I read an interesting article on the “earthlodges” of Native Americans in the Dakotas the other day. I’d learned early in my life when the family moved from New York to “Indian Territory” – Oklahoma – that not all Native Americans lived in those portable teepee tents so prevalent on the plains. I knew the ‘civilized’ tribes of the southeastern United States were able constructors of log cabins for their permanent villages, and of course knew about those spectacular adobe pueblos in the southwest. And while I learned in junior high Oklahoma history about the sod-roofed shanties built by white settlers (and for which Oklahoma was famous), I’d never heard of earthlodges.

Earthlodges are large round structures from 20 to 50 feet in diameter which are built to be much more permanent than the yurts that basically amount to a Mongolian version of teepee for migratory people. Lots of people these days have deck-mounted yurts that are popular as camp cabins or gazebos, but they’re not really something stable or well-insulated enough to live in full time.

In contrast, the earthlodge is dug into the ground and framed with logs, covered with woven willow mats and then covered completely (except for a smoke hole in the middle of the roof) with mud and sod. Your basic hobbit house, but as its own hill rather than dug into a pre-existing hill. Of course, there are some modern earthlodge designs that combine aspects of natural landscaping and lodge building, which are actually quite nice if you don’t care much about windows. It would be quite easy to engineer one of these with skylights, so interior darkness can be alleviated.

Dakota State Historical Society

The original earthlodges were built communally, often housing between 15 and 25 people. They provided solid, very well-insulated shelter for harsh Dakota winters, and stayed naturally cool in hot Dakota summers. They lasted only as long as the palisade poles and main support logs lasted in the ground, about 7 to 10 years before they’d rotted enough to need replacing. Since it took only about a week for a group to construct an earthlodge from scratch, the old one would simply be torn down and a new one erected in its place. The old logs recycled into firewood made this village system quite efficient given that the Dakotas do not enjoy the thick, lush forests of the American southeast.

For a new homesteader looking for cheap, eco-friendly housing on a tract of raw land, it’s not difficult to see how the problem of ground-rot could be simply eliminated by seating the anchor and palisade logs in concrete. The thermal mass of palisade logs plus dirt/sod can be nearly warm in winter and cool in summer as 3-foot thick adobe walls. More modern – and fully waterproof – coverings take the place of those woven willow mats, and fewer palisade poles would allow for regular insulated walls or an opportunity to place windows and/or exits to porticos, or to build storage rooms or closets off the main structure. For a truly permanent structure, some research on new under-sod waterproof roofing material would probably be a good idea.

The niftiest thing about this kind of permanent shelter is that if your land is raw enough to need some clearing, the logs and poles can be taken as part of your clearing plans. These will have to be de-barked and dried above the ground, there are many good Do It Yourself books and plans out there for site-built log homes that have clear instructions on how to do this. If you’re planning to grow crops, the sod shouldn’t be hard to come by. Rather than a big central fire pit and large hole in the roof, a central wood stove with just a pipe running up through the roof will protect from the elements much better than the wicker baskets the Mandan people used to cover their smoke holes when it rained.

It also strikes me that the side walls could be constructed of straw bales and covered with mesh and stucco or adobe instead of mud and sod and still be as easy to heat and cool. Some may consider rock as well, if the land has an overabundance of those that need removing before crops can be grown. Any of these alternatives for some or all of the side walls would make for a very handsome home. The sod roof does have great appeal, I’ve always envisioned a hobbit house with wildflowers instead of just more grass to have to mow.

The interior, once you’ve got the central roof supports and planned your walls, can of course be framed and subdivided as you please for cooking sleeping and living areas, bathrooms and utility as you wish. The Dream Green link above also offers a plan for a ‘multi-lodge’ made up of several octagonal earthlodges connected to a front portico area. This idea offers the possibility for future expansion as the family grows.

So chalk this up as yet another eco-friendly green construction to think about if you’re new to homesteading or are planning to build more structures on your homestead than you’ve already got. A far less modern (more true to origin) version of earthlodge would make a very serviceable combo barn, root/wine cellar and tool/vehicle storage shed. For as long as you can keep the livestock from eating the walls and roof, that is.

Links:

Indians 101: The Earthlodge
Dream Green Homes Earth Lodge
Blue Ridge Yurts

Sure, we all remember the children’s story about three pigs and a big, bad wolf, who could huff and puff and blow the house down (unless it was made of bricks). The stick house held up a little bit better, but the straw house didn’t provide much in the way of protection at all. But these days, houses made of straw and stucco are getting quite sophisticated. Even looking sturdy enough to stand up to a good, stiff breeze, whether it comes from a wolf or a hurricane.

