Factor e Live – Part 6 – Solar Turbine Beginnings
Here is video documentation for making the first two parabolic reflectors for the Solar Turbine project: The Solar Turbine Convergence is here – Elliot and I are continuing on the next reflector version, and we are picking up Stuart today. We’d...
Factor e Live Part 4 – Digging for Water Completed
In part one of “Digging for Water”, we drilled a hole 85 feet deep, hit water, and tried to insert a 6 inch casing (pvc pipe) into the hole. When the 6 inch pipe didn’t fit, we decided to use a 4 inch casing. Although the 4 inch casing...
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...
Fertile Birthing Period
I’ve been asked a number of times about the progress on the CEB press. The best answer is that we’re in a fertile birthing period. If you went through the presentation in yesterday’s blog – you know that we decided to build our...
A Prickly Journey
A reality check is a bitter sweet pill. The sweetness comes from the truth and the bitterness is in the swallowing. This week I received a letter from an inventor. An inventor who loves the world but sleeps on a couch. When I asked him about collaborating,...
Ecotechnology Buying Club
It’s time to take our open source product development to the next level. The next on the Compressed Earth Block (CEB) press prototype development is a computer controlled XYZ table for automating acetylene torch cutting of the metal. You may see...
Turbine Update
Our team is working with Dan Granett on the boundary layer turbine (see former blog entry). This will be a profound improvement over the Lister for electrical generation. It will be fired by a Babington burner with a flash steam generator. Here are simplified...
Brick is Born
It was thirty days before Christmas, two thousand and seven. The first compressed earth brick was born from an open source compressed earth block press. It was smooth, it was sleek. Six inches by twelve and four. Wouldn’t give it away for twice...
Solar Turbine Update
Yesterday I talked to Dan Granett of Granett Engineering. He made a boundary layer turbine successfully, and has performance data (please let me know if you know others). This turbine is an external combustion engine, and is a cheaper, simpler, and more...
Logs and Thoughts
I have been cutting lumber for my new little house almost for two weeks now. It is hard and extremely slow. Every few days we have to change a chain or the whole chainsaw all together. Look at this picture: Isn’t it beautiful? This house is being...
