Steve Zoma

Pearl Sutton wrote:
The problem here is the word "grounded."  You are using it as a technical term (GROUNDED.) The people who popularized the concept simply used that term as it's familiar to people.

You are not "GROUNDING" when you ground yourself. Going a hair metaphysical here, what you are doing is connecting the energy field of your body to the energy field of the earth. Any bare skin contact does equally well, quite a few natural fabrics allow that contact through too. What does NOT let it through is things like soles of shoes and unnatural fabrics, a lot of building construction materials etc. People didn't have to ground themselves when they lived without all those factors, with them, it helps to periodically remove obstructions to allow that connection. The easiest thing to convince someone to do as far as this goes, is to take off their shoes outside and stand on the ground (on the surface of the earth, not on a parking lot or standing on a balcony.)

This is where your confusion is coming from. Instead of thinking of it as electrical grounding, think about it as just contact between your body and the ground. And yes, it has lots of great benefits, when the way we live is not natural to the human body, we react badly. Being in contact with the ground without unnatural interference helps a LOT.  

Maybe, but the videos I was reviewing were not merely using grounding as analogy but the physics of actual electricity within the body.

Like in one poignant moment of the video, a guy is standing there checking for true electrical continuity while he was barefoot on grass, and the other man was in shoes. The barefoot man had a path to ground, but the man with shoes did not.

And in another situation, it spoke of where some people had retained voltages in the body, some via millivolts and some as high as one or two volts. Again, not really surprising considering we are made up of 80% water and can have varying PH levels that could make us poor batteries, but batteries nonetheless. Or as it seems, more of a capacitor.

If the latter is the case, then wouldn't any voltage be discharged to ground immediately upon a touch of something grounded? But I digress.

In the video it was saying a leader in this area was a man named Clint who was an electrician who realized he was grounding everything, but human beings were being less grounded. So at least in what I was researching it seemed they were quantifying grounding with dissipating real electricity and why I had so many questions. But maybe that is where I went wrong. I was looking at grounding for answers when I really should be researching electricity in the human body?

Or maybe inventing something we all might need: flux capacitor shoes.

tony uljee wrote:yes i am cheap and mean --i would like to go solar panel ---go off grid --keep all my excess electricity for my own use--not interested in the buy it from me or credit  my bill plan ---should mention i am also very dis-trustful--so onto building my own large batteries has always been my holy grail---i do realize my almost total lack of how its done and all the other back ground to it---disclaimer statement over and out the way-- used to /still do   enjoy -watching   Dr Robert Murray Smith  and his shows--- very sadly though he passed away last year--   a large mine of info still available---he was wacky and a few miles of understanding --above my head. But recently found another "mad scientist " to follow and enjoy his postings--- a young man named Robert Karas under his ROWOW on the tube--and building my dream of homebuilt /own batteries now seems a step closer --- i might then have enough energy to finish my flux capacitor conversion to my kangoo van .

My friend, you are in great company here!

I do not have any specific help to you on a homemade battery, but will reiterate a mantra I have long held.

"They had nothing in the 1800's yet built some amazing things... like batteries... so with todays technology why can't we?" It might be crude looking, but so what. We built it.

I just found in todays world people greatly overthink things. Me? I try and recoil everything back as far as possible so it is simple. Simple is easy to make. Sure, we have to stay out of the rut of reinventing the wheel so using the idea "what can I use that is already made to make that portion of it" makes fabrication simpler, but it does not mean we have to buy the whole thing!

Another area where boughten and homemade bump heads, is with automation. Most times it is in the automation, or convenience, or lack of maintenance that makes something complex. Having the mindset of, "I can do that once a week", can eliminate a lot of sensors, valves, microswitches, etc. But some of that is just human behavior. Build a functioning homemade battery and people will say, "that looks crude", but put something digital on it with cool multicolor changing digital outputs and the same battery will generate a "that's so cool". People buy into complexity.

But make your own battery... hell ya you can. My advice here was just to support you on many homemade versions of things, not just a battery.

I am not sure I agree with her regarding time. Things just happen even if you are not in a hurry and have the most time ever.

Granted I am not outside like she was, but I hike 4-7 miles a day for health reasons and do so EVERYDAY. I started out on just the best days and quickly realized that was not going to work. With the mindset that I am going everyday means I have hiked in some crazy weather. But my miles per year also went way up doing so because doing 5 miles a day every day is 35 miles per week, while doing 5 miles per day 4 days a week is only 20 miles. Blizzard, rain, gales, heat, etc... I go every day.