Bales of straw (usually wheat straw) as building material isn’t exactly new, though perhaps not as old as the Three Little Pigs tale. late 19th century homesteaders out on the Nebraska plains are credited with building the first straw bale and mud-wattle houses, much as Oklahoma homesteaders pioneered stone and earth-sheltered homes with sod roofs. These early examples of hardy home-building with whatever’s handy largely escaped modern notice until the early 1970s, when the hippie “back to the land” movement took off. Most straw bale houses built over the following couple of decades were non-code off-the-grid shelters, but the benefits of bale construction have gained new fans.

Featured in this New York Times article is a rather spectacular example in the Catskills hand-crafted with loving care over a period of years by Clark Sanders. For the new revival in homesteading pioneers for the 21st century, there are a number of outfits and websites offering education in straw bale building techniques, helpful hints, and contacts for associated material like stuccos and plasters, wall lattice, etc. Some of the most interesting and useful are listed below. There are even some very nice straw bale house plans that can be built as offered or altered to your own site’s needs and combined with other green technologies such as earth sheltering, etc.

A relatively small straw bale shelter could be built fairly quickly and cheaply by new homesteaders on their land as a place to live while developing the various water and energy systems that will support something more permanent at a later date. If sited well and built sturdily, such a shelter built into a berm or hillside could later serve as a well-insulated root cellar for food storage, or a cool shelter barn for ruminant livestock. Just be sure your plastering job keeps up with the normal wear and tear of time, or the livestock just might eat their own barn!

Check out some of the listed sites and their offerings, see if straw bale construction might serve you well in some application. All told, the recurring benefit theme of this construction method is low cost. Which is always something modern homesteaders need to consider.

Links:

Straw Bale Construction
StrawBale dot Com
Bale Watch: 50 House Plans
A House of Straw
NYT: Bale by Bale, Stone by Stone

I was somewhat surprised on one of my web surfing jaunts to see a blog dedicated to ways of saving money weigh in against the notion of doing odd jobs and building projects yourself. Because for my homestead – and very likely yours as well – if we didn’t do our own odd jobs and building projects, then no needful jobs or building projects would ever get done. So I’ll take the opportunity presented to offer a rebuttal to some of the objections logged in the Money Bucket blog.

The article is Saving Money – Or Not – With DIY Projects, and it’s worth a read if you’re genuinely unsure of whether or not you’ve got the ability to tackle a project on your own. Of course for big projects it’s very important to understand going in exactly what will be necessary – time, tools, materials and a certain degree of skill. Homesteaders already know about budgeting their time toward the “work in progress” that describes our way of life, as there are always a dozen or more projects and repairs that need doing. Most of us, if we’ve been living this way for some years, have amassed more tools than many city-folk even know exist. In fact, for most projects the primary concern is coming up with the money to purchase the materials, and making sure we’ve got every little nut, bolt, pipe, sealant and extraneous parts before we start.

Perhaps the author is speaking more to urbanites than those of us who live out in the boonies on purpose and strive continually to be ever more self-sufficient. When the faucet washers wear out and start wasting our precious water supply (and driving us crazy with drips), or the drain clogs or cracks, or the windows break or the door needs replacing, we aren’t usually inclined to call a plumber or contractor. Heck, many of us would laugh at the very idea of paying some stranger extra to drive from town to our property and repair or replace what we could repair or replace, for ten times more than we could do the job for. But even urbanites with some tools, patience and an ability to turn screws/wenches could fix a leaky sink or hang a door without breaking the budget.

DIY disasters can cost big money to fix. Before starting any home improvement project you will need to understand each step from start to finish. Research potential pitfalls and problems you may encounter along the way to determine if the project is over your head. Be honest with yourself because your enthusiasm will quickly wear thin if something goes wrong – and if you don’t know what you’re doing, things can head south quickly.

That paragraph in the Money Bucket article made me chuckle. Sure, the author is talking about ‘home improvement’ more than simple repairs, but we homesteaders are quite used to those type of projects. We remodeled our kitchen last summer, which included replacing a window and door, re-siding the exterior wall, re-plumbing so we could move the sink, re-wiring, installing new cabinets and countertops, removing a bar to make room for the dining table we inherited, drywall installation, re-framing, flooring and insulating the attic space, and even reinforcing the main load bearing beam. It cost a pretty penny for all the materials, and we did have to replace the drill twice (old chestnut and locust beams are literally hard as rock). And of course things discovered along the way once we got into the walls and attic weren’t planned for but had to be dealt with anyway. Such is life.

Hiring a reputable contractor to complete an upgrade at your home generally gives you the peace of mind that the job is done right the first time. You will pay dearly for that peace of mind, but in some situations it can be worth every penny.

Heh. That’s kind of a surprising bit of advice to give to people described in the first paragraph of the article as “…planning to sell and need to update your home to make it more attractive to potential buyers…” I mean, if you have to pay dearly to upgrade your home in order to sell it to somebody else, then your improvements aren’t likely to cover the costs in this awful real estate environment. If you’re already underwater on that mortgage, digging yourself in deeper isn’t going to help.

