Babington Burner Trial One
Today we started to put together our Babington burner. This burner is important because it is a versatile source of heat for: space heating, metal melting, glassworks, pottery, steam engines for remote power, heat engines for mobile power in cars and...
Solar Turbine, Cast of Characters, and CEB Press
Stuart, Elliot, and I are here on the Solar Turbine: For the next two weeks we will iron out the details – right now it looks like a set of 40 foot long, 2-foot wide slats – 4 of these in total – with 48x solar concentration. Cost is...
Down on the Farm: Wild Strawberries and Global Swadeshi
It has taken me a while to allow my experiences and inspirations from this weekend at Factor E to gestate, to ferment into tangible thoughts that I can easily disseminate to readers. Being lucky enough to sit down with Brittany and Marcin and talk face...
An Open Letter to Lovers of Centralization
I detect a widespread lack of acknowledgement of the critical issue of scale in human orgnanization. E.F. Schumacher’s seminal work on the subject points clearly that human organization simply breaks down after a certain size is reached, as is stated...
Portal to Mystery
Look at that frost pattern on our door. The frost came from a combination of moisture and contrasting temperatures… but where did the diamond pattern come from? No shadows cross the door to create such marks. The only guess I have is that somehow...
Cordwood Addition Complete
I always imagined that when I am going to be in my mid sixties, i’ll retire to the woods and live in a small wood shack out in nature. Well, why wait? Here is my lovely little shack: You can view more pictures and more information by clicking below.
From 12-11-07: Yesterday a stove; Today firewood.
The cord wood room was coming to completion and we were still without a stove to heat it with. Craigslist, ebay, and local newspapers only had dead ends; the stoves listed were either too expensive, too far away, too big or already sold. I had asked a...
Internetless Ice storm
We have been out of touch for over a week now; an ice storm struck and while we still had power (unlike our neighbors, who do not have off-grid power systems) our internet receiver was covered in ice. As it is located on top of a tree, also ladden...
Assessment
How much is a twenty-foot diameter building worth…made of earthbags? Does it increase the property value or decrease it? When we first built our earthbag structure (locally known as the “mud hut”), the very small neighbouring town was...
Ups and Downs and the Plan
For all of you who are interested in building global villages in the future – here are some lessons from our experience. This applies to the case where you start with raw, undeveloped land. To begin with, the upshot is that we have just succeeded...
