Offgrid living

Living off grid often correlates with poorly accessible locations - because that's where the infrastructure is not.

On certain latitudes, especially near bodies of water, especially in remote locations - do not ask who the snow comes for - it always comes for you (and with a grudge). So, what ya gonna do?

Over here, a tractor being incomplete (it is great folly to go into winter with an incomplete tractor), snow is handled by an electric microcar. Since the microcar is made of thin sheet metal and plastic, it cannot carry a plow... but the rear axle being solid steel, it can pull one.

The plow is one year old, and was previously pulled by a gasoline car. It is made of construction steel: 8 mm L-profiles shaped like a letter A with double horizontal bars. The point of connection on top ensures it doesn't lift too much while plowing. It's currently fixed with an unprofessional and temporary C-clamp (there will be an U-bolt soon). It is pulled with a chain.

If snow is heavy, the L-profiles lift the plow on top of snow, and you have to plow the same road many times. Sometimes it veers off sideways. Generally, you have to catch the snow early with this system - if you're late, you're stuck. :)

Not many advantages, but dirt cheap. Don't go plowing public roads with such devices - it is nearly invisible to fellow drivers, and cops would get a seizure.

The Amish are often thought to object to the use of electricity, but actually they only have a problem with the grid due to being interconnected with the outside world. They use solar, wind, generators (fossil fuel based), and various other clever hacks.

IIUC, there’s a self-reliance value going on. The grid makes it quite unclear who provides the energy from where, and being reliant on unknown entities outside the village is a non-starter for the Amish.

But what about within the village? I get the impression the Amish are quite okay with transactions and interconnectedness within a village. So my question is - do they ever have a village-wide micro grid? Or even shared power between a couple households? Or are each of them always off-grid on a per-household basis?

Canonical YouTube link

To make no excessive claims, I have to admit I burnt a fair bit of wood during the night. In the morning however, around 9 o'clock, the solar fence (nominal power 2400 W) was giving 600 W and steaming vigorously. By 10 o'clock, it had thawed and gave 940 W. Later, other panel arrays took over and wattage decreased. The energy was used to run a heat pump.

P.S. Knowing that server resources aren't infinite, I hosted the image externally, I hope that hosting on "postimages.org" works smoothly.

My rainwater collection begins with a first-flush and debris removal tank, but it is not ideal; all the water flows through it and in a big rain it can stay stirred up. So it has debris and because it is necessarily open to the roof this means some bugs in there. The outlet to the storage tank is wrapped with three layers of window-screen cloth, but the overflow is open to the drain. Frogs (cute little coqui tree-frogs) come up the drain and inhabit the tank. The storage tank overflow ties into the first flush overflow, so once in a while there is a tree frog in the first storage tank. There are no bugs in that tank so the frog will die if I fail to capture it (which they are very wily).

How can I keep a frog from climbing up the pipe while being sure I do not obstruct water going down the pipe?

I've been chatting to another user on here (https://slrpnk.net/u/JacobCoffinWrites who does the cool photobash images of solarpunk scenes) and it really got me thinking about solar concentrators so i went on a bit of a binge learning about them, there are so many really cool designs and so many things a source of heat like that can be used for.

One idea i especially like is using it to power absorption refrigeration (like off-grid gas powered refrigerators use) so when the sun is hot you can focus it's power and use it to cool your house -- then when it's starting to get cooler switch it to heating, ideally heating a medium which will retain the heat so you can distribute it through the night. For agricultural use it could heat greenhouses and drying rooms, industrially there's an endless amount of possibilities. Even recreationally it could be great, cutting out the cost of heating a pool or hot tub - could really make some off-grid luxury.

A great youtube channel with various diy examples is Sergiy Yurko, who's still managing to make great videos despite living in Ukraine - https://www.youtube.com/@sergiyyurko8668/videos

and https://www.youtube.com/@GREENPOWERSCIENCE/videos has some really cool videos too, like demonstrating using a fresnal lens to melt metal

After some rather unsuccessful attempts at reusing some large lead-acid batteries I got for cheap (which were not fully broken when I got them, but I managed to break them in the process), I caved in and bought a 5.2kW LiFePO4 battery pack (was 25% off at a local store).