It’s a little different if your home is where you plan to live for the rest of your life, but not much different when money’s tight. I had no kitchen all summer (it wasn’t officially finished until Thanksgiving), had to cook on the grill out back while a big sheet of plastic served as a front wall to my house. We all worked very hard, this is not the kind of project that allows much time for other things, and it involves everyone. It even upset the dogs and cats. But if we could have found a contractor to do that much structural damage to a hundred year old chestnut cabin with a crew of a dozen, it would have cost more than we paid for our entire homestead. Literally. And no, that would NOT have been “worth every penny.”

Sure, those kind of huge projects – new roof and/or installation of solar panels/wind or hydro generators, reworking the entire water supply (my next big project), tearing out walls or floors to get to wiring or plumbing, building a barn, etc. aren’t things one undertakes lightly. Or often, if you can help it. And it certainly helps to build up your confidence in the meantime by tackling small repair and replace projects first, learning to handle all the tools, and such. And exercising your mind about how to plan clever ways of getting around serious issues that may be encountered.

It’s all good for you, and just puts that much more of yourself into the overall Being we lovingly call “Homestead.” Good planning works too, so that several projects can be tied into one – the solar panels at the same time the new roof goes up. Replacing the old water-guzzler toilet with a low-flow at the same time you replace the sink and shower. Going ahead with the better insulation when any section of wall comes out. Things like that deserve the time it takes to plan ahead.

Money Bucket is correct in their bottom line that doing things yourself doesn’t always save you money, especially if you’ve got more money than time, skills and tools. But for those of us who have dedicated ourselves to a broader, more expansive and involved way of life that highly values self-sufficiency, doing things yourself is simply another aspect of the life we’ve chosen for ourselves. And we’ve usually got way more time, skills and tools than money to spend. Plus at least one friend with enough time, skills and tools to help us out if we need it.

In an economy like this one, sometimes a friend will help just for the nightly cook-outs, fresh garden veggies and fruit, refreshing cool-down at the swimming hole after swinging a hammer and wielding a circular saw all day, and maybe some iced beer and story-telling around the fire while the fireflies rise.

Money, after all, isn’t everything.

A friend left a little 16-foot travel trailer in our back yard a couple of years ago when he had to sell his land and move east to tend his aging parents. The plumbing got wrecked because he forgot to unhook it before pulling it out, but the electricity’s still fine, and I’m presuming the stove, fridge and heat would work if we cared to replace the propane bottles. We’ve been using it as a combination storage shed and guest bedroom, but had to drape a tarp over the roof to stop leaks in the corners that led to a nasty accumulation of mildew.

What I’d most like to do is convert it into an actual camp-cabin style “Tiny House” that would blend in with the forest scenery better than white with turquoise trim on your basic aluminum trailer siding. Maybe build a Tiny House shed while we’re at it as well. Tiny houses are often built on wheels to get around local building codes, and of course this trailer is already on wheels. But that’s not really necessary here because there are no building codes out in the wilderness – unless you wish to obtain insurance, that is.

Of course, we could probably do better by selling it cheap just to get it hauled out of here, and then building a little camp cabin instead. By building from scratch we could get more width and height out of the space, which goes a long way in the ‘tiny house’ realm toward making the space usable and comfortable at the same time. Wish some help from our grandsons we could probably supply all the logs necessary from right here on the land, though I’d still need that mule I’ve been meaning to get in order to get them transported from where we cut to where we want to build.

Our primary problem is the fact that we don’t have much accessible flat land. What is accessible is already in use for our 28 x 28 cabin (with half basement and loft) built into the side of the mountain a hundred years ago, and about an eighth of an acre of back yard. Where that ugly travel trailer is parked using up way too much of it. There is flat land down at the creeks on both sides of the ridge, but it’s not accessible by road, only by trail. And the climb uphill to the driveway and house cabin is darned rugged no matter which creek you start from. But what we do have is what’s left of an old logging road that goes to the top of the ridge, which we could grade a little less steep and gravel to a parking area that would provide good access to that ridgetop.

And while we could build up foundations on that ridgetop for camp-sized cabins (about 14 x 16 plus porch), I’d rather leave that land as is because it’s part of our trailway from the top of the knob to the access route for the old Mount Mitchell trail. Over which one of these days I’d really like to take guests on two-day nature hikes during the spring, summer and fall. They could rent the cabins for a week at a time, we’d make a little money, and a good time could be had by all.

So what I’m thinking about are bridge timber decks going off the far end of the ridge, onto which we could build the camp cabins. We camped at a state park on a lake in Tennessee once where all the campsights were on this sort of extended deck, with hookups and big enough to host several tents or a big Winnebego and still leave room for the truck-wheel campfire and a nice built-in charcoal grill on a pole. Sort of a do-it-yourself flatland. Our decks need be only 14 x 20 feet or so in order to comfortably host the cabins, which would then sit perched up amongst the trees and with lovely picturesque views of the highest Black Mountains peaks beyond.

