M Pearson

Yea that sounds amazing. Toilet is really the only thing in a normal residential setup that currently "has" to go down. Hence my false floor idea. Obviously if you could remove that you don't even need the false floor! I love the idea of the utility room, we actually sort of already did that in the house I mentioned. All the plumbing & much of the electric in one wall accessible via a hinged door from the storage room. Only thing you really can't get to from there is the toilet..

Yea, great point! There's a whole thing with modern houses and condensation forming on the back of the drywall.. total nightmare. They try to solve it with more vapor barriers & moisture barriers & engineering this or that.. but I like a house that breathes. (Yes I know houses don't literally breathe.)

For $100 I'd get some nice wool socks, a wool hat, and a sweater. Boom, nothing bothers me until close to freezing.

My experience with old houses/cabins is that they are rarely "really well insulated/efficient except for this 1 small part." E.g. they'll have drafty walls, no insulation, bad window seals, and single pane glass. Just fixing 1 thing won't move the needle very much. If you put new efficient, well-sealed windows in, you'll still lose all your heat through the walls. So I am not aware of any broadly applicable "quick fixes" although they can of course exist in a specific house, but it's case by case.

Just out of curiosity, have you been a boot for 4 years now?! You must really like it Are you doing one of those programs where you end up owning a piece of the land?

Also out of curiosity, it seems in your early days 4 years ago you were doing the SKIP program and quickly did 20 BBs, but that since then you haven't continued adding more. What made you change your mind on that?

I was just checking over the new Willow Feeder page and was reminded of something. Due to the nature of having a bucket under your seat, they both have raised floors or steps.

We built a small community house last year that included 2 bathrooms. The original design was pretty standard with all the plumbing & pipes buried in the floor. We found this pretty bad because we kept making small changes to the design & layout as we learned more about our needs, as we built. But if all your stuff is in the floor, you can't ever get to it again! Heck, if it starts leaking after a year, how would you even know? There's a toilet sitting on top of flooring on top of a subfloor. Sometimes interior walls are sitting on the subfloor, so you'd have to bust out a saw to even check. Or you put trap doors everywhere for checking lol. I suppose this is why people have crawlspaces.

But the obvious answer for us was, why not just build a slightly raised floor instead, and put all the pipes in there? I suppose it could be "less stylish" and confusing to a normal home owner, but I see no downside to having to step up 1 or 2 steps to get into the bathroom, or onto the toilet/shower. Then you can have all your plumbing above floor level, easily accessible, easy to check on, easy to fix.

We are planning on doing this once we put a full shower in the second bathroom.

Anybody have experiences with or thoughts on this?

Gray Henon wrote:I am quite impressed with the simplicity and capability of the self contained power units made by companies such as Bluetti, Jackery, etc.  If they prove to be long lived (10 years+), I think they could be a huge asset to the sustainable off grid community.  If they fail after 5 or so, I’d probably just consider them another point of consumption.

Edited to add:  Just saw this on the Jackery website, the rapid advancement in this area is truly amazing!

“Jackery power stations last 8 to 16 years or 3,000 to 6,000 charge cycles for newer LiFePO4 models, while older lithium-ion units last about 500 cycles or 2 to 3 years.”

Yea, I have one myself. I think I've had it for 2 years now and it's functioned pretty much flawlessly. It can power a small fridge for 1-3 days depending on outside temperature. It can run power tools, even pretty serious ones, w/ about 3,000W peak output.

I think someone on here was making something like this himself.

The one thing, I think that while the "combination of battery/inverter/charge controller/outlets" form factor is nice for small to mid size applications, I think you start being better off once you get from the "small cabin w/ 12v power" to the "ADU or small house" level. At that point you don't need to scale the inverter or charge controller that much, but you probably want much, much bigger batteries. It's no longer required to be mobile if you charge from solar or a generator. You'll have breakers & separate wire runs for your outlets and switches anyway.

But for mobile utility, vehicle, or small cabin applications, these things are amazing.

Gabe Melondra wrote:Jay, the point about everything depending on one person is a good one. We could have spare pumps and controllers and still be stuck if the only person who understands the setup is away.

Part of the intention with Melondra is for people to learn several roles and pass those skills on. Someone may know a system best, but I wouldn't want them to become the only person who can look after it.

That would also be a useful test of the instructions: can someone who didn't build it follow them and deal with an ordinary fault? If not, there's still work to do, however well the system runs when its designer is around.

This is a very important point that I've run into. One of the communities I've been involved in was started by a super high-energy solo founder who would just do/build/make/run everything. The problem is that, at this point, he is the only one who can do 80% of the tasks. Even somewhat simple tasks are often blocked by only him knowing the exact details of how to do it, to what spec to do it, or, more fundamental.. where the tools are!

if you know you have the right tool, you just don't where it is on this 100 acre property.. you don't really "have" it. So everything in this community was blocked by having to ask him, often times multiple times for a single task or project, and he's busy with other stuff cause he's so high-energy and constantly moving forward with other things.

One of the reasons I ended up not staying at that community.

Only slightly related, but could one burn trash/plastic in a RMH if it burns so hot? Obviously even better not to create trash in the first place, but would that work or be a stupid idea?

I saw this guy on Youtube build a solar-powered firewood kiln: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMI40iFx8KE

Wonder if just a passive solar setup could work too, like the jerky solar drier?

Interesting, is the wood carving business still good to be in?