Outline of my personal projects.

I think I mentioned some time back that this was a group project.   There are parts we plan on collaborating on as a group and other parts that are just mine.

The aquaponics and most of the general farm/garden related stuff will be a group effort.  This part is pretty much my own pet project.  The 1.3 acres or so that I bought are on a hill so imagine the dotted line being the peak of the hill, where the tree is (the gigantic pine from earlier pictures) is on the level top of the hill, the rest is on the slope.

The idea is to make as inexpensive and permanent a setup as possible to provide a comfortable and independent lifestyle at a minimum of expense and maintenance.  When this is all done the whole thing including the land should cost less than $7,000 and should last the rest of my life.  I also don't want to have to spend much time maintaining it and want to be able to leave it for long periods without worrying about anything.

Long term I would like to make several of these in different locations.  This one is in Arkansas, which is as close as I get to a "hometown".  While spring and fall in Arkansas are incredible... summer (now) and winter leave quite a bit to be desired.  It would be nice to have a similar setup in places like Colorado, Montana, Maine, Florida, Oregon, British Columbia.  I envision hauling a bunch of solar panels and whatever I have that is valuable around with the seasons.  Hopefully I can build a few of these... maybe I can convince a few other people (hint, hint) that it is a good idea and we can perhaps form a group where we can loan out the spares to each other.

I would like to think that the structure would not present much of a target for vandalism or abuse.  There is nothing really valuable that could be taken, it cannot be set on fire, it is too solid to be damaged much.  All factors that make leaving it for months at a time in the middle of nowhere a little more practical.  Then again my optimism in humanity has not been very justified lately, so who knows.

The basic idea here is to eliminate the need for utilities as much as possible.  In the short term I expect I will just get standard water / electric utilities, but I would like to do away with these eventually by substituting solar for electric and catching rainwater.

Solar means that there can be enough power for lights, fans, a computer, and small appliances, but not enough for standard refrigerators / freezers and air conditioners.  There are some smaller fairly expensive refrigerators for the RV industry that can be used with sufficient solar power, but standard air conditioning is out.  Some years ago I spent a couple of years living out of a truck and learned some ways to make this work, but I think I will save that for another post.

Water can also be conserved greatly by a few simple changes that in my mind fall into the minor inconvenience category... most peoples opinion on this probably differs.  I grew up using a outhouse in Africa, it never seemed to be much of a problem to walk a little ways to go to the bathroom.  In America I used them while hiking the Appalachian Trial.  Most people I talk to dismiss them immediately because of bad experiences with poorly maintained outhouses or "porta-potties".  In reality "composting toilets" can be very clean, comfortable and not smell bad with some minimal maintenance.  This eliminates one major use of water.

The other major water consumer would be showers.  While it is possible to stay clean by taking a sponge-bath using about a half-gallon or less of water, it is not ideal.  What I am going to try as a solution will be a large outdoor hot-tub.  I will go into more detail on this later, but the idea is to combine some of the aquaponics with earth-bag construction with a rocket-stove water heater in order to make a controlled creek with a swimming hole.  In the diagram you can kind of see how this works if you follow the arrows.  There is one electric pump which constantly pumps water from the holding tank at the bottom through the terraces and back into the hot-tub in an continuous loop.  The terraces will act as a giant "sand trap" filter, and this along with the plants should clean the water enough that it can be continuously re-used.  Water will have to be added periodically to account for evaporation, but hopefully the rain will be sufficient for that.

I also plan to do away with "running water" by having a water-barrel that I can periodically take somewhere and fill for drinking water and dishes.  This with a nice metal bowl seems to suffice for most of the world.  I don't foresee the slight inconvenience as sufficient to justify chaining myself to the public utilities.

Well... hopefully that gives a "birds-eye-view" of where I am going with this part of it.  I will go into more detail on the hot-tub design and some of the things I figured out while living in my truck in later posts.

Rocket Stove Introduction.

I was fairly skeptical about these things at first. I suppose I still am and as a result I am eager to actually try it. The short version is that it is a large (several tons), cheap, easily constructed wood burning stove that is extremely efficient. It has two fairly unique properties. The first is that the design allows for a horizontal chimney that can be run as far as thirty feet or more. The second is that it burns extremely hot, so hot that it totally burns all the gases that come off the wood to the point that the only thing coming out the chimney is basically warm water vapor.

