Timothy Ettridge

I've often thought about this. One simple approach would be to combine a Dakota fire hole with a small cobb oven.

I also have a 6" cottage rocket I made at an Uncle Mud workshop. The top of the 19" wide barrel is of course removable so I've contemplated building a mini version of Paul's barrel oven for it.

In the meantime, I've been using Biolite's Basecamp Stove (basically an electric-assisted rocket stove that uses the resultant heat to recharge a battery to use for the next firing) with the same company's pizza oven attachment to make single pizzas and such. Sadly, Biolite has moved on from those items and no longer produces them. I could make a single pizza with nothing more than six nine-inch long sticks of wood as thick as my thumb; three to heat the oven to 400 degrees and three more to keep it hot for ten minutes to cook the pizza. A cooked pizza from six sticks of wood; it seemed like magic.

With that option gone, I've been experimenting with a "Pizzacraft PC0601 Pizzeria Pronto Stovetop Pizza Oven" on top of a "TAFEIDA Upgraded Camping Rocket Stove."  Not very stable so I need to make some modifications to it.

paul wheaton wrote:
Did it not say in the email you were sent?

What did the email say?

It looks like, after all, that I've yet to receive the second e-mail referred to in your "The Candy River Begins" e-mail. Moments after joining this forum to ask about this, I got a "[Permies] Message posted: 2018 rocket oven kickstarter support" e-mail. In my late-at-night, two minutes from bed fog, I mistakenly assumed that was THE e-mail.

So what's the title of the e-mail I'm looking for, so I'll know it for sure?

In the mean time, however, having now read this entire thread, I see that the Justin Rhodes Full Tour is that candy. Dang. I'd just bought that maybe two weeks ago. But I'm happy you get the extra $3. That's why, after gathering I should look in "my stuff" from my perusal of this forum last night, when I saw it there, it seemed natural, not new.

So, though I now know the answer to my question, the issue of why I'm not getting the e-mail I should still remains.

"I selected something that is new - just to make sure it is working correctly.   You will be able to tell what it is, by the email you were sent telling you about it,"

I still don't know what it is yet. Is it just this forum?

Okay...it just now came.

"If you did not get that email, please check your spam box."

Didn't get the e-mail (five hours after your "candy river begins" e-mail). It's not in my spam box.

This all is working in basically the same way as a normal air conditioner:
1) compression of some refrigerant (driving the compressor is where the high electrical load comes from)
2) Allowing the heat created to dissipate (cooling fins on the back of your frig or on the exterior side of your A/C unit)
3) expansion of refrigerant (the temperature drops in that section of the A/C's plumbing and a fan is blown over it)
4) re-compression of the refrigerant.

As with blowing cool air out from your mouth, steps 1 and 2 are inside your mouth and step 3 is outside your mouth.

The heat generated will be at the neck of the bottles, outside. Problem is, you'll need a fair amount of wind to create the pressure to drive ambient air through the bottles necks. Also, dropping the air a few degrees on a hot day doesn't do much, at least not for me.

I can think of a lot more practical ways to get electricíty free cooling, e.g., upwind-facing air intake leading into earth tubes with the exhaust blowing their cool air over an air intake radiator. You don't want earth tubes venting directly into a living quarters, though. Too much of a risk of mold spores you can't control in the underground part of the earth tubes.

Or...here's a thought. Build a wofati.

Glad to see the hand-powered washing machine being put to good use by being stashed inside one of the stalls in the skiddable shower. Seems like the perfect place for it.

I live in central Florida and am building an off-grid tiny house. Designing a water system has been my main challenge (and main obstacle to moving to the location I intend). Reading this thread has been very informative.

On one hand, I'm contemplating paying to have a well professionally dug, and let that be the end of it, but I would prefer to have a self-built system drawing lake water and using a slow sand pre-filter leading to ceramic filter (such as the Monolithic ones mentioned above).

I'm trying the find the sources to answer these questions.

1. Is my lake, spring-fed (from below, as is almost all of Florida's lakes) and a near perfect circle 660 ft across, large enough to be a good source?
2. If so, where exactly in the lake should I draw from? The center surface? The center below the surface (and how far below)?
3. Where can I find plans to build a slow sand filter suitable to my low-level needs (only one person's worth of water)?

Thanks for any input on this.

If you live in an area where the soil is 100% sand (as I do in central Florida), do you accept that as your base or do you buy topsoil from a gardening vendor and have them dump a truckload on a tarp for you to distribute as you build the mound?

Maybe it's a Florida thing. This hive was under a friend's deck near Leesburg, Florida for seven years. When his wife said enough was enough and it had to go, I harvested it into a Warré hive and had it in my apiary for just over a year. Normally robust, it faded away just this last summer (I never harvested any honey from it in the 14 months I had it). I'm wondering if being high over a cement floor had protected it for its seven years of existence from Small Hive Beetles (whose larvae develop in sandy soil beneath the hive) but my putting it into a standard apiary setting of only 18" off the ground sealed its doom. Hard to tell.

As for the original question, I'd think it was either a swarm who, like the one that started this hive, decided being outside was good enough (the tree must have provided enough rain protection) or, as mentioned elsewhere, it was a swarm that just couldn't wait any longer to find a home.