the power pack. It's putting out 24v and may have fried the fan.

These may be examples of quality fade. That is when your overseas supplier cuts one percent cost out of the product every week until the product life drops to zero (one of the unintended consequences of globalization.) Here's a good article about it.

'Quality Fade': China's Great Business Challenge - Knowledge@Wharton

A lot of the commentary in the media these days assumes economic growth will soon be back on track, led by the developing world (BRIC.) This is commonly taken as an independent variable, an exogenous driving function. I don't know about Brazil or India but in the case of China this is clearly turning out not to be true. Because their growth was export-driven and those purchases were debt-financed, they were living in the same house of cards as us, next room over. Lately I've been noticing other articles about troubles in China:

The crumbling of China's export market | Energy Bulletin

After Long Boom, China Faces an Industrial Downsizing - US News and World Report

China’s Water and Soil May Be Too Far Gone to Support a Growing Economy - Energy Tech Stocks

Chinese flaws exposed as business chiefs go missing - MarketWatch

More factory owners in China jump ship | The Honolulu Advertiser

Nippy

2008-12-15T15:05:00.000-08:00

So it got a little stormy there over the weekend, snowed about a foot. I slept in Sunday morning so it was about 10 am by the time I noticed the potato emergency - the wind had blown the lid off my root cellar and the wireless thermometer was reading 8 F. Supposedly the flavor of raw potatoes changes if they freeze. I brought them inside and thought "I'd better go ahead and cook some of these up," so I made a big batch of garlic mashed potatoes. I decided to try using the pressure cooker, but that ended up taking even longer than boiling them. It was almost an hour before it even got up to pressure, and then there was the cool-down time. I can't tell for sure about the flavor change because I accidentally added way too much salt, like tablespoons instead of teaspoons.

Mostly the potatoes still seemed okay after they warmed up, I mean they didn't turn to mush or anything, so I put the whole thing back together today. I changed the warmer to a 50-watt rough-service bulb (from 25 w), and put a rock on top of the lid.

It was clear and sunny today. In the morning we had those whatayacallem, sun dogs or icebows on either side of the sun. I went for a walk down the grocery store to test my winter wear. It was about -10 F with a wind chill of liquid nitrogen. The bike shop never did call back about the studded snow tires but I do have the neoprene face mask, and I thought the conditions might be good for a sort of dry run with a view to winter cycling. I had two layers on my legs, three on my arms, and four on my chest. From head to toe my kit was:

Blaze orange "Radar" cap

Positive mental attitude

Neoprene face mask

Long-sleeve flannel shirt

Polyester fleece sweater

Down vest

Short "redcap's" jacket

Polartec gloves

Heavy weight long johns

"Relaxed fit" jeans

Medium weight wool socks

Cross trainers

The idea was to try and stay warm enough while keeping arms, legs, and peripheral vision free. The "radar" cap is nice because it covers your ears and shades your eyes. This outfit was more or less okay for my two-mile walk, but I could have used one more layer on the legs, like a pair of sweatpants. (Also for cycling my feet would get a lot colder and I would have needed insulated boots and maybe electric socks.)

So I walked into the grocery with my black face mask and canvas bag, and Mr. Fellow Customer was like, "is this a stick-up?" No, just heading for the dairy case there.

But that's not the funny part. The funny part is, technically it's not even winter yet.

Root cellar energy use

2008-12-10T17:41:00.000-08:00

I just checked the wattmeter on my outside aboveground root cellar, which is heated with a 25 watt bulb controlled by a thermostat set for 40 degrees.

It has used 11.75 kilowatt hours over 725 hours (30 days), or 16.2 watts on average (55.3 Btu/hour). During this period the average outside temperature was 21.4 F, so the average temperature difference inside-to-outside was about 20 F. The heat loss coefficient "UA" of the box is therefore about 55.3/20 = 2.76 Btu/h-F.

If I calculate a U value based on the outside surface area of the box, U=UA/A = 2.76/150 ft2 = 18.4e-3. The R value is 1/U = 54 in English units (h*ft2*F/Btu.) This is pretty close to the nominal R value of the SIP panels I made it out of.

Solar Water Heat, Phase Drainback

2008-12-02T18:23:00.000-08:00

The piping connections to the solar collectors needed some teflon taping.

Contractor needed some copper pipe upside the head. ;-) (I can pay you next week I swear, just a little cash flow problem you know how it is...)

The circulation pump for the solar loop is a Grundfos UP 26-99 F. The rotameter-style flowmeter (and sightglass) is a Blue-White F-451002LHBSN. It is made of polysulfone and needs to be protected from ultraviolet light. Don't let me forget about that.

Here's J sweating atop the tanks.

My camera has developed a bad habit of forgetting the date and time, so here is a photo of the astronomical conjunction (or whatever) of the Moon, Venus, and Jupiter, to prove to future archaeologists that this photo was actually taken yesterday, 1 December 2008 AD, and not in 2000.

Cottage heat loss coefficient

2008-11-26T12:09:00.000-08:00

On my list of things to be thankful for, category wonk, subcategory building science, is a thing that happened during the first few hours of Nov 16 - the cottage settled into a thermodynamic steady state with the boiler running full out and all four radiant floor loops turned on. (I was trying to warm the greenhouse floor for painting.) Because of steady state I know that the boiler electric power, the heat delivered by the distribution loops, and the heat leaking to the outside are all the same. That plus the air and water temperatures from the monitoring system allow me to estimate the building "UA" or heat loss coefficient, and the flow rate of the hydronic circulation pump.

Data from the 2-3 am hour of Nov 16:

Boiler power 17061 Btu/h (5000 W)

Outside air temp 22.72-23.31 F

Inside air temp 70.3-73.78

Greenhouse air temp 55.53-57.69

Inside to outside temp difference 49.025 F, 27.236 C.

Building UA = 17061 Btu/h / 49.025 F = 348 Btu/hF

Building UA = 5000 W / 27.236 C = 183 W/C

Lower is better. It would probably look better if I hadn't been heating the greenhouse, but in order to get steady state with just the cabin zones heated, it will have to get colder outside.

I'm actually more interested in the circulation pump right now as I'm trying to figure out the solar hydronic system. The data I have is:

Boiler outlet 97.85 F

Cabin return A 90.27

Cabin return B 91.41

Greenhouse A 94.05

Greenhouse B 90.09

I really wish now I had a sensor on the boiler inlet to measure the mixed return water temp. As it is I don't have much choice but to assume all the loops are carrying an equal share of the flow, and use the average of the four return temps.

Distribution loop temp difference: DT = 97.85 - 91.44 = 6.395 F

Qdistrib = m cp DT = Pboiler, in steady state.

m = Pboiler/(cp DT) = 17061 Btu/h / (1 Btu/lbF * 6.395 F) = 2668 lb/hr * 1 gal/8 lb * 1 hr/60 min = 5.6 gal/min.

I looked up pressure-flow curve for the Taco 007 circulator, which is (irritatingly) labeled curve number five (dark green).

At 5-6 gpm the 007 is almost maxed out on pressure. I wanted to put flow meters in the distribution loops but I can't find any (cheap) ones that drop less than about 1 psi @ 4 gpm, which is like two feet of water and it looks like that would choke this pump off entirely.

Must-read septic system update

2008-11-21T17:00:00.000-08:00

It looks like the septic-line-insulating-dirt-berm-operation (SLIDBO) on the 18th has halted the coldward temperature trend on the east-west section of the line (middle trace on the graph below). That is good because it is only 4 degrees from freezing. Air temp outside has been below freezing for a week. Now that there's more dirt on top I hope some heat from the ground can migrate upward and warm the line or at least offset the cooling trend. It's only November.

Solar Water Heat, Phase Uffda

2008-11-19T21:53:00.000-08:00

J and Grandmaster-J, from RREAL.org, swung by today with Solar Water Heat parts, including the two 120-gallon solar storage tanks. Lookatemgo.

These are Richmond S120HE-1 tanks.

In other exciting news, our pal Pigpen replaced the seal on the toilet and "retrained the operator."

[Photo omitted.]

I on the other hand had a rough day of sitting in my cozy cabin and working on the computer.

Survival spud diet update

2008-11-19T00:02:00.000-08:00

As Jerry Reed sang in She Got the Gold Mine, "why didn't you just learn how to cook?"

My many loyal readers (hi Mom) will recall the 600 pounds of potatoes I grew this past summer. I think I'm running behind on eating them, at a rough guess maybe 30 lbs so far. It occurred to me that if I made a big batch of mashed potatoes ahead of time it would be more convenient to reheat them for quick lunch breaks etc. Mashed potatoes make a great extender for canned chili, soup, hash.

This is a form of what I think of as Bachelor Chow, where you take a processed food product and bulk it up with extra vegetables, usually in a one dish. Here's another example: a breakfast salad I made from a gas-station breakfast sandwich and broccoli:

Actually that one didn't turn out that great (a little dry).

I once saw KP making potato pancakes; it looked like she was just frying patties of mashed potatoes. I haven't been able to get that to work, they crumble when I go to turn them. Adding milk and even egg makes the potatoes smoother and creamier but they don't add any strength to the patty, and seem to make it even more likely to stick to the pan.

What did work was adding mashed potatoes to corn muffin mix and making pancakes out of that:

Here's my recipe for Corntato Pancakes:

2 1/2 cups Bob's Red Mill Cornbread Mix

2 cups mashed potatoes

1 1/4 cups water

1/4 cup oil

1 egg

Makes about 1 dozen. Yummy.

I've also been working on mastering the no-scramble, one-egg cheese omelet:

Another round of freeze protection

2008-11-18T17:50:00.000-08:00

Mr. and Mrs. Universe donated their trailer home. Last week the nice men came to take it away, ha ha. (I mention this in case you'd wonder where it went in subsequent photos.)

I'd been monitoring the septic line temperatures via the sensors Neo and I installed t'other week, and got a bad feeling. I showed a chart like the one below to Edie D. the Executive Director, and Pigpen, learned with drain expertise. The light blue line shows that from noon on the 4th to midnite on the 11th, the outside air temperature dropped from 65 to 17 F. The dark blue line shows the temperature on the downstream leg of the septic line which we recently bermed over, that temperature barely moved. The gray line shows the temperature on the upstream leg which was only about a foot down. It responded much more quickly to the air temperature and had dropped into the thirties already. We decided maybe we'd better hurry up and throw some more dirt over the upstream leg of the septic line.

That dirt-berming operation took place today.

I decided we'd better bring the berm right up to the house. Glad I didn't spend too long setting the pavers for the walkway.

Pigpen must've brought out at least a ton of straw - four or five of the 8-foot bales. We talked about throwing some manure on it in the spring and planting it.

I had to reroute my walkway which looks a little goofy now.

Greenhouse floor sealing

2008-11-17T19:08:00.000-08:00

Next week the Rural Renewable Energy Alliance comes to install solar water heat equipment. It'll be one for the ages, the heat storage tanks will hold one ton of water and once installed will not be moving for a while, God willing. I thought it would be a good idea to do something about the greenhouse floor before they went in. The cob-crete floor has been wearing away into a fine powder. Redbeard came up with a scheme to seal it using ordinary water-borne polyurethane and came out to do a test patch.

It seemed to basically work. Not a super-tough surface but it was a lot better than before so I went ahead and did the rest of it. Redbeard says to me, "try and mix the poly and dirt into a slurry and fill the cracks in the floor. And don't get ahead of yourself." I sort of did that, but as much dirt and dust as there was on the floor, it still wasn't enough to fill the cracks, and it seemed crazy to dig up more dirt outside for that purpose. That could still be done some time I suppose. It took three gallons @ $40 to do the whole floor. I wanted to hurry up and finish it so I could stop using electric boiler heat to warm the greenhouse floor.

I had a lot of stuff stored in the greenhouse which I had to move inside. The upside of this is that there's much less floor to sweep in the house.

Freeze protections

2008-11-11T17:05:00.000-08:00

When I got back from the Passive House Conference on Sunday it was down to 53 F in the house. I hadn't left any heat on, the weather had turned colder, and I wasn't there to open the door to the greenhouse to let the solar heat puff in. So far this fall I'd been getting by with said passive solar and a 1500 watt space heater on cloudy days. It was sunny on Monday and I got a lot of good heat into the house, but come the night the little space heater couldn't keep the house above 60.

I find if the temperature is below 64 my nose gets cold, which I dislike. So late Monday night I decided to torch the planet's future for the sake of my short-term personal comfort, and turned on the Big Heater. That's the 5000 watt electric boiler and the in-floor hydronic radiant heat. Right now there's no thermostat control - a simple on/off thermostat probably wouldn't work very well anyway, because of the huge time delay between turning on the power and heating the air. There is an aquastat for controlling the boiler outlet water temperature, which I set at it's minimum of 90 F. Over the past day the boiler has been cycling on and off. On the HUGnet monitoring it looks like the boiler outlet water is averaging about 88 F, the return about 78 F, and the air temp in the house about 64 F. This was with the water heat loops to the greenhouse floor shut off.

The temperature sensors on the septic line have been trending down, faster on the E-W section which is the shallower leg now. It's now about 37 F. Typically it is coldest at around 1 pm and warmest at around 1 am, that is, there's about a 10-hour delay from the daily cycle of the air temperature above. It seemed like a good way to run the deicing cable might be, to turn it on for awhile midway through the daily cooling-off period, which would be about 10 am. I've set it on a timer to run from 9 am to 11 am each day, we'll see how that works out.

I also set up a heater to keep Big Foamy, the aboveground root cellar, from freezing. It's just a work light with a piece of polyiso insulation board taped over it to keep the potatoes in the dark. I've got a little line-voltage winter watchman thermostat to control it, set at 40 degrees. It's also plugged in to a Kill-a-watt meter so I can monitor how much energy it's using.

The future of housing

2008-11-09T19:33:00.000-08:00

I'm yust back from the North American Passive House Conference in Duluth, Minnesota. Redbeard recommended I should go and he was right. It was a small conference but very good. I thought the presenters represented the best thinking on sustainability, and the audience participants also had smart questions and comments.

Passive house is a super-insulation concept for buildings (which originated in the U.S. and Canada in response to the oil shocks of the 1970's) was formalized and so-named about 15 years ago in Germany, and is now reimported/revived in the U.S. The key concept is that as you add more and more insulation and air tightness to a building, you can take more and more cost out of the heating system, therefore you can get dramatic (90%) reductions in heating and cooling energy for little extra cost - a true win, not just a tradeoff. Or, to put it in my accustomed sarcastic and curmudgeonly terms, it is ridiculous to continue the stone-age practice of burning stuff to heat the house, now that we have so much better insulation...than in the stone age.

The Passive House Institute has set a Passive House Standard. It is a performance-based standard which I think is focused on the right things. Being German, it sets very stringent requirements for air-tightness, total annual heating and cooling energy per square foot of usable floor area, and total household energy use including all appliances. They derive these allowances from a concept of per-person fair share of the earth's capacity to absorb greenhouse gases. The Germans have about a ten-year lead and have thousands of buildings meeting this standard; in the U.S. there are only a few yet.

It's interesting (I'm sure you'll agree) to compare and contrast the stereotypical German Passivhaus, the two examples we toured in Duluth (the Isabella Eco-House and the Skyline House), and the HDT Eco-Cabin from which I am broadcasting here.

The big difference is that all three U.S. houses are considerably fancier. All three are tricked out with solar water heat systems for both domestic hot water and space heating. Two of the U.S. houses also will have solar electric systems. Two also have attempts at long-term (seasonal) heat storage in the ground under the building. Partly this is because of the harsher climate of Minnesota as compared to Germany, and partly because of lingering bias in the U.S. towards adding renewable sources of energy instead of efficiency measures. The canonical German Passivhaus is a super-insulated, super-tight house with full time mechanical ventilation through a heat-recovery ventilator, and a small (1000 watt) electric heater also integrated into the ventilation system.

The Isabella Eco-House:

The Skyline House:

Compared to these places our HDT cottage here is relatively modest, and uniquely intended from the start to be 100% solar.

There was also some great stuff on retrofitting existing houses, how to achieve deep reductions in energy use without breaking the bank. Things like super-insulating only a portion of the house, or building a small super-insulated addition.

There was also a very interesting presentation on straw bale construction. The presenters had basically given up on making the straw bales load-bearing, and had evolved basically to a double-walled wood frame house construction with straw bales as insulation. They were even cutting the strings on the bales to eliminate the gaps between them, essentially turning the straw into a dense-pack insulation within a wood structure.

Battening down for winter

2008-11-05T17:10:00.000-08:00

Since the hard freeze of Monday-before-last? we've had another nice little stretch of Indian Summer, good for getting in a few more outside jobs:

Back on Cob Spraying Day (see 30 October) while the Cottage Cob Crew was at their labors, Pigpen and I worked on freeze-protecting the septic line with gutter de-icing cables. This was not a photogenic process. Basically, the process was to run fish tape or plumbing snake downhill to the tank or cleanout, tape the plug end of the heater cable on and pull it back through. I repaired the existing 100 ft cable which because it is shorter is now 700 watts instead of 600. It protects the E-W section of the line. A new 375 watt cable protects the N-S section of the line, and the tank. As I described previously, we've also got temperature sensors buried just outside the pipe so I can tell when freezing threatens and the heaters need to be turned on.

As I went about mentioning to people about the temperature sensors everyone pretty much said "sure would be nice to get a bit more insulation on top of that line..." Pigpen was like "Yah, let's get crazy with the Cat. Two hours I can build one of my patented two-foot-high six-foot wide dirt berms on it. I'll even drop a straw bale on top you can spread out for extra insulation." This plan was speedily approved and boda-whang, he got 'er done.

Looking north:

Looking east:

The straw ended up about six inches deep. I fluffed up the old straw over the tanks as well.

The extra dirt is helping - I can see a difference on the temperature traces. Before there was about a five degree daily temperature swing, now it's less than one degree I'd say, on the N-S section of the line.

I think we are in pretty good shape on this, with the sensors, the electric heat, the partial berm. Also when the solar water heat is hooked up I may be able to use free solar hot water to warm the line. Multiple elements supporting the function. Permaculture.