I want to use this for two reasons, heating the earth-bag dome and heating the hot-tub. This is where the 30-foot horizontal chimney comes in. In a traditional fireplace the majority of the heat goes up the chimney with the smoke. With a rocket stove the design produces a forced-air effect once it heats up and essentially pushes the exhaust through the chimney. In an earth bag dome the chimney can be buried in cob or cement and made into a bench running around the interior perimeter of the dome. The heat conducts through the metal chimney pipe into the thermal mass of the bench and uses the bench and the dome itself as a kind of heat-battery that then slowly releases heat into the dome for long periods. By running the chimney a sufficient distance through the bench most of the heat from the exhaust gas is removed leaving the water vapor coming out end of the chimney only slightly warm.

In the hot tub, it would basically work the same way except that the bench will be underwater and will heat the water as well.

The materials needed are a large (55 gal) metal drum, a small (20 ish) gallon drum, a few firebricks (15 or so), some high temperature stove pipe and a bunch of regular chimney pipe.  The diagram above shows a simple design.  The air and wood go in the small drum (not shown) then into the burn chamber this heats the insulated steel stove pipe causing an updraft in the heat riser at the top of which it hits the 55-gallon drum and starts to cool as it goes down the other side and out the chimney.  The whole thing is plastered in cob or cement to hold it together and absorb the heat.  The top (or the bottom of the upside down 55-gallon drum) can be used as a cooking surface or a boiler or whatever.

There is an excellent book on the whole subject available on amazon with much more precise instructions and other variations.  There are also a large number of websites and videos demonstrating the construction process I will list a few here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_stove
http://www.rocketstove.org
http://biocongress.org/category/rocket-stove/
video - dancing rabbit

Aquaponics.

Essentially this is hydroponics (growing plants without soil), except instead of mixing chemicals with the water you stick some fish in it.

The short version is that the fish eat whatever you give them and produce waste in the form of ammonia which is then turned into nitrates and nitrates by bacteria in the water.  These are then consumed by the plants.  This cleans and aerates the water for the fish and provides the plants with everything they need to grow.

The advantage of aquaponics for plants is that you can grow them in a more controlled environment (without bugs).  They put more energy into the fruit instead of the roots, since the water brings the nutrients to them.  And it eliminates soil borne disease and pests (since there is no soil).  There also seems to be much less maintenance when they are set up properly, this is the main appeal to me.  Mainly you have to add water as it evaporates and pick whatever it produces.

When it is balanced properly it solves most of the problems associated with having fish, you never have to clean the tank or change the water and it does not smell bad.  It also produces a bunch of food in a small area, like an apartment.  I have not changed the water in two years, and I don't use any filters (other than the growbeds themselves).  I do have to add about five gallons of water a week to keep up with evaporation.

On a large scale you can use something like tilapia, or another edible fish in a large pool to provide enough nutrients for several greenhouses.  For example a pool 6ft deep with a 5ft radius would have a volume of 471 cubic feet.  You can have one tilapia per cubic foot, they mature in 6 months which would produce about 1000lbs of fish a year along with a greenhouse full of food.

So far I am on version three of this system after two years of messing with it.  The room I am currently in has no windows which makes it impractical from a cost standpoint since I had to use artificial lights.  Apart from that though it has been fairly successful.

Version One was built on the top bunk of a bunk bed.  It had 4 medium sized plastic bins as grow beds and used a fairly complicated system of bell and loop siphons to produce an "ebb and flow" cycle.  The idea was to have each of the beds completely fill then completely drain over and over in order to provide nutrients without leaving the roots constantly in water which can result in rot.  I have three 10 gallon fish tanks containing bait-store minnows  (about 10 in each tank).  There is a water pump from a cpu cooler that is still going strong after two years of continuous use that pumps water from the tanks to a reservoir that slowly fills then totally drains with a loop siphon into a PVC pipe will holes drilled into it to trickle into the four beds.  Each bed has a bell siphon that allows it to fill to a point and then they each drain independently back into the fish tanks.