We could supply water by tapping a spring on the other side’s creek and doing another ram jet to a raised cistern farther up the ridge (again for gravity feed), but we can’t provide flush toilets with septic tank and drain field. Way too expensive. I have, however, been doing a bit of research into your basic waterless composting toilet systems. Which should work fine for short-termers, and if we get long-termers they can do the emptying maintenance themselves. Thus there could be showers – grey water can be piped back down the mountain with no environmental damage so long as the soaps are degradable – and toilet facilities as well as water for drinking and cooking in the kitchenettes.

Or, I suppose, if we wanted to have several camp cabins up there, we could just build another one as a shower and toilet station for all to use – using your basic composting outhouse technology. This arrangement would have the added advantage of being useful to players on the top 10 holes of the disc golf course, thus keep them out of the main house.

My goal is of course to have a way to make some extra money off the place, tap a few of those 10 million tourists that pass through this region annually in search of mountain air, grand scenery and wilderness adventures. And also to have available space not in my own very small house for friends and family who love to visit but can crowd me out quickly when the weather’s less than fine. Besides, there’s nothing I hate more than having to wait in line for our sole bathroom every time I need to use it.

But on an encouraging note, now that land prices have fallen so significantly that nobody’s making any real money off that “real estate boom” that busted a few years ago, people in the city who have been harboring dreams of the homestead life could get started by going small. An acre of unimproved, forested land in my county is going for just a couple of thousand dollars these days if you’re willing to buy 5 or 10 acres at a time. An off-grid (solar, wind and/or hydro) site-built Tiny House or camp cabin can be a good investment on top of that while the work on clearing and planting a garden, learning and managing wilding crops, sheltering and fencing some livestock, etc. is being done. Better amenities and a larger home cabin can thus be not something needed immediately. Then the self-sufficient starter cabin is just a lovely added feature of your homestead – a private studio or workspace, a guest quarters, a rental cabin, a children’s play house, whatever.

It’s a thought. So think about it!

Useful Links:

Tiny House Blog
Tiny House Design
This Tiny House
Tiny Pallet House
Vermont Tiny Houses
Envirolet Composting Toilets
Sum-Mar Composting Toilets
Biolet Composting Toilets

As plans for the new water system move forward, we find ourselves in sudden possession of quite a lot of high-end good-sized PVC piping of various lengths, assorted odd couplings, some strips and scraps of new carpeting (good for insulation of trenches), and a surprising amount of aluminum ductwork. Salvaged from various places. Not being content to leave what look to be perfectly good but not immediately needed lengths of such pipe and ducting behind, we’ve been rescuing as much as we can get from the dumpster-side repository at the contracting facility next door to hubby’s day job.

Some of these lengths of thick-walled new pipe are 3 or 4 inches in diameter, so I’ve been considering how we could use them as we head into this major project, other than as the ‘head’ flow from the new spring to the ram jet in the pumphouse. Given as it’s nearly July, I have also been scouting around for some form of air conditioning that doesn’t require an air-tight home and way more not-cheap electricity than we care to use. We only need it occasionally during the hottest hot-spells of summer and only at times when it’s inconvenient to spend the afternoon in the basement, out under the shade trees, or down at the swimming hole. As part of that research, I’ve been looking at geothermal engineering concepts and technology as well as at modern iterations of good old evaporative cooler (a.k.a. “Swamp Cooler”). Which looks great and works well in places like Arizona, but is not so great here in the southern Appalachians where it’s around 85-90% humidity all the time. Geothermal still looks good, so…

A Do-It-Yourself heat pump! But without the compressor/heat element assist. This could work.

This old cabin is built right into the side of the mountain, thus the ground (basement) level stays almost AC cool all summer. I’ve previously considered installing an in-floor fan basically where the wood stove pipe rises through to the main floor and simply sucking that cool air upstairs, but in my experiments with portable fans to blow the cool air up, warm exterior air simply gets pulled in from the side of the basement that isn’t earth-shielded and then the basement level is as hot as the rest of the cabin. The installed in-floor fan is still a good idea, but needed to find cool air to replenish what’s blown up to the main floor.

This 100-year old chestnut cabin is anything but air-tight, and I must admit I like the fact that it “breathes.” We live on a beautiful mountain and love the fresh, green (and often pollen-laden) air, the constant breeze and such. Want to be able to refresh the air summer and winter to a certain extent, and this is where those pipes may come in handy to supply both cool air in summer and warm air in winter.