* * *

We also moved Big Foamy, the insulated box now serving as a root cellar, to my Originally Designed Root Cellar Location just outside the west door. Now that it's out in the sun it should stay unfrozen a bit longer. Mr. Universe also pointed out that because it's so insulated, it wouldn't take much electric heat to keep it unfrozen, twenty watts maybe.

I also tried various things to fix the leak in the lid. I found some heavy black plastic film which Redbeard later told me was "root barrier". I tried gluing it to the lid (which is made of pink polystyrene foam board) using expanding foam. It didn't stick. Next I tried gluing it on with roof tar, that caused the edges of the film to curl up. I gave up on it for now and turned to the sides. I wanted to cob the outside of the box, basically to make it look nicer. It then would match the cottage, both in appearance and in the manner of construction being comprised of wood, styrofoam, and mud. I got as far as stapling on two layers of chicken wire, and cobbing about one eighth of it.

* * *

Fancy finished up cobbing around the windows and doors, and declared a seasonal end to major cob operations. She says it's better if it dries before it freezes, but the forecast is for wet weather through to a hard freeze on Saturday.

I can report some qualitative evidence that the door and window resealing is working: before I could smell straw inside when the wind blew hard enough, I don't notice that any more. I'd still like to get a blower door test done to quantify the air tightness of the house. Hopefully when the new building is tested we can piggyback on that operation.

* * *

Another thing I had designed but not gotten to was the beltway path around the cottage. The main point being to better protect the floor inside from tracked-in sand. Mrs. Universe had a couple pallets of patio pavers she wasn't using so I grabbed 'em and started hastily throwing them down. I guess ideally the ground should be fluffed and leveled and tamped before setting the pavers. That I did pretty half-assed. Most of it's not too bad.

Solar electric

2008-11-03T15:19:00.000-08:00

I made some progress on my solar electric system - I built a rack to hold the panels. I have the same modules as KP and the Skipper have out on the Island: BP Solarex MST-43. They had gotten their rack from Power Fab and gave me the part number for the rack to match these panels, but when I asked Power Fab for a price, they ignored that, asked for all the module specs, and came back with a quote of $2770. For a rack! This was more than twice what I paid for the solar panels! Clearly this was custom, hand-made-by-union-Ph.D.-plumbers pricing. I was so disgusted I didn't even call them back but I thought about saying something like, you did hear me say rack, not crack or rock, right? Mr. Universe joked that it would be cheaper to buy a Cadillac and bolt the panels onto to it - it would be long enough to hold all seven, and heavy enough not to blow away.

So for one-fortieth of that price I built my own rack, out of wood and deck screws because that's what I know. This was a solid three-day project.

I designed the basic cross section in Sketchup, for a 60 degree angle. The instructions for the modules recommended latitude-plus-fifteen-degrees tilt for this location. They also recommended using the middle set of mounting holes (on 2-foot centers) rather than the holes at the corners. The back leg of the rack is also at a 60-degree angle. This suggests an equilateral triangle shape which I thought would be pleasing.

I worked out the 3-d details and added extra bracing as I went along. It's made in two eight-foot sections and the center module spans over the joint.

The basic strategy was to screw horizontal crossbars tucked inside the rails on the back of each module, and then to screw those crossbars to horizontal rails on the rack. I figured this would be pretty forgiving of inaccurate construction and wavy wood.

Pocketing the face of rails for the screw heads.

I left a good inch between modules. This helps it look okay even though the panels are not laser-parallel, and gave me space to clamp.

Because of wavy rails I had to shim here and there.

It's ballasted with 4x4 timbers and concrete blocks. I don't know if this is enough. I positioned it as close to the house as I could in hopes of reducing the wind load. There's no gutter on the front yet, the drip line is right above the concrete blocks.

I would have preferred to paint or stain it but I settled for caulking all the glue joints. Now it's ready for some grounding & wiring.

Cob Spraying Day

2008-10-30T18:27:00.000-07:00

It was a big day here at the cottage - Cob Spraying Day. The straw bale walls have been waiting all year for their outside second coat. The actual amount of spraying time was about five minutes. The prep and cleanup took basically all day. Redbeard showed up with two helpers and about sixty-one thousand dollars worth of equipment to do the job, including:

A tractor,
A PTO-driven cob-mixing vessel,
A peristaltic mud pump,
An air compressor the size of a chest freezer, and
Two Bobcats (one to load the mixer and one to load the mud pump)

He didn't actually get the entire cottage sprayed. I'd say, maybe a fifth of it. He concentrated on the east and west hard walls of the attached greenhouse (which needed their first coat of cob, and had been prepped with tar paper and chicken wire earlier in the summer.) I dunno, it looked to me like the same number of people could have done as much in half the time if they'd just brought a wheelbarrow, a shovel, and a trowel instead. I'd have to say it all went pretty smoothly though, I mean they knew what they were doing. My contribution to the effort was basically to get my stuff out of the way, and to ask stupid questions. I also lent them some tools, most of which I got back.

Let's watch the capital-intensive Kabuki. One of Hunt Utilities Group's earlier development initiatives was around building printers. It's pretty far back on the burner now, but they still have all this stuff around - might as well use it. Gizmos are fun anyways, they make loud noises.

Screening the rocks out of the clay (very important.)

Wiring up "Huffpo", the mother of all 220v, 35cfm@100 psi air compressors.

Ms. Fancy, the Mixmeistress of Cob, supervises loading of the mixer. There is some art to this - she explained later that she had a new/unfamiliar source of clay, which took a bit more time to get the mix right. Incorrect proportions can cause sand to separate out in the hose and plug it solid.

Sprayable cob. It has a consistency similar to Slurpee. This is a special recipe with Enviro-seal (an earth stabilizer.)

Loading the pump:

Here's the nameplate on the peristaltic pump:

Next we have Redbeard in digital-camo bermudas, putting wand to wall:

Closeup of spraywand. The peri pump controls the flow rate of mud. The nozzle has about a 3/4 inch bore, on the inside of which is a ring of angled air jet holes. Compressed air blasts the mud out the nozzle. The operator has an air valve on the wand.

Troweling smooth:

Cleanup and more cleanup. The mixer, the pump, the hose, basically everything the mud goes through has to be flushed out.

Again, what do I know, but it seems to me that in order to really justify this level of equipment you'd need to have straw bale cottages going by on a conveyor at the rate of four a day or something like that.

Turnip Soup

2008-10-29T21:38:00.000-07:00

Here is an example of the permaculture principle of productive edges. Loyal readers may recall that I seeded the field next to the cottage with Deer Forage Mix, which included some turnip and sugar beet seed. On most of the field the tubers are I'd say golf-ball to tennis-ball sized, but there is an edge where they are larger, softball-sized. This productive edge developed alongside a rut created by the skid-steer track as it drove over a pile of straw. I don't understand why but you can see the extra-lush greenery and fat turnips jumping out of the ground even in this crummy cellphone photo:

The biggest of them was almost the size of a cantaloupe. The deer are eating the greens but leave the tubers alone. I decided to try and make a turnip soup. You can see how big the thing is next to my six quart crock pot there.

The soup turned out not bad. In addition to the turnip I used two onions, a bunch of potatoes, chicken and chicken stock, and a tablespoon of Mrs. Dash.

It turns out turnips have mainly carbs. They are filling and nutritious and it's better if you eat the greens as well, according to nutritiondata.com. They don't taste as good as potatoes but are hardier and easier to grow I'd say.

Lengthy and fascinating septic system story

2008-10-26T21:00:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time in these parts, the ground would freeze in the winter to a depth of about five feet. Accordingly, people buried their septic lines and drain-fields six feet deep. Then global warming began and annoyingly made it drier in the winter here, meaning less snow cover. Without the insulating blanket of snow the ground began to freeze seven feet deep causing untold misery of drains frozen for weeks on end. It became evident that septic lines should be buried eight feet deep however, in the meantime, concern had also arisen about the danger of groundwater contamination from deeply buried drain-fields, and recommended or regulated practice had changed to shallow or mound-system drain-fields. The combination of a deep line and a mounded drain-field requires a lift pump. Said pump is obviously, you know, mission-critical.

Nobody likes these things due to the expense and reliability issue, but the idea particularly irked the designers of this cottage - to put such a high-tech, energy-sucking thing into what was supposed to be a low-energy mostly-natural building. So they ended up putting both the line and the drain-field shallow so that it would gravity drain. There have been freezing problems in both winters since it was installed. Insulating it by placing large straw bales on top of the line was successful the first time but not the second time, and they had to be removed in the spring in order to allow the ground to warm. This is a lot of wasted motion.

This past spring, the installation of an electric heating tape (gutter de-icing cable) saved the day. These things however also suck a lot of power, six watts per foot or so and the line is 170 feet long. In order to detect when de-icing is needed, today we installed several temperature sensors alongside the septic line.

The line comes straight east from the cottage for 100 feet and then turns south, another 70 feet to the tanks. At the turn and on much of the N-S leg, the line is only one shovel deep.

Sparing you the leaky toilet photos

2008-10-19T20:36:00.000-07:00

Yah.

Back in March was it? we retrofitted a composting toilet setup out here, by installing a huge Phoenix compost bin in the greenhouse and a small Sealand marine macerating toilet into the tiny bathroom, which pumps up and over to the compost bin. This toilet has a sort of ball valve in the bottom of the bowl. The toilet is no longer holding water, the valve hasn't been sealing. The thing came with a little seal-cleaning brush - I tried this according to the instructions and it didn't work.

Gloving up, I determined the problem. The valve was not closing all the way. It needs to tuck under the seal but was stopping at the edge of it. This allowed water to leak down and gas to leak up. Nice.

As a temporary workaround I found that spraying the valve with Pam allows it to close properly, at least for a while. There may be a looseness problem between the valve and the pedal that actuates it. Maybe I can talk Pigpen into looking at it, I've had enough of the dratted thing for now.

Solar Water Heat

2008-10-09T21:27:00.000-07:00

Awhile back I began to argue that whereas, this cottage which is owned by Happy Dancing Turtle has a half-completed solar water heat system, and whereas the Rural Renewable Energy Alliance is in the business of providing such and is located within 500 feet of HDT, therefore be it resolved that maybe they should work together to complete the solar water heat system.

I'm happy to report that this has now been agreed to, and to brag that, due to my awesome diplomatic prowess, the negotiations were speedily concluded in only five months.

Here is the system schematic. It is a drainback design that will provide both domestic hot water, and space heat via the in-floor hydronics. The parts that currently exist are the electric water heater, boiler, and radiant floor loops on the left, and the solar panels on the upper right.

This is essentially a tailored version of the design recommended by the solar collector manufacturer (Solar Skies.) There is an extra 120 gallon heat storage tank because of the large solar array (ten 4x8 foot panels.) In this design the large storage tanks could function as the domestic hot water supply, but because there is already a small electric hot water heater, the main tanks will serve as a preheat for it.

Here are some ballpark calculations I did on the heat demand, supply, storage, and distribution.

Minnesota dreamin'

2008-10-06T20:42:00.000-07:00

You'd be safe and warm, if you was in Pine River in a straw bale cottage...Minnesota dreamin', on such an autumn day.

I'm pleased to report that I haven't had to turn on the heat yet, though the average temperature these days is only around 50 F. As in the spring, the attached greenhouse on the south side works very well to heat up the house on sunny days, if I remember to open the door. One thing about thermally massive construction is that it does more good if you can let the inside temperature vary somewhat, warm it up during the day so that it doesn't get so cold at night. By letting it vary between about 62 and 78 I've been able to avoid turning on the heat.

At the current outside temperatures it would take about three cloudy days for the inside temperature to drop into the 50's. It helps that the cloudy days tend not to be as cold as the clear days.

I don't know how much longer I can hold out. November tends to be cold and quite cloudy around here.

Blasting the financial elite

2008-10-03T20:00:00.000-07:00

Back on May 27 I posted a comment, actually more of a rant, to this article on CBS Marketwatch.

These Wall Street shenanigans have me in a ranting mood so I'm going to repost it here:

"In my humble opinion, we are caught between: 1) the rock of oil depletion, meaning that cheap energy is gone for good (while vast resources remain, they cannot be extracted quickly or cheaply enough to lower prices,) 2) the hard place of global warming (we cannot afford to continue burning fossil fuel at current rates without frying the planet,) 3) the knife to the gut of unsustainable agriculture (the Green revolution relied on fossil fuel derived fertilizer and crops bred for that input,) 4) the gun to the head of Islamic extremism (again, in my humble opinion, it is fundamental to Civilization that words be answered with words, and hits be answered with hits; the extremists persistently answer words with death threats and bombs; we must stand against this. Beware anyone who is convinced they KNOW how to MAKE a heaven on earth, and justify atrocious means by that end.) Most political affiliations make light of at least two of these four, I find them all compelling concerns. The Fed's massive "liquidity infusions" (money printing) may be necessary to prevent immediate collapse, but they are not sufficient. Issues 1-3 require us to transform the entire physical basis of our civilization. By us I mean all the bottom-up searchers, not the top-down planners. The recession is an indication that the economy is focusing on the wrong things. Just guessing here, but I suspect we need less airlines and more railroad, less croupiers and more farmers, less personal injury lawyers and more nut tree breeders. I beg the government: no Marshall Plan, no Apollo Program, no Manhattan Project. Just set the big picture goals, free us by 20% and we will find the wedges, the silver buckshot, the silver bolos, to save our towns and our country. If you, our elected representatives, were of the generation that authored those grandiose proposals, you might have some credibility, but you are not. We have only ourselves to blame for electing twits whose best efforts are brain-dead, DOA ideas like, outlawing high gasoline prices, suing OPEC sovereign nations in US courts, and subsidizing corn ethanol. Your greatest service at this point would be, as Clint Eastwood's Harry Callahan might say, to know your limitations. Talk to the geophysicists, and get us on the right glide path - how many parts per million carbon dioxide, how many barrels of oil per day. Let us work out the details. As for our vaunted masters of the financial universe, I say to Alan Greenspan: forget about it, stop trying to defend your legacy, you will be reviled in history as the architect of the housing bubble, who seduced us into borrowing a trillion dollars to build energy-sucking housing in the early 2000's when the end of cheap energy was credibly predicted in Scientific American in 1998, based on fifty years of petroleum geology. I say to Ben Bernanke, dude, for ten years I socked away fifteen percent into the 401k like they said. Thank you, I think, for not trashing the dollar to where I'm much below break-even, I know you're in a tough spot. To the mutual fund industry I say, let me get this straight, if I'm understanding Jack Bogle, Warren Buffett, and Paul Farrell correctly, suppose the economy grows by 1.5 % in a given year, you guys have all the assets under management, and your fee is 1.5 % of assets per year. Therefore the Wall Street cut of all the wealth created in the economy that year is 1.5/1.5 = 100%, that is to say, all of it, and the Main Street cut is 0%. Do I have that about right? You want all the money? I think everyone from Lou Dobbs to James Carville would tell you, you've got a choice, you can let the middle class live, or you can spend so much on walled compounds and private security that 2015 upper class will feel like 1965 middle class. Your choice, Masters of the Universe, what do you do? What do you do?"

Potato mystery #2

2008-09-30T19:51:00.000-07:00

How the heck are you supposed to cook hash brown potatoes?

I've made some progress but I'm still not satisfied with the results. I think I figured out the secret of having them not stick to the pan. You need to preheat the pan on medium-low with a little oil in it. After you add the potatoes, don't try to stir them right away. Let them brown on the bottom for a minute then you can flip them over.

But so far, even when I can get the outside the right golden-brown color, my hash browns are coming out kind of dense, soggy, and gray on the inside, not light and fluffy like at the cafe. What am I missing? Do I have to peel them before I grate them?

Potato mystery #1

2008-09-27T19:22:00.000-07:00

Today's food mystery is: Why can't you home-can anything with dairy in it?

Mom and I tried adapting a crock-pot recipe for Smashed Potato Soup to home pressure canning. The crock-pot recipe basically has you cook the potatoes in stock for a long time, mash them slightly, and then add cream, sour cream, and cheese right at the end just before serving.

The pressure-canning instructions for potatoes were to cut them up, put them in the jars under salt water, and cook at 10 psi for 45 minutes. There were recipes for chowder in the canning book but they leave out the dairy and have you make, for example, clam chowder "base", to which you add fresh dairy when it's to be eaten.

The crock pot instructions have a general advice not to use fresh milk but only precooked milk such as powdered, condensed or evaporated. In the potato soup recipe they do use fresh dairy but do not let it cook for long.

We left out the dairy when we pressure-canned the potato soup, because we weren't sure if it was allowed. These books don't explain what the problem would be with pressure-canning fresh dairy. Does anyone know? Is it possible to do this or to make evaporated milk at home? It would be nice to be able to do so. The Skipper told me that potatoes plus dairy (the Irish diet) is pretty complete nutritionally.

We followed the crock-pot recipe for the soup but only cooked it for about ten minutes before putting it in the pressure canner.

Potatonomics

2008-09-25T13:34:00.000-07:00

The viral marketing department found a prospective customer for my potatoes, even though I didn't ask them to. So I had to come up with a price. The Natural Farms online catalog had organic potatoes for $0.80 to $1.30 a pound, delivered, so I set the higher price for the hand-sorted ones and the lower price for the "use me first" seconds.

The total amount of time I spent on potatoes over the season was probably about 120 hours for which I got 600 pounds. That is 0.2 hours per pound. If I could charge Natural Farms delivered prices at my garden gate, I would thus be working for $4.00 to $6.50 an hour. Doesn't sound so great but I think not bad for a first try and considering I did almost everything by hand.

It worked

2008-09-23T09:59:00.001-07:00

There was a deer foraging in my deer forage plot this morning. Guess what's for lunch? You're correct - potatoes it is.

Lamentably, the deer also already munched one of my unfenced bur oaks - the one closest to the house. So, the hypothesis that a half-acre of tasty turnips would distract them from a couple of yukky bur oak seedlings, is scientifically disproved. My new hypothesis is that they're mind readers bent on destroying every plant precious to humans.

Incredible progress on all fronts

2008-09-17T20:15:00.000-07:00

The East Bur Oak Nucleus is mulched.

The West Bur Oak Nucleus is mulched and fenced.

