Water

Water

Can this bucket save the world?

Pieter Hoff’s Groais is an off-grid tree incubator that could help reforest an area the size of Canada wiping out our carbon emissions in the process.…

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Water

Earth Balls

A low-cost, off-the-grid, dome-like housing option, adapted for living on water.…

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Community

Wow, what a rain!

Living in the high desert means having to deal with long periods of dry weather punctuated by periods of mega-rains. We got one of those yesterday. I was not at the skycastle when this occurred, I was at a friend’s house. My drive home was a bit tricky, our roads are dirt, some gravel, some boulders and several places are clay. The clay is the problem, when it gets wet, soaked, it becomes a car eating muck pit. There are several places I have to cross that have lots of clay, one place in particular is a S-curve just before my place, I avoid it when it’s wet. That means going over an even steeper,  higher, rougher road, but it’s worth it to miss the mucky S-curve. As I was going over the alternate path, I noticed a couple of cars that were abandoned on the road, not a pleasant thing to see where I live. That usually means a long, rough walk for the occupants, unless they are lucky enough to find someone else driving though or are close enough to walk to a friend’s house, that usually means at least a half mile or more walking either up or down steep hills. Did I mention that cell phones don’t work out here?…

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Community

DIY washing machine and homemade laundry soap

What do you get when you combine a 5 gallon bucket and a toilet plunger? An off-grid washing machine. Well, maybe not a machine in the traditional sense, unless you consider my hands the motor. This is something I have been wanting to make for quite some time now. The other day while I was in town, I saw a toilet plunger on the shelf and put it in my cart. I also picked up 3 bottles of Mrs Stewart’s bluing, I’ll explain more about that in a bit.…

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Energy

Green home loans

SAN FRANCISCO — Locals will use home loans to finance green improvements now San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has unveiled a new financing program, Green Finance SF.

The
program (slogan: saving you money, energy and water) will finance projects between $5,000 and $50,000 such as installing low-flow toilets, solar water heaters, solar electric panels and double-paned windows. Homeowners will pay back the costs through property taxes.
The initiative is financed via Federal stimulus funding and is one of many similar moves in towns across America.
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Community

Off the Grid and the prepared

So, just what does that mean? I can tell you from personal experience and from the responses I have received from people over the years that it definitely has different meanings to different people. From living completely without any utilities, no electricity, water or gas (think hunter’s cabin, wood stove, candles or kerosene lamps, no running water…), to generating one or more of these items on site yourself (think solar panels, wind power, methane digester…), I even had one person say that for him, living “off the grid” meant living so remotely that the government couldn’t find you, essentially hiding from the world. For some people it brings up a picture of a hermit living in a shack on a remote location, others envision a state of the art home that independently takes care of the needs of all occupants from food and water to electricity.…

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Off-Grid 101

Reedbeds, not sewers

Reedbed Filtration is a natural approach to human waste water treatment. International environmental scientist, MELVYN RUTTER is a born-again reed-bed enthusiast. Here he describes his personal journey.

I began my research in the spring of 1995, shortly after graduating as a mature student from Huddersfield University. I visited many sites with reedbeds, learned their designs, and saw what they did. I formulated a design that avoided all of the faults and mistakes of the systems I studied.

All methods of waste water treatment harness the work of bacteria to break down nutrients and pollutants. In the presence of air ( oxygen ) things break down, and in the absence of air ( oxygen ) things build up. The original developers of reedbeds used a horizontal flow system. This is where the effluents flow in the top and out of the top of the bed. They normally used a single bed. Sometimes they elongated it, and twisted the flows round and round again.…

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Humanure – sawdust toilets

Sit, flush and forget, that’s what most of us do, multiple times a day. Composting toilets are the answer.

We use perfectly good, drinkable water to flush our waste —  what a waste it truly is! After we flush, we don’t think about all the water that is used/wasted to process the sewage that is created, chemicals are pumped into our water system, the water we DRINK, so that we can do it all over again.

I’m starting to sound pretty green aren’t I?…

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