Still needs some more hooking up, and due to some stupid regulatory reason I can't install solar panels yet, but I hope to already use it as a backup power supply over the winter.

The hybrid inverter is quite cool as it allows hooking up two individual strands of PV and also export a lot of very detailed data to the open-source Home Assistant software. Also seems to have a built in UPS feature for connecting servers, but I need to test that first (by default the emergency backup power only kicks in after a few seconds).

So, not really offgrid living, but the system would allow an off-grid setup at least.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/1867431

Lately I’m running into more and more situations where I am forced to patronize a private company in the course of doing a transaction with my government. For example, a government office stops accepting cash payment for something (e.g. a public parking permit). Residents cannot pay for the permit unless they enter the marketplace and do business with a private bank. From there, the bank might force you to have a mobile phone (yes, this is common in Europe for example).

Example 2:

Some gov offices require the general public to call them or email them because they no longer have an open office that can be visited in person. Of course calling means subscribing to phone service (payphones no longer exist). To send an email, I can theoretically connect a laptop to a library network and use my own mail server to send it, but most gov offices block email that comes from IP that Google/SpamHaus/whoever does not approve, thus forcing you to subscribe to a private sector service in order to do a public transaction. At the same time, snail-mail is increasingly under threat & fax is already ½ dead.

Example 3:

A public university in Denmark refuses access to some parts of the school’s information systems unless you provide a GSM number so they can do a 2FA SMS. If a student opposes connecting to GSM networks due to the huge attack surface and privacy risks, they are simply excluded from systems with that limitation & their right to a public education is hindered. The school library e-books are being bogarted by Cloudflare’s walled garden, where a private company restricts access to the books based on factors like your IP address & browser.

Where are my people?

So, I’m bothered by this because most private companies demonstrate untrustworthyness & incompetence. I think I should be able to disconnect and access all public services with minimal reliance on the private sector. IMO the lack of that option is injustice. There is an immeasurably huge amount of garbage tech on the web subjecting people to CAPTCHAs, intrusive ads, dysfunctional javascript, dark patterns, etc. Society has proven inability to counter that and it will keep getting worse. I think the ONLY real fix is to have a right to be offline. The power to say:

*“the gov wants to push this broken reCAPTCHA that forces me to share data with a surveillance capitalist

no thanks. Give me an offline private-sector-free way to do this transaction”*

There is substantial chatter in the #fedi about all the shit tech being pushed on us & countless little tricks and hacks to try to sidestep it. But there is almost no chatter about the real high-level solution which would encompass two rights:

1. a right to be free from the private sector marketplace; and
2. the right to be offline

Of course there could only be very recent philosophers who would think of the right to be offline. But I wonder if any philosophers in history have published anything influential as far as the right to not be forced into the private sector marketplace. By that, I don’t mean anti-capitalism (of course that’s well covered).. but I mean given the premise is that you’re trapped inside a capitalist system, there would likely be bodies of philosophy aligned with rights/powers to boycott.

This is a video of my off-grid house in the Dominican Republic, which is featured in this community's title background. It is for sale, so buy it and you can be famous! lolz https://drive.google.com/file/d/16s22L6fgJRtxPQ-a6_aEWy8QJsgsWexN/view?usp=sharing

Crossposting here because an off-grider is relying on milk and potatoes for nutrition completeness. I suppose getting nutritional completeness with as few ingredients as possible is generally interesting to off-grid living.

This is a compilation of all my Wood Gas powered projects, from a fire wood fueled Truck to giant flame burping wood stoves all the way to small folding camping style units built for cooking.

I'm here to share a fairly famous youtube channel and community from a man I have had some very interesting conversations with over the past 10-15 years. His name is Jamie Mantzel and he basically personifies off-grid living, IMO.

I started a community here on slrpnk.net to clone his Reddit presence because I felt that this was the most philosophically aligned place for this content. The content is automatically cloned over from Reddit (all I had to do was make a request with the Boycott Reddit Bot).

If you've never seen his channel before, you're in for a treat.