Cobbing of the window and door frames has commenced, by the hands of Fancy. I asked permission to photograph the work. She said only if you help. I meekly complied. As we flang mud she explained the science. The straw bales need to be coated with something breathable. When the tiny clay particles get wet they expand and overlap, providing some sealing action. When they dry, pores open up so that moisture can evaporate out.

The total potato haul was 600 pounds even.

I have a 3-point potato storage strategy:

1) Root cellaring in Flora's basement.
2) Root cellaring in Big Foamy out behind the cottage.
3) Home canned potato soup (Mom & I are working up a recipe.)

Mixing up Cob

2008-09-12T20:37:00.000-07:00

In other exciting news, Redbeard and Fancy got a batch of cob hyomped up, for to reseal around the cottage windows on the outside.

The mixer is a custom unit of local manufacture.

It's basically a hopper with a big tapered screw auger in it.

The design was inspired by this Patz V360 large agricultural feed mixer.

Here's a closeup of the finished product. Mmmm natural.

Potato harvest interim progress report

2008-09-12T19:50:00.000-07:00

The September 9 freeze mostly killed my potato plants so I'm harvesting. I'm digging by hand and keeping everything bigger than a nickel. Here's what I've got so far. That's 376 pounds. Took me about two days and it's a little hard on the spine. It will be a job sorting them out. Supposedly you can root-cellar only whole perfect ones, any holes or cuts and they will rot. So I will have to cook some right away. You can't freeze raw ones either but I believe you can if they are partially cooked (as evidenced by the Ore-Ida section of your grocer's freezer.)

Here is the productivity data row by row. I've dug 4 of the 5 rows in the west patch, average productivity 1.3 pounds per linear foot. (Row 5 starts with Kennebecs (I don't remember if it's all Kennebecs (I think I alternated white and red (but I digress.)))) If the trend were to hold up in the east patch I would project 700 pounds total which would be close to my 750 pound goal. Remember that was 1000 calories a day for 200 days. But the east patch was more heavily munched by deer and bugs, so we'll see.

There was one Baby Jesus potato (so far.)

The little ones are good pan-fried in oil and onion and sprinkled with rib rub.

People keep telling about oh/yah you can go to the big potato farm in Park Rapids and they'll let you glean potatoes for free after the picker goes through. Sure and I could dumpster-dive with the freegans but how resilient and sustainable is that?

Remembrance

2008-09-11T08:15:00.000-07:00

On the day of the September 11 terror attacks, I was in Kiel in the north of Germany, at the Heidelberg Druckmaschinen printing press plant, with two other Kodak engineers sent to work on the image disruption crisis of 2001. Ingo Dreher told us the news, saying "the Trade tower is knocked down." I thought he must be mistranslating, but no.

In the shadow of those events I reconsidered my life and career, as did many others. Some changed course right away. It took me another five years. First I worked on getting out of debt; I had just bought furniture and a new car. Finally in 2006 I sold my house and joined Americorps.

Your correspondent has observed that the one favorite political flavor takes the threat of Islamic radicalism very seriously, while pooh-poohing the threats of global warming and peak oil, while the other favorite political flavor does the opposite. Sigh.

I take all of these threats seriously and am not the first to notice the connections between them. Renewable energy, conservation, efficiency, and local food production are national security fronts. While I have chosen to work on these fronts, I honor those who have chosen to work the sharp end of the stick.

For those of you who may be less concerned about the energy/food and global warming issues, I urge you to read the peak oil primer at energybulletin.net, and any of their other articles as well. There are a few other primers on this topic listed at www.theoildrum.com. On their scale of alarmism, the energybulletin view rates as Defcon 4.

For those of you who may be less concerned about Islamic radicalism, I would urge you to read these two articles, which are the most level-headed discussions I have found: The Philosopher of Islamic Terror - Paul Berman, NY Times, and How to Manage Savagery - Bret Stevens, Wall Street Journal. (These are longish articles by online standards but worth your time.) Towards the end of Berman's piece he writes

President George W. Bush, in his speech to Congress a few days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, announced that he was going to wage a war of ideas. He has done no such thing. He is not the man for that. Philosophers and religious leaders will have to do this on their own.

One religious leader who has taken up that cause is Coptic priest Zakaria Botros.

Bur oaks planted

2008-09-09T18:19:00.000-07:00

It froze last night. That's a little early. I think the 50% 1st frost date here is Sept. 23d. It's been about a week since I stopped setting the windows open at night for cooling, and today was the first day I set the greenhouse doors to warm the house during the day.

Also today I planted the five potted Bur oaks which I've been dutifully watering all summer. They are not mulched or fenced yet. I'm basically following the instructions in Dave Jacke's Edible Forest Gardens, Volume 2. (Hole 2x the diameter of the pot, domed bottom hole, no amendments in the hole other than mycorhizal inoculant.) I'm going to omit the cardboard layer as there are not that many weeds growing out here to suppress.

I hope I didn't kill them to death. For container plants he says to spread out the roots and roughen up the outside of the root ball before planting, but when I did that huge chunks of the dirtball tended to fall off, which he says is a bad thing.

Domed-bottom hole.

Made my own inoculant out of a couple of shovelfuls of forest soil mixed with wood-chip based mulch.

Double handful of inoculant in hole.

Rootball out of pot.

Plant partially backfilled & puddled in.

Backfilled and with tamped-earth watering ring just outside edge of hole.

New charcoal retort, insulated

2008-09-08T22:10:00.000-07:00

I wrapped the mineral wool insulation onto the new charcoal retort and did a test burn. Inside fuel was about a 50/50 mix by volume of flax straw and wood chunks, packed in alternating layers. Wood comprised both lumber scraps and snagwood. Outboard fuel was lumber scraps all the way up the sides with flax straw kindling on top.

The burn went better than the uninsulated ones preceding, in that I didn't have to refuel it. But it still took an hour to get going and burned only on one side for awhile, as before.

Here's a pretty good shot of the smoke escaping from around the bottom of the inner vessel and being burned.

With insulation the outer barrel got orange-hot all the way around and the inner barrel got red hot.

It burned quite hot and clean for about fifteen minutes, here you can see almost the whole outer barrel is orange-hot. The burn finished clean (odorless.)

Again however, low yield of ashy charcoal (overcooked or overoxygenated) and there were still a couple of embers inside the next morning.

New charcoal retort

2008-09-03T18:31:00.000-07:00

I made a new charcoal retort, as the first one burned up after a dozen batches. This one is closer in design to what Folke Gunther describes, in that the outer barrel has a bottom and the inner barrel sits upside down in it. (In the first one my outer barrel was open top and bottom, and the inner barrel had a lid.) Also per Gunther, the outer barrel has triangular notches in the side near the bottom to let in combustion air, and it is not insulated.

The new inner barrel is ten times the weight of the previous one (35 vs. 3.5 kg.) It's the inner pressure vessel from a carbon dioxide tank. My idea was that it would last longer, and might do a better job of cooking the charcoal to completion by retaining heat longer. Unfortunately it's slightly larger and taller than the old trashcan and there is at most a two inch gap between the inner and outer barrel.

So far this thing is a disappointment. I've done three trials and had to refuel it during the burn each time. It tends to start burning only on one side. I suspect the narrow gap is to blame and possibly the lack of insulation. It did cook to completion but the yielded a low volume of ashy charcoal, indicating overcooking or afterburning of the completed charcoal. In one case, the inner vessel was still hot after sitting overnight, and had live coals inside. The heavy inner tank is retaining heat but this appears to be a mixed blessing, and it is slower to heat up at the beginning. Also I may have cut too many or too large notches in the edge of the inner tank to let the gases escape, this may be allowing air to get into the inner tank and feed combustion of the charcoal.

I realize now that I made three changes which tend to slow the thing down: there is less area at the bottom for combustion air to enter, the inner tank is much heavier, and more heat can radiate out the sides with no insulation. Also there is less room for fuel outside. Probably the next thing to do is insulate the outer barrel again.

Experiment plot update

2008-08-31T21:00:00.000-07:00

You might remember the mixture experiment we did with the soil amendments spread on the west field before we chisel-plowed it. No? Well the north third got 14 yards composted cow manure, the south third got 14 yards rotted sawdust, and the middle third got a 7&7 mix. More or less.

Back in June when it was raining the north plot really jumped out in front in terms of greening up, while the south plot stayed almost bare and the middle plot was in-between, really noticeable differences.

But the August dry period pretty much evened things up. The north and middle plots crisped up but the south plot continued greening up slowly. The north plot grew a lot of turnips. The south plot grew no turnips but quite a bit of clover.

This photo shows the dividing line between the north and middle plots at the end of August. The line runs from the cottage door to where I'm standing. You can't really see any difference in the ground coverage on either side.

Likewise with the line between the middle and south plots, which runs top to bottom right through the middle of the frame.

You can just make out the three plots in this view from the south. Look how well the clover's doing in the south plot, middle left in the frame, by the tree line. I think it's benefiting from the afternoon shade. The clover behind the house and under the picnic table also had an August growth period.

Vegetable update

2008-08-27T08:38:00.000-07:00

Earlier this month I dug up one potato plant to see how it was doing. Here are its potatoes; the largest was almost baseball-sized, the smallest grape-sized. It was Yukon Gold and they were pretty yummy.

The deer forage mix I seeded in the experiment plots did in fact produce a lot of these things. (I think it's a turnip.) I know there are some larger than this. There have been reports of munching deer.

I made a removable accessory for the flatbed hand cart. I call it My Little Hayrick. It's for schlepping flax straw from the Great Wall of Flax Straw to the charcoal kiln, without using the Bobcat or the skid-steer.

It's made entirely out of scrap lumber and took me an entire afternoon to build. Sustainability is so labor-intensive.

I used it also to spread out a pile of wheat straw that was kind of in the way of getting to the Great Wall of Flax, on which I am standing to take this picture.

Charcoal making experiments

2008-08-22T07:18:00.000-07:00

I've been doing a series of charcoal-making experiments, using the retort method, with a 20-gallon trashcan inside of a 55-gallon drum. (Those barrels are burnt out now so I thought I'd pause to give you an update.)

Resilient and sustainable homesteads would be growing a lot of trees and other plants and would thus have both source material and a number of uses for charcoal:

Charcoal as a soil amendment, to increase the Cation Exchange Capacity
Charcoal filters for water recycling
Cooking fuel

Last but not least, any use other than burning sequesters carbon, is carbon-negative, and helps stave off global warming. As F. Gunther describes, making charcoal by the retort method configured to burn the gases prevents the emission of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, during the process.

Executive summary: It does work, but the results are quite variable in terms of how much of the starting material gets charcoalified and how much is left unconverted. I'm having to use more fuel than I'd like to ensure robustness against these variations. I suspect the main culprit is dampness. So there's a tradeoff between robustness and fuel efficiency. Seems like there's also a tradeoff between clean burning (very hot) and retort life. The bootstrapping or positive feedback effect of burning the pyrolysis gas is dramatic. There can be hardly any embers left between the barrels and yet the thing is roaring like an oil furnace.

There's several tons of moldy flax straw here by the cottage and I kept trying to use as much of that as possible for both the source material inside the retort and the outboard fuel. I think as I dug further into the pile there was more damp stuff. I'm also trying to use up the large quantities of snagwood and lumber scrap that are around campus. It takes a ridiculous amount of time and some energy to cut this stuff up into little pieces for charcoaling. I have one measurement of 0.24 kWh (0.86 MJ) of electric chainsaw energy to cut up 15.4 kg of snagwood into fist-sized pieces. Realistically dry biomass has an energy content of ~18 MJ/kg so about 280 MJ for my wheelbarrow load.

So far my experience is that if the piece of wood is roughly cubical or spherical it can't be any bigger than a tennis ball. Pieces can be long and thin, or thin and flat, but the thin dimension can't be much more than one, one and a half inches, or it won't cook all the way through.

The biomass books warned me about this - drying and comminution are headaches.

Here are my notes on the first series of tests. (See previous post for photos of first test.)

1) 7-Aug-08

Configuration notes

Outer barrel has open top and bottom. Outer barrel has removable lid with 6 inch chimney 2 feet high, chimney has damper and rain cap. Outer barrel is spaced off the ground on 4 thin firebricks, inner barrel directly on ground, lid down. Fiberglas insulation was wrapped on partway through the burn.

Source material (in retort)

flax straw, packed tight by jumping on it.

Fuel material (between inner and outer barrels)

~4 gal lumber scraps (about 1/4 of the way up the side) with flax straw on top.

Burn description

Lit the top, let it get burning and then put the chimney/lid on (didn't fit and sat crooked.) Fiberglas insulation melted and sagged partway off. Hissing and gentle roaring noise. Inner can split up the side. Incomplete conversion.

Discussion/what next

Inner can clearly needs more venting than that provided by the gap between the can & lid.

2) 7-Aug-08

New inner can - drilled fourteen 1/4 inch holes around the rim just below the lid. Outer barrel chimney/lid flared to fit better. No insulation.

Source material

flax straw, packed tight

Fuel material

~5 gal lumber scraps (about 1/3 of the way up the side) with flax straw on top

Burn description

Much smoke when lid was put on. Let it burn down more first? Roaring and pitchy coal-like smoke seems to characterize the pyrolyzing of the flax in the retort. Some ash near the top of the can and some unconverted material near the bottom.

Discussion/what next

Not as good as #1. Damper straw? Ground keeping bottom of retort cold? Partial insulation on first trial helped? How little starting fuel can you get away with?

3) 8-Aug-08

Propped up inner can on 3 firebricks on edge & put wood underneath. No insulation.

Source material

flax straw, packed tight 5.4 kg

Fuel material

like #2 but with extra wood underneath the inner can.

Burn description

Let burn longer before putting lid on. Left damper open the whole time. Incomplete conversion.

Discussion/what next

Next try insulating outer barrel again, this time with refractory insulation.

4) 11-Aug-08

Insulated barrel with high-temp mineral wool insulation held on by metal stucco lath (I think is what this is) & wire.

Source material

lumber scraps and snagwood, chopsaw cut

Fuel material

wood all around to about the top of the inner can? flax straw kindling

Burn description

Hot - lower half of barrel glowing orange thru gaps in insulation. First one to finish clean without acrid odor. Complete conversion, volume down by about half.

Discussion/what next

That worked great for wood inside & out, what about straw? Concerned about the amount of smoke produced. The straw on the outside can't be packed too tight or air won't draw up through it. Maybe if there was less straw inside the retort it would work better.

5) 12-Aug-08

Raised outer barrel onto fat bricks instead of thin - more airflow underneath may reduce smoke?

Source material

flax straw, not packed super tight

Fuel material

flax straw, not packed super tight

Burn description

Only converted about halfway.

Discussion/what next

Not having much success cooking flax straw with flax straw. Try using a lot of fuel wood to cook the hell out of the straw.

6) 13-Aug-08

Insulated barrel on fat bricks.

Source material

flax straw, packed tight

Fuel material

snag wood, almost all the way up to the top of the inner can, flax straw kindling

Burn description

Complete conversion, volume down by about half. 4:15 start, cool by 6:25

Discussion/what next

Finally got a complete conversion of the flax straw. Next let's try a wood inside & out burn, see if we can get away with long thin pieces.

7) 13-Aug-08

Configured like 5 & 6.

Source material

snagwood, with some longer pieces. 9.8 kg

Fuel material

lumber scrap & snagwood all the way up, flax straw kindling.

Burn description

Barrel glowed orange again, smoke ceased a few minutes later. Conversion complete. 2.2 kg charcoal (22%)

Things retain their shape but shrink, as they are charcoaled. Here's a branch with pine cones, isn't it pretty? Careful it's extremely fragile.

Discussion/what next

Have successfully converted straw and wood including long/thin and thin/flat pieces, by using a lot of outboard fuel (filling the gap between the barrels almost all the way up.) Let's try making an afterburning chimney to reduce the smoke.

8) 14-Aug-08

New 55-gal afterburning chimney.

Source material

snagwood including one large damp piece

Fuel material

lumber scrap, flax straw kindling.

Burn description

As usual I lit the flax straw kindling and then put the chimney on. Putting the new chimney on immediately accelerated the flax burning. However the fuel wood got a slower start (almost went out) but the thing burned like a rocket once it got going. Lower barrel glowing orange even at top of insulation. Everything but large lump converted. Inside of barrel blistered.

Discussion/what next

Burned cleaner, hotter, and faster with large chimney. It draws so much better I think I can pack the straw quite tight around the outside and still have it burn. Let's try converting straw with straw fuel, using new chimney.

9) 19-Aug-08

Outer can back on thinner fire bricks (3 of them). 55-gal afterburner.

Source material

mostly flax straw, a few branches, reusing unconverted lump. 5.2 kg

Fuel material

mostly flax straw packed tighter. 6.0 kg

Burn description

Lit @ 3:30 and took right off. Almost done by 3:45. Burned quite clean. Near complete conversion. Large lump still not finished. 1.2 kg charcoal (27%)

Discussion/what next

That worked pretty well. Can the amount of outboard fuel be reduced?

10) 20-Aug-08

Configured like 9).

Source material

flax straw, packed tight 5.2 kg

Fuel material

flax straw, less than in 9) 3.0 kg

Burn description

Failure - did not catch, incomplete conversion even after refueling & refiring.

Discussion/what next

That didn't work. Can I get away with refiring it with flax straw, adding more underneath and more to the inner can?

11) 20-Aug-08

Mineral wool insulation retucked.

Source material

char & unconverted from 10), plus new flax straw. 6.4 kg

Fuel material

Flax straw underneath as well as on the sides, tamped tight with pole. 4.4 kg

Burn description

Started okay but still didn't finish clean. May need large chunks of wood in the bottom to help it finish? Some of this straw may be more damp.

Discussion/what next

I think there's a lot of variation in the dampness of the flax straw causing trouble. It may be important to have large chunks of wood in the bottom to help a flax burn finish clean. Let's see if I can finish converting this mass by firing it with a lot of snagwood outside, not adding any more to the inside.

12) 22-Aug-08

Added spark-arresting screen of "expanded metal" I think it's called.

Source material

Do-over, mostly flax straw & char from 11).

