Coydon Wallham

Edward Lye wrote:Your cat will enjoy this too.

Ahem, the title of this thread is "Stairs and Ladders". I believe 'Chutes and Ladders' would fall into another forum...

I'm looking to sew more canvas coverings for yurts and other semi-permanent structures.

Five years ago I made my first yurt cover. I searched around for the best natural fibre to use for thread, but the advice I got was that any natural thread would have me resewing my work every few years. I went with some #138 thread. I figure like the billboard plastic liner in a wofati, a relatively small concession to the gick economy was worth the larger benefits. After exposure to the full seasonal cycles of northern Wisconsin all these years, the cover is holding and I don't see even early signs of failure.

I recently started sewing another tarp, but couldn't locate the spool of #138. I had purchases a smaller spool of #69 at some point and just started with that. When it occurred to me I was going to be putting a lot of faith in this tarp holding up to the weather I began to question whether #69 was enough. That was the thread used and recommended by the offgridpermaculture website I used as my initial guide, but that website proved to have enough other fundamental flaws I'm not going to assume it was the best advice.

Looking on Amazon, #138 has gone up since I purchased it last time and is around 3 or 4 times the price of #69. Does anyone have reliable experience comparing the performance of these various threads under harsh conditions?

I'm using 12oz duck canvas, planning to move up to 18oz after my current supply is exhausted. While the thread is holding, the 12oz has started to go threadbare in spots...

Paddle stairs for the win. Not much more space taken than a ladder, but I walk up and down mine carrying stuff both ways all of the time.

I'm surprised Will takes such a supportive stance in relation to alarmist attitudes on the subject. I think this post expresses what the forum veterans see in the situation more generally.

I've noticed Will seems under a great deal of pressure to control content on the site and skew it in a direction promoted by outside influencers. I've seen something similar here with Paul and pressure over videos he's posted on Youtube, things like chainsaw safety. However, while logging related activities are statistically one of the most dangerous activities 'normal' people engage in, the numbers Will is talking about with LFP fire/explosions are absurdly tiny. If the standards of safety being suggested here were applied to the world of medicine, no one would ever take a pharmaceutical again. I think any discussion of "safety" and "risk" is distractive unless the relative proportions of probability are made clear...

John Weiland wrote:I hope this is an appropriate thread for this cautionary entry. As I'm in the middle of testing a small 12V LiFePO4 battery DIY build, I've been immersed in many web-pages and videos on the battery chemistry and technology.  The video linked below came across my viewing and details the explosion of an LiFePO4 home battery bank, at this point determined to likely be due to hydrogen gas liberated from a few malfunctioning cells.  Apparently, the room housing the batteries accumulated sufficient gas to ignite and cause the explosion.  The video author provides numerous references regarding the incident and offers, as a fire safety engineer, some thoughts on how to safeguard rooms that may hold large battery banks.  As I am finishing up a small 12V 100Ah battery construction and had not seen much on venting the box, I was wondering what others may think of safety precautions regarding LiFePO4 batteries and their location on the homestead.  Comments encouraged about how those engaged in DIY LiFePO4 battery construction and installation are addressing these potential dangers.

For DIY batteries/solar, I would not chance the random misinformation from Utube University, not when there is the DIY Solar forum full of knowledgeable people who check each other while engaging in conversational discussion over the topics. I've seen a few threads where the veterans there roll their eyes at that StacheD dude as he tends to embellish 'facts' in his reporting of incidents to sensationalize them and do the clickbait thing for his channel.

I had my 8S1P 280Ah LFP battery in a box I made from 1" pine lumber originally in a shed under my panel array. I moved it into my yurt for winter and it stayed there for the next year. Then I had my root cellar done enough to place them where the temperatures will remain steady, and am engineering some ducts with computer fans drawing through mass to keep moisture down without losing the temperature moderation, which will in turn prevent any gas build up in the unlikely event of a critical failure.

Given the number of DIY batteries done with LFP cells that have been rejected from the auto industry and relatively few incidents reported, catastrophic failure is not on my personal radar. I did however find one of my cells leaking when I opened the shipping container. I didn't know what to do with the cell after a replacement was sent, so left it sitting just inside my yurt door.

Eventually, after hours and hours of scouring the internet for danger/disposal info about the electrolyte in LFPs, I confirmed that leaking fluid mixed with water would give off a form of chlorine gas. I had already noticed some symptoms and connected them to snow being tracked in and mixing with the leaky battery before moving it outside. But it is alarming to me how almost no information existed in the consumer sphere about a plain and clear danger like that, while the media was being flooded about sensationalized Lithium explosions that seem extremely rare and more adjacent to LFPs than caused by them...

You decided to drop the bypass? [edit: I guess it is that handle coming out of the cob- forgot this was a 1.5 barrel high radiant chamber.]

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:
Fair comment. My keg is embossed with "Labatt" which is a massive brewing behemoth now likely absorbed into a multinational. Plus I drank their lousy beer when I was young and foolish. I have zero qualms about cutting this keg -- I see no substantial harm being done.

Labatt? I'm surprised you aren't using it for some form of target practice...

(BTW, my experience was that the small breweries bought used equipment more than they did new stuff, at least when starting out and struggling. Not sure if labeling laws applied to imprints on kegs or not, and these laws vary greatly by locality, but the main info is usually on a removable tag around the spout...)

It wasn't rare for our brew club to encounter a brewer who had converted a keg into a cheap, large, boil kettle.

It also wasn't rare to learn that they or the person that sold it to them had done this with a regular keg for the mere price of a deposit at a liquor store.

It also also wasn't rare for most people to berate them for this because the distributors had a tendency to pass the costs of the lost keg to small breweries that were friends of the club and who would have trouble eating the loss.

So anyone looking to follow this path might want to double check that the keg is a legitimately discarded one, if for no other reason than to make sure it isn't damaged in a way that would affect the intended converted use...

Burra Maluca wrote:But at the moment we can pick up free bags of fatty pork scraps which I sort out and render lard out of. It's a lot less effort for me than hauling my butt up to the top terrace and picking olives!

But if food prices do go up drastically, living off the crumbs from the rich man's table will be less of an option as there will be far more people wanting cheap cuts of meat and demand for the free stuff will no doubt increase to the point that it won't be free, or available, any more. Also there will be less work for the boys to do, so less money, and less fuel to go to the shops so often. At the moment my son picks up bags for me when he passes the shop, but as people run out of money he's likely to not be driving around the place so much. I'll have to switch from tightwad to something more self-sufficient.

I think staying flexible is important!

This comment on 'side economy' practices experiencing a ripple effect inspired my to create a parallel thread...