I am retired so I am not in a hurry but my last injury was last fall. It was raining and I slipped and fell. I was on a huge band of bedrock except for this tiny root that I did not see and it was slick with rain. I crumpled pretty hard and felt it, worst yet it was getting late and I was two miles out. I tentatively, painfully made it out. Thankfully this place has good cell service and I live within site of a US Coast Guard Station so I knew help was available if I needed it, but that injury had to do with observation not being in a rush.

But while I agree with her time is a huge reason some people get hurt, it is not the only thing that keeps you safe. The two things I think that injuries people is:

1. Rushing to get something done
2. Using the wrong tool for the job

But one thing not mentioned was other safety factors. I hike every day, but whether along a road or deep in the forest, I carry a firearm. I don't flaunt it. I don't discuss it, but I carry one, and several times I have been very grateful I have had it. It is not a guarantee, but it is a tool I always have on me.

(PS: Shout out to a local US Coast Guard Station who saved three fishermen's lives as their fishing vessel sank last week. Always glad to know those guys are well-trained, on-call 24/7 and are humble about all the lives they save).

Disclaimer: This is NOT directed to anyone in particular. It is just a frustrating case-study for me in trying to figure this all out...

But I have been studying up on this more and more and found a founder of this was a lot like me, an electrician who realized everything was earth-grounded in the world more and more except for humans who were being grounded less and less so. From that I thought, “I need to learn more about this”.

But now I have more questions than answers.

In figuring out the last time I was truly barefoot on bare earth prior to a month ago, was in 2017 on the Appalachian trail and had to cross a stream when it was October so I waded barefoot across it before I put what would have been wet socks and hiking boots back on. But I hike 4-7 miles every day so I thought I could incorporate grounding into my daily routine. It is cold, with ice and snow on the ground here still, but in the right places I will have lunch and be barefoot for a while. What I noticed is, that after I do, my knee joints which regularly hurt (I need knee replacement surgery) no longer hurts. I feel the strain, but no real pain.

But how can that be?

I am an electrician so I know despite what we are told, electricity does not flow like water in pipes, it conducts, and conducts in swirls and eddies as the wire gives the conductivity a path. So knowing humans are conductors and positively charged with ions, don’t we ground ourselves in the course of our day in ways we might miss?

As an electrician every time I put in an outlet and wire up the ground part of it, I am connected to ground. Or touch a steel electrical box. But that is work, what about now that I am retired, I just live my life day to day? I mean I have an old cast iron tub with metal plumbing… surely that is grounded so when I take a shower every day I am grounding myself? But what about as I hike and I grasp trees on my way by? Or kneel to scramble up rocks? Electrons move very slowly within a conductor, but the conductivity of electrons is very fast outside of it, so wouldn’t my accumulated ions be dissipated to ground instantly with each touch to ground? So any touch, not just by bare feet to ground, would do so, right?

I am not trying to be difficult on this. I am very open-minded and know how my joints feel after being barefoot in nature, there is NO QUESTION, I feel better. And I can see people having heart attacks because of built up ions, and certainly know in working in powerhouses making megawatts of electricity how I feel in stations where electromagnetic frequency is insanely high. Certain areas of the powerplant just make me feel frazzled from the EMF I am producing through stirred electrons and ultra-high amperage and voltages.

But I have so many questions.

How much time in grounding is needed?
How many milliamps and millivolts does our bodies store up before its hazardous?
Are we really being grounded in day to day life and do not realize it?
Are we especially well conductors through bare feet instead of hands and other points of contact?
Why extra time to ground? The ground wire we are required by the NEC code to connect to earth is designed to never be used it its entire life, and if it is used in an emergency, it is instant and of short duration.

Again, I am just trying to understand the how human grounding in our lives works. It is just this strange knowledge of electricity that makes me both a critic of it, and yet a proponent both. I just struggle to really understand human grounding for health. I mean in my own life it seems like it works, but why?

I think if it was me, and I love the idea of it, but I would keep things as simple as possible. Ever try to cope crown molding? It looks easy but is anything but, and that is only one compound angle, you are looking at six coming together at the exact same spot!

So my suggestion to you, or anyone trying this, would be to cut the framing pieces square and use plywood gussets to fix the braces together. That way the angles would be perfect, and then just nail the braces to the hexagonal plywood gussets. You could even use a nail gun, but would need the gussets on both the inside and outside of the frame. But that is no big deal, just use strapping lumber to make up the difference when you go to trim out the interior or exterior of the frame.