Fuel material

snagwood

Burn description

Had to rekindle, after which it burned very hot still didn't convert all the straw. Inner can burned through in one spot. Less than 3.8 kg charcoal.

Discussion/what next

Not sure whether dampness, the hole in the can, or the presence of unremoved char is responsible for the incomplete conversion.

13) 22-Aug-08

Configured like 12).

Source material

Layered top to bottom: fine sawdust 4 gal, straw, pine branches. 5.0 kg

Fuel material

Layered top to bottom: straw, pine branches, lumber scrap. 6.0 kg

Burn description

There was a small detonation early on. Started to catch and then went out. Refired while hot with strips of plywood (about 8 square feet of half-inch altogether). It took off and burned hot. 0.4 kg charcoal

Discussion/what next

Very low yield. There was ash inside the can. Either the sawdust blew out or the holes in the inner can let in too much air. Inner and outer barrels are both perforated and distorted, need replacing. The fast/hot burns with the large chimney are much less smoky but harder on the metal and may be less fuel efficient / harder to get going.

Larger 20-gallon charcoal making retort, burn 1

2008-08-14T06:47:00.000-07:00

Flush with overconfidence from my half-gallon prototype, I went ahead and made a full-size version of Mighty Gunther's Backyard Charcoal Retort, with some minor modifications.

His web site pictures a thirty-gallon barrel inside an open-top 55-gallon barrel. Rumor had it that burn barrels are illegal here. While this is a charcoal retort and not a burn barrel, it would look a lot like a burn barrel in operation, so I cut the bottom off my barrel and attached a chimney to it, which should incontrovertibly make it a stove. With no bottom, it was easier to set it up on fire bricks to allow combustion air to enter rather than punching holes in the side.

I went to three junkyards and could not find a 30 gallon metal barrel, so I bought a brand new shiny 20-gallon trashcan. I stuffed it with flax straw as tight as I could by jumping up and down on it, put the lid on and put it upside down on the ground inside the large barrel.

I put scrap lumber chunks around the bottom to about a third of the way up, and filled the rest of the gap and the head space with flax straw, not too tight.

I lit the top and waited until it was burning all the way across before putting the lid on. It didn't fit as well as when it was cool, consarnit. Treebeard and I tried to insulate the outside with regular fiberglas insulation, but it got hot enough to slag it and it melted partway off.

I figured the gas would escape around the trash can lid but instead it burst the side seam! There was an audible hissing during the burn.

The outside fuel burned completely.

The straw inside mostly cooked into charcoal except at the bottom, which was right on the ground.

Making some charcoal

2008-08-13T05:46:00.000-07:00

I've been doing some work on making charcoal. Say why? Well, I'm mainly interested in it as a soil amendment (see Terra Preta.) Charcoal in the soil is supposed to increase the cation exchange capacity (CEC), that is, the ability of the soil to hold onto vital trace nutrients such as potassium and calcium until plants and their symbiotic root fungi are ready to take them up. Charcoal is also potentially useful in greywater filtering, and of course, barbecue.

According to the internet, there are two basic approaches to charcoal making, the direct method and the retort method. I decided to try a retort method, described very well by Gunther the big Swede.

I started with a minature version. The retort is a juice can upside down in a piece of six-inch class-A insulated chimney pipe. I stuffed the inner can as tight as I could with flax straw. The inner can is placed upside down in the outer pipe.

Fuel around the outside of the inner can is burned, producing heat that cooks the material in the inner vessel. I decided to try top-down burning as in the wood-gas camp stove. I placed a few cubes of wood at the bottom and flax straw in the rest of the gap.

The inner can rests on a grate, allowing the smoke and gases to escape at the bottom and be burned in the outer fire, adding to the heat. The outer sleeve is spaced up on bolts to allow combustion air to enter.

Here you can see the gas flare as the volatiles from the straw in the inner can are driven out and burned. This is a positive feedback or bootstrapping phenomenon. On my first attempt the fire went out before this got going. I had to refuel it and start again, then it took off and burned a lot longer.

It worked. It converted all the straw inside to charcoal with very little ash. The volume of charcoal was about half the original volume of straw.

Lightweight things

2008-08-01T12:02:00.000-07:00

I got the bike trailer hooked up, so now I can carry something bigger than a loaf of bread. This makes it a lot more useful for errands to town. Its a Burley flatbed trailer.

I'm hoping to ride later into the cold this year. Last year I gave up around Halloween. At the midwest renewable energy fair I learned of studded tires that make it possible to ride on ice, and of neoprene face masks.

The instructions wanted the hitch bracket in the left rear dropout, but I didn't want to lose the kickstand that was already there, so I drilled the bracket that holds the rear rack and bolted it to that.

The trailer is offset considerably to the left. I think this is so you can continue to ride close to the right side of the road, and if overtaking traffic is going to nick something it would be the trailer and not your left hand.

Colorado potato beetles have been spotted eating the lamb's quarters on the west berms. I checked the potato patches and a couple of the plants in the east patch were afflicted with the larvae. I picked off the ones I could see.

I've been watching Skyler's pet bug while he's away at camp. It hatched from its chrysalis yesterday, a fine-looking monarch butterfly. I set it free and it managed to fly to the trees, so it made it to The Wild.

In other news, Redbeard began preparations today for spraying the finish coat of cob onto the cottage, starting with moving the clay pile. Here he's on his third trip in the bobcat, after which he called it a week.

For our News of the Future segment today, here is an article about the vast potential of energy efficiency improvements. Also we have U.S. electricity rates to double over the next five years and Coal shortages in China will spark more foreign takeovers of U.S. assets.

And then the deer came...

2008-07-23T19:39:00.000-07:00

Here are a couple of pictures of the potato patches after I thoroughly weeded and carpet bombed them with straw mulch. I'd have to say the mulching process was strenuous, tedious, exacting, and dirty. You can't just fork it on, it has to be tucked around the plants so there's a lot of bending and straightening of the spine. I had to wear a dust mask as I'm slightly allergic to mold and pulling the straw apart released huge clouds of it. I guess the saving grace of mulching over weeds versus hoeing them out is that you shouldn't have to do it as often, but maybe next year I'll try hoeing instead.

West patch:

East patch:

They were looking pretty good but shortly after this the deer started munching. As of yesterday they had eaten the tops off more than half of the east patch. At Flora's suggestion I sprayed fish hydrolisate which if I'm lucky will foliar-feed the plants and make them untasty to the dratted herbivores. Why they are picking on my plants when there's zillions of others all over the place I'm sure I don't know.

Energy Independence Week, Day 7

2008-07-15T12:53:00.000-07:00

Thursday, July 10, the last full day of Energy Independence Week.

I had a little open house to show the Hunt Utilities Groupies how it went. Just to review, I observed Energy Independence Week by

a) Using no electricity from the grid

b) Burning no fossil fuel, and

c) Making no trips to the grocery store (stocking up ahead of time okay).

The idea being to learn preparedness for both disaster-type emergencies and for the Long Emergency of transitioning to the post-fossil-fuel world.

I think my response was a pretty realistic combination of partial preparation in advance, and hasty improvisation. I had purchased a few solar panels months ahead of time, and asked for a quote on a battery-based solar electric system design. I measured the power requirements of everything in the house and was pretty sure that a 500 watt system would be able to run the well pump, the fridge, and a few other things. I hoped to get it for $5000 and have it installed in time for 4th of July week. I also expected that the half-built solar water heating system (a Redbeard project) would be completed (it is now 101 days late (and counting)). I had acquired a charcoal grill, a woodburning camp stove, and a solar oven, so I could cook without propane or electricity.

But, come the day, there was no solar hot water, and the quote for the fully pimped solar electric system had only just come in - at over $13000. I almost bailed on the Energy Independence project but decided if I could just get water and power to the toilet (which has its own pump) I would go through with it. A couple of deep-cycle marine batteries ($185) and a 1000 watt car inverter ($60) made enough power to operate the pump. For the water I set up a rain barrel on a platform about five feet high and plumbed it into the house via a garden hose through the window. A rain barrel was on the long term plan anyway, and there just happened to be a 300 gallon plastic tank and a platform for it lying around. Stocking up ahead of time, I pumped 150 gallons into it from the well. This gave low-pressure water to the sinks and toilet, but it wasn't high enough to feed the shower head. I guessed about right on the water, I had about 30 gallons left at the end of the week, so, about 20 gallons a day.

I did have my four motley solar panels which I figured I could somehow use to recharge the batteries, but I knew there was no way they would supply enough energy to run the fridge, so I hastily built a large outside cooler/icebox out of scrap SIPs, and loaded it with as much ice as I could keep frozen ahead of time in my regular freezer. That ended up lasting six days, I was pretty happy with that.

This icebox I also hope will be useful longer term, either as a root cellar or as an icebox per se. When I did my electrical load plan for the PV system, the fridge was the largest single remaining energy-consumer after I eliminated all forms of electric heating. It doesn't make much sense to spend a lot of electricity running a fridge indoors in a climate where it's below freezing half the year. The long term plan is to use the outside cold for refrigeration either directly or by saving ice in the winter to use in the summer.

So, my original plan was to have a 600 watt solar electric system which I estimated would be capable of producing about 100 kilowatt hours a month, 1/10 of the average US household. That was going to cost over $10000. What I ended up with for Energy Independence Week was only 1/10 of that - a 60 watt system costing under $1000 and producing 10 kWh a month, or 1 % of US average household. Even that 1% is a boon if you prioritize it right. It was enough to run the compost toilet fan and pump so I didn't have to poop in a bucket. It was enough to charge the phone and run the laptop computer, and provide a bit of light at night, watch DVD, amp some guitar. It might have been enough to run the well pump a little except that the necessary 120 to 240 v step-up transformer would have doubled the cost of the system. It would not have been enough to run the hydronic circulation pump in the winter. It was probably not enough to do laundry. I have a pretty efficient front-loader but even so it takes about 1 kilowatt-hour per load. I also didn't have enough water pressure.

I chatted about this with Ms. Flora, who lived off-grid without running water for three years including raising her infant son, and with a guy, let's call him Longfellow, who came to our second Natural Step study circle meeting, who had lived off grid for many years. It turns out Flora did laundry on the grid (at the laundromat.) She also mentioned the one thing she really missed at the cabin was a vacuum cleaner. Longfellow had concluded that what he really needed electricity for was some lights and one half-horsepower motor that he could hook up to run a bunch of different things.

Modern conveniences. We've gotten used to making everything run off 120 vac. I would suggest as a rough guide that the earlier an appliance was invented or let's say commercialized, the more worthwhile it will be to hang onto it in the low-energy future. Don't throw the washer out with the Wii. That's only a rough guide, obviously you'd better use LED lights instead of incandescent. Also, while an electric dryer is normally a monster energy sucker, if you don't use the heat but only run it a few minutes on air fluff to keep the line dried things from coming out stiff as planks, it would be worth having.

A lot of what high-energy buys you is convenience, the ability to make what you want happen at any time, cold drinks, hot shower, whatever. This past week I found there was just more overhead of daily living, and I had to plan ahead and pay more attention to the weather, especially for solar cooking and bathing in the river. It wasn't bad at all really. The first couple of days I spent a lot of time getting the solar panels wired up, but once that was working I had time during the day, which I mostly used to attend to the potato patch and ride bike. It was a somewhat camping-like experience and I was using camping-like technology to deal with it, which is kind of rinky-dink. The solar shower for example was just a plastic bag, I gave up on it. Both times I tried to fill it, it sprang a leak.

Cooking was not convenient. I ate more cold cereal and peanut-butter sandwiches than I had in years. I lost weight (which is a good thing.) Part of the inconvenience would be easily fixable: the solar oven, grill, and wood stove all had to operate outside and the cooler was outside, but the utensils, dishes, and dry foods were all inside, so my kitchen was split in two pieces and I had to walk all the way around the house to get between them. This could be fixed with better design. On the other hand, there are a couple of pretty basic problems with solid fuel cooking - there's a lot of warmup time and it's difficult to regulate the heat. Also wood and charcoal are high-carbon fuels and produce a lot more carbon monoxide than gas, so they have to be used outside or there has to be a flue vented to the outside.

Another thing I noticed is that the cottage is not that bright inside in the day, even with all the blinds up. It could use a couple of those tube-skylights, strategically placed over the kitchen and bathroom sinks.

Let's see, I have a couple notes here about the water. Having only low-pressure water, you naturally tend to use less when you're at the sink. Also, it turned out that a lot of what I had been using the electrically-heated hot water for was just to temper the really cold groundwater. Using room-temperature water from the outside tank I didn't feel the need for hot water so often.

Conclusions

I managed to cut my energy use to a small fraction of normal and not take too bad of a lifestyle hit, for a week, in the summer, with a cash outlay of about $750 for a small solar electric lashup, and some additional scrounging plus stocking up ahead of time on food, water, and ice, and avoiding laundry. I was also sort of on vacation, or staycation, and spent some time working on the related food security project of growing potatoes.

The next step up in Energy Independence would be to do this in the winter, or for longer, say from Christmas through New Year's.

It seems to me there's got to be a value engineering opportunity here to develop low-energy appliances that are in between the $75 camp stuff, and the $2500 full-featured high-efficiency stuff. In a sense, the sustainability you can buy off the shelf these days is the decadent sustainability, $2500 fridge, woodstove, washer with no loss of convenience. The $75 camping equipment also works but is noticeably less convenient. Where's the in-between $450 stuff that's somewhat convenient and super low energy? I hesitate to mention this but safety also costs. A lot of the cost of that pimped-out solar electric design was in making something that would work safely and automatically under all conditions.

* * *

I would like now to venture into a discussion of the wider context of what I'm doing. Up to now I have mostly dealt with that by providing links to external articles written by more eloquent people. I want to discuss it here directly to better organize some thoughts. There will be some foaming at the mouth.

The Natural Step and Transition Town movements seek to offer a positive vision for the post-fossil-fuel future. I haven't read far into them yet but I think they are trying to do the same kind of thing I was this past week, that is, show how you can have a reasonably amenable life without using fossil fuel or relying for your basic needs on fossil-fuel powered global networks and franchises. That is great, we need practical ideas for technologies, deals, laws, attitudes and philosophies to address the mind-bogglingly large downside risk to our civilization, posed by the end of cheap oil.

What we do NOT need to do, in my view, is dissolve the United States, or outlaw money, or corporations, or anything like that.

Any discussion of sustainability must begin with a description of what we are doing that is unsustainable. I've noticed a tendency for these descriptions to wander off onto things that are just plain bad, and may be like symptoms or ripple effects but are not at the heart of unsustainability. Critics may bring up our unseemly materialism, unhealthy food, isolation, narcissism, unfulfilling occupations, overly centralized power. They make many good points, but because most people working on sustainability come from the political Left, what I consider to be valid and rational critiques are inextricably veined with the nihilistic rhetoric of the Hard Left that sees nothing worth saving in the American project and wants to chuck the whole thing. In favor of what I don't know, some kind of socialist utopia? This grates on me continually, it's not going to play down at the Legion see? and if you really want to sell sustainability in the mainstream I suggest you get Marx and Chomsky out of your head and tune out the tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorists and the anarchists. They are off-point, let's get back to sustainability.

The Natural Step, Transition Town, Post-Carbon Institute and others speak of relocalization. There is a straightforward logic to this. The extremely globalized world order of the last twenty years was made possible by 1) the end of the Cold War and the subsequent Pax Americana, 2) the Internet and other advanced communication technology, and 3) cheap transportation. Because 95% of transportation is fueled by oil, leg 3 is now being kicked hard and globalization is about to shift into reverse, that is, relocalization. I remember a news story from a couple of years ago, a company that made safes in upstate NY had outsourced their manufacturing to China, but was bringing it back because even with gasoline at only $2.50 a gallon it didn't make sense to ship safes halfway round the world. There is much more of this to come, and we might as well get ahead of the curve. Strengthening local communities and local economies seems to be a most constructive response to the impending energy crisis, and one that could actually improve the tone of our culture. We may not have any money to buy any more fancy stuff, but we'll be able to count on each other for the things that really matter, so the hope goes. This makes a lot of sense to me and I fully support the idea of rebuilding resilient local communities. Again, nothing wrong with focusing on the upside of the future that way, but it's so often accompanied by one-sided bad-mouthing of our current culture and economic system. Everything about global trade, corporations, and capitalism gets tarred with a big black brush. This lacks nuance (a charge that progressives should be sensitive to.)

For example, let's talk about this corporation-as-psychopath meme that's going around. Here's Wendell Berry:

A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance...It can experience no personal hope or remorse. No change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money.

This is hopelessly broad-brush. I just disagree, it doesn't square with my experience at all. I worked ten years for a corporation (Kodak). From my point of view, a corporation is just a bunch of people trying to figure out how to make a living. It's staffed and directed by people who can be held accountable. Limited liability does not mean totally unaccountable. For one thing, the bigger a pile of money it is, the higher it rises on the lawyer's watch lists. A corporation with deep pockets is strictly contained within the law. If it does anything actionable, high-powered lawyers will glom onto its face, burrow into its gut, and explode out of its chest with big toothy grins on their faces. The legal climate is such that even tiny companies like the Green Scene organic produce don't dare remain unincorporated and infinitely liable, the partners could lose their houses.

For another thing, it matters a great deal how the corporation plays the game - positive, zero, or negative sum. You can make money while creating or destroying real wealth, or by winning bets. At Kodak we played a positive-sum game, that is, we were desperately trying to devise something that some one somewhere would find useful and be willing to buy. Wall Street plays a zero-sum game. In stock trading, some one wins, some one loses. Health insurance companies and the Mafia play negative-sum, they make some money, cost everyone else a lot. The choice of game is a human decision. People can buy back their "moral allegiance" by changing jobs, which is what I did. As for immortality, well, if the corporation is mortal then so are all the jobs at it. The only hard-hearted thing I saw was from my perspective they boned a bunch of people out of their retirement. You can see that's a tough call, it pits older employees vs. newer employees. The whole time I worked for Kodak, it was becoming a smaller pile of money and trying to pull out of the dive, because when you're out of money, you're out of business. It was like working on building a jet engine in the back of a plane in flight after the propellor had fallen off the front. But I digress.

