Offgrid living

Crossposting here because an off-grider is relying on milk and potatoes for nutrition completeness. I suppose getting nutritional completeness with as few ingredients as possible is generally interesting to off-grid living.

This is a compilation of all my Wood Gas powered projects, from a fire wood fueled Truck to giant flame burping wood stoves all the way to small folding camping style units built for cooking.

I'm here to share a fairly famous youtube channel and community from a man I have had some very interesting conversations with over the past 10-15 years. His name is Jamie Mantzel and he basically personifies off-grid living, IMO.

I started a community here on slrpnk.net to clone his Reddit presence because I felt that this was the most philosophically aligned place for this content. The content is automatically cloned over from Reddit (all I had to do was make a request with the Boycott Reddit Bot).

If you've never seen his channel before, you're in for a treat.

Anyway, here's the cloned community: Adventure Builders

or

!adventurebuilders@slrpnk.net before the bot comes and corrects me!

If anyone wants to help moderate that community, please let me know.

https://piped.video/watch?v=LxNQK6dYh3g

Witness the interplay of earth, water, and straw to create in-fill walls for a hand-crafted timber frame structure.

Stone, clay, bamboo and straw are combined to create beautifully finished walls. Many hands come together, to gather stones, make adobes, mix cob, harvest bamboo to build natural walls that are durable and breathable. Multiple methods of cob, adobe blocks and wattle & daub are combined to create a unique mix of artistic textures and lines. Witness as walls are made smooth with clay plaster and decorated with simple relief designs, and even metal doors made from scratch as the metal wood shop takes final form.

These EG4 batteries from Signature Solar look like a pretty good deal to me; $265/kWh according to their calculation. I paid a little over $500/kWh for some 12V form-factor lithium batteries at the start of the year and thought those were a reasonable price.

Today's adventure: a couple of rainy days caused low battery levels, but not too low I thought - still 30% or so; these are lithium batteries and can deep cycle. They are "smart" batteries and if one is full in series, none can charge further - so they should all be at the same charge level all the time. But a couple had gotten out of step somehow and when they reached zero everything shut down.

How to bootstrap it? With no battery output (since a zero battery turned itself off and would not let the battery bank show any voltage!) - there is no way to activate the inverter and let street power run the battery charger. With no battery power, there is no way to turn on the MPPT controller and charge the batteries!

I could rearrange the banks to put four batteries with remaining charge in series because I have an 8-battery system, and get things restarted; but if there had been only four like when I first installed the system - I'd be in trouble.

Another thing that happened. Before I figured out the battery problem, I was trying to switch back to street-power. Because power from the street comes to the inverter first and then the inverter powers the distribution panel, when the batteries are down, I cannot get street power to the distribution panel. I could install a manual bypass, but it is not a commonly needed item and it is a large amp switch. So I removed the inputs and outputs at the inverter and bypassed manually. That worked fine. But in the process of disconnecting or reconnecting, I must have loosened the neutral connection to the inverter. So when the inverter was working again and I checked voltage, I only checked across the two hot legs - yay, 240V. I did not check that each leg was 120v from neutral! They were not: one leg was at zero and the other was at 240. I found this discrepancy fairly quickly after only destroying an outlet strip, the oven control electronics from a very old stove we were wanting to replace, and the controls of an old Sharp microwave oven with the 4, 7, 9 and Clear buttons not working. Woohoo we have a new stove out of the deal!

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/611077

I have been thinking on how to claim every energy that comes on my plot. Technology goes more and more into harvesting the smaller left over energy. Ive seen examples in the Netherlands where startups try to get energy from a chip (I have been thinking on how to claim every energy that comes on my plot. Technology goes more and more into harvesting the smaller left over energy. Ive seen examples in the Netherlands where startups try to get energy from a chip (http://www.nowi-energy.com, https://memsys.nl) and a transparent solar panel layer on windows etc. Here in Lithuania sometimes the whole day has an overcast sky and that is the solar energy that we are getting. I know that with heavy overcast days a standard solar panels output can be as low as 10%. So a 5kWp can generate instead of 3.75kW produce only a meager 370W. My question to you, arent there other solar technologies that are adjusted to this overcast circumstances? So to gain more efficiency from diffuse lighting or from frequencies that can pierce the clouds more (like infrared spectrum)?

Some sunday morning pondering....

Found this on instagram from an account I follow (not religiously, so no guarantees on reliability). It's an app for designing your off grid homestead, and from the demos I saw on instagram it looks neat. Not too expensive to back at the lower tiers, all of which give you access to the app.

Obviously Kickstarter apps are 0% Guaranteed no matter what they say, but I thought this was worth sharing here.

I'm purchasing a property which will not perc for a conventional septic system. There are alternative septic systems that are possible, but also I'm wondering, what about an alternative system altogether? Does anyone have experience with handling greywater and waste separately (say composting for waste) in a home with several members?

I was looking back at reddit posts (while deleting them), and I realized I'd written a book worth of stuff about this topic. I would write it all again, if it is helpful. But for a brief synopsis of "how it works", here is what one does:

Assess power needs - look at your living standard and catalog all the devices you power, and estimate the time they operate - power is measured in watts, and time in hours. Multiply to get watt-hours; then divide by 1000 to get kilowatt hours. Compare with your utility bill.

Have you heard of a system for RV campers that lets the user take long showers using the same filtered water over & over? Has anyone heard of or used such a set up? Any recommendations?

Here's some of what I've found so far. Loopz: https://hamwells.com/en/loopz/

Overview of Our Recirculating Shower | RV Renovation Ryan & Su: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhpBTra9bXs

I've been using rainwater for a long time. Back in 2001 we rigged a rain catchment when we were living on a sailboat, and we were hooked. Great tasting water and plenty of it, at least here in the tropics.

We built a house in 2013 with roof runoff collection and a pair of cisterns under the house. A pump at the lower level sent water up to a tank located about 12 meters above the house - so there was always water pressure from that 350 liter reserve. We added a 200L first-flush drum to catch the first debris-laden water draining off the roof.

When we moved in 2021, of course we bought a house with a cistern - but it had no roof drain collection, so we had to retrofit that. The first flush tank is a bit larger now at over 400 liters.

Rainwater from a roof can have bacteria and parasites in it, but during storage, almost everything settles to the bottom of the cistern. One thing that does not is Giardia cysts, so it is wise to filter the water with a one-micron cartridge before drinking. Other household uses are adequately pure after a coarse 50 micron filter at the pump, but the one micron filter is on the cold side at the kitchen sink. The first flush capture and the 50 micron prefiltering are so effective the one micron filter is good for a year or more. Even the 50 micron filter shows no sign of clogging in a year, but when we change it, it LOOKS like it needs changing (very dark brown).

I bought the electrical equipment from AltEStore and the panels (not shown!) from a local solar store. 4kW Schneider split-phase inverter (replaced once under warranty), and 60A MPPT. The array is a bit over 2kW. The battery bank is KiloVault lithium wired for 48V; 9.6kWh capacity (about $4800 for all eight units).

I actually have two large 220Ah batteries that I got cheaply that I am trying to repair. Not sure if they are totally broken, but the seal poped open when trying to charge them again after a while and I am a bit hesitant what to do about them. Would be a shame to just bring them to a recycle center though if they can be repaired somehow.