Upsetting the Apple Cart

I don’t know about you, but here at my homestead we’ve been watching the goings-on in New York City, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, Dallas and elsewhere across the country (including our own small city 20 miles up the road) that comprise the burgeoning and growing Occupy Wall Street protest movement. As the authoritarian servants of the richest 1% of the nation’s population have moved to isolate and abuse the professional activists, the unemployed, the homeless who have gravitated to the encampments, the juxtaposition with astroturfed, billionaire-funded “Tea Party” demonstrations where denizens were allowed to openly carry guns and assault members of Congress is dramatic. I admit I feel a little guilty to be so enjoying the gorgeous fall colors while people are putting their lives on the line to demand equality and an end to taxpayer bailouts of the criminal 1%.

It is glaringly obvious that the well-funded astroturf ‘movement’ enjoys a far greater share of our supposed First Amendment freedoms than the downtrodden 99% of people who just want to make the rich share in the suffering they order our political class to impose on the rest of us as ‘austerity’. So far the demonstrations have remained entirely peaceful even when police officers start pepper-spraying demonstrators (and their fellow police officers), or when the riot squad barrels into the crowd to choke and fling demonstrators to the ground. Reminds me of 1968. I know ‘they’ say that if you can remember the 1960s you probably weren’t really there, but that was one action-packed year full of billy-clubs and fire hoses and cracked skulls… and that was just the Democratic National Convention. It was still a bit less than 3 years before the Powers that Be started killing college kids wholesale for rudely NOT volunteering for that generation’s dirty big war, but let’s not fool ourselves. The very same thing is possible in 2011, and I’m pretty sure those doing the demonstrating across the country are aware of that possibility.

Continue reading »

New DIY Solar from Westinghouse

Andrew Burger at CleanTechnica blog reported Monday [September 26, 2011] that Westinghouse Solar has introduced new plug-and-play solar panel kits for do-it-yourselfers, which can be purchased off the shelf at Lowe’s. These kits come with built-in AC inverters, brackets, roof flashings and panel splices, connecting easily to each other. Each panel is rated at 235 watts, making the basic 4-panel kit (~$1500) come in at just under a kilowatt.

Homesteaders are nothing if not do-it-yourselfers, and most of us would dearly love to be supplying our own power. Maybe even selling clean green energy back to the electric company by generating more than we normally need! And since we tend to live out in the boonies… er, countryside, we are often last in line to get our outages taken care of after storms or other problems cut electricity. It would be great to have alternative on-site sources for at least some electrical demands when the commercial power’s out, preferably not a gasoline generator that uses petroleum, contributes to global climate change, and is loud enough to be a public nuisance.

The price of solar panels has been coming down steadily over the past few years, as more companies get into producing the materials for them, and with China investing heavily to develop their domestic industry. There are still state and federal rebates and incentives available in the U.S. to help cover the cost of going solar, so now would be a good time to buy. Those rebates and incentives won’t last long once the price comes down to honestly competitive.

Continue reading »

Shakeup on the Solar Energy Front: Solyndra

Those of us homesteaders who have been hoping the cost of solar panels would continue to fall until we can finally afford them on our houses and outbuildings have been watching with some trepidation the news that solar start-up Solyndra has filed for bankruptcy. What does it mean in terms of the push to secure truly ‘green’ jobs here in the U.S., as well as our struggle to get our nation off filthy fossil fuels like coal and gas, and to phase out ill-conceived nuclear power generation before Megalopolis ends up a ‘dead zone’ for 300+ years.

The New York Times reports that Solyndra’s bankruptcy bodes ill for the entire solar industry. But does it really? While we can be sure King Coal and Big Nukes would dearly love that to be true, that doesn’t necessarily mean it is true.

Solyndra’s collapse marked the third time in as many weeks that a solar company declared bankruptcy. Evergreen Solar Inc. of Massachusetts and SpectraWatt of New York also filed for protection.

Continue reading »

Homestead Tools: Weaponry

The very idea of weapons – particularly firearms – can generate some emotional reactions from people who like to think about homesteading as some sort of idyllic back to the land type movement for the terminally idealistic. As opposed to a committed, hard-working and independent lifestyle aimed at handling as much harsh reality as nature (and sometimes society) care to deal out.