I've come to realize that there are mend-America leftists and end-America leftists. It's often difficult to tell the difference, there's a lot of fellow-traveling and sometimes it turns out the some one who's actually working on mend-America is just spouting end-America rhetoric, inconsistently with their actions. I want to tell them, be careful what you wish for.

It's lonely being a Green Conservative. I struggle with how to witness to people. (Why aren't conservatives for conservation? Why aren't liberals for free speech?)

I want to mend America, to save it. We are a threatened nation. Let me take a minute to recognize and celebrate some of the good things, ethos, and customs that we have in this country which is our home - things and customs which are at risk in this coming age of fossil-fuel depletion.

Kunstler says "The entropic mess that our economy has become is the final blowoff of late oil-based industrialism." I'm arguing that as such, the mess does not define our nation. There was an America before fossil fuels. The big cars and beefsteaks were nice sprinkles on the icing, but there are more important things, like, America is a place where you can be who you were really meant to be. Let's try and hold onto that shall we?

I hereby recognize and celebrate material prosperity. USA: all-time hands-down winner.

I am well aware that materialism and consumerism have been shifting into ever higher gears since the early 20th century, finally spinning out of control into affluenza. Franklin Roosevelt tried to remind depression-era voters that there was more to life than stuff - "the current crisis concerns, thank God, only material things" words to that effect. Louis Rukeyser said something similar on his Wall Street program after I think it was the 1987 market crash - "it's only your money, not your life." Right today there's still a lot of fluff and frivolity in our economy, we haven't even begun to pinch pennies the way they did in the Depression.

Well said, Frank and Lou, nevertheless (point of nuance), up to a certain point, money can buy happiness, and the pursuit of happiness is one of our inalienable rights. What's-their-names, the voluntary simplicity people, came up with a definition of money that was something like: the stored life energy of people, or, something you trade your life energy for. It takes money to feed the hungry, remove the cataracts, cure the Lyme disease. We are material beings, some degree of materialism is not optional, some additional is not greedy.

Jim Kunstler himself, the original Mr. Suburbia-Sucks, does a pretty fair job of listing the modern conveniences, medical miracles, and "all the precious cargo of human culture" that the fossil fuel age has brought us, and which is therefore at risk, shortly. From the Long Emergency:

It is no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as a benefit of modern life. All the necessities, comforts, luxuries, and miracles of our time - central heating, air conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lighting, cheap clothing, recorded music, movies, supermarkets, power tools, hip replacement surgery, the national defense, you name it - owe their origins or continued existence in one way or another to cheap fossil fuel. ... The blandishments of cheap oil and gas were so seductive, and induced such transports of mesmerizing contentment, that we ceased paying attention to the essential nature of these miraculous gifts from the earth: that they exist in finite, nonrenewable supplies, unevenly distributed around the world.

Lately I am fascinated by what it must have been like to live in the early twentieth century when so many of the things we take for granted in our daily doings today had just come on the scene and established themselves as normal accessories to everyday life - the car, airplanes, household electricity, central heating, skyscrapers, radio, motion pictures, hot water on demand, X-rays. How modern it all must have seemed in 1924, when most adults could still remember a world of horse-drawn carriages, outhouses, kerosene lamps, and Saturday night baths!...How amazing it must have been to witness everyday life improving so dramatically, and how this procession of marvels must have induced people to think that the human race was moving toward exactly the sort of perfection that the Enlightenment philosophers had promised. The most astonishing thing though, is how quickly we came to take these things for granted.

Everything characteristic about the condition we call modern life has been a direct result of our access to abundant supplies of cheap fossil fuels. Fossil fuels have permitted us to fly, to go where we want to go rapidly, and move things easily from place to place. Fossil fuels rescued us from the despotic darkness of night. They have made the pharaonic scale of building commonplace everywhere. They have allowed a fractionally tiny percentage of our swollen populations to produce massive amounts of food. They have allowed us to develop industries of surpassing ingenuity...

The age of fossil fuels is about to end. There is no replacement for them at hand. ... A hopeful public, including leaders in business and politics, views the growing problem of oil depletion as a very straightforward engineering problem of exactly the kind that technology and human ingenuity have so successfully solved before, and it therefore seems reasonable to assume that the combination will prevail again. There are however, several defects in this belief.

The oil endowment was an extraordinary and singular occurrence of geology, allowing us to use the stored energy of millions of years of sunlight. Once it's gone it will be gone forever. Technology is just the hardware and programming for running that fuel, not the fuel itself...much of our existing technology simply won't work without petroleum, and without the petroleum "platform" to work off, we may lack the tools to get beyond the current level of fossil-fuel based technology...we have an extremely narrow window of opportunity to make that happen.

Based on everything we know right now, no combination of so-called alternative fuels or energy procedures will allow us to maintain daily life in the United States the way we have been accustomed to running it under the regime of oil. We are in trouble.

You tell 'em Jim. What I would like to suggest, is that the people of the US used their economic freedom and accountable political system along with fossil fuels, to invent and produce many things of real value, in addition to the mountains of trash and trivia. I think it was the combination of freedom, responsibility, and fuel that made this possible.

If Kunstler, Heinberg, Cohen, and the other peakniks are right, and I think they are, fifty years from now some one will write a Gone With the Wind novel about our time. The book Gone with the Wind, even more than the movie, grieves for the Old South. In our study circle, Longfellow spoke of the grieving process that people will have to go through. Some of the material wonders on Kunstler's lists might not be worth grieving over if they are lost, but many are.

But what I really want to get to is that the fruits of the fossil fuel age go beyond these material wonders, and I say it is to our everlasting credit, even glory, as a civilization, that we chose to spend some of that sloshing oil wealth on them. As I went through my Energy Independence Week, I started a little list entitled Things We Will Used to Have Been Able to Afford, Maybe. I've already alluded to one of them above.

Safety regulations. I mentioned about the cost of safety in solar electric system design. As I understand it, the FAA has come to a very hard calculus on the cost of safety. Because perfect safety costs infinite dollars and would ground the industry, they had to come up with a finite average value for a human life. They chose one million dollars. In the future, we might end up marking that down. We might decide to accept 1940's-level idiot-proofing instead of 1990's-level idiot-proofing.
Careers for women outside the home. Ever see that episode of 1900 house when they did the laundry, and it took all the women all day? Single motherhood, living single, all practical impossibilities before modern conveniences.
During the open house as I was mentioning about my increased workload of daily life, one of the Groupies, let's call her e-Moondog, commented that back in pioneer days, people didn't live single. One partner would work on the household chores while the other worked the forest or field. Still works that way in Amish country I presume. I know Jim Kunstler caught flak for depicting some return of traditional gender roles in his post-oil novel World Made by Hand. But I think there were practical reasons why the traditional division of labor worked the way it did.
Science, both the physics kind and the stamp-collecting kind. In doing research for the site assessment part of my permaculture design, I found on the Minnesota DNR web site a trove of information about soils and plant communities all over the state, which must have taken many ranger-years of work to assemble. That reminds me of another one:
Conservation laws. We have them because people voted for them. We have had money to spend on enforcing them. Poaching is much less of a problem here than in other places where those things are not true. The rangers and game wardens are going to be in a tough spot if freezing starving people head into the woods with saws and arrows.
Kunstler mentions recorded music and movies. I can't believe he forgot Broadway, and to me the greater marvel is not the technologies but the sheer number of people who were able to have careers in the creative arts. Without that oil-driven economy would we have the musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein, the music of Ray Charles? Maybe, since they were geniuses. But what about the Eagles? Carole King? Eddie Rabbitt? Livingston Taylor? Suzie Quattro? Maybe not.
Honest cops and Attorneys General who answer the phone. Why do you suppose it was, when the United moving truck showed up with the rest of my stuff last week, I didn't have to ransom my stuff from the driver or bribe Zack and Cody not to drop it? Because United is a big company in a closely regulated industry. Democracy breeds accountability, see how that works? Of course its not perfect, don't get me started on Dish Network. But I digress again.

I'm sure you could add more. How about the 40-hour work week?

I hereby recognize and celebrate our nation's nonmaterial achievements. Natural resources underlie them, but they flow from our values and institutions.

All of these, worth grieving for, should they pass away. Let us work to see that they do not.

Of course it's been a mixed bag. Coal-fired electric power freed us from a lot of drudgerous daily physical labor. Some people then worked even longer hours at high-stress nonphysical jobs. Before machine power and safety inspectors, many people got swift tickets to old age through repetitive stress injuries and outright accidents. With those greatly reduced, many proceeded to give themselves swift tickets to old age with gluttony and cigarettes. In a free country not everyone's going to spend the "oil dividend" the way you might want them to. (Mmmmm gluttony.) But many people and companies did play the positive-sum game and created real wealth, cultural treasures, and public goods.

If you tell me you don't care for Bush/Clinton America, nor for Gordon Gekko/Alex P. Keaton America, I'm like, yeah I see your point. But what about Jimmy Stewart/Gary Cooper America? or Jefferson/DeTocqueville America? Something worthy there? I don't think we need to invent a replacement for our nation, we need to appeal to its better nature.

As we relocalize let's not forget (point of nuance) the value of economies of scale, and of national unity. I think it matters a great deal that there is a "we" and what we tell ourselves we stand for. I believe the people who accomplished all I talked about above did so both because of natural resources and because they were walking around with "We are Americans. America equals life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, liberty and justice for all, all men are created equal" and so on, echoing around in their heads. This was their mythology of America, in the Joseph Campbell sense of being an abstracted narrative which captures the meaning of what's going on. Look, all history is mythology right? No history book can list everything that everyone did. In recent decades revisionist historians have been promulgating an alternative mythology of America that goes "America equals slavery, genocide, greed, corruption, and war." In doing so they scrupulously cite facts so they can't be called liars, but it's clear that the intent of this negatory mythology is to undermine any sense of allegiance to America.

(My turn to get out the broad brush :-) It worked on Hollywood, which used to make moralistic movies from the perspective of the original mythology, movies that went: "In a world where: this happened in America and it sucked, see? It sucked because it was unamerican, see? So we should not put up with that." Now they make movies from the perspective of the revisionist mythology which go: "In a world where: this happened in America and oh,migod, it sucked. That's America for you, like, sucktastic. Why would anyone want to call themselves an American?" Big difference.

I guess what I'm trying to argue is, for this country at least, the best "platform" on which to build the post-fossil fuel order, is the American way. It was conceived a hundred years before the oil age, fifty years before the coal age. I think we can find in it, keys to the future.

I'm an engineer, not a historian or political scientist, but sustainability is patriotic to me. That is why I quit my job, sold my house, joined Americorps, and worked on solar panels. That is what Energy Independence Week is about. Please join me for the next observance, to be announced.

Energy Independence Week, Day 6

2008-07-14T13:33:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, July 9, day 6 of Energy Independence Week

In the morning the batteries were down to 12.3 v. It seems to take almost a quarter of the battery capacity just to run the 5 watt compost bin fan all night. The icebox was hanging in there at 43.5 degrees.

Cold cereal for breakfast again, and then it was off to weed and mulch the potato patches. By 6:30 the cooler was up to 49 degrees, and all the two-liter bottles had thawed, so it was just the three blocks left. It looked like there was a storm coming so I hustled down to the river for my daily swim. On the way back I decided to cheat and buy some more ice at the gas station, two five-pound bags. So the original charge of ice lasted six days seven nights. I barely made it back before the rain started.

I joined Flora's expedition to Farmer Dave's U-pick Strawberries along with Ranger K and young Skyler. So, dinner was basically rain-washed strawberries off the vine. That was nice, as was the rainbow which was so bright it almost touched the ground in front of the treeline. Farmer Dave's mosquito herd made such a good living off me I started to wonder if his U-pick deal was a scam to produce a sustainable yield of mosquitos.

I've been meaning to mention how well the cottage is working temperature-wise throughout the spring and summer. The space heater gave up the magic smoke back on June 5, when the daily average temperature was still well below room temperature. I haven't needed any active heating or cooling since, nor even any fans. I've been able to manage the temperature just by opening and closing windows. The passive-solar overhang on the attached greenhouse is a key feature - back in the spring when the sun was lower in the sky it would shine into the greenhouse and I could pump heat into the house just by opening the connecting door. I don't mind it warm so I would heat the place up to almost 80 during the day and let it cool off at night. Now that it's summer I'm opening the windows at night and closing them during the day. I was using the ceiling fan a lot during the spring but I shut it off for Energy Independence Week and haven't missed it.

There is maybe some controversy about whether thermal mass is useful in this climate. The argument against goes something like this: Many of the natural building methods feature thick heavy walls with lots of heat storage. But a lot of that comes from the desert southwest where the main problem is not the average outside temperature but the extreme day-to-night difference. But in central Minnesota it can easily be cloudy for say the entire month of November, and it would take a ridiculous amount of storage mass to ride that out, something like full earth sheltering which nobody dares because it's so outre it has no resale value. So forget thermal mass, build it light and very tight (like passivhaus.)

I was pretty sympathetic to this argument but I have to say from living in this cottage it is nice to have the massive walls. At the Midwest Renewable Energy Fair there was a workshop on the subject. The presenter argued basically that in the spring and summer in Minnesota, the heating and cooling problem is in fact a daily moderating problem, as in the desert, so thermal mass is useful in this climate for a good portion of the year.

In other news, the experiment plots are showing some noticeable differences. There's a pretty bright line between the all-compost plot and the compost-sawdust mixture. Here's a couple of views of that. The all-compost plot is basically to the left of the white door on the cottage there.

The compost-sawdust mixture is right now not even as good as the chiseled-but-unamended control plot, and the sawdust-only plot has only a little bit of stuff growing.

It didn't photograph that well but the left half of the picture is the compost-sawdust plot and the right half is the sawdust-only plot.

Here's the control plot:

The crater has developed a more verdant patch, on the north side east, closest to the piles of dirt that were pushed in to fill it. There is some different stuff growing there but it looks to me like its just more fertile on that side.

Energy Independence Week, Day 5

2008-07-14T12:17:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, July 8, day 5 of Energy Independence Week

The batteries were down to 12.17 volts this morning, which is about 50% according to this chart from the Battery Book for Your PV Home:

12.60 100%

12.35 75%

12.15 50%

11.95 25%

11.85 discharged

This chart applies to 12v lead-acid batteries which have been sitting without charging or discharging for at least an hour. I think it was the Skipper that told me even deep-cycle batteries shouldn't be discharged more than halfway, for longest life. So I really needed to get them charged up. I was able to get up to 6.5-7.5 amps from my mongrel solar array. At 5 pm I took advantage of my lack of mounting racks to reposition the best panel facing west. By 6:45 the batteries were back up to 12.53v.

This battery-based solar electric lashup cost about $750 altogether. Nominally it's a 194 watt array but the most I've gotten out of it is 92 watts, due to the mismatched panel voltages.

For breakfast I cooked up a cheese and lamb's quarters omelette on the woodgas camp stove. I used pine lumber chunks about 1 inch big for fuel, kindled with fire starting cubes. I only filled the stove halfway but that was still too much fuel. Lunch was another peanut butter sandwich. For dinner I reheated leftovers in the solar oven, along with some hot water for dishes. The water supply was down to about 60 gallons at the end of the day, and the cooler was at 46 degrees, up about 1.

I've continued going down to the river in the evening for a dip. The first couple days it was like 85 degrees and the water was clear. The third day it was like 80 degrees and the water had some bits of algae in it. Today it was like 69 degrees and the water had algae, pine needles, and a small dead fish. Maybe the Lord is trying to toughen me up - maybe by Thanksgiving I'm supposed to cannonball through a half-inch of ice with a hearty rabble yell.

Ms. Flora stopped by in the evening to apply compost tea to the hazel seedlings and the potted bur oaks (I believe this is to promote root growth.)

You can see I'm having to regularly keep an eye on the water in the tank, the ice in the cooler, and the juice in the batteries. I think this is good for putting you in touch with the general idea of thrift and conservation. When you're plugged in, you don't see the coal mine or the aquifer being emptied, so what the heck, leave the sprinkler and the ceiling fan on.

As I wasn't messing with my infrastructure so much I had time during the day to work on weeding the potato patches. I mentioned before how we ended up with the worst of both worlds there. As I understand it, there are two basic approaches to weed control in gardens: digging them out with a hoe, or smothering them with mulch. We went with mulch, but the wheat straw I used was full of seeds which came up, so now I have to weed as well.

Potatoes have to be kept in the dark as the grow, or so I am told, they will become green and poisonous. Again this can be done two ways, by hilling up dirt over them or adding more mulch. After I get done weeding I have to add more mulch (Ms. Flora strongly advises me.)

Energy Independence Week, Day 4

2008-07-08T10:07:00.000-07:00

Monday, July 7, day 4 of Energy Independence Week

So after three days of cold cereal for breakfast I thought I'd try to make pancakes again using the woodgas camp stove. In my one previous attempt I kind of scorched'em.

I fueled the stove with cut up bits of cardboard standing on end, about 1x3 inches big, and kindled it with fire-starting cubes. That worked out perfectly, it was just the right amount of fuel for the job. I keep the stove's fan on low, and regulated the heat by taking the pan on and off the stove.

It was a cool morning and I really wanted some hot coffee now. I thought I'd see if the supposedly 1000 watt inverter would run the supposedly 750 watt coffeemaker. Sort of. The inverter overheated about halfway through the 10-cup cycle and had to rest. It was drawing 85 amps from the 12v batteries. Making one pot of coffee used about as much electricity as the compost bin fan running all day long - twenty-some amp-hours. I decided I'd better wire up my fourth solar panel. It has a crack in the back glass but I think it still works.

I mulched and watered the hazelnut trees. That took awhile as I can only get one or two gallons a minute through the 250 ft hose from water "tower". That put a big dent in the water supply. I'm down to 80 gallons or so from the 150 I started with.

Three of the thirty seedlings had leafed out since they were planted last week. It hadn't rained more than a trace in that time.

The garden hose through the window seems to have created a mouse highway - I've trapped two since the start of this stunt.

Lunch was Peanut Butter and Cherry Pie Filling Sandwich. For dinner I fired up the woodgas stove with pine lumber chunks then pan-fried together a bunch of Italian sausage, tomato, red chard, and lamb's quarters (picked fresh from the crater.) I also mixed in the last of the solar oven vegetable stew.

