Jeff Bou

M Jaffee wrote:Unique fully off grid Homestead on 18 acres in Southern Ohio. Off-Grid Solar, compost toilet, rain water catchment, propane cooktop, and wood cookstove that heats house in winter. Home is ecologically designed and best suited for 1-2 people.

2 ponds, 1 stocked with fish, 1 seasonal frog pond, 6 acre field and 12 acres of woods to explore. Small young orchard and 15 blueberry bushes. Property has not been sprayed with chemicals in the 12 years that I've owned it!

Absolutely beautiful place and great location just South of the Great Lakes winter cloud belt.  Best of luck, someone will be lucky to find this.

paul wheaton wrote:If you hit the "purchase" button on this thread, you will see the streaming version of the rocket ovens movie.   Is that what you are looking for?  No DVDs involved.

In "My Stuff" it shows "Rocket Ovens Movie + Rocket Oven Plans + J-Tube Plans Bundle" and that I paid $25.  When I click on the link, it takes me to the page that says "Now that you have access to the video, you can watch it HERE:" but there is no link to the movie and everything below the "HERE" arrows pointing down is blank until I get down to the comments.  I can and have downloaded the PDFs but there is no video.  Can anyone steer me to what I'm doing wrong?

Andrés Bernal wrote:

jay wong wrote:
I agree. These 3D design drawings don’t show size of brick. How many layers. Doesn’t show the inside of the brick oven clearly as they are building the design of bricks for the stove. What type of hot plate did they use for the pot?
It says to watch the other free heat video which I don’t have access to. Unclear instructions.

Hi Jay! Thanks for the feedback, were working on an update to the plans to specify all these details. Ill keep you updated and make sure to include them.

Any updates?  These drawing are very unclear and I also simply do not understand how to get from step 5 to step 7.  

Emmett Ray wrote:This confounds me to no end.  
I know you can run A/C on solar, but that requires a LOT of solar and battery storage.  It works, but it's not ideal.  

I'm a heat wimp, folks.  Anything above 70°F and I'm as baked as an Easter ham.  I actually get physically nauseous when I get hot.  It's the only thing that causes me to question ever going off-grid.  Whoever solves this problem is guaranteed a front row seat in heaven, surely.

If you break down your issues and look at it from a slightly different perspective, you can rephrase the issue as "How to I stay cool and comfortable off-grid?"

Solar aircon works well during the heat of the day when you need it most.  If you try to use solar ac when the sun doesn't shine, it gets very expensive very quickly.  I think most of us can agree in most environments, early morning and LATE afternoon can be acceptable without aircon.  To me, the real problem is how to get through the peak heat of the day and then how sleep comfortably.  My approach, in "development" is as follows:
* morning - fans running on solar charged batteries, a single 100-200ah LiFePo batter can easily handle this off of a 300W solar panel
* late-morning thru early/late afternoon - solar aircondtioning, ability to run into the later afternoon/evening is entirely dependent on investment you're willing to make in batteries and additional panels but looks to be roughly $250 per hour you want to run when sun is down ... this is all assuming something like a 400-500 ft2 area
* evening - chilled mattress pad.

For the chilled mattress pad, there are a variety of commercial options but either require meaningful electricity (though still MUCH less than traditional ac) and are both expensive to buy and maintain in the long run.  I've already put together a trial unit that works perfectly well at 1/3 - 1/4 of the cost of commercial options and is very inexpensive to maintain.  My wife actually complains that she's a bit too chilled.  We comfortably sleep through the night on >80F nights with no ac.  Approximately 12lbs of frozen salt water in old milk bottles (with a 6F freezing point) will chill water sufficiently for 8 hours of nice, chilled mattress.  I split a cooler into two parts and use the frozen salt water in the larger portion to hold chilled water and a radiator to maintain the temp of the smaller portion of the cooler that uses waterbed softened water to circulate thorugh mattress pad.  My plan is to use a solar freezer to freeze the water bottles during the day then transfer to bed cooling system. This isn't as complex as it seems ... I just throw the bottles in the freezer each morning and then back in the chilling cooler each evening (using regular wired kitchen freezer for now).  