Yet as is true of all the ‘best’ tools to amass for homesteading purposes, the question of what type of weaponry one may need is tied to what type of situations any weapon will be expected to deal with. Sometimes that may mean firearms. The homesteader will have to take into consideration what types of wild animals are most likely to be encountered in their location, whether or not someone in the family hunts for food, the likelihood of having to put down injured livestock, and any property or personal protection needs the family may encounter. In many cases the best tool for the job – and the person wielding the tool – could be a BB or pellet gun. Which is surprisingly effective at discouraging bears from the trash or compost without actually hurting them so as to leave an injured bear on the property (a real, live danger). These can be well less than deadly, but also come with CO2 cartridges that can turn them into effective small game/bird hunting weapons.

Continue reading »

An Earthquake? HERE???

USGS

After heading down to the springhouse around noon today to patch together the badly jerry-rigged connection from the cistern so as to get the water going again (no, the new ram jet system isn’t there yet, but we did get the new cistern to bury on the ridge…), I was glad for the gorgeous, crisp and clear weather. For a change, the summer having been absolutely miserable hot and humid inch-a-day rainy yuck until the second week of August. It’s quite a hike, so I was resting in my chair being grateful for peace and quiet and gazing at the impossible Carolina Blue sky out my window.

Then I felt the shaking. I thought it was Starfish the German Shepherd scratching right under my chair and turned to look. She was laying across the room looking at me like it was MY fault. Then the china started rattling and knick-knacks on the shelves, and I knew it was an earthquake. It didn’t make that deep bass rumbling sound I remember from my childhood in the Philippines and California. Guess the piedmont here east of the continental divide is just too much mud and clay to generate those good deep basalt earth-groans.

Only lasted about 15 seconds or slightly less. Nothing broke, nothing fell, and all the trees are still standing. But the USGS now rates it a 6.0, centered under Mineral, Virginia. Little aftershocks continuing.

Continue reading »

Nuclear Energy: Florida Rate-Payers May Get a Break

Now that my terminally wrinkled fingers have finally recovered from the tomato harvest – two bushels dried and half-dried, a third bushel variously canned and frozen – I can get back to enjoying the break (finally!) in this summer’s all-time record heat wave that had us here in the mountains suffering 95º+ temperatures daily for two and a half long, long months. Back to more normal now with low to mid 80′s during the day, mid 60s at night. I love all the seasons for what they have to offer, but readily admit spring and fall are my favorites. Because by February I’m darned sick of ice and snow no matter how pretty it is, and by August I’m more than ready for fall’s crisp clarity and cool nights.

Homesteaders tend to make real sacrifices for as much self-sufficiency as possible even while our most major projects proceed over a period of years in a perpetual “work in progress.” We like to tread lightly on the earth, though as the temperatures steadily rise a lack of air conditioning certainly can make summer a miserable season. So thoughts of course turn toward more necessary projects for energy self-sufficiency that are bigger than just completely redoing the water system for a ram jet and gravity feed. Solar panels are still too expensive for my family at this time, but I have discovered some nifty wind projects we could build on-site without the multi-thousands of dollars it takes to even think about solar.

That of course being a big project for sometime down the road (still working on the water), but please do check out the Homemade Wind Turbine Plans site to get yourselves dreaming in the right direction. In the meantime, there’s good news for Florida utility customers this week, which may even end up helping out utility customers in Georgia and South Carolina as well.

If you’ve driven cross-country in the past year you may have noticed that the vast American Midwest is sprouting windmills at a fast pace. Given this year’s nuclear horror at Fukushima – and associated nuclear unease across the entire planet – you may be happy to know that it became official over the past year that renewable energy sources now produce more electrical generation capacity in the U.S. than nuclear. The statistics are that wind, small-scale hydro, solar and biomass energy production came to 381 gigawatts of capacity, compared to nuclear’s 375 gigawatts.