We’ll have to do quite a lot of excavation to get the water from the new spring and ram jet up to a new cistern above the house, which will also require a new supply pipe to the house from the hill-side rather than the bottomland-side. So I’m thinking we could hook these pipes together with ‘u’ joints (with an above-ground intake at the back end) as a geothermal collector about 2 feet deep out in the side yard. The ground doesn’t really freeze here in winter (just not that cold here), so the air that runs through this underground collector would pick up heat in the winter and cooling in the summer. Then we could hook that to a small in-wall exhaust fan into the basement level to provide cool air in summer for the in-floor fan to blow upstairs. Thereby keeping the basement level cool while circulating to the rest of the house. Working just the opposite in winter.

In the dead of winter the air from this collection system is likely to be only around 50º F. But during the day when the leaves are bare and the sun is in the south, we get a hefty amount of passive solar heating when the sun shines. And the wood stove in the basement (our “central” heat) has always worked great to make the place toasty on the coldest of nights. The geothermal should help even things out quite a lot, and likely even save wood. If we can pipe in 50º air to where the wood stove is cooking and it’s 25º outside, the whole system should be more efficient. And the house would still ‘breathe’ in a healthy manner.

So once we get from the creek and springs up here to the house (on our way up the ridge where the new cistern will be), we’ll be doing work on two projects at once. As it takes shape I will be sure to take lots of pictures and report regularly on the progress. Again, stay tuned!

We generously applied some sealant to the inside of the cistern, but it’s still leaking to the point that I can’t do a load of laundry and wash the dishes on the same day. So we’ll have to do the job this summer, and I’m thinking it’s time to go ahead and do what I’ve always wanted to do – put the cistern up on the ridge so we can have gravity feed to the house, and somehow get the water from the source to the cistern without having to use a 220-volt electrical pump. Which is about half our hefty electric bill every month, so whatever we do would be paid for in less than a year.

The issue is that the spring and its settling cisterns are in the bottomland, representing about 150 feet of vertical climb to get water from there to the house. If I wish to pump it to the ridge, water will have to climb another 60-75 feet (depending on where I put the cistern). The spring is next to the creek, however, which flows all year and has ample fall across the width of our acreage. I’ve often thought about damming the creek to have both a trout pond and a turbine for producing electricity, but we’d lose enough juice on the actual distance between us and the creek that it’s not really cost effective.

What we can do, however, is install a hydraulic ram jet to pump the water up the mountain incline to the new cistern, even with a ~225 foot vertical rise. This uses an old technology called a “ram pump” or “ram jet”. It is basically using a “fall” – the amount of vertical drop from the water source to the pump – to pressurize a tank that will then pump the water uphill to where we want it.

Clemson University’s cooperative extension service offers free plans for an easy home-made Hydraulic Ram Pump they say would cost about $120 in parts. Which is cheaper than buying a commercial unit and certainly worth it for the ability to get water from the bottomland to the ridge. I will have to do some serious creekside evaluation and calculations to get all the details right, but so far my back of the napkin estimates show that we could get the 225 feet of lift we need with 30 feet of fall pressure. It wouldn’t pump fast and hard, but once the tank above the house fills, the indoor water pressure on gravity feed will be fine.

The real problem is that we’ll have to tap a spring well upstream of where ours is currently located. Since the creek is spring fed and there is nothing but National Forest beyond us all the way to the continental divide, that shouldn’t be difficult. We will have to dig out the spring and build a protective box over it with a hinged lid that will allow us access to clean out silt occasionally. Then we must tap the spring into a new settling tank (much cheaper than an actual new cistern), run the pipe down to the ram jet which we’ll put in the old pump house to get the pressure we need. We can bury the tank and pipe most of the way which will insulate it against winter freezes.

Judy of the Woods also offers plans for a low cost, low flow ram pump engineered to do precisely what we are planning to do with ours. With clear illustrations and instructions, this seems like a project almost any homesteader who lives on graded land could do for themselves, thereby cutting monthly electricity usage by enough to start seriously thinking about ways of generating the rest on site as well. Which is, of course, a whole other subject…

There is an alternative that we’ve also been considering, which would be a bit more expensive but could be considered by homesteaders on flatter land who have a creek with enough steady 12-month flow to operate an undershot waterwheel. The ‘fall’ pressure is generated via a spiral water wheel so all that extra piping isn’t necessary. Great for tapping the creek itself and pumping uphill to provide wash water and garden water and such, but for drinking water creeks are not anyone’s best choice. Sure, a nice in-sink triple filtering system would work pretty well if there’s no coliform bacteria in the creek, but if you or your upstream neighbors have livestock, you can bet your bippy there will be.

Moreover, during heavy rains creeks tend to become quite muddy and rise enough that an undershot wheel may suffer damage. So it wasn’t too difficult for us to make our choice, no matter how intriguing the spiral wheel may be. I’ll be putting that idea into the folder marked “possibles for electrical generation” if we ever get around to that.