I refueled the stove a couple of times during cooking, and again after, when I put the dutch oven on full of water to heat for dishwashing.

The bike shop is stringing me along on this bike trailer. First they said last Thursday, then this Monday, now its maybe next week....

Energy Independence Week, Day 3

2008-07-08T09:30:00.000-07:00

Sunday July 6, day 3 of Energy Independence Week

Well the batteries got a full solid charge on Saturday, but just running the little compost bin fan overnight brought the voltage down to 12.3.

It only took about half an hour in the solar oven to reheat some leftovers for lunch. The same trick worked at dinnertime, though I left it in longer (6:20-7pm) it wasn't as hot.

Made some steps for cooler. This 16-foot trough made of two-by's had been sitting behind the house for months. One time I asked Redbeard, is this like, a thing, or what is the deal? He said it used to be but go ahead if I had another use for it. Now I do, so I just sawed it into four pieces with my solar-charged cordless sawzall. Voila, standing platforms.

Originally I thought of hinging the icebox lid, but decided I liked being able to open it on any side. Not bear-proof though.

I'm using these little 6-LED rechargeable lanterns. But this time of year there's so much daylight you shouldn't need lights much.

Energy Independence Week, Day 2

2008-07-08T07:50:00.000-07:00

Saturday, the 5th of July, and Day 2 of Energy Independence Week.

On Friday and Saturday mornings both, I ate cold cereal for breakfast which I hadn't done in years. This week I'm cooking only with solar, wood, and charcoal, which isn't as convenient as gas or electricity. My 50/50 mix of Special K and Crunch Berries hit the spot.

In the morning I mostly worked on my solar electric lashup, which as you see is totally safe and structurally sound. My panels are mismatched for voltage. I have a current booster which is designed to downconvert my 72 v panels to 12 v to drive a pump - I was hoping it would be able to charge my 12 v batteries as well, but it didn't. It ran a car wiper motor okay but just sat there doing nothing when I hooked the battery to its output.

So instead I just connected all the panels directly in parallel with the batteries. This forces the high voltage panels to operate pretty far from their maximum power point, so about 70% of the power comes from the one little 12v panel. I was getting about 5 amps peak under hazy skies. With the panels directly connected they can draw power from the battery if it gets too dark, so I have to watch the ammeter. I was still getting positive amps at 5:30 pm.

I was hoping to use my little folding solar cell phone charger to run the compost bin fan, but that didn't work so well either. In full sun it ran about half-speed.

Rain was forecast in the evening so I broke down the solar array and hauled it inside for the night. It's wired together with cut up pieces of lamp cord and such, no conduits or weathersealing.

Here's my little outdoor kitchen. Note chimney-style charcoal starter, no lighter fluid allowed. I grilled up some burgers, zucchini, and portabellas more or less as directed in this week's Green Scene memo. According to those recipes, the key to grilled vegetables is salt, lots and lots of salt.

I set the dutch oven on the grill to use the rest of the charcoal to heat some water for dishwashing.

Meanwhile I went down to river for a swim. There's a nice little park by the dam. Earlier in the day I had tried to fill the solar shower bag again, but it sprung a leak again in the exact same place where I had fixed it before, so I gave up on that.

Energy Independence Day!

2008-07-05T05:58:00.000-07:00

Friday, the 4th of July, day 1 of Energy Independence Week

Back on Wednesday morning I got the outside water tank plumbed into the inside via a garden hose through the window. It isn't high enough to feed the shower head, but there is low pressure water to the sinks and the commode, which is a fine thing.

I spent most of Wednesday and Thursday making the cooler pictured below. As with the small personal water tower, the cooler is supposed to be useful both for Energy Independence Week and longer term. For now its an outside icebox replacing the fridge which I don't have enough solar power to run. Later I hope to use it as a root cellar.

You can see I'm making it out of scrap Structural Insulated Panels (styrofoam faced with oriented strand board.) They're a foot thick and allegedly R50. There were three odd-size pieces in the attic of the shop - I spent like an hour figuring out what was the biggest size box I could make out of them. I ended up with 22 cubic feet on the inside. On the outside it's basically five feet big. I made the lid out of three layers of 2-inch pink foam insulation board (polystyrene). That should be nominally R30. The whole business is stuck together with Pur Stick professional gun foam.

I could've spent three weeks making this like a grandfather clock but I was desperate to just get it basically functional in time for 4th of July. The air sealing of the lid needs improvement, and the ergonomics aren't that great.

It doesn't have a drain, so the ice needs to be contained. I had previously frozen 13 two-liter bottles of water. I moved these into the cooler along with the wireless thermometer and tried to freeze some more bottles overnight on the 3rd. The cooler chilled right down to 35 F by morning, but the new bottles didn't freeze. In my haste I had bought the cheapest regular soda and hadn't dumped it all out and replaced it with water. Either there wasn't enough time or maybe the sugar depresses the freezing point?

Anyway, come the morning of the 4th and it was time for power down. I transferred most of the contents of the fridge in bags and buckets, along with another 30 pounds of block ice. I ate the ice cream for brunch. I don't think the temp went over 45 all day. The meat was still frozen and there was still a lot of ice at the end of the day. It might go the distance?

As I was washing out buckets at the end of my 250 foot garden hose, I noticed the water was pretty warm even at 9 am sunshine levels.

Some of the food in the fridge was produce that wasn't going to keep much longer, so I broke out the solar oven and made up a recipe. Potatoes, tomato, celery, baby carrots, red chard, onion, garlic, salt, basil, and a little oil.

I let it cook from about 11:45 to 3:45. It was a bit cloudy so I put the reflectors on. I had some of it for a midafternoon snack, turned out pretty okay. I put some corn on the cob back in the solar oven and let it cook the rest of the day. That was really good and went great with the steak I grilled for dinner. I reheated the vegetables by putting a skillet on top of the charcoal grill.

In the afternoon I worked on hooking up the solar panels. I'm reluctant to put much drain on the batteries until I have a way to recharge them. By the time I got it set up it was too late to tell if it was going to work. I have a current booster for running a 12v motor from my 72v panels, but I don't have a real solar battery charger. The compost toilet bin really wants its fan to run 24 hours a day. At this time of year the day is so long here that there isn't that much need for lighting.

It was a hot day and by night I really wanted a shower. For that I filled two five gallon buckets from the hose, hauled them into the shower, lifted them up and dumped them on my head, cold turkey (one for wash, one for rinse.) This was not that bad, but it wasn't that great either. A little cooler than I'd've liked, but as I say it was a warm day. Mainly it was just awkward.

Why am I doing this? Because I read the News of the Future.

Energy Independence Week is here...aaack!

2008-07-01T19:24:00.001-07:00

You may remember my call to celebrate Energy Independence Week this 4th of July. That is:

No burning of fossil fuels
No using electricity from the grid
No trips to the grocery store

This exercise works to increase your preparedness for both random disasters and for the entirely foreseeable low-energy post-fossil-fuel world to come.

I almost punted because neither the solar water heat nor the solar photovoltaic system I was planning to use is built yet. Also as far as I know I'm just about the only celebrant. I questioned whether anything useful would be learned or should I postpone my observance.

The real crux of it is the well pump. Without 460 watts of 230 VAC I don't have running water. Without 525 watts of 115 VAC I can't flush the toilet, because it's got its own pump-out to the compost bin. The original plan was to install a solar electric system capable of driving these. I also greatly desired to be able to take hot showers, and was counting on the solar hot water system being finished. Nada.

So yesterday I went around to my friends, told them of my troubles, asked for advice. Miss Twiggy lent me her portable solar camp shower, which is like a black plastic bag you hang in the sun, holds about four gallons. It had a leak which I fixed with the plastic welder, but even so, it only puts out about as much water as some one pissing on you. Lame.

Redbeard suggested driving a new sand-point well and putting a hand pump on it. I wasn't crazy about that because I've seen it done and it's a lot of work. I finally thought of an alternative I liked better, and that was to go ahead and set up the roof water catchment tank which I had included in the permaculture design, for gravity feeding irrigation water to the gardens.

There already existed on campus a few 250 and 300 gallon plastic tanks and a platform for holding one up about five feet off the ground, so it would only take a few plumbing fittings and a hose through the window to hook it up to the inside plumbing and get some low-pressure running water, enough to supply the sinks and toilet anyway.

Also, it turned out I needed irrigation water a lot sooner than I thought, because Flora got a blowout special deal on five hundred hazelnut tree seedlings, which had to be planted right away. I had in the design an area designated for hazelnut trees but wasn't going to plant any until next year, until these came along. I said I'd take thirty of them.

Here is my water tank. I picked out the prettiest of the 300 gallon totes, one with an intact cage, a lid and a working drain valve. (This solution exhibits the permaculture principles of catching and storing, multiple elements supporting the (water) function, (tank) element has multiple functions, least change for the greatest effect.) It isn't really a rain barrel yet as there's no gutter, but the rules of Energy Independence Week allow stocking up ahead of time, so I half-filled it from the well using dirty old coal-fired electricity.

The platform was so big and heavy and far away I didn't have much choice but to use the Huge Arguably Unnecessary Forklift to put it in place. I'm trying to get grass and clover growing near the cottage and it annoys me to drive on it. I had never driven the Lull before but Jolson was kind enough to give me a lesson and wave me off bashing into anything important. Unfortunately the tank is not high enough to gravity-feed the shower head, or maybe just barely if it was filled all the way up. It took three adapters to get the two-inch plastic nozzle on the tank down to a garden hose, and I cross-threaded it something awful so it drips a little.

Here is the new hazelnut tree grove, southwest of the cottage. In spite of my attempt to place them randomly I basically ended up with a three by ten grid. The seedlings are individually protected from deer browsing with yellow plastic mesh cages staked with bamboo (available from Forestry Supplies of Jackson MS.) You can see my water hose there which runs 250 feet from above pictured tank.

The lesson here is that even though you never know what's going to happen, its still good to have a design and a phase plan so that as fate throws stuff around you have a better chance of picking out pieces that will fit into some kind of coherent whole.

Thanks to Flora for help with the tree planting. It did pain me to do so much stomping around in the south experiment plot where the deer forage mix is just starting to come up. I think I will wait a week before going out there again and mulching the trees.

So that was yesterday; went pretty well. Today I resolved if only I could get the toilet working off-grid I would go ahead and celebrate Energy Independence Week. I had earlier purchased a cheapo $60 modified-square-wave 1000 watt inverter for the car, which I figured might just be capable of running the macerator pump. I decided Hunt Utilities Group needed to trade in a couple of their dead car batteries for brand new Interstate marine deep-cycle batteries, and that furthermore they would not mind if I borrowed them for a week.

I ran this setup once and it worked so I'm off to the races. I have a 65 watt 12 volt solar panel I can use to recharge the batteries. The inverter draws a lot of standby power (10 W) so I don't dare leave it on.

I spent the rest of the day chasing down plumbing fittings to connect the water tank to the inside piping. Redbeard gave me an Aquapex lesson. Tomorrow I'll see how much damage I can do with a little plumbing knowledge. After that I need to see about a cooler (the original plan was for the fancy PV system to run the fridge too.) I think I've got enough hardwood charcoal for cooking and heating dishwater. I have some LED lights. Trips to the hardware store are allowed during Energy Independence Week as long as you don't drive, so I've ordered a Burley flatbed trailer for my bike. It'd still be nice to figure out a way to at least get a lukewarm shower...

______________________________

Postscript: The terms of Energy Independence Week allow apartment dwellers and other such city mice to celebrate it by spending the week with country mice who will be in a better position to do the off-grid thing, but if you've talked your entire condo association into putting up a wind turbine, "more power to ya."

House & Garden

2008-06-26T11:45:00.000-07:00

The styrofoam roof of the cottage is looking good in its new fascia. Now it's time to get it ready for the finish coat of cob.

On the east and west walls of the greenhouse, the OSB has been shingled with roll roofing and stapled with chicken wire.

I've posted before about our difficulties in sealing joints at the edges of straw bales. Montalban is putting in some do-over time, cramming more flax straw in around the windows.

The crater area continues to green up. The rest of the seeded areas around the cottage are only just starting to show a few sprouts. It hasn't rained very much since planting day.

The potato patches have come up nicely, all except the Norkotas which are almost a complete bust. The wheat straw Flora gave me for mulch turned out to be kind of a mistake - it was full of seeds and a lot came up, requiring hand-weeding of the whole doggone thing. Flora was very apologetic, said she hadn't used that exact kind of straw before and hadn't had such a problem with the usual flax straw. She helped me weed.

Yesterday your correspondent had the privilege of attending part of a board meeting for our client, Happy Dancing Turtle. One of the board members, let's call her Ray-man, is you might say a skeptic or at least not inclined to be any kind of early adopter of any of this sustainability stuff. "I'll do it if it's convenient."

Us sustainnibals and peakniks encounter these situations from time to time, opportunities to witness to the unconverted. I feel like we more or less blew it again. I maybe should have said something like, "We're working on it. We'll try to make it convenient, and by 'try' I mean lives, fortunes, sacred honor, but I gotta tellya, I think the way this is likely to play out is not so much that the sustainable life gets more convenient, but that the unsustainable life gets steadily less convenient - less customers in your video store, the price of gas, food, and everything else going up. Steadily if we're lucky and there isn't some kind of outage or shortage. That's why I'm trying to learn how to live sustainably now."

Let me reinforce that in our News of the Future segment with a couple of articles from the fine web site www.energybulletin.net. Here Dave Cohen talks the near-term economic consequences of oil addiction for the US. Here John Greer eloquently makes a point I've discussed with friends, that our intricate human civilization is more vulnerable to climate change than a thin-skinned tree frog.

Construction weather

2008-06-18T06:30:00.000-07:00

Out in the crater, the annual rye and other groundcover is starting to come up (compare to last week's photos.)

At the cottage, there is much fascia to install. The underside of the eaves is to be sprayed with cob.

Huge, arguably unnecessary forklift.

"Well this is another fine mess you've gotten me into."

Another Woodgas Stove test. This time I fueled it with strips of corrugated cardboard standing on end, with three fire-starting cubes on top for kindling. This trial had the fastest start and the lowest smoke so far, and it burned a good twelve minutes in gasifying mode.

I'd have to say it was pretty raw for mid-June

2008-06-12T09:17:00.000-07:00

Forty-five Farenheit. Horizontal rain.

I ventured out with poncho and shovel to check the dikes in the crater. Ponchos are not that good in a high wind. The dikes were mostly hanging in there.

I headed down towards the office to return Flora's seeder, and give her a bag of dirt and dandelion seeds (which I knew she would appreciate.) I found her happily composting in the garden, while Redbeard and the other weather weenies waited inside, whining.

Planting Day!

2008-06-11T18:26:00.000-07:00

Tuesday was a big day, a day of soil decompaction and tilling, and seeding of groundcover, a day of Diesel Fuel, Big Knobby Tires, and Steel.

On Monday I spent quite a while dragging the bedspring around the South and Center plots with the lawnmower, trying to even out the sawdust and compost. That worked pretty well for smoothing out small-scale unevenness, but not so well for one whole corner being light or heavy, because its like having a rake you can't pick up. For a change it didn't rain much Sunday or Monday, so most of the standing water from last week's deluge went away.

So Tuesday was it, even though there was still a large puddle in the North plot, I figured we had to go ahead with decompaction and planting, as more rain was forecast.

Here's Pigpen chisel-plowing the West field (south plot.)

We rented a front-mounted rototiller attachment for the Cat, to fluff up the Forklift Exclusion Zone (FLZ) around the cottage, and the grounds north and east of the cottage, including the former driveway.

That soft spot in the North-west plot was mostly gone after two passes with the chisel plow.

From here you can see most of the scheme. Let's start on the right side of the cottage there. The light-colored area right around the cottage can't be tilled because there is a styrofoam ground roof just under the surface, to keep the ground dry and insulating for heat storage. Later in the day I top-dressed and seeded it. Moving to the right, the brown banded area out to the little white stake is the 50-foot forklift exclusion zone, which was rototilled after earlier being spread with composted horse manure. The inner ring, the FLZ, and the grounds north and east were all seeded with a "drivable groundcover mix" of white clover, high-traffic grass seed, and dandelion. Farther to the right, between the white stake and the grassy berm, are the control plots for the West field experiment (the West field runs across the foreground.) These West and South field plots were seeded with Wright On Custom Soil Building and Wildlife Forage Mix.

Wright On Mix:

white clover 21.55%

300st per. Rye 21.23%
alfalfa 14.42%
cr. Red fescue 14.25%
birdsfoot trefoil 10.72%
rape dwf essex 6.30%
purple top turnip 4.76%
alsike clover 3.50%
pasja brassica 2.57%
winfred rapeseed 0.71%

Here's the view of the tilled up driveway, north and east grounds.

Jolson and Pigpen finished all the tilling in an hour and a half. I had all my seed ready and spent the rest of the day seeding with Flora's vintage 1909 hand-crank Cyclone seeder. Just in time too, because the next day it rained like the Dickens again.

Final thought: I have come to sense a certain irony, or dumbth, in that because so much compaction was caused by heavy equipment, we were forced to use heavy equipment for decompaction, to fight Diesel, Big Knobby Tires, and Steel with same. In fact, within minutes of decompaction and seeding, the dratted forklift was back out in front of the cottage, six tons of metal positioned so that Montalban could nail up a six pound plank. I fully expected this to happen, but inside, part of me was screaming, like Charleton Heston in Planet of the Apes, "you maniacs, you compacted it again. Darn you all to heck." I muttered something about this to Mr. Universe, who was like, "forklift's gotta drive somewhere." I think, actually, not. We use it because we have it, and, if one is concerned only with building construction, it is probably faster than ladders & scaffolding. But if one is concerned with both buildings and permaculture gardens adjacent to them, it might be that ladders and scaffolding have lower total project cost, than heavy forklifts followed by other heavy equipment to fix the damage caused by them. Just a thought for future consideration.

