William Bronson

This is very cool!
I might do this at the community garden.
I wonder, could you alternate cuttings and pea seeds, for a little nitrogen fixing?

 They grow quite easily here, but when I had one I barely tasted any of the fruit, thanks to the squirrels!
Or maybe it was racoons, since every fruit was eaten down to the pit in a matter of a day or so.
At any rate, I've realized since that even the pits can have yield.
The nut inside can be used to make "almond" extract and also eaten, but they need to be cooked first.

EVs have the potential to get cleaner and cleaner.
The more that are in use, the less emissions from that part of their infrastructure.
Electric vehicles can be  involved in harvesting materials for construction or delivering finished vehicles and parts.
The static infrastructure like refineries and factory lines might also be run on solar electric.

We can clean up the emissions of  IC infrastructure as well,but IC vehicules will always be burning something and conventional IC vehicles will be burning oil products, the extraction, distribution and refinement of which all produce their own pollutants.

I think it will be a lot harder to get the oil industry to run their refineries off of solar electric than it will be to get a battery manufacturer to run their factory of the same source.

I've worked at a coal fired power plant, a gas fired power plant and a metro sized solar power installation.
If the three, the solar installation would make the best neighbor.
Not so much due to emissions, more due to traffic.

The coal plant needed a constant stream of vehicles not only delivering fuel,  but also everything else that goes into maintain in such a power plant.
It has lots of moving parts, coolants and lubricants are involved.
It employs  a lot of people.

The gas plant also needed a lot of tending, but it at least receives it's fuel via pipeline.
It's gas turbine design, so lots of moving parts, coolants and lubricants are involved.
It was originally built as a "peaker" plant, to cover  periods of high electricity demand , but with fracking, natural gas got (monetarily) cheaper so it runs all the time now.
It employs  a lot of people.

The solar power installation needs  maintenance but no fuel.
No moving parts, so no built in wear, no need for lubricants or coolants.
The panels should be kept clean and the grass needs to stay short.
Some places mow and some use sheep or goats.
I think humans are required for the squeegee work, but not that many, so it should not employ a lot of people.

The misery of an exploited workforce seems to be part of all forms of advanced transportation technology.



My ideal vehicle would be a plug in hybrid   panel van with an all electric 4x4 drivetrain.
Basically an Edison Motors "bread truck"


Realistically, I'm trying to get my wife into a newer used Honda Odyssey so I can claim the one she has now.
Minivans can  haul animals,vegetables, minerals,etc  or they can haul people, but the people complain about the smell, stains or occasionally, bugs that the cargo leaves behind in the van.
I in turn am annoyed at them treating the van like a living room instead of a wheeled workbench.

Any perennial that is bare in the spring could host pea plants.
I tend to only use peas as a haphazard "cover crop", sowing them into any bed or container,secure in the knowledge they will fade in the heat of summer.

If you put the sunchokes in a container,and sink that container halfway into the ground, you can limit their spread/density  and make harvesting them easier.


If you have a source of elderberry cuttings you can use them as stakes for a season,then transplant them at the end of the season.
I have done this with tomatoes.

Hey Von!
Here is a link to some rocket kiln information:
https://permies.com/wiki/177379/harvest-clay-and-make-pottery#3030406

Here is a link concerning your long bench idea:
https://permies.com/t/59302/Length-exhaust-pipe

If I were in your position, I would try building a short, temporary, above ground bench powered by a   j tube style rocket.

I'm not sure aluminum leaching is really anything to worry about, but if it worries you, a silicon bunt cake might fit this oven fairly closely.
A steel bunt cake pan might even be used as part of a diy version of this stove top oven.

I see that the tea light didn't work, but I bet a twig or pellet burning gasifier stove would work great.
They can be easily made from a stainless steel double walled vacuum insulated  drinking cup/water bottle.

A tiny alcohol or oil stove also might work.
Imagine burning  tallow in a little stove and the hot exhaust  flavoring your biscuits

I propagate plants because I'm compelled to.
I work a job to pay for life.
Propagating as a hobby could pay, but that will happen as an outgrowth of me getting more and more skilled at it.

Get paid fixing appliances, build your nursery on the side
Focus on permaculture plants and  other hard to get items to avoid the competition.

Electrical storage heaters  heat ceramic bricks during times of day when electricity is cheapest:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_heater

This is old tech.
Coupling it with PV solar is old tech
The difference is a rocket stove heats through radiation and a storage heater will often have ducts and fans as well.

So yes, it would work, but I doubt it will work as easily as we might hope.
For example, most electric water heaters in the US use 120vac.
Most ovens in the US use 240vac.
The water heater thermostatic switch will probably not work well with coils from an oven.
Of course ovens come with their own, so we could salvage that.
Also you could use probably two of them(I think water heaters generally have two) and switch each leg of the 240V circuit.
We can install the coil in the base of our bell and the thermostatic switch into the wall of the bell.
Hmm, the inside if a rocket mass heater bell is way hotter than
The inside of an oven or the skin of a water heater.
No matter, we will either embed the coil and thermostatic switches in the walls to protect them , or get higher rated components off of the Internet.

Now to power the thing.
I would assume we would wire it into mains power, since solar produces DC voltage and we need to rectify that over to AC voltage for the sake of the components we are using.
There will be loss, but we are talking about storing otherwise wasted energy, so it's not really a big deal.
PV solar often uses water heaters as dump loads, so I imagine there are off the shelf solutions we can use to ensure we only fire up the up the coil when we have excess solar pv.

 This seems like good idea, the suggestion I would make is to plant perennials as well.
What fruit grows well in the heat of a Missouri summer?
How about figs?

Of course a trellis with vining plants might work as well.
I grow a grape vine on a wire cable to provide shade for the Western wall of my house.
No grapes, just lots of leaves that grow in right when we need them.

I am planting some sunchokes in buckets, and placing them front of a community garden greenhouse , with the idea that they will provide shade,biomass for compost, food and nursery stock.
I plan on adding favas to the buckets, and maybe some elderberry cuttings.
My only concern is high winds, but we will figure that out.

To me the point of kilning fire wood is to save time.
For example,in the case of a collapse, green wood will be immediately available but seasoned wood will be at a premium.


One YouTuber I've seen uses a sawdust stove to dry sawdust bricketts for sale and use.
Another drys firewood in the same shed that houses his forced air wood furnace.
As long as you are using otherwise wasted heat, drying fuel seems viable.
Burning scraps, sawdust or whatever just to dry fuel  is more iffy.

My personal preoccupation with making use of the heat from charcoal production is why I am curious about wood kilning.
As seen by the responses, drying fuel with incidental heat is very popular.
I think certified kiln dried firewood can cross state lines and this be sold at a premium.
There are other reasons besides fuel drying to have large oven that can get up to moderate temperatures.
Dehydrating of human foods or animal fodder, steaming of building materials, even cloths drying , maybe.
I think a white oven is probably the way to go for any of these uses.