So we’re going to dig out and tap a new spring for this system. As soon as we get started on this project I’ll be taking lots of pictures and reporting here on every step along the way. If any readers out there have already built and installed this type of system, please offer some feedback on what we can expect in the way of glitches and problems, and how we might avoid them. It must be done before winter, so please stay tuned for the updates!

Helpful Links:

Earth Garden: Spiral Water Wheel
Low cost, low flow hydraulic ram pump
Home-made Hydraulic Ram Pump
Small Scale Hydro Power
The Amazing Hydraulic Ram Pump

During my year off from blogging one of the Big Projects for the homestead was a total kitchen make-over. We could afford it because my dearly loved Mother-in-Law died last April, after just a month in assisted living, at the ripe old age of 87. Turned out she had so much money in her checking account that even after expenses and splitting what was left with hubby’s brother, I could finally get a nice new kitchen to go with the dining furniture she also left to us.

For eighteen long years the kitchen has been separated from the main living space with a bar, even though the front door enters the kitchen rather than the living room. That bar has been variously attached to the right and left sides of the kitchen (thus changing the traffic pattern), and for the past six years it simply floated in the middle, topped with a piece of plywood painted for paper-flip football, mini-table tennis and various other games. Never managed to have four actually stable, matching bar stools at any given time, but our annual visitors were encouraged to buy or build their own, which would be exclusive to them whenever they were in-house. Some of them are pretty amazing, but of course none of them ever matched. And that front door, just so you know, was a hollow closet door that never actually closed or locked, we used to brace it against wind and possible night intruders with a bucket full of dirt.

Never had any upper cabinets because the huge 6×8 foot window took up the most of the wall. Worse, it extended well below the countertop level, becoming a catch-basin for all sorts of junk and dirt. My nephew managed to break 4 of its 12 glass panes some years ago with a bad shot from the second tee, I’d replaced them with cardboard and scrap lumber. Very, very ugly. So, for the very first time in my life, I got to go out and buy real building supplies from a real supplier and design the room just as I wanted it to be.

Not that there weren’t some significant “Uh, oh” moments involved, of course. We knew the front door opening had to be enlarged to handle a real, live actual front door. Which we got at such an astounding discount at the freight salvage place (along with window, cabinets and drawers) that we went ahead and bought two. One for us, one for daughter’s place out back. That Saws-All and re-framing job wasn’t so bad, it was the window that took most of the summer. Made me entirely miss out on mid-summer preservation of the harvest, the entire front of the house was wide open and covered (barely) with a sheet of plastic. Put in a standard 2.5×3 foot window – double pane! – and this allowed me to put upper cabinets on both sides once the sheetrock was replaced and painted.

Moved the plumbing so the sink could be right under the window instead of next to the door, put the stove against the far wall and out of its corner hidey hole, replaced the beams on two sides to shore up the roof and attic, and gave up on my planned hardwood floor before the holiday hoards descended. Maybe next year…

New cabinets, new countertops, nice recycled glass tile work (still not grouted), new furniture. All that’s left is a new ‘fridge, but that must await whenever Habitat for Humanity gets a stainless or black glass one they’ll put aside for us. So for Christmas, to celebrate what we described to my retired State Department sis and brother in law as our dramatic rise from Third World to Developing Country, they got me a nice brushed stainless (matches the outlets/switches) Cuisinart bread machine. Because they know that I make a lot of bread, and wanted to give me something they knew I’d use. Hubby continued the theme with Cuisinart super bagel toaster and coffee maker for Christmas, the clean look of matching appliances makes me feel positively… modern!

And while I won’t complain about the bread maker – which is incredibly convenient – I’m now back to kneading bread by hand as I always have because its ‘dough’ cycle doesn’t have a whole wheat option, as its bread cycle does. And my family won’t eat anything that even vaguely resembles white bread. Just spoiled that way, I guess.

Have used the dough cycle for baguettes, for bagels, for pretzels, pasta dough and for basic cloverleaf rolls. All of which require further processing outside the machine, which can only bake loaves. Every single time I’ve had to dump the unmixed mess out onto the counter and start all over again, because the machine can’t handle whole wheat for anything but bread. Now I don’t bother with it, but it still looks nice on my counter along with the rest of the appliances. It does keep us in whole wheat loaves of regular old bread, and I’ve even learned how to factor for sourdough instead of yeast, it does very well with that. It beeps for me to add sprouts and seeds and whatever else can be added after the first rise, and the finished breads are downright scrumptious. Heck, I could go into business with some of the best of ‘em!

But mostly, it just looks very cool on the counter next to the toaster and the coffee maker. Which, if anybody wanted to know, is the best contraption since indoor cooking, for sure. But that’s a whole different blog post…

Until next time, look forward to spring, get those seedlings started, and know that it indeed is entirely possible to make the transition between Third World and Developing Nation right here in America’s very own hinterlands!