It worked fairly well for about six months.  I grew basil, cilantro, lettuce, oregano, and tomatoes.  They all came up well, then the tomatoes grew over and killed everything else and produced no actual tomatoes.  Turns out that without insects or airflow you have to manually vibrate the flowers to pollinate the tomatoes.  I also did not provide adequate drainage and every once in a while one of the siphons would fail and dump water all over the bottom bunk which was my computer desk.  This was not ideal.

This system is really designed for a much higher water flow than I had.  The siphons need to get to a tipping point in order to engage and if the water flow is insufficient they seem to just dribble a little instead of producing a sudden gush of water.  You can compensate for this by using smaller tubes and siphons.    But I think it would be much more practical in a larger system.  There are several you-tube videos demonstrating hydroponics with bell siphons.

Version Two was much better.  I built it on a heavy duty steel wire shelf system and did away with the siphons entirely.  The grow medium I am using is pebbles on the bottom and a few inches of vermiculite on top of that.  Vermiculite is essentially puffed rock, it wicks moisture really well.  The intention was to have the water pumped out of the tank into bed one on top.  It would then trickle down to the pebble layer at the bottom and would wick up into the vermiculite above.  After filtering through this it would drain from holes in the bottom into bed two below and do the same before finally dripping back into the fishtanks.  One complication was keeping the water levels even in the three 10-gallon tanks at the bottom.  I used a system of vacuum tubes, one big tank would have been much better.

I grew the tomatoes off to the side this time and kept them trimmed back.  I also used cherry tomatoes which seemed to fruit without the need to vibrate the flowers.  The top bed contains a couple of types of lettuce, cilantro, tomatoes, and chives.  The bottom one has more lettuce, and a couple types of basil and mint.  I put some pitcher plants, venus fly traps, and sundew plants in both to get rid of the gnats that I think came from the pebbles that I picked up outside.  The lettuce, mint, chives, pitcher plants and tomatoes did really well.  The basil, sundew and venus fly traps did not do so well... I think the light was insufficient.  With good sunlight I expect a system this size would produce enough for 5 small salads or a couple of big ones each week.

I planted the bulbs of a pack of grocery store chives after cutting off the green part to eat and was a little amazed to see it immediately start growing about two inches a day.  The stump of a head of lettuce from the grocery store also grew really well.

I stopped maintaining it about 4 months ago, and now let it grow wild to see what will happen and to keep the fish happy.  Again I need to improve the drainage... something like a small french drain made out of PVC pipes would probably work better.  The vermiculite compacts over time, and roots plug things up.

Version Three is my attempt at making the whole thing as small as possible in order to make a kit that I can sell or give away to friends of mine with a south facing window.  It is still a work in progress.  The current version works pretty well, I just need more time to see if issues occur.

With the first two I was not concerned at all about appearance, but this one is supposed to be slightly decorative.  It is basically a big glass bowl on top of a glass globe.  The glass bowl is the growbed and has a couple of holes drilled in the bottom of it.  The globe is the fishtank.  It has a copper pipe going through the center that uses an airlift pump to dribble a stream of water over the vermiculite.  It then drains back into the globe through the other holes in the bottom.  There is also a larger copper pipe that goes through the center hole that I can use to feed the fish.

The growbed has the same gravel in the bottom, and this is again covered in vermiculite.  The vermiculite wicks water from the point it is dribbling out and stays constantly damp all over.  The plants can be added anywhere in the top bowl.

The hardest part is drilling the holes in the glass.  There need to be about three of them, and they need to be about 3/4 inch in diameter.  To do this you need a drill press and a diamond drillbit.  Which can cost a couple hundred dollars.  The trick is to do all the drilling underwater (fill the bowl with water while you drill the holes)  otherwise the glass gets hot and the bowl cracks.  The biggest surprise so far is that for some reason you seem to need a bubbler to aerate the water sufficiently.  In the other systems I was able to have about five times the suggested fish density without any aeration.  The water flowing through the growbeds was sufficient.  In the small verison this does not seem to be the case.

