Jen’s Boot Camp and Allerton Abbey Experience

Excited for you!

It's great to see the abbey getting some love. It was an awesome place to hang out when I visited the lab. I read a lot of books while hiding from the crazy heatwave; sitting 3 feet from a doorway without a door it was nice and cool.

Looking forward to hearing about the winter experience!

(But you haven't given up on a boat forever, right?)

Dillon, I haven’t entirely given up on the idea of a boat, but I can also see myself staying here for a while! We shall see.

The cooling effect of the wofati in hot weather is magnificent. I look forward to seeing how it performs this winter!

I am camping on the Lab for ten days taking care of Jeremy’s cat, Cloud, (Jeremy is an Ant) so I stopped by Allerton Abbey this morning to observe the site and finish off the last bucket of finish plaster before joining the other boots at base camp. English Fred and I went up to Raspberry Rock to water and check on the raspberries we mulched a couple weeks ago. Most of them were doing well, but a couple had been nibbled by deer, so we expanded the tanglefoot fences we built last time with Josiah. Then we rejoined the other boots to work on the stone patio we are building between the library and Fisher-Price House.

Now we are having lunch while awaiting the return of Original Fred (the land manager and boot camp leader) with supplies.

(Day 3)

Jennifer Richardson wrote:Dillon, I haven’t entirely given up on the idea of a boat, but I can also see myself staying here for a while! We shall see.

The cooling effect of the wofati in hot weather is magnificent. I look forward to seeing how it performs this winter!

I am excited that someone will be wintering in the WOFATI. It is an interesting experiment, but one where a person cannot just throw in a weather monitoring station, and then see how it does, because life in a cabin produces a lot of heat. In a WOFATI, that adds up to a lot of potential.

I am kind of a weather geek, so it would be interesting to set up a small weather monitoring station and see how the WOFATI Performs. By that I mean, see how wind plays a role in how much heat it loses per day, or what the threshold is when the building begins to lose heat instead of gain it, etc. You kind of have to know the outside weather varibles to figure out why the WOFATI is thermally acting as it does. Of course that is simply expressed a Degree Days, but it would be interesting to see how drastically less the degrees days are in a WOFATI.

Travis, we are currently considering what sort of monitoring equipment to use in the thermal inertia test—tracking thermometers, something more like a small weather station, etc. If you have any recommendations and/or wishes for variables you would like to see monitored, please do chime in!