Steve Zoma

Seventeen dead sheep. Worst day of farming in my life.

I put the sheep on succulent pasture too soon and they got bloat and 17 died. All were composted, but that was 20 years ago and I still feel bad about it.

Today, I could have saved every one of them via emergency veterinary knowledge. I had no idea what to do at the time and watched them all die slowly.

It is hard out there, with an endless list of things to do next, more of the dreaded, 'if I only had this's', and then for some; a partner that was commited early on, but now... well... it seems more like a 90/10 split then a 50/50 split of the workload.

I am more of a homesteader now than a farmer, but in thinking back to those days I tried to remember the true ratio of life. Sure, three days to put up 10 acres of sheep fence, but that sheep fence even today is still standing. That is a really good ration: three days for twenty years... you do the math!

But then, what about skills learned? I was petrified when I first started, not sure if I could give a living, breathing sheep a shot. In two years time the vet and I did a C-cession on a ewe and saved two twins! But pulling stuck lambs at birth, and watching our mortality rate go from 40% to 3%... that was skills I can still use today on this site helping those who have sheep even if it is just giving advice!

The general mind shift. People over machines, farms can be any size, food density over food quantity, etc. I am embarrassed about my first farming outlooks, but it has since shifted, and for the better. I have learned a LOT.

They say thinking is the great antidote to dementia. I admit it, a LOT of the drawings I have doodled up about alternative building, heating designs, emergency shelters, grazing plans and farms plans never materialized, but just thing about some of those things have kept my mind active and engaged instead of other vices like drinking, drugs, watching sports, or even worse... watching politics? (LOL) Sure, Forest Bathing might have set me off on a week-long rabbit hole online, but what did it hurt? I could have watched funny cat videos, instead I saw what other Permies were doing on their youtube channels.

I did not always dawdle online. Sure, there is something to be said for farm planning, but at some point, boots have got to hit the dirt. As one USDA employee told me, "When you say you are going to do something, you do it. It might take a while, but eventually you do what you said you were going to do". That is integrity in homesteading and a VERY good thing. Don't overthink: sure thoughts might matter in five minutes, five hours, five days or months, but not in five years. Research. Plan. Make a decision, then get out there! Don't just make plans, take action. Make a legacy not be a lunatic with just crazy plans on paper.

Very few things in life cannot be undone. You might not be able to take that time back, but you sure can check it off as experience. Trust in yourself: you got this. It is not rocket science, people have been doing homesteading since the dawn of time. So you make a mistake. No big deal, it can be undone. I did. I lost 17 eyes when I put them on succulent pasture and they got bloat. Worst farming day of my life, and no, I cannot get those ewes back, but I did build a barn that was sheep friendly and saved hundreds of lambs from death just after birth.

Finally... you really want to stay motivated as a Homesteader? Learn THIS:

Don't worry what other people will think. If they think anything of you at all, they are already thinking you are crazy. Give them proof. But honestly, people are so wrapped up in their own failed lives, failed attempts, poor family relations, and other societal woes, they really are NOT thinking of you at all. Fretting about what others might think of you, or do against you is a waste of time. Everyone has something going on in their life: they probably are not thinking of you at all.

Sean Bahr wrote:I have in my thought cage and idea that I'm not sure is possible, but figured this was the group to chat about it. Would it be possible to recycle water that has run through a turbine back up and around again using a ram pump, essentially creating a closed loop water engine? Has anyone heard of such a thing? I've done some searching on the tubes, but haven't found anything yet.

Another half-baked idea is to somehow introduce grey water and filtration into the equation. It would cease to be a closed loop, but maybe better for different applications.

Micheal Quick is indeed correct, and this in no way negates what he says.

But in the hydroturbine world you can get a little bit extra out of the flowing water via the venturi effect. When I worked at a fairly modern dam, a 16 megawatt dam built in 1989, it used this principal. No different then how a carburetor necks down, then goes big again to get a little bit of siphoning effect, a dam with horizontal turbines can gain a little in output.

That dam further got more efficiency by having variable turbine pitch. That was, the turbine  blade could by spun on its axis so that it was flatter, allowing more contact with the water to get the generator turning from a dead stopt, then would adjust itself to a more angled pitch at higher speeds as the need for torque reduced and it just needed rpm to keep the generators locked in with the grid. There was a bell curve that showed the ideal turbine pitch to generator megawatt output, and that was so the most power was produced from the least amount of water flow.

I think it would be hard to build that variable pitch turbine blade into a home-built microhydro project, but it had amazing attributes. At full headpond I could pull 16,000 kilowatts, or go down as low as 175 kilowatts. Whatever the river was flowing, we could match.

A workaround for me might be figuring out a way to just get the iron out first.