The airlift pump seems to work particularly well for this.  Basically you bubble air partway up a submerged water filled tube.  The bubbles force some water up the tube as they rise.  It seems that with some one-way valves you can lift water quite high with this, even though I only need a few inches.  I found out about it here: http://our.windowfarms.org/ it allows the motors to be external to the system so they are not visible and it provides the small amount of water flow needed to maintain something this size.  I also expect that since there are no moving parts it will need little maintenance.

I expect that not counting the tools, the raw materials are about $60 with a couple of hours labor.  Not bad for a low maintenance year round herb-garden and fish-based entertainment center.

The plan for the property is to build a large version.  I hope to make a 70ft diameter geodesic greenhouse with a 10ft diameter fishpool in the middle.  But that is still open for debate.

Tick fever... you don't want it.

So the first thing I did before starting this project was take a quick walk around the bit of land I was about to buy in order to "ponder".  Well... in 15 minutes or so I noticed a bunch of ticks... I ended up picking off over a hundred of them from that little walk.  I thought I got them all.  Later that night I woke up scratching and felt another tick, so I pulled it off, tore it in half and went back to sleep thinking nothing of it.

Three weeks later (apparently it can take months) I became sick.  The symptoms of tick fever are as follows: fever, joint pain, sweating, shaking, headache, rash.  The headache and joint pain were pretty much constant, the fever, shaking, sweating would go in about an 8-hour cycle.  The rash came after about four days of this.  Apparently if not treated this can go on for years and can also include paralysis and death depending on the type.

I have a friend that had this and said it was the worst thing he had ever experienced.  In my experience it is about the 4th worst thing.  My personal misery scale is as follows:  1. Malaria, 2. Heat Stroke, 3. Food Poisoning, 4. Tick Fever.  Of course if it had gone untreated my ratings might change... especially if the death part was involved.

Progress has been slow the past several weeks because of the above mostly, also because July in Arkansas is miserable.... August is not much better, but some progress is better than none I suppose.

Geltaftan - How to set your earth bag dome on fire.

I was just talking to a friend at lunch and he mentioned that he had read about something similar to earth bag domes except that the entire dome was fired and glazed to produce what is essentially a giant clay pot.  While the result is appealing, it seems like it may be a lot more work than I am ready to do at the moment.  Still, something worth thinking about.

I was not able to find much information but it looks like the same guy that pioneered most of the earth bag stuff Nader Khalili is the same guy that is trying to set them on fire.  Below are a few links I found (let me know if there are better ones).

Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceramic_houses#History_of_the_Geltaftan_Method
http://www.sdearthtimes.com/et1295/et1295s3.html

Geodesic Dome Introduction

While my primary goal over the next year will be the construction of an earth bag dome, there is another better known design that has been around since about 1926.  This would be the geodesic dome that was popularized by Buckminster Fuller.

As a home I think the earth-bag dome will work best, but the geodesic dome does have a few advantages.  Some of these are as follows:
1. Also inexpensive, can probably be built for under $1000
2. Can be very large.
3. Can be semi-transparent (greenhouse)
4. Are relatively lightweight so can be moved.
5. Can be built quickly.

The structure of interlocking triangles make the geodesic dome the strongest possible structure for the material used.  As a result they are good for large open areas that contain no internal supports.  Apparently Buckminster wanted to put an entire city under one in order to maintain warm temperatures during the winter.  A sphere also provides the most volume with the least surface area, which in theory provides the most efficient use of resources.  This is why they use geodesic domes in places like Antarctica.

In practical terms they do have a few issues.  Using standard building materials (such as wood) they are almost impossible to build.   Every angle is different, there are lots of joins which all have the potential to leak and nothing that you buy at the local home improvement store will fit as there are no flat walls or 90-degree corners.  They also amplify sound so everything inside becomes very noisy.  These issues can be mostly avoided if you buy one as a kit, but then it is very expensive.

However, if you think of it more in terms of a yurt or permanent tent than a traditional house.  Things become much simpler.  Basically you use inexpensive metal galvanized conduit pipe, flatten the ends, drill a hole and join them with a bolt.  Then you cover it with some kind of tarp.  This has been mainly used for making temporary shelters for events such as burning man.

