Dave Smythe

Found out by accident that 5 gal pots planted in October with a few old potatoes and about 5 or 6 inches of dirt and slowly filled with kitchen scraps grow worthwhile crops of potatoes as well as producing pots of vermicompost when the worms move in. Forget about them mostly during the rainy winter here in N Cal and they grow themselves. Picture is harvest from 4 pots.

Now 7 years later I am wondering if this got built and if so how it worked out?

I have been thinking about heating a rocket mass heater with a solar air heater as a means of moving free (both cost and labor) heat from the hottest part of the day into the evening/night hours.
A solar air heater is a flat box maybe 2 ft wide by 6 ft tall by a few inches deep with a layer of insulation at the back, then an airspace with several sheets of window screen material and a front glazing panel glass or polycarbonate. The box has an inlet at the bottom and an outlet at the top that would be connected through the rocket mass heater bed. Air will move itself via convection when it heats up in the sun, but there can also be a fan hooked up to a low voltage electric solar panel that will run when the panel is in the sun. So during the day the hot gets blown through the RMH bed and stores heat. Might need to make sure heat doesn't siphon out backwards when the air heater gets cold at night.

To heat the building floor I would think it might be good to choose the section(s) of the floor you want to heat and make them into shallow mass beds heated by the solar air. So maybe place plywood underneath the floor joists, possibly with an insulation panel on top of the plywood, and then a thin layer of pebbles and then pump the solar air through the pebble layer in a direction parallel to the floor joists. This might be a good way to incorporate RMH into a room without taking up any space.

I have had mixed results saving peas, beans, squash and tomato seeds from year to year.
Seems to work for sugar snap peas and cherry tomatoes but beans and large tomatoes seem to vary a lot and never seem as vigorous as commercial seeds.
I usually buy one commercial variety of tomatoes each year and I have much better results with the disease resistant varieties than the heirloom ones although hope springs eternal.
Squashes grow well and true from seeds from grocery-store-bought butternuts and spaghetti squashes but saved squash seeds never seem to come true although some of the results are interesting.
Whenever I find potatoes sprouting in their bag I plant them in a bed if I have space or in a 5 gallon pot (got a pickup truck load of pots free from a landscaper on Craigslist a few years ago) if not. I start the pots with about 6 inches of soil and feed the pots kitchen scraps and add more soil as the potatoes grow. The worms move in and these pots are an easy way to do vermicomposting while growing potatoes. The year after I plant cherry tomatoes or pole beans in these pots and they seem to do well along the sunny side of my house growing up strings nailed to the eaves with a dripline on a timer (lazy gardener).

We were given a 5qt basket type air fryer as a present and we have used it almost every day for about 2 years.
The basket latch mechanism has now seized up so we just bought a larger 8qt replacement on sale for black friday.
We cook almost all the meat and fish we consume in it as well as various veggies sliced into "fries."
One problem it is on the same electrical circuit as our microwave and we cannot run both at the same time without tripping the circuit breaker.
Our normal frying pans are only used for eggs and anything that involves much of a sauce.

I would build a prototype Skytherm roof probably on a tiny house built as an ADU in my daughter's backyard.
Skytherm was invented by physicist Harold Hay back in the 1970s and he built a prototype house in Atascadero CA.

http://www.solarmirror.com/fom/fom-serve/cache/30.html

For a tiny house I would put a waterbed bladder on the roof but surrounded above and below with a sheet material on two rollers. The sheet would be half transparent (e.g. strong netting) and half insulation with a silver/mylar reflective layer on top. So the sheet can be rolled to put the insulation either above or below the waterbed. In the winter you uncover the waterbed during the day to gain solar heat, and then cover it with the insulation at night to retain the heat. In summer you do the opposite, cover with insulation/mylar during the day and uncover at night to radiate any heat into the sky. This will moderate temperatures in the building and greatly reduce the need for supplemental heating/cooling. To keep the weather out you can cover it all with a supplementary shed roof covered in  clear corrugated polycarbonate sheeting. Would need to vent the roof space in summer and close it up in winter.
Can use multiple waterbed bladders as you have space for and obviously your roof and supports would need to be engineered to take the extra weight.

If that were a success, I would do the same on a bigger scale with a doublewide mobile/modular home.

The other thing I would do is try to buy shares in Brilliant Light Power that I believe has the ultimate solution to global warming by making either heat or electricity from hydrogen with an efficiency of about 200 times just burning hydrogen despite what wikipedia says.

https://brilliantlightpower.com/news/

A couple of crazy ideas.

1. Use an old tower PC that has a removable side panel and remove all except the power supply and fan(s). Attach to the wall above the stove with the fans blowing outside. PC fans are pretty quiet. If you are offgrid could use a small solar panel to power a PC cooling fan.

2. Build a solar air heater which is like a 4x8ftx 4 inches deep box with dark window screen material to absorb solar heat. Mount it on a south facing wall with two vents at top and bottom going into the house. Hot air will naturally convect into your house while pulling cool air from the other vent or you can use a fan to force air through it. Use it to heat your home in winter. To use as an extractor fan you switch the air input to take air from a pipe that comes from a hood above your stove and switch the output to exhaust the hot air outside.

An alternative that would have similarly low energy needs for heating and cooling is a Skytherm Roof.



Harold Hay, Skytherm, and the Quest for Passive Cooling

Essentially the idea is thermal mass on the roof that can be covered/uncovered by shading/insulation.
In winter, the mass is uncovered during the day to absorb solar heat, and then covered/insulated at night to retain the heat overnight.
In summer it's the reverse, shaded during the day to avoid heat gain, and uncovered at night to let any heat radiate away into the clear night sky.
This maintains a much more equitable temperature inside the building year round with far lower heating/cooling needs.
One cheap way would be to simply place the  thermal mass on the existing roof which might need some reinforcement and build a second roof on top of the normal one that is glazed with clear polycarbonate roof panels.
Inside the roof above the mass but below the glazing install movable insulation/shading. This could be as simple as roller blinds or mini-blinds or a roll of insulation material.

A different eBay item has a can with ingredients listed as "raising agents (E450a, sodium bicarbonate, E341), wheat flour"

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Bird-s-Golden-Raising-Powder-String-Tin-with-String/402638975911?hash=item5dbf2733a7:g:2DIAAOSwaDRfyqtb

E450a is various diphosphates: https://www.morechemistry.com/food-additives/e450a.html
E341 is calcium phosphate: https://doublecheckvegan.com/ingredients/e341/#:~:text=E341%20may%20or%20may%20not,%2Dmaking)1%20and%20bones.

You can buy the old cans on eBay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Birds-Golden-Raising-Powder-Tin-1950s-Display-purposes-only/174591801685?hash=item28a67b7955:g:H1QAAOSwUepf11t8

From the recipe suggestions on the back it appears to have been used in mostly sweet recipes. The "golden" may have been powdered eggs to save having to use fresh or for use where none were available??

Welsh cawl sounds similar to what in my family was called Irish stew (as in the old music hall joke: "Irish stew in the name of the law!") and consisted of mutton or lamb chops, potatoes, onions, and carrots in a thin broth.
My old family recipe is too simple to have been written down and is just an oral tradition spanning at least 4 generations in my family. We make it at least 5 or 6 times a year. It tastes better and is easier to make than apple pie.

Apple Crumble
8-10 apples, core, peel and slice, then place in the bottom of 9x13 dish
Topping:
1 cup butter, melted
1 cup sugar
2 cups flour
Mix topping and crumble over apples evenly and bake 350F for 1 hour.
Optional in season: blackberries.
Serve hot with ice cream or cold just by itself.