Woodgas Stove initial evaluation

2008-06-08T17:43:00.000-07:00

You may recall I am advocating Energy Independence Week this 4th of July, which is observed by 1) Using no grid electricity, 2) Burning no fossil fuel, and 3) making no trips to the grocery store.

If you can pull this off for a week in July, maybe you learn enough to do a week in October, from which you learn enough to do a month in January. Maybe not all in the same year but you get the idea. Learning energy independence strengthens your household and America.

For this July I'm thinking of it as a staycation, like camping at home. I need a way to cook without electricity, gas, propane, or even fossil-derived charcoal. This means biomass, like wood and wood-derived charcoal. I did get a charcoal grill, but for cooking on wood I liked the looks of the Woodgas Campstove XL from the Biomass Energy Foundation. It's a small forced-air inverted downdraft gasifying stove which claims to burn wood and the like much more efficiently and cleanly than say, a regular open campfire.

Last night and this morning I cooked two meals on it and did a couple of additional test burns. I hereby report my findings:

Trial one: Loaded the stove with chunks of wood about the size of hot dogs or dill pickles, and used flax straw for kindling. I think the wood pieces were way too big as it took quite a while to get the stove burning cleanly - I had to add more tinder about seven or eight times. I get the feeling the wood pieces should be more like the size of grapes or berries. Once it did get going I sliced up a potato and made home fries. This worked really well, the skillet was just the right temperature for browning the potatoes.

Trial two: Test burn with flax straw as the only fuel. I stuffed the stove really tight with it. This got going smoothly but didn't burn as long. The stove burns in two phases - the gasifying or smoke-burning phase, and then the charcoal-burning phase. You can tell when it switches over because the flame goes out and the coals sit there and glow. With the straw as the only fuel, the flaming phase lasted just seven minutes.

Trial three: I found some smaller wood about finger-sized to egg-sized. I decided to get fancy and try to make strawberry pancakes. This time it took maybe four or five additions of straw tinder to get the thing burning hot enough to stop smoking. As with the first trial, even when burning with no visible smoke there was a kind of pitchy odor, maybe because most of my wood was pine, and not all that dry. A bit of soot formed on the bottom of the skillet. Even with the fan on low, the pan got way too hot and I scorched half my pancakes. I should have brought out a trivet to set the pan down off the stove.

Trial four: Another test burn with flax straw only. I took a wad of it, bunched it up tight like this with the top looser, and stuffed it down into the stove.

Where's my aim'n'flame? I might have to write an exception to the no-fossil-fuel rule to allow the use of butane lighters.

The reason I keep on about the flax straw is that we've got so much of it. Here's that same blue wheelbarrow parked in front of the supply - enough to run the stove half a million times I guess, although it'll probably decompose first; there's already mushrooms growing on top.

Here it is burning nice and clean on the straw. It didn't even burn as long as the earlier straw-only trial, maybe four minutes instead of seven for the flaming phase. I'm not sure why, maybe the straw was more damp or I didn't pack it as tight. The pile of char and ash there is from the Strawberry Pancake Trial. I want to try saving the charcoal and running the stove on it later.

My beloved 8-inch iron skillet fits nicely on top of the stove.

Conclusions:

This will do nicely for Energy Independence Week. It basically works and is pretty okay for what it's trying to be, which is a portable camp stove. I'm convinced it's vastly more efficient than a regular campfire; how else could you cook a batch of pancakes on one handful of wood?

It's harder to get going than I expected maybe; I needed a lot of kindling, more than would fit in the stove at first. It would take a lot of skill to be able to load it, light it with one match, and just have it come up without smoking. In that respect it is similar to fire-making in general. I think my Trial Two was beginner luck. The manual says you may have to use commercial fire-starting sticks. I vaguely recall reading somewhere else about this kindling-on-top technique, in the context of making an open fire or maybe it was a Rumford fireplace. In that article they had four or five different sizes of fuel layered with the biggest on the bottom.

When burning wood the stove did occasionally sort of sputter and let out a puff of smoke, I don't know why. Might be wind, or maybe my wood chunks are still too big, or uneven, or damp. When burning straw, it tended to puff out little bits of ash all the time - it's a forced-air stove and the straw burns to a very fine ash.

I mentioned earlier about saving the charcoal. There are two reasons for doing this. One is to save it as fuel for later, cleaner-burning fuel. The other is to use it as a soil amendment in the garden, in which case you might as well save the ash too, as it will have calcium and suchlike mineral nutrients.

With this stove it's a little inconvenient to save the charcoal, basically you have to dump the coals out while the stove is hot - there's no damper to shut off the charcoal burning. If you're saving it for the garden you could dump the char/ash into a pail of water. To save the charcoal for later use as fuel, I dumped it into my wheelbarrow and spread out the coals so they'd stop burning.

For the stay-at-home use I have in mind for it, I think it would be worth making some kind of stand or cart for it, to hold it securely at a convenient height, and with a side shelf or two.

and then the rains came...

2008-06-06T17:17:00.000-07:00

...two inches of rain, ish.

Here's the North plot. It's slightly lower than the Center and South plots, is the most compacted from construction of the cottage, and gets all the water from the cottage roof. Glug.

Panning to the right we see the Center plot, which starts at about the cottage door there.

Panning more to the right we see the South plot, which is less compacted and had no standing water.

Here's the Crater. The five check-dikes we raked up the day before helped a lot but weren't adequate for the two-inch rainfall. I counted forty-two washouts or about one every twenty-five feet on average. I gave Flora and Mr. Universe each separate tours. Flora figured there should have been twice as many check dikes, Mr. Universe figured they should have been twice as big. Gaaah! How am I supposed to get people with such profoundly different philosophies onto the same page? As Dave Barry once wrote, it would be easier to get the entire city of Tokyo to wear matching outfits than to get any two Americans to agree on pizza toppings.

Crater repair Thursday

2008-06-06T16:55:00.000-07:00

After the local excavators gimped out on our plan to terrace the crater, Flora came up with a scheme to hand-rake some check-dikes into it on contour. I pitched it to Mr. Universe, and he was like, "so let it be written, so let it be done."

Here's Ms. Flora showing me how it's done. (Ain't she something? I love a woman in boots.) Of course Mr. Universe has a laser level, we used it to mark the contours and got faster with it as we went along.

We raked five dikes about five inches high - the lower two separated by about 8-9 inches and the upper three separated by about a foot. Over 1000 linear feet altogether, which took the two of us most of the day.

Meanwhile, Jolson took back Old MacDonald's manure spreader and rented his chisel plow, which we're going to use to decompact the west field.

It's set up to plow about ten feet wide, and has three rows of chisels plus a drag rake. Training day: I practiced with it in front of the shop. Redbeard said I looked good driving the tractor. (Mental note: bust chops on Redbeard mercilessly in the blog.)

I found I could chisel about eight or nine inches deep before the tractor ran out of traction.

It was fun chatting with Old MacDonald. He knows a lot about the local geography and who done what to where. He was like, "yah, you've got a job to do over there - they planted corn every year there until it basically wore out." He likes our Ford 8000 tractor "that's some good horse."

As Doc Brown might say, It's a science experiment.

2008-06-04T17:13:00.000-07:00

Only instead of an 88 mile per hour time-traveling DeLorean, we have an 88 foot per minute distance-traveling manure spreader. Oh yeah.

Site repair continues at the cottage. Today was compost-spreading day. Altogether the site is more than an acre, so we rented Old MacDonald's manure spreader.

We're basically doing a mixture experiment with two different types of compost. The "expensive" kind is rotted horse manure @ $20/yard. The "cheap" kind is rotted sawdust @ $4/yard. (Delivered prices.)

We are motivated here by the permaculture principle of turning problems (like waste sawdust) into resources (like soil amendment.)

The hypothesis we are testing is: that this composted sawdust is like peat moss as a soil amendment, that is, it will help the soil retain water and, while its carbon/nitrogen ratio is high for compost, the soil microbes can only break it down slowly, so they won't tie up too much of the soil nitrogen needed by plants. As far as we know there is no standard lab test for this property, so we are testing it on the ground. (As I mentioned in a previous post, the two campus biologists, both with degrees and years of experience, had completely opposite instincts about this stuff.)

I divided the west field into three plots each about 68 feet by 90. The idea was to amend the south plot with sawdust only, the north plot with horse manure, and the middle plot with a 50/50 mix. All the plots would receive the same total amount of organic matter - 14 yards - which was my estimate of the amount needed to boost the soil organic matter percentage by two points (on a dry weight basis) to a depth of 8 inches (if it was tilled in uniformly.) Overall it probably ended up being amended more heavily - on the map the west field measured 0.58 acre, but on the ground, only 0.42 acre.

I think we more-or-less pulled this off. The tractor and spreader is a 30 foot long rig together and therefore kind of a blunt instrument in an 80 foot plot. Also, we don't have a good way of verifying how much material we actually got from the compost suppliers.

Here's Jolson driving the Ford and spreader, while Pigpen tries to spread the sawdust out more uniformly with the Cat:

The south plot was supposed to get 14 yards sawdust and the center plot 7, it probably ended up closer to 15 and 5, we ran a little short.

The total amount of horse manure applied to the north and center plots was probably about right. It was supposed to be 21 yards, we believe we had 50 to start with and we put a bit less than half the pile on it. It was supposed to be split 7 on the center and 14 on the north. Jolson kind of eyeballed that by driving the spreader faster over the center plot.

The plan is to chisel-plow through all three of the west field plots to decompact them from the earlier construction traffic. This will mix in the compost somewhat, and we can do soil tests to see what we actually got.

There are also two control areas on the south side of the cottage. One will get no compost but will be chisel-plowed, and one will get neither.

For now I plan to seed these areas with wildlife forage mix.

The rest of the site, mainly on the north and east sides of the cottage, we are basically just trying to get green with a drivable groundcover. Much of this half-acre area consists of very poor sandy subsoil. On this we put down 28-ish yards of the composted horse manure, which I estimated should be enough to boost the soil organic matter by two percentage points to a depth of six inches, if it was all tilled in uniformly. This area we will probably rototill.

We did get the lab test results back on the sawdust and the soil samples. Here are the hilites:

The west field soil had only 2% organic matter and a cation exchange capacity of 4. This is pretty bad, I think you'd like to see both of those numbers about twice that. The compost should double the organic matter.

The sandy subsoil had only 0.4% organic matter. The compost we added today should get it to about a minimum level to support plant life.

The soil along the south edge, closest to road, I had tested for lead. That was negative (less than 5 ppm, with 100-300 ppm being considered actionable.)

The sawdust was tested as compost, and it sure does look pretty bad on paper. The carbon/nitrogen ratio was 115:1, and the pH was acid (4.6). I did my own water-retention test on it, it held about twice its weight in water (6.5 oz dry -> 19 oz wet.)

Cottage site repair begins

2008-06-03T18:47:00.000-07:00

Edie the Esteemed Executive Director gave go-ahead on implementing some of the phase 1 permaculture design. We decided the crater had to be dealt with first, as it required heavy professionals with heavy professional equipment. Redbeard made arrangements with a local outfit, name of Schrupp Excavating. Here they are getting ready to start with the schrupping:

They recommended widening the crater slightly in addition to shallowing it, so the sides would not be too steep and start washing out again.

Much of the dirt pile north of the crater was pushed into it.

Here I'm standing on what's left of the dirt pile looking south at the newly remodeled crater.

The d-day plan called for terracing in eight-inch steps, and then laying logs on contour so as to form kind of an amphitheater-like place, but the gizmo they were going to use to do the terracing was on the fritz, and they couldn't say how many days it might take to fix and get back. To make a short story even shorter, we ended up declaring mission accomplished on the major earthmoving operations, and seeded it (annual rye.)

Meanwhile, Montalban and Sly got to work on the cottage roof, putting up furring strips for attaching fascia to the styrofoam. I've noticed one downside of styrofoam as a construction material, in that little bits of it get all. over. the freaking. place.

Little things update:

The plague of teensy tiny little bugs coming out of the straw bales has almost subsided entirely. The ants have not returned. I trapped one mouse. Some birds built a nest on top of the north wall, there is an inviting ledge between the top of the straw bales and the underside of the eave.

Potato patch planted

2008-05-23T07:23:00.000-07:00

According to Solomon, growing potatoes produces just about the most food per acre of anything. My goal is to produce enough to provide 1000 calories a day for 250 days (one Minnesota winter) which according to my calculations is about 750 pounds. Flora advised this would require about 75 pounds of seed potatoes. Here they are cut up into 2-3 oz pieces and laid out. I got eight kinds from three stores. I also want to companion-plant some amaranth with the potatoes, that isn't done yet.

Clockwise from upper left:

Yukon Gold, Kennebec, Norland, Norkota, Lasoda, All Red, Pontiac, Burbank Russet

By the time I got them planted, my original 75 pounds of seeds had dried out to 51 pounds.

Battle of the Biologists: the Potato Round.

I ended up having to plant two separate plots as there wasn't enough room for them all in the main garden. The first plot was planted with Flora's advice and assistance, and the second with Pigpen's, according to who was around for me to nag. A big Wright On Thank You to both for all your help.

Plot 1 prep:

Row spacing staked out about two feet apart.
Rows forked by hand to loosen the soil. The soil in the main garden is not too bad. I ended up with four 75-foot rows and one 65-foot, or 365 feet for plot 1.
A total of 1 lb 12 oz mixture of sulpomag and powdered humates was sprinkled onto the rows, followed by maybe a quarter yard of mostly-composted horse manure.
The fertilizer was worked in and the rows furrowed with one of those four-tine rake things.
Seed potatoes were planted about a foot apart, and the dirt alongside the furrow raked back on top and tamped down to make a slight depression.
Drip irrigation hoses (Toro Aqua Traxx) were laid on top of each row.
Fluffed up straw laid about 8 inches deep on top of the rows.

Closeup of forked protofurrow, left half manured.

Plot 1 weeded and forked:

Plot 1 fertilized:

Plot 1 furrowed

Plot 1 covered with straw.

Plot 2 is a berm about 10 by 50 feet which Pigpen constructed last year. It has a few young raspberries planted at the east end but otherwise wasn't doing much. He kindly offered it for my potatoes.

Plot 2 prep:

In Pigpen's judgment the soil was not too good, so he dumped about six yards of the composted horse manure (4 inch deep layer) and rototilled the whole thing, saying "I don't like to fake around." Or words to that effect.
After that I furrowed, planted, tamped, ran hoses and spread straw, same as for Plot 1. I ended up with 170 feet altogether in plot 2. The seeds in plot two were on average a bit larger and farther apart than in plot one.

Plot 2 fertilized, tilled, furrowed, and planted:

Plot 2 tamped:

Plot 2 with irrigation hoses:

Plot 2 with straw:

Prognosis:

I ended up with 535 linear feet planted, and about 1100 square feet. A yield of 750 pounds from this area would be equivalent to about 30,000 pounds or 300 hundredweight (cwt) per acre. That would be darngood - according to the USDA modern commercial growers can get up to 400 cwt/acre, but the preindustrial yields were more like 50 cwt/acre.

So far it has taken about thirty hours to set this up. There is a bit more yet to do in planting the amaranth.

Soil organic matter percentage

2008-05-20T07:41:00.000-07:00

I've been ciphering on the question of: if I want to increase my soil organic matter fraction by Fom to a depth of d over an area A, what volume of compost Vom do I need to add?

Because the soil organic matter percentage is a weight thing, and we order compost by volume, you might suspect the answer involves the densities of the compost and the mineral soil. The formula derivation is shown below.

Bottom line, if I want to get the 0.51 acre Forklift Exclusion Zone up by 2% organic matter to a depth of six inches, I need 0.202 acre-inches or 27 yards compost.

If I want to get the 0.58 acre West Field up by 2% to a depth of 8 inches, I need another 0.317 acre-inches or 43 yards, for a total of 70 yards.

Permaculture Design Update

2008-05-17T19:56:00.000-07:00

Was over to the gas station today, when a couple of young horsewomen rode up on a horse. Ah yes, I said to myself, someday this gas station will be a beer-lotto-cigarettes station only. For the record, the horsewoman bought a pack of gum.

Good news & bad news on my soil amendment experiment: the clover seed germinated after just nine days, and there was some visible in all four plots. Then the winds came and blew a bunch of sand onto it. I don't know if it's going to make it. We really need to fix up this sand and get something growing in it.

The campus is blessed with an Ingersoll-Rand long-boom off-road forklift "Inga". Morpheus gave me a lift to get this crane shot of the cottage. We're looking west by southwest.

Let's pan to the left. The light-colored area on the left is the barren sand of "pad 3" originally intended as a building site.

Let's pan to the right. The light-colored area on the right is barren sand of The Crater (source of Pad 1 (where the cottage is), Pad 2 (beneath the photographer), and Pad 3.)

Here's the partially-completed 3-d Sketchup model of my design, viewed from a similar angle. Visible here are some of the West Field trees, the roof water catchment tank, the 'shroomery, the trellis, and the ice storage.

Shameless plug:

Here at Wright On Sustainability (Permaculture Design and Engineering for the Post-Carbon World) we strive for solutions which are right for the short-term and long-term, right for the site, the region, and the planet, right for the client.

Espousing the Greatness:

I thought, let's take seriously this seven-generations thinking. Accordingly, the p/c design for the HDT cottage has eight phases and goes through the year 2150 AD:

By End of June 2008
By 1st frost Fall 2008
By last frost Spring 2009
By 1st frost Fall 2009
By 2020
By 2050
By 2100
By 2150

How to walk through a design of six zones and eight phases? In earlier posts I went zone-by-zone because the inner zones came clearer to me first. In my May 5th presentation to the client, after an ad-lib overview, I mostly went by phase, and within phase by zone, going outward in space and forward in time. The clients were politely complimentary but didn't dive for their checkbooks.

Let me here try a patterns-to-details narrative, without getting too ridiculously detailed.

First, we should review the client's goals.

Hunt Utilities Group Strategic Direction - develop buildings for Agricultural Resilient Communities
Buildings which heat themselves.
Buildings which produce no sewage.
Buildings where you can grow your own food.
Campus overall goals of landscaping and gardening
“Goals: want to see HUG to have more permanent production with only a smaller yearly veg. garden area. Want to emphasize the longer term plants, orchards trees and shrubs.