For my purposes I want to build a smallish (25ft diameter) version as a test and to use as a temporary shelter while I build the dome.  Later we may make a guest-house, storage building, or chicken coop out of it.  In any case it will be semi-permanent and will need to be waterproof.  The covering then becomes the most complicated part.  Usually people use a parachute, or make their own cover out of some kind of plastic.  Because of the shape this can be kind of complicated.  There are patterns which can be sown to fit, but this is a lot of work.

My plan (and I don't know if this has been tried) is to cut a cotton or Tyvek drop cloth into circular bands that are cut to fit the contour with a slight overlap on the bottom of each.  Then "paint" over this with polyurethane floor sealer (the clear plastic stuff on gym floors) or fibreglass resin.  Then while it is still sticky throw on some white sand.  The idea is to make the fabric stiff and waterproof and a little heavy so that it does not flap in the wind.

Hopefully if this works out then we can build a much larger version for the aquaponic greenhouse.  In my opinion this would be the most cost effective and practical option but since this part is going to be a community effort I will have to convince everyone else that is involved.  I would estimate that a 70ft diameter dome could be built for less than $2000, which if true would be far less than using a traditional design.

I expect my small 25ft version will be less than $1000 and will be two stories which the top story being a trampoline base.   The reason for this is that I am used to sleeping in hammocks and they are a lot cooler in the summer.  A mattress acts as a huge blanket on one side so air conditioning has to be used to compensate.  A thin fabric does not insulate well so will be much cooler.

Useful Links:
http://www.desertdomes.com/domecalc.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesic_dome
http://www.weasel.com/dome.html
http://graphics.stanford.edu/~munzner/dome/struts/
http://www.byexample.com/projects/current/dome_construction
https://www.artsy.net/artist/r-buckminster-fuller

Earth Bag Domes Introduction.

The motivation behind these things is simple.  No mortgage payments, and very little maintenance.  The entire thing can be built for less than $1000 in materials and a bunch of labor.  The reason the cost is so low is that all you really have to buy is a bunch bags and some barbed wire.  Of course if you are able to spend a little more then it would make the job easier and faster but even then it will still be less than a few thousand dollars.


There is an excellent book with a great deal of information about all aspects of earth-bag construction that is available on Amazon and elsewhere (click on the picture to the left).  If you are actually thinking of doing this then I would recommend buying a copy.

The idea is that you take a woven polypropylene bag like they use for storing feed for farm animals and you fill it with dirt.  If the composition of your particular dirt is too loose then you can buy cheap dirt or stabilize the dirt you have with a little cement or lime.  You then tightly stack the bags in rows and between each row you add a couple of strands of barbed wire to keep it from sliding.  As you go up you move the bags slightly inward until you end up with a dome.  On top of this you put some kind of plaster such as cob, or cement, or lime, or even a living roof of some kind of grass.

They can be built in a variety of sizes but generally should probably be under 20ft. in diameter.  If a larger area is needed several can be joined together.  Windows and doors are created by stacking the bags into a variety of arch shapes.  Other more traditional structures can be built using the same principal, I am going to probably use earth bags to build a fish-pond for the aquaponics project and for an outdoor hot-tub.

The finished structure weighs about 40 tons or more and is basically impervious to floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, rotting, insects and fire.  The pressure on the bags produces something similar to rammed earth, which has been used all over the world and has held up for hundreds of years.  Most of the great wall of China is rammed earth.  The mass of the structure also helps stabilize the inside temperature.  It takes a long time for heat to pass through and as a result it tends to remain cool through the day and be warmer at night.  If lime is used then it can have a similar effect of the humidity.  They can be built with a sleeping loft in the top and can be partially subterranean for extra thermal stabilization from the earth.

The disadvantage is that it is unusual looking, generally smaller than a normal house, and not allowed by most building codes inside city limits.  The lobbyists for the steel and lumber industries pretty much had it written into law that a home had to be "stick built" or metal and generally has to be over a specified square footage.  This is the main reason I had to buy property outside of city limits.  They also require a lot of labor, but I am considering that a free fitness program.

I have a friend that is about half way through building one of these.  He agreed to let me do an article on his dome.  I will try to take some pictures of it for another article in the near future.

Useful Links:
Wikipedia
http://www.earthbagbuilding.com/
Videos of another couple in Arkansas currently building a dome.