My uncle turned me onto this type of construction years ago and I really like it. A few sheets of plywood go forever since most gussets are small in size, but hold so well. The more accurate you are with your framing cut makes the whole design more ridgid, but still some flex there.

But the gussets HAVE TO BE PLYWOOD. Not boards because they will split. And not OSB since it disintegrates with moisture. It needs to be true plywood.

I think I would go with 3/8 plywood but would use two layers of it so that there would be flex in spanning the different members. I would make the inner one bigger than the outer one by a few inches so it would give me something to nail the purlings/strapping too. But you are not talking a lot of material here either. If a plywood gusset was around 1 square foot, you could get 32 out of just one sheet of plywood. You would need four per connection point, but 3 sheets at $30 a sheet would net you over 100 gussets. You are looking at only $100 roughly for the plywood. I don't know about you but I have wasted $100 on worth things then part of the framing of my home.

I think plywood gussets would take this from being a nightmare frame to build that might not ever get done to being one that was quick and easy to assemble. I would think with precutting your gussets and frame members, then with a battery powered nailgun and a weekend, you would have the frame up.

I think it is an ingenious design, I just think the connection points are being overthought to the nearly impossible level. I would go with $100 worth of plywood and have a house that was framed.

My controversial take on this is that knowledge without action is almost meaningless. What good is becoming a vet if you never see any animals? Research rocket mass heaters and never build one? Learn electrical generation and never build a generator?

I love learning and quit a ton of good jobs because I stopped learning and got bored. But knowledge without action or skill is just plain self-defeating for society and for individuals. It even has a name: the Duncan Krueger effect. Basically it states that the more intelligent a person is the less THEY feel they know. Why? Because as much as they know, they also know they have so much more to learn. And even if they know the topic they know others are more skilled then they are in executing what needs to be done.

If you need a permie example look up YouTube on rocket mass heaters. AI has latched onto them and there is a ton of informational videos about them, but I also noticed they are getting vital information wrong. What is happening is AI is feeding on itself and slowly convincing itself that the poor information is correct.


Another example? I needed a cover for my latest novel. I got the same woman in different configurations, but 80 percent of the pictures I got were of that one woman. Hair a different color. Mirror posing of her etc, but it was mostly her. I mean hundreds of pictures but 80 percent was of her.


We are not gaining knowledge we are getting lazier that is all. Why learn a new skill which takes time and effort when we can pseudo-learn from the internet and then argue with one another on finer points so it seems we are more knowledgeable than we are?

But even with politics it really is not about division. The former ultra conservative coworker was just like my ultra progressive mother in law: they both spent hours on news, podcasts and the internet to find that strange angle so both could tell me, “see you don’t know this but”… it was not about the information it was about them knowing some unique slant that no one else knew about. I am fine not knowing. I’m glad, it’s why I don’t have a TV in this house.

The secret sauce is SKILLS. That is knowledge and proficiency personified.

I can say this with authority because I am a Gert.

Seventeen dead sheep. Worst day of farming in my life.

I put the sheep on succulent pasture too soon and they got bloat and 17 died. All were composted, but that was 20 years ago and I still feel bad about it.

Today, I could have saved every one of them via emergency veterinary knowledge. I had no idea what to do at the time and watched them all die slowly.

It is hard out there, with an endless list of things to do next, more of the dreaded, 'if I only had this's', and then for some; a partner that was commited early on, but now... well... it seems more like a 90/10 split then a 50/50 split of the workload.

I am more of a homesteader now than a farmer, but in thinking back to those days I tried to remember the true ratio of life. Sure, three days to put up 10 acres of sheep fence, but that sheep fence even today is still standing. That is a really good ration: three days for twenty years... you do the math!

But then, what about skills learned? I was petrified when I first started, not sure if I could give a living, breathing sheep a shot. In two years time the vet and I did a C-cession on a ewe and saved two twins! But pulling stuck lambs at birth, and watching our mortality rate go from 40% to 3%... that was skills I can still use today on this site helping those who have sheep even if it is just giving advice!

The general mind shift. People over machines, farms can be any size, food density over food quantity, etc. I am embarrassed about my first farming outlooks, but it has since shifted, and for the better. I have learned a LOT.

