Tom Dakan

My wife and I were recently able to purchase a dream property. The propert is off grid and there's a well and a small cabin, but the infrastructure is old and needs quite a bit of work before we can move there full time.

My first construction project is probably going to be building a new well house to protect the well head and associated equipment.

We're in western washington state near the ocean, so freezing isn't super common, but it does occasionally get down to ~10F/-12C and past freezes have damaged some of the exisiting equipment so I want to insulate the shed so that I can hopefully keep it warm with a minimum of electricity or fuel.

I'd like to avoid things that won't decompose after they have served their purpose so I'm thinking I'll go with cedar shakes for the roof and I'm thinking possibly wool for insulation.

Has anyone used this combination? A shed like this wouldn't normally get a finished roof, so the insulation would need to go in the joist bays, but both cedar and wool need to breath and not have trapped moisture. I'm considering using twine or something to try to keep the wool contained below the top of the  joist bay so that there's ~1" of empty space and laying skip sheathing on top to fasten the shingles.

Does that sound like it would work, or do people have ideas about other ways to deal with this?

We're getting closer to buying property to eventually build on, so I'm trying to figure out what all needs to happen asap once we have the property.

We will hopefully be buying property on a small island in the San Juan islands of Puget Sound/Salish Sea which means that getting building materials to our site is somewhat more complicated and expensive than a lot of other locations.

I think it makes sense to slake quick lime on site for the project and i expect that we will be plastering most of the interior and possibly some of the exterior.

I know that a lot of folks use 55gal barrels for slaking lime, but I'd prefer to avoid bringing extra stuff onto the island that we would eventually need to dispose of.

I've tried to read up on tradition methods that I've seen referenced, but haven't been able to find much information.

Does anyone know how lime was slaked in pits? I'm assuming the pit would need to be lined with clay or something to keep the water from running out, and I'd probably want to cover it to keep it from dehydrating. Maybe I'd also need to fence it to keep people from accidentally going in? If seems like there's a high chance that dirt and other debris would end up in it, so I'm wondering how that was dealt with historically.

Maybe the lime slurry is too basic and I would regret doing this to the land?

I've been wandering the forum the last few days and came across this thread so I wanted to chime in with the intial blog that got me interested in microhydro. A guy named Manfred Mornhinweg down in South America (Chile I think) posted a great series of pictures of his microhydro install. It definitely looks like he has plenty of head, but the interesting part is that he's also excellent with electronics and includes schematics and code for a microcontroller-based power regulator that he's using for his system. So if you someone does have any experience with a soldering iron, or wants to learn, you don't have to invent any wheels. The thread that covers the microhydro install is here: http://ludens.cl/paradise/turbine/turbine.html he also talks about how he's divided up the circuits in his home, etc. Obviously the building code/environmental regulations wherever he is are a lot less strict than we generally have to deal with in the states but there is plenty of good information in there.