Having posted with pride about our new honest-to-hillbilly deck, I thought this might be a good time to talk a bit more about the many tools a homesteader needs in order to keep the place in order, do the gardening and landscaping, renovate and repair home and outbuildings. I can do this because during the deck project we had a total of 4 hammers on hand, and two of them ended up without handles before we were done. Frustrating.

The very best thing you can do, of course, is to purchase the absolute, best quality, longest-lasting tools – any tool – you can possibly afford. Yet in today’s economy, getting the best quality tools is often beyond the means of those of us trying hard just to make things work. Here at my homestead we’ve got a shed chock full of old chain saws, string trimmers, handle-less shovels, pitchforks, axes, mauls, sledgehammers, pruners, etc., not to mention a whole collection of broken hammers, screwdrivers, various saws and power tools bought cheap over the years and which didn’t last long enough to get to the second job.

Worse, I’ve an energetic daughter and some grandchildren who work hard on occasion, but can’t ever manage to put the tools back where they belong. Which means I find rusted things all over the place, often with wooden handles that long since rotted into compost. It’s extremely frustrating, and having to replace the tools every time you start a project is a regular pain in the ass. Not to mention expensive.

My friend and local homesteading hero told us many years ago to “Buy The Best” because that way you don’t have to keep on buying over and over again. Great advice, but not very practical if you’ve got to have an axe (the last one has only half a handle) and you’ve got just $20 to spend right now. And my hugest complaint about ALL homestead tools with handles – when the heck do the handles get to the modern composite resin/graphite world, just like golf clubs?

Luckily for all us non-wealthy homesteaders, There Is A Way. Why, we can purchase ‘best’ quality tools secondhand! There are a number of ways to do this, and you won’t be sorry. Often you can acquire the super guaranteed-for-life item at or below on-sale cheap stuff at Walmart if you just spend some time looking around. There are estate and farm auctions, there are whole secondhand warehouses, and there are a good many sites on the internet where even with shipping costs the ‘best’ tool comes in cheaper than the Walmart Special.

You could go local to the auctions and auction houses that will let you inspect the items and brands pre-auction, you could go to Craig’s List or Freecyclers and hope for the best, or you could check out some of the links below and surf some of their cross-links too. The ‘best’ of our tools is a Craftsman tiller my father-in-law bought for me when we first moved here. It’s still in the shop right now for its 5-year tune-up, but that thing’s a true workhorse that may never really die. We went ahead and put out the bucks for a Stihl chain saw about 7 years ago, and it’s still going strong on its 4th chain. Which is better than the several cheap ones under the shed that didn’t last 2 seasons.

What’s your most elderly tool, and are you glad you bought the ‘best’?

Links:

Used Tools
How to Buy Good Used Garden Tools
Used Snap-On Tools

Great news this week on ScienceDaily, picked up by Nanotechnology News and other outlets that researchers from Swansea University have developed a paint coating for steel buildings that will generate electricity even in low light situations.

Note that this isn’t solar panels on the roof, but the enameled coating on the siding itself. Meaning that metal buildings – including garages, barns, equipment sheds, airport hangars, outlying megachurches and community buildings could all be generating electricity (some from the infrared spectrum current solar cells cannot capture) while they’re just sitting there enclosing space. Put a few regular panels on the roof too and it could be generating more than it uses on a regular basis.

But when I went looking at just how innovative this development is in the overall scheme of things keeping affordable alternative energy options safely insulated from regular people who might just put them to work, I found that the idea isn’t all that new, and isn’t anywhere close to being marketed to consumers of things like metal buildings (commercial or residential). Why do you suppose that is, given the sheer amount of money being funneled into research and development, as well as into actual production?

For instance, National Geographic reported in January of 2005 (more than 3 years ago) that Spray-On Solar-Power Cells are True Breakthrough. Just like in the ‘new’ news, nanotechnology able to harness infrared as well as visible light was formulated into a plastic to be sprayed like paint onto stuff (including clothing and cars) to produce “portable power.”

Have you bought any solar powered clothing or cars lately capable of charging your cell phone or car battery? …I thought not. In January of 2007 (just over a year ago), researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology reported that they had developed a buckeyball-based solar cell that could be sprayed like paint onto flexible plastic sheets. Inhabitat cited one of the researchers as predicting…

“Someday homeowners will even be able to print sheets of these solar cells with inexpensive home-based inkjet printers. Consumers can then slap the finished product on a wall, roof or billboard to create their own power stations.”

Have you printed out any usable solar cells on the ol’ Epson yet? Not to worry, says Konarka Technologies, which has actually developed the inkjet solar cell printing process for big production facilities (but no reports on whether any big production facilities are actually buying it).