They say thinking is the great antidote to dementia. I admit it, a LOT of the drawings I have doodled up about alternative building, heating designs, emergency shelters, grazing plans and farms plans never materialized, but just thing about some of those things have kept my mind active and engaged instead of other vices like drinking, drugs, watching sports, or even worse... watching politics? (LOL) Sure, Forest Bathing might have set me off on a week-long rabbit hole online, but what did it hurt? I could have watched funny cat videos, instead I saw what other Permies were doing on their youtube channels.

I did not always dawdle online. Sure, there is something to be said for farm planning, but at some point, boots have got to hit the dirt. As one USDA employee told me, "When you say you are going to do something, you do it. It might take a while, but eventually you do what you said you were going to do". That is integrity in homesteading and a VERY good thing. Don't overthink: sure thoughts might matter in five minutes, five hours, five days or months, but not in five years. Research. Plan. Make a decision, then get out there! Don't just make plans, take action. Make a legacy not be a lunatic with just crazy plans on paper.

Very few things in life cannot be undone. You might not be able to take that time back, but you sure can check it off as experience. Trust in yourself: you got this. It is not rocket science, people have been doing homesteading since the dawn of time. So you make a mistake. No big deal, it can be undone. I did. I lost 17 eyes when I put them on succulent pasture and they got bloat. Worst farming day of my life, and no, I cannot get those ewes back, but I did build a barn that was sheep friendly and saved hundreds of lambs from death just after birth.

Finally... you really want to stay motivated as a Homesteader? Learn THIS:

Don't worry what other people will think. If they think anything of you at all, they are already thinking you are crazy. Give them proof. But honestly, people are so wrapped up in their own failed lives, failed attempts, poor family relations, and other societal woes, they really are NOT thinking of you at all. Fretting about what others might think of you, or do against you is a waste of time. Everyone has something going on in their life: they probably are not thinking of you at all.

Sean Bahr wrote:I have in my thought cage and idea that I'm not sure is possible, but figured this was the group to chat about it. Would it be possible to recycle water that has run through a turbine back up and around again using a ram pump, essentially creating a closed loop water engine? Has anyone heard of such a thing? I've done some searching on the tubes, but haven't found anything yet.

Another half-baked idea is to somehow introduce grey water and filtration into the equation. It would cease to be a closed loop, but maybe better for different applications.

Micheal Quick is indeed correct, and this in no way negates what he says.

But in the hydroturbine world you can get a little bit extra out of the flowing water via the venturi effect. When I worked at a fairly modern dam, a 16 megawatt dam built in 1989, it used this principal. No different then how a carburetor necks down, then goes big again to get a little bit of siphoning effect, a dam with horizontal turbines can gain a little in output.

That dam further got more efficiency by having variable turbine pitch. That was, the turbine  blade could by spun on its axis so that it was flatter, allowing more contact with the water to get the generator turning from a dead stopt, then would adjust itself to a more angled pitch at higher speeds as the need for torque reduced and it just needed rpm to keep the generators locked in with the grid. There was a bell curve that showed the ideal turbine pitch to generator megawatt output, and that was so the most power was produced from the least amount of water flow.

I think it would be hard to build that variable pitch turbine blade into a home-built microhydro project, but it had amazing attributes. At full headpond I could pull 16,000 kilowatts, or go down as low as 175 kilowatts. Whatever the river was flowing, we could match.

A workaround for me might be figuring out a way to just get the iron out first.

Hydrogen hydrosulfide (hydrogen peroxide) works well because it chemically changes the water soluble iron into particles that regular water filters can pull out of the water. I am wondering if using a typical water and brine system, but swapping out the salt for hydrogen peroxide powder might work? But other chemicals that work on iron are citric acid, oxalic acid, sodium hydrosulfide and vinegar as well. All these are readily available online because they are organic, and water softener companies recommend adding hydrogen hydrosulfide to the brine well once a year for yearly maintenance. What if I used that primarily?

I am thinking now, perhaps using oxalic acid in a pretreatment tank might get the iron out of suspension, which can then be skimmed off, with the cleaner water going through a secondary filter to get the rest of the iron out. But I can also test the rest. There are only two of us here (empty-nesters) so we only go through 100 gallons of water per day.

From there, into a RO system to clean up what remains and we may be there for drinking water That would cost us about $7000 but less than $45,000.

Even without the $4500 RO system, we would no longer be dealing with orange water on us, clothing, or dishes. Right now we buy 4 gallons of drinking water and it costs us $5 and it lasts us all week. I am fine with doing that. Just getting the iron out of everything would be nice.