Hydrogen hydrosulfide (hydrogen peroxide) works well because it chemically changes the water soluble iron into particles that regular water filters can pull out of the water. I am wondering if using a typical water and brine system, but swapping out the salt for hydrogen peroxide powder might work? But other chemicals that work on iron are citric acid, oxalic acid, sodium hydrosulfide and vinegar as well. All these are readily available online because they are organic, and water softener companies recommend adding hydrogen hydrosulfide to the brine well once a year for yearly maintenance. What if I used that primarily?

I am thinking now, perhaps using oxalic acid in a pretreatment tank might get the iron out of suspension, which can then be skimmed off, with the cleaner water going through a secondary filter to get the rest of the iron out. But I can also test the rest. There are only two of us here (empty-nesters) so we only go through 100 gallons of water per day.

From there, into a RO system to clean up what remains and we may be there for drinking water That would cost us about $7000 but less than $45,000.

Even without the $4500 RO system, we would no longer be dealing with orange water on us, clothing, or dishes. Right now we buy 4 gallons of drinking water and it costs us $5 and it lasts us all week. I am fine with doing that. Just getting the iron out of everything would be nice.

John C Daley wrote:Steve, your problem looks bad! Is it worth $45000 to solve?

The simple mathematical answer is no. Despite being on a point on one of the furthest islands out to sea, but still accessible by bridge, the house only has a value of $220,000 once rebuilt. While we bought it for half that, rebuild will be around $50,000 making a $45,000 investment in water really questionable. (Purchase price, plus rebuild costs, plus water would cost us $211,00, thus with a sale of $220,000 we would make $9000 profit. The problem with that is, people don't care what you had to do to get the water drinkable. They just expect a house to have water they can drink. And to be fair, banks financing houses do as well.

The long and short of it is that I need to deal with this. All is not dire though as unless the Atlantic Ocean is suddenly drained, I have all the water that I will ever need. It is just salty and full of iron. But that saves me from concerns regarding backwashing.

The price quoted was for a turn-key operation, and to turn our water into drinkable water. They have to do this because by law they cannot partially filter water. That would make them liable if someone was to see a water filtration system and think somehow the water was safe to drink and it was only better, but not fully drinkable. I am not under those laws however as a homeowner.

The other issue with that quote is that their product removes 12 mg/per liter of iron, therefore I would need three of their systems. But they do make systems that pull 30 mg/liter out of the water… just not their system. So it was like when I had sheep. I needed more selenium in my sheep, but grain only provided 3%, so the grain company and their nutritionist suggested three times more grain to get the sheep where they needed to be. I was like, ‘why not just give selenium supplement” and the guys said, “because we don’t sell it”.

So a person has to be wary of these situations. THEY might only have one way to do it, but there might be work-arounds.

I can tell you mine is NOT!

I have tested it and it failed both primary and secondary thresholds.

A few things I am just barely over, like nitrates at one tenth over allowable levels. But the nuisance ones I am way over on. Iron and salt water. Neither pose a health risk but they are inconvenient.

At 37 mgs per liter our water is orange. Our clothes are orange and out dishes are orange. It’s rust and I will turn orange if I don’t scrub my hair and skin once a week with clarifying shampoo using it as a body wash. Body hair is the worst to deal with.

Then there is the seawater. It’s just under the 2000 mg per liter threshold so it’s brackish water and not full seawater but it’s bad. Soap does not lather. Clothes take forever to dry in the dryer, and you never really feel clean.

I am working on a way to mitigate this but the water company was blown away. By far the most costly water they ever saw to try and clean. The starting cost was $45,000 in filtering systems.

Yes!

The first was really nice, looked good, a split two room place for both ducks and chickens with a center area so that there was no real way for the chickens to escape...

And it was tough to shovel out so we seldom did it.

Our next coop... it was bigger, had more light and was more simple in construction. It was WAYY easier to shovel out. It also had lights, outlets and an enclosed outside run.

The three absolutes I would never be without:

Concrete floor: It is hard to shovel a dirt floor coop
Full door: It really sucks to have to duck down to get inside the coop and for eggs etc. We got inside our a lot more than we thought we ever would.
Lights: It gets dark quick and long in the winter. Having a light you can just snap on is more than a luxury

Dakota Miller wrote:

John C Daley wrote:

How does that sailor get water from the ocean, because he can't always take enough water with them, or the stored water becomes sickly.  

from google
Sailors in the 1700s primarily obtained water by filling large wooden casks at ports, supplementing this with collected rain, and rationing it strictly.

Distillation may be the only way that will work for you.

Yeah I'm considering destillers. At least the limitations are pretty inarguable. I know exactly what will evaporated and what I need to physically filter.