Food Production, Short term – to eat right away, Long term – fruit trees etc.
Soil Building
Water management
Beautification
Experimentation and research
Education
Cut down on dust”

As full-time resident of the cottage, your designer wears a small client hat himself -> I added these goals:

Cottage specific goals – all of the above plus:
Access. Doors face S & W, civilization is to the N & E.
Storage. There is not a closet in the house.
Resilience to Grid outages. The house is all-electric.

Cottage and Site assessments incorporated by reference

See previous posts:

2/7/08 - Cottage assessment

4/9/08 - Client interview and site assessment

4/23/08 - Long-term strategy appropriate to the region

Design Concept

The area is managed as a silvopasture, a savannah-like habitat with widely spaced nut-bearing trees and shrubs. The herb layer is almost all perennials, some edible and some for animal forage. (This no-till perennial approach will make a nice comparison to the adjacent field which is undergoing soil building in preparation for annual cropping of the organic kind.)
To maintain the solar resource for the cottage, the vegetation height increases going around from the south to the west – on the south side are mainly low-growing plants with edible roots and tubers, stepping up to mainly hazelnut trees on the southwest, and then to large oak, pine, hickory, and maple trees on the west.

The long-term strategy I envision for the campus would have these primary aspects:

Planting more native deciduous nut-bearing trees.
Replacing the native pines with edible-nut-bearing pines.
Husbandry of cold-hardy animals, both working and edible.

Patterns

Jacke & Toensmeier have adopted Alexander's Design Pattern approach to forest gardening, that is, patterns which solve design problems. Below are the patterns from J&T used in this design, and how they are instanced. Being gardeners, J&T don't list many house patterns like root cellar, greywater. The design also includes such things but they are not emphasized in this post. There is also quite a bit of site prep to be done, soil decompaction and such, which I'll leave to later postings.

At the landscape scale
1. Productive Landscape Mosaic (Campus-wide)
“When sterile, unproductive, and monocultural landscapes dominate the built environment, local ecosystems and culture suffer. Generate mosaics of productive and beautiful habitat throughout and around cities, towns, and suburbs by creating a full range of healthy and useful ecosystems on public and private lands.”

The 70+acre campus is already a mosaic of forest, old tree plantation, old fields, wetland, and a nucleus of buildings. This pattern can be enhanced over time.

At the site scale
5. Site Repair (Entire cottage site, esp. crater)
“People often build or garden in the most beautiful spot on their land, leaving the rest of the site to its own devices. Leave the most beautiful, healthy, precious, and comfortable places on your site alone. Build and garden in those areas that need the most repair and attention.”

The cottage is built on a worn-out cornfield, on a pile of sand excavated from an adjacent pit, in an unsuccessful attempt to bury the septic line deep enough to keep it from freezing. We are going to fix all that. Presently The Crater would look right at home on Mars, but I have a vision of it as a grassy gathering place, where Hunt Utilities Groupies would sing their company song "I'd like to build the world a home", which I've been practicing up on guitar.

6. Outdoor Living Rooms (N of cottage)
“Those forest gardens that function best are lived in most. Design your forest garden so that it looks, acts, and feels like an outdoor living room.”

The storage shed and north wall of the cottage formed two sides of an outdoor room. A trellis forms the third side, and has the additional functions of hiding the rainwater catchment tank and shading the mushroom logs.

7. Zones and Sectors
“Plants or animals that require frequent care or yield frequently often don’t get the attention they need because they are ‘out of sight, out of mind,’ far from the eyes and hands of those responsible for them. In addition, we need to appropriately deal with forces and factors that radiate into or out from the site.”

Zones:

Zone 0, the cottage itself.
Zone 1, the grounds within 30 feet or so.
Zone 2, the grounds within 100 feet or so, bounded by the septic line on the east, the trees to the south, the trees to the west, and the north side of the crater.
Zone 3-4 (field east of septic line, and the woods to the west down to the pond, and the tree line south by the road).
Woods north of Old Main are considered Zone 5, unmanaged long term.
NE Red pine grove and SE oldfield expected to come under closer management within 2 generations.

Sectors:

Here I will just highlight wildfire. The road forms a firebreak to the south, and the pond is a firebreak to the west but does not go very far north. A northwest firebreak may be needed to protect Old Main and the Shop. The pond is a potential firefighting resource, but a long pipe and powerful pump would be needed to deliver it to the buildings.

Of the garden
13. Oldfield Mosaics (Field south and west of cottage)
“Early- to midsuccession mosaics of trees, shrubs, and herbs constitute one of the most productive and beautiful habitats to mimic, but a multitude of forces can make this stage of succession difficult for woody plants. Plant woody plants into grassy, bacteria-dominated soils in clumps, rather than as isolated individuals, to create a mosaic of annual and perennial herb patches with clumps or masses of shrubs and pioneer trees.”

17. Forest Gardens in the Woods (West woodland)
“How can we forest-garden in existing woods without major disturbance to the forest? Assess the structure of the existing woods to see what community niches may be missing, then fill in with useful plants, preferably native species.”

The strip of woodland on the west, between the cottage and the pond, is an early-succession habitat with trees less than about ten years old. We can "get in on that", planting edible-producing trees such as sugar maple, shagbark hickory, and butternut.

20. Forest Edges (South of berm)
“Most forest edges in cultural landscapes are a sudden shift from woods to field, with no transitional space to speak of. This limits the potential for beauty and productivity at this useful edge environment. Develop a diverse and productive forest-edge community using a mixture of useful trees, shrubs, and herbs.”

The narrow strip of trees between the road and berm is almost a pure forest edge about six hundred feet long by thirty wide, currently dominated by Jack pine with some young oaks. We don't want really tall trees in front of the cottage, but Whitebark pine has edible nuts and gets only about 30 feet tall. Over time this strip might be converted into a Whitebark pine dominated area.

In the garden
24. Definite pathways (not laid out yet but will be.)
“Soil compaction is one of the major banes of healthy, living, productive soil. Create definite pathways and growing areas clearly demarcated, that tell human visitors where and where not to walk.”

A lot of the campus is sort of undifferentiated open ground, which invites driving the Cat around willy-nilly, to the great detriment of struggling ground cover. This is a bad habit we need to get away from, so say I.

25. Strategic materials depot
“Moving around large quantities of mulch is one of the more difficult tasks in forest-garden establishment and management. Clearly, the location of the mulch piles is a key ingredient in determining how much work and time this will take.”

Currently I am thinking just east of the crater is the place for the SMD. Phase one is looking for several dozen of yards of compost to amend the soil.

32. Nuclei that merge (West field)
“How can we establish forest gardens when we don’t have money, time, or energy for extensive broadscale plantings over large areas? Plant perennial polyculture nuclei that expand and reproduce until they fill the available space.”

I would like to get these nuclei started this season:

North row of large tree nuclei (just south of crater)
1. West – Siberian Stone Pine, Korean Nut Pine
2. Middle – Siberian Stone Pine, Korean Nut Pine
3. East – Bur Oak

South row of large tree nuclei
1. West – Butternut, Shagbark Hickory (both Juglandacea)
2. Middle – Bur Oak
3. East – Whitebark Pine

37. Gourmet decomposers (‘shroomery N of cottage)
“The vast majority of net primary plant production in forests passes through decomposers. How can we tap into this energy flow to feed ourselves? Integrate food fungus production into your forest garden using logs, stumps, wood chips, straw mulch, manure piles, and enriched soils.”

39. Lumpy texture (Height increasing clockwise from south)
“Many forest gardens we have seen have a smooth, thick texture because the gardeners have tried to use all the layers all the time. This creates numerous problems in the forest garden and does not truly mimic the structure of natural forests. Design planting density and layering patterns to create lumpy texture.”

South of the cottage is low-growing stuff: potato patch, berry bushes, hopniss, jerusalem artichokes. Southwest there is room for at least twenty hazelnut trees. On the West side there is room for a few large nut-bearing trees.

43. Native species (Bur Oak, Hickory, Maple, Hazelnut, Nut Tree Mix)
“We feel concerned about the loss of native species and the explosion of opportunist exotics, but many of our most desired and useful plants are not native. What should we do? Look to native plants to perform your desired garden functions first, before looking to nonnatives.”

49. Ground cover carpets (Drivable groundcover, deer forage mix.)
“How can we manage weeds when we don’t continuously disturb the soil to prevent their germination and spread? Can we do so in a way that gains us other benefits as well as reducing our workload? Plant dense carpets of ground-cover plants that fill the available niches for unwanted plants in the forest garden, suppressing weed germination and growth. Select species that also perform functions such as attracting beneficial insects, improving the soil, producing food, or increasing populations of native plant species.”

The near-term planting plan for most of zone 1 and 2 is ground cover of one kind or another. Detailed design of an edible perennial understory is deferred to later phases.

Summary

I attempted a design which does the minimum necessary to accomplish the stated goals.
The plan is cautious regarding perennial polyculture, with a small number of nuclei and edible perennials to start with.
It does not call for massive plant purchases, major earthworks, or in-ground irrigation systems. Many of the house and Zone 1 improvements were already planned.
The plan leverages Flora's earlier seed mix designs, and uses some soil amendments already on hand. There should be a lot of leverage from improving the soil tilth.
Most of the first-year dollars are devoted to the urgent priorities of beautifying the grounds and improving the resiliency of critical house functions, with less dollars going to the important priorities of long term food production and water management. The soil amendment and site prep work is both urgent and important. It’s the most massive part of phase 1, but should be low-risk.

Marked Progress

2008-05-13T19:08:00.000-07:00

The construction of the outside storage shed by Dan Hoefs, (218) 568-8733, took only two days and is a big step forward! It does still need some bat-proofing along the ridge vent and the corners of the roof.

In other exciting news, Mr. and Mrs. Universe are moving their trailer out here to the south field while their new Eco Dream Home is built. This will make it much more convenient to trade hotdish. But please tell the grandkids to aim their bottle rockets away from my styrofoam roof, at least until Redbeard gets some fascia on it.

But that's not the funny part. The funny part is, I learned about this move the day after I dug my soil amendment experiment plots on the trailer pad. I had to tell the clover seeds to hurry their little genes up or they will be in big trouble.

* * *

Previously I wrote about the opportunity for "catching and storing" outside cold for refrigeration, here in central Minnesota. Here is a calculation to get an idea of what my fridge is doing in terms of ice. Mostly the calculation is a string of unit conversions by the factor-label method.

The energy guide tag says the fridge uses 484 kilowatt-hours per year. It's average electric power usage is therefore 484 kWh/year * 1 yr/8760 h * 1000 W/kW = 55 watts electric, long term average.

The amount of heat which the fridge is moving is greater than the electric power by a factor called the coefficient of performance or COP. I'm just going to guess this is 3, so that the average heat transfer out of the thing is 166 watts thermal * 1 Btu per hour / .2931 W = 565 Btu/h.

One "ton" of cooling is the latent heat of melting of one ton of ice in 24 hours, or 12000 Btu/h, so the fridge is using the equivalent of 565 Btu/h * 1 ton/12000 Btu/h = 47e-3 tons of ice in 24 hours. 47e-3 tons * 2000 lbs/ton = 94 pounds of ice per day, which melts into 11.75 gallons of water.

That seems like kind of a lot, but the unit does have a freezer, so if you were only trying to replace the regular fridge part with ice cooling it wouldn't take as much. Does anyone remember how much ice the ice man useta bring and how often?

For Energy Independence Week I was thinking of taking some of the refrigeration load off the PV array by freezing 2-liter bottles of ice ahead of time. This calculation suggests that might not help too much.

Also for Energy Independence Week I've been monitoring how much I'm using the microwave, using a Kill-A-Watt meter. The news there is pretty good - I've used only 1.2 kilowatt hours in 17 days. That may not be accurate though - annoyingly, the meter is only rated for 15 amps and the microwave is 20. This meter is a great product but it's no good for some of the big stuff that really matters, like hardwired furnace fans or electric dryers and ranges. Get with it P3.

My News of the Future segment today features John Michael Greer's latest blog post. His previous six posts are very good as well.

Not to worry, minor toilet explosion totally under control

2008-05-07T16:53:00.000-07:00

Yes, well, so, in an earlier post I described the low-flush toilet connected to the compost bin through a macerator pump, and how I had learned to be very economical with the flush water so as not to overflow the compost bin.

Too economical as it turned out. Over the course of a week or more, the pump became slower and slower to turn on after a flush, and the toilet developed a disturbing 'belch-back' behavior. Sure enough, it eventually backed up. Not in the long skinny line from the pump to the bin, but in the short wide pipe from the toilet to the pump.

Pigpen was annoyed. His diagnosis is that more flush water is needed in Number Two Situations. This in turn makes his planned overflow-processing plant bed mission-critical, instead of being just a nice-to-have accessory. That is to say, there may not be a window of operation between enough water to flush and too much water for the compost bin, or if there is, it is very small and will require an experienced touch on the pedal, like the touch the Skipper needed to start his 20-year old diesel, you know, before it threw a rod and became a yard ornament. I digress, but that's the end of my little story 4now.

Here's another news-of-the-future link for all you sustainnibals:

Put a Tyrant in Your Tank

Raging controversy over soil amendment

2008-05-06T18:23:00.000-07:00

So I'm faced with the issue of what to do about the soil, which is sandy, compacted, or both, and in several places, like near the cottage, is actually subsoil that is almost pure sand.

All I really want to grow is clover (nitrogen-fixing drivable groundcover) and other soil-building cover crops, but the soil is in such bad shape I fear even these won't take.

For compaction Jacke & Toensmeier recommend: "Amend with organic matter and till. Thoroughly incorporate organic matter through depth of compaction. Compost and Compost Tea." They give a reference: Harris, Clark, and Matheny, Arboriculture: The integrated management of landscape trees, shrubs, and vines. 3rd edition. Prentice Hall 1999.

For soil-too-sandy J&T recommend: "Add organic matter: Mulch, Compost and Compost Tea, Cover Crops, green and brown manures."

As I understand it there are two kinds of Organic Matter - decomposable and nondecomposable. Fresh animal manure, dead leaves and other mulch, kitchen scraps, etc, are decomposable. The nondecomposable remainder is called humus, which helps the soil retain water and the plant nutrients released when the decomposing microbes finish and die. If I am understanding this correctly, Compost is a mixture of humus and and these plant nutrients (fertilizer.)

Solomon explains very well how there is good compost and bad compost, according to how much fertilizer ends up in it, and how making really good compost is as subtle an art as making good beer or wine.

Here at the cottage I surmise the soil is lacking in both humus and nutrients. I really wish I could at least give it a massive humus infusion. It dries out so quickly. I feel like if only I could increase the water retention and cation exchange, that would give my forage crops a big jumpstart.

One form of Organic Matter that we can get a honking lot of is old, partly rotted sawdust. There are also the sawdust berms that were scraped off the site a couple of years ago. My dear friends Flora and Pigpen, both trained biologists, are in total disagreement as to whether this would make a good soil amendment. The issue seems to have to do with its carbon/nitrogen ratio and humus content.

The books say fresh sawdust is extremely high-carbon, and Pigpen is convinced it must still be too high, so that applying it would freak out the soil microbes and cause them to flare off all the soil nitrogen into ammonia gas, or something like that. Flora is convinced it has become a lot like peat moss and should therefore make a good soil amendment.

At the meeting we agreed to send a sample out for lab testing.

In the meantime, I started an experiment on the ground.

The photo below shows the 4x4 foot patches I made, which have different soil amendments, but are all seeded with dutch white clover. The seed is preinoculated with the nitrogen-fixing bacteria.

The site is pad 2, one of the built-up subsoil areas, which had a house-trailer on it all last year.

The lower left patch just has the seed raked shallowly into the surface with no amendment. You can see the soil is gravelly sand.
The upper left patch has an inch of the rotted sawdust raked shallowly into the surface.
The upper right patch has an inch of composted humanure raked shallowly into the surface. This compost has a lot of sand in it as the humanure was composted with sandy soil as the bulking material. Pigpen thinks this is well-finished compost.
The lower right patch was loosened one spade deep and about half the dirt removed and replaced with four inches of the rotted sawdust. Some of the underlying soil was turned up into it and raked to a uniform mix. I have to say it was moderately difficult getting the shovel in.

The idea with all of these treatments is to simulate something we could do on the broader scale with the bobcat, so no fussy topdressing.

I have this vague notion that even if the sawdust amendment is too-high in carbon, since all I'm trying to do is grow a nitrogen-fixing cover crop, maybe it won't care so much if decomposing microbes are hogging up all the pre-existing nitrogen while they are decomposing the sawdust.

I'd love to hear from you pro-am composters out there, how you think this will turn out.

As I write it has begun to rain, the first hard rain of the season. I hope my experiment does not wash away.

Little things update

2008-05-03T07:55:00.000-07:00

Well the ants went away by themselves, I hardly see any of them anymore. I think this proves my theory that Ant Baits Are A Scam.

The teensy pepper-grain-sized flies are still around but not quite as numerous.

There are now mice, or something like that. They don't seem to have access to the inside, but I hear scritching in the southeast corner, like they are in the joint where the greenhouse roof meets the south wall. Maybe coincidence but this happened not too long after Redbeard punched a hole there to bring the solar water heat pipe down in. I think they started a family - I heard meeping noises one day. Could be squirrels, I saw one climb the east wall and then run along the top of the straw bales, under the north eave. He drew my attention to a hole in the underside of the foam roof - looked like something had tried to dig out a nest, though he did not go into it.

This house is a little on the dusty side. I've identified three sources. One is the bits of mud plaster that continue to flake off the walls. Second is the very fine dust which wears off the greenhouse floor. It's very easy for this to get stirred up into the air. Down the road this floor should probably be tiled. Third is dirt tracked in from the outside, this is mostly sand, which stays down on the floor.

_____________________________________________________

Link of the week:

Forget Nuclear By Amory B. Lovins, Imran Sheikh, and Alex Markevich

www.energybulletin.net

2008-04-28T16:57:00.000-07:00

This appears to be the mother ship of all peak oil web sites. They cover all the related issues - climate, food & agriculture, transportation, housing, waste etc. They have a most excellent primer, and news and perspective from all over the world.