Phil Stevens

The cost of PV just keeps falling and from a financial standpoint it makes sense to put up panels and use the electricity to heat water to circulate in your existing system. I've got a grid-tied 4.4 KWp array and use a Paladin diverter to dump excess power into the hot water cylinder instead of exporting at the measly feedin tariff that our retailer offers. On a sunny day I get 300 litres of water heated up to 78 C for nothing.

Your photos of the garden position sun path taken in early October will also work for early March, which might be useful in terms of prep and early planting with cloches, etc. You've obviously put some thought into this.

Matt McSpadden wrote:The hardest to pronounce town name for each state. How many can you say?

Tucson is way harder to pronounce than Sonoita and Kykotsmovi tops them both.

Josh Warfield wrote:Maybe I'm searching with the wrong terms, but I can't seem to find that type of heat exchanger for sale anywhere, except for on manufacturer sites that say to call for a price (which I know means it's gonna be expensive). But I did find some DIY instructions that don't look too hard: https://makezine.com/projects/heat-exchanger/

I think that would be more than adequate for your situation. A couple of small CPU fans could run 24/7 off a small solar panel with a battery and simple charge controller. Might even build one of these myself....

Hi Ethan. Welcome to permies.

Awesome. That bodes well for the short and cloudy days coming up a few months from now. Isn't it amazing what a little bit of strategically placed lighting can do, too....

One thing that helps a lot with both passive and active ventilation systems is a heat exchanger that gets the incoming and outgoing air as close as possible to the same temperature without mixing. This can help with humidity control as well.

My ex had this problem and had to go off chicken eggs for a while. We discovered that if we stuck to whole grain feed mixes from certain suppliers that she didn't have trouble and finally decided it might have been the maize that some mills were using.

There are a few large tagasaste that lean out and overhang the chicken run here. Flower drop is the most popular product, and if a branch breaks off and falls in it gets stripped. They also like the seeds but it seems like each summer they have to relearn the fact that small black shiny things are food.

Our native pigeons, the kēreru, love these trees and will strip flowers, buds, and tender growth around this time of year. It's always fun to watch them perch on a branch that can barely support them (they're huge) and fall off with a swooping recovery to land on the next tree over.

I do sysadmin work and provide some boutique hosting services for community organisations and nonprofits. Up until several months ago I was developing an IoT solution for a manufacturer of precision dosing pumps (that's now on hold as the tough economic conditions forced the business to scale back its aspirations). I've pared down my client base over the last few years and just have one major one to support. They're an online news outfit with a legacy codebase that's mostly undocumented and parts of it date back to the last century.

I've also got a small but tenacious biochar business, selling out of a local heritage tree nursery as well as direct at the farm gate. The biggest load I've shipped to date was 600 litres to a turf installation specialist in the Waikato. I also produce quantities for research projects according to the source materials they specify. The big thing I'm putting all my spare time and energy into is consulting to develop commecial projects and we're close to hitting the go button on a large continuous plant at a sawmill, with an input of about 30,000 tons annually and biochar output of around 8,000 tons. So far that's all happened on my own dime and the idea is to make it back on market development and commissions.