Continue reading »

Houses of Straw

Leonard Leslie Brooke illustration

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

When Working from Home Really Pays Off

Working from home has all sorts of advantages to it over the alternatives. Naturally it’s better than being unemployed because you still get paid. It also has numerous benefits over having to go to an office. For one you don’t have to adhere to a dress code. For another you don’t have to commute on a frequent basis. Finally, you get a great pay-off when your schedule needs to be flexible and you can still accomplish your workload when an office serf would be struggling with their schedule. Also, working from “home” doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be at home when you do your work.

No Dress Code

Dress codes aren’t very fun. Often you have to spend most of your day in something uncomfortable. You may even have to wear something that doesn’t look that great or feel that appropriate for your personality. When a t-shirt and jeans kind of person gets a “grown-up” job they usually have to suck it up and wear ties and uncomfortable shoes. However, when you work from home you can dress however you like. One of the biggest advantages to working from home is that you can dress like its laundry day any day you want.

No Commute

One of the great ironies of the modern world concerns people’s automobiles. Almost everybody loves to drive, but almost nobody enjoys going to the office. When you work at home you don’t even have to commute to use the fax machine thanks to the new release of the MetroFax app for the iPhone. This app lets you send and receive faxes from anywhere. Couple that with how you can e-mail, call and text and you start to wonder what all the expensive equipment most offices have is actually useful for. When you can spend a fraction of the money for more compact equipment it starts to look silly.

Couple that with not having to care much about gas prices and you really have a winner. When you don’t have to commute you no longer care very much about traffic, weather and a lot of other silly concerns all those office workers need to worry about. Being at home frees you in a way that’s hard to describe.

Flexible Scheduling

Have you ever noticed how difficult it is to both work in an office and have time for emergencies and personal errands in your day? You find problems like that aren’t a big deal when you work from home. You can work at 3 a.m. if a project is especially challenging or exciting and sleep in if you feel like it. You don’t even have to call in sick.

When you work from home you have more responsibility. However, this is more than made up for when you realize how much additional freedom you take on from not having to commute anywhere. There’s no dress code and you can do practically everything at home that people used to need an office for. Overall, the benefits of working at home really shine. It’s especially good when your schedule lets you do things you couldn’t in an office.

Livestock: A Rabbit In Every Pot

I’ve been looking into the various classified ads locally for livestock I want, to get an idea on budgeting first for proper quartering and actual animals. Chickens are of course a first choice. Also want bees, been looking at hives and queens for sale. If I can site them properly, bears shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Goats are sometime in the future, will need more fencing than we’ve got.

On those classified pages I discovered an awful lot of meat rabbits for sale, and remembered some homesteader friends in Virginia about 25 years ago who were big into meat rabbits. At the time we’d recently become vegetarian and I rejected the idea for our just-started homestead, but all these years later I think the ease of raising rabbits might make them an excellent livestock choice… so long as I don’t have to be the one who slaughters and prepares them for sale. There are surprisingly ample markets locally for good rabbit meat, especially organically raised. Even including some of the high-end eateries and B&Bs who are my regular fresh organic herb and sauce customers.

Continue reading »

Vertical Wind Growing [Straight] Up

As the energy situation in this country becomes more and more frustrating due to a myriad of factors such as costs, aesthetics and a troubling amount of stonewalling by rich, organized fossil fuel and nuclear die-hards, it’s nice when research and development produces technologies that can answer some of the most frustrating objections to renewable energy.

Here in the western North Carolina mountains – where the wind blows stiffly enough on the high ridge lines to cause constant issues with the myriad tall radio transmitter and cell phone towers that mark them with flashing lights high above the tree lines, some pretty underhanded lobbying by rich developers and the Big Energy lobby (nuclear and coal from MTR mining) amended the state’s 1983 Mountain Ridge Protection Act to exclude the windmill exemption (but of course keeping the radio and cell tower interpretations in place). Now, the Act only applies to ridgelines over 3,000 feet in elevation, which would apply primarily to the Blue Ridge debarking the eastern continental divide and the “J” shaped ridgeline of the Black Brothers, including Mount Mitchell and several others among the highest peaks east of the Mississippi River.

Continue reading »