Going off-grid shouldn't be doing exactly what we do today, it should be using innovative approaches to solve our problems.  My approach above is a bit of a hack, but I've proven the hard part (non-battery intensive solution to staying cool at night) and the rest is pretty proven technology.

C. Letellier wrote:You might want to look at systems like this.  I can't find a link for the older one that was easily buildable with no moving parts but here is a newer version.

solar ice maker.

Bit of a necropost, but would anyone be interested is a kickstarter to build a solar powered ice maker based on parabolic mirror and ammonia absorption (zero energy operation)?  I simply don't have time/space to build and validate but want to build one of these for our off-grid retirement place in the Philippines in a few years.  If anyone is intereted, I'd be will to do something like match any pledges dollar to dollar up to an amount that should allow this to be built.  I want someone publically committed but am willing to fund a good bit if the results are a validated build, instructions, some YouTube videos, etc that would be public domain when complete.

Anyone interested?

PS - I reached out to ISAAC and did not get a response.  Their web page is there but doesn't look to have been updated for around 2 years.  I also did a Way Back machine search for a great article on this topic (below).  Finally, there is a great construction blog on easy construction of a parabolic solar array (https://georgesworkshop.blogspot.com/2012/08/diy-solar-parabolic-trough-20-intro.html)

I've used (something similar to) these in very windy Hong Kong.  Not perfect, but they definitely extended the life of a weak / low quality tarp.  I as some else mentioned, you can fold tarp over a board (I used wooden chop sticks with these) and it extends the tension out from the jaw quite a bit.  I haven't used these exact ones (these actually look pretty cheap) and just picked as an example.  The ones I purchased had the saw teeth and clamp opening was adjustable and appeared to be a good be more robust.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08HN7KR5P/ref=sspa_dk_detail_0?pd_rd_i=B08HN7KR5P&pd_rd_w=e0jmT&content-id=amzn1.sym.386c274b-4bfe-4421-9052-a1a56db557ab&pf_rd_p=386c274b-4bfe-4421-9052-a1a56db557ab&pf_rd_r=T7TXWJS2JX92T636JXHK&pd_rd_wg=qIF5d&pd_rd_r=ad44e873-19cb-4a65-92b2-a39fe6c570a3&s=hi&sp_csd=d2lkZ2V0TmFtZT1zcF9kZXRhaWxfdGhlbWF0aWM&th=1

Can someone help me ... I'm trying here.  I simply cannot understand what happens between step 6 and step 7.  Step 7 clearly shows that all flow from the rocket stove riser is completely blocked from the cook top.  I just can't visualize the actual gas flow since all the pictures show a circular / semi-circular brick wrap around the pot which would block flow to the gas top.  I see how the flow gets to the pot, but flow beyond that point is very unclear ... how does the heated gas get to the stove top, how does it flow within the stove top chamber and then how does it get to the exhaust?  I can make guesses but the book clearly shows all flows being blocked so I'd just be guessing.  Can anyone help clarify?

Randi Arc wrote:More photos

Please keep posting ... love it.  I spent a year in Cebu and wife and I are looking for our retirement farm now in Cebu, Bohol and Palawan.  Your pics are inspiring.

See Hes wrote:
Because I want the our housemaid and her boyfriend taking over the trade of our products he is fully into this idea, especially after I designed the Aquaponics System for Red Claw Crayfish (and proved that it works) and now Capybaras. That gets us standing well off the crowd..

Will & See, are you interested in providing any information on your Crayfish system?  We're shopping land in Philippines now and plan to do something similar to you but with more focus on small resort with adjacent permaculture.  I'd like to include crayfish.  I likely won't have enough land for a large lake at the "resort" (we're looking at 5,000-8,000m total land), but we also only need enough to feed ourselves and a small number of guests.  I'll likely purchase small farm near by for sugarcane, bamboo, bananas, cassava, etc.  I'm trying to figure out if can multilayer IBC tank grow or if I would need 4 rice fields and rotate so I can get full 3 year growth on the crawfish (plus a little rice).

I have experience with small scale 2 IBC aquaponics system Koi and ran a hydroponics system off of the aquaponics water as well, but was really just experimenting to get some experience.  Would love to see what you did, how it worked and get any "lessons learned" you'd be willing to share regarding crayfish.

Jeff