When can the average homeowner expect to be able to purchase house, slab and deck paint that generates electricity at Home Depot for a comparable price to regular exterior paints? When can we expect to buy roofing tiles or sheets at Lowe’s that have inkjet printed plastic coatings that not only generate electricity, but add to the life of the roofing material?

The technology is out there. The government is pouring money into development. So far, none of it’s found on the shelves at Home Depot or Lowe’s. Why is that?

If we COULD buy it for a reasonable price when it’s time to paint or re-roof, We the People surely would. I’d sure hate to think that this might actually be the reason we can’t buy it. They’ve had time to incorporate and patent, they’ve had public money for R&D, they’ve reported for years that it’s easily done and the technology is easy. They can make more money off us if they wanted, I’d sure buy the stuff and so would millions of others. What’s the holdup… really?

We’ve looked a bit at on-site electrical generation, transportation fuels and building technologies. In this installment we’ll look at some ways of putting things together into overall strategies for homestead independence.


Part 4: Hybrid Energy Systems

In a previous post a short video was offered about as small, 1Kw hybrid energy system using solar and wind offered by a company in Canada. Whether you’re planning to go off-grid with storage batteries or negotiate a price for your excess production with the local utility (and get a “backwards meter”), the same thing is true of energy supplies as is true of general homestead success – diversify. So Here are five hybrid systems, some good links and some cool ideas for planning your alternatives…

16. Solar-Wind

In addition to the previously linked hybrid system from Canada’s SEMA Technology, there are many other solar-wind hybrid systems out there at varying power ratings and costs. Best place to get an overview is from DOE’s Consumer’s Guide to small hybrids. Most homesteaders in areas where the wind isn’t a constant gale will find smaller, steadier units that work well in low wind situations best for their use, while avoiding the bird kill problems of the big 2 and 3-bladed powerhouses.

Some of these (and other hybrid systems) can also be supplemented with generators that operate on biomass, waste cooking oil or methane. The handy homesteader can also make their own waste oil burners to supplement household heat, make an outdoor oven/stove, or even supply the heat for a homestead ethanol fuel still.


17. Hydro-Solar

A micro-hydro system powered either by diverted head flow or sited directly in a flowing creek can supply steady power 24 hours a day. When supplemented by solar during the day, all it takes is proper timing of your consumption habits to live on your home-generated energy budget.

Again, if the homesteader avoids using electricity for thermal energy – home/greenhouse heat, cooking, etc. – a steady power supply from micro-hydro supplemented with wind or solar (or both!) should supply enough electricity for normal homestead uses. An alternative fuel generator can supply occasional heavy loads.

18. Solar-Geoexchange

This is a hybrid “space conditioning” system that doesn’t generate electricity separately, but makes use of clever design engineering to diminish a home’s energy usage year round by using a double wall envelope and below-ground heat sink. This keeps the space at a temperature that doesn’t require air conditioning or much heat in the winter. Since these are among any home’s greatest energy uses, these ideas can be put to work in various ways by the handy homesteader. There are construction companies in many states who specialize in this system, so look around if you’re building! And for an overview, see SolarGeo.

Homesteaders lucky enough to have property over sizeable cave systems, or in geothermal hot spots, have options the rest of us don’t. But eventually thermal gradient technology such as that currently used in today’s heat pump units may be refined to work on very little electrical input, making them a good choice for homesteaders who generate their own juice.

19. Combined Heat and Power Systems

Solar Air Conditioning:

Abbreviated CHP (Combined Heat and Power), systems that make use of the waste heat generated by fuel-powered systems (boilers, furnaces, wood stoves, etc.) to increase efficiency. Depending on where you live and how you’d plan to put the heat to use, a CHP mini-system might be a worthy option. If you live north, the heat can warm your toes and cook your bread. If you live south, consider engineering a version of the thermal energy conversion technology in solar air conditioning to keep your home cool! Solar could help on hot, sunny days, but heat is heat – your CHP system can provide it.

There are CHP home systems available and in development, or again a handy homesteader could rig one up with either an internal combustion or a Stirling engine.

20. Multi-Tech Systems

Most clever homesteaders will have recognized already that diversification of energy sources provides all sorts of hybrids they could hook together to ensure an ample, steady supply of energy to their buildings and property. But for a good overview of what’s being done out there on this level, check out the Hybrid Micro Energy Project [HMEP] home energy multi-tech system.

Making use of integrated photovoltaic, solar thermal, wind and biomass, it’s easy enough to add hydro to the mix. The technology is out there to hook things together, charge batteries or go straight AC to the house or grid. It won’t totally solve America’s energy crisis, but it will solve our homestead energy needs. Big changes always start out with small steps. We can do this.

Posts to This Series:
Part 1: Electrical Generation
Part 2: Transportation and Motorized Equipment
Part 3: Building Technologies & Direct Alternatives
Part 4: Hybrid Energy Systems
Part 5: Collective Strategies for Communities