1700s sailors were built different. Lol. Most modern boats have a BEEFY RO system. (That's why I chose RO instead of destilling) Plus any other add-on filter they like. I'm looking very critically at the katadyn survivor 40E. It's over built and over priced for ground water. But it's built to be used as a complete system. The company expects that their customers will drink the water straight out of the system. They can't afford to cut corners and play with false claims because they'd end up with very sick, lawsuit-happy, customers. But apparently it a go-to in the long distance ocean traveling group when storage is only a temporary solution. You can repair most the parts yourself with common tools and such. They generally use an RO system to purify sea water. Dump it in a holding tank and test it on boat. If it tests good they put it in the main tank to drink. The only thing they have to be concerned about is oil and red tide. And those can be seen visually in the water.

That is NOT correct.

I live on an island far out to sea where my well's are compromised by sea water and can be affected by red tides. None of that can be visually seen in the water.

I have looked into RO for seawater because of the sea water in my house-system, but what RO system I use for desalination is very different. If the water is over 2000 mg/liter it is considered sea water and takes a special robust filtration system, and if under that it takes another. As desalination is being carried out, it constantly has to be adjusted, and that is just for desalination. Too much pressure and it strips the water of minerals, not enough and you get salty water. This is a VERY real issue for me and I have conducted a lot of research on how I can get good water here. The quote I got from professionals has been the most expensive system they ever saw: $45,000 with (3) whole house RO systems to get out all the problems I have to go from undrinkable to drinkable.

If I just had sea water issues, I would distill, but sadly I also have incredibly high iron so distilling would actually make my water worse.

You do not have it quite that bad, but you can use the information that I have learned to set yourself up to be better off. Water is life and it pays to do things right.

My neighbors do not treat their well water because it is too expensive to filter so they instead have rain catchment systems. But they test their water. I am on the east coast so may be different than you, but the rate of cancer here is the highest in the nation per capita. I myself have cancer, and it is because of the topography and jet stream. In short, bad shit comes here when it rains.

Yes, water testing will change with every rainfall, but you get an average of what is in the water.

No one person on this forum is smarter than all of us put together, but you are indeed right. You do not have to justify your water filtration system to anyone. I am not affected by what you do with your water system, but when I hear of blanket statements like "you would see bad water", for the sake of others who might read this thread, I feel obligated to say in a kind manner, "I'm not sure that is the case". Myself and others can explain this in many different ways, but we cannot make you understand it. However, we can only hope that others who read this thread do and keep themselves safe.

Drinking water is the key of life. Best to do things right, not guess.

We found a work around to almost all of these problems that were brought up by old dishwashers: we have a countertop dishwasher instead.

It is half the size of a regular dishwasher so it uses half the water, but lets a machine do it instead of us.

Since it has its own heater, it brings the hot water temp up high enough so the dishes are disinfected.

We do not have to wait until the dishwasher is full because it uses so little water and takes no time to run. You can pack a lot in it if you organize like a deranged architect and I have washed some crazy sized stuff, like crock pots and baking dishes. It's all how you load it. Load it fast and no, you will not get much in. Load it carefully and it will blow your mind on what is washed in a single load.

It has multiple functions too, like a fruit and veggie wash mode so you can clean your fruits and veggies. But stem ware and other modes.

You can put it on your countertop, or install it permanent like a real, but smaller dishwasher in your kitchen cabinetry. We permanently mounted ours up higher in our lower cabinetry so we can load it without bending over like on a full-sized dishwasher.

It also takes cheap powder for soap instead of expensive and gummy pods.

We really like it. For two empty-nesters it works perfectly for us. We only knew about them when we were looking at Tiny Houses and saw one that had this dishwasher in it. We researched it and bought it. It was $350.

I think artificial intelligence is now taking the Rocket Mass Heater to the masses...

It is done differently, but all over Youtube there are AI generated videos about rocket mass heaters. They have twisted it, putting the stoves into woven oral yarns that begin... "In 1845 on the plains of Colorado Phineus was scoffed at by his neighbors" and then for twenty minutes there is a tale about how Phineous survived a raging blizzard where his neighbors nearly froze. I sound like I am making that up but I am not. That is really what many of these videos sound like as they begin.

I mean there are a TON of videos out there on Rocket Mass Heaters now.

Some are not so flowing with a verbal tale of olde, some are touting the virtues of these heaters in a more matter-of-fact way, and they have differing names on what they are, but they are all rocket mass heaters. Crimean stoves. Finnish masonry stoves, etc. Many differing names but they are all described alike. I mean it is all over youtube now. Some with better details on how to build them, and some not so much, but AI has got ahold of this heater of olde and really is running with it.

It is not a bad thing. The masses are soon going to know in droves as people see it scrolling youtube and begin to think how it might help them.