Anyway, here's the cloned community: Adventure Builders

or

!adventurebuilders@slrpnk.net before the bot comes and corrects me!

If anyone wants to help moderate that community, please let me know.

https://piped.video/watch?v=LxNQK6dYh3g

Witness the interplay of earth, water, and straw to create in-fill walls for a hand-crafted timber frame structure.

Stone, clay, bamboo and straw are combined to create beautifully finished walls. Many hands come together, to gather stones, make adobes, mix cob, harvest bamboo to build natural walls that are durable and breathable. Multiple methods of cob, adobe blocks and wattle & daub are combined to create a unique mix of artistic textures and lines. Witness as walls are made smooth with clay plaster and decorated with simple relief designs, and even metal doors made from scratch as the metal wood shop takes final form.

These EG4 batteries from Signature Solar look like a pretty good deal to me; $265/kWh according to their calculation. I paid a little over $500/kWh for some 12V form-factor lithium batteries at the start of the year and thought those were a reasonable price.

Today's adventure: a couple of rainy days caused low battery levels, but not too low I thought - still 30% or so; these are lithium batteries and can deep cycle. They are "smart" batteries and if one is full in series, none can charge further - so they should all be at the same charge level all the time. But a couple had gotten out of step somehow and when they reached zero everything shut down.

How to bootstrap it? With no battery output (since a zero battery turned itself off and would not let the battery bank show any voltage!) - there is no way to activate the inverter and let street power run the battery charger. With no battery power, there is no way to turn on the MPPT controller and charge the batteries!

I could rearrange the banks to put four batteries with remaining charge in series because I have an 8-battery system, and get things restarted; but if there had been only four like when I first installed the system - I'd be in trouble.

Another thing that happened. Before I figured out the battery problem, I was trying to switch back to street-power. Because power from the street comes to the inverter first and then the inverter powers the distribution panel, when the batteries are down, I cannot get street power to the distribution panel. I could install a manual bypass, but it is not a commonly needed item and it is a large amp switch. So I removed the inputs and outputs at the inverter and bypassed manually. That worked fine. But in the process of disconnecting or reconnecting, I must have loosened the neutral connection to the inverter. So when the inverter was working again and I checked voltage, I only checked across the two hot legs - yay, 240V. I did not check that each leg was 120v from neutral! They were not: one leg was at zero and the other was at 240. I found this discrepancy fairly quickly after only destroying an outlet strip, the oven control electronics from a very old stove we were wanting to replace, and the controls of an old Sharp microwave oven with the 4, 7, 9 and Clear buttons not working. Woohoo we have a new stove out of the deal!

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/611077

I have been thinking on how to claim every energy that comes on my plot. Technology goes more and more into harvesting the smaller left over energy. Ive seen examples in the Netherlands where startups try to get energy from a chip (I have been thinking on how to claim every energy that comes on my plot. Technology goes more and more into harvesting the smaller left over energy. Ive seen examples in the Netherlands where startups try to get energy from a chip (http://www.nowi-energy.com/, https://memsys.nl/) and a transparent solar panel layer on windows etc. Here in Lithuania sometimes the whole day has an overcast sky and that is the solar energy that we are getting. I know that with heavy overcast days a standard solar panels output can be as low as 10%. So a 5kWp can generate instead of 3.75kW produce only a meager 370W. My question to you, arent there other solar technologies that are adjusted to this overcast circumstances? So to gain more efficiency from diffuse lighting or from frequencies that can pierce the clouds more (like infrared spectrum)?

Some sunday morning pondering....

Found this on instagram from an account I follow (not religiously, so no guarantees on reliability). It's an app for designing your off grid homestead, and from the demos I saw on instagram it looks neat. Not too expensive to back at the lower tiers, all of which give you access to the app.

Obviously Kickstarter apps are 0% Guaranteed no matter what they say, but I thought this was worth sharing here.

I'm purchasing a property which will not perc for a conventional septic system. There are alternative septic systems that are possible, but also I'm wondering, what about an alternative system altogether? Does anyone have experience with handling greywater and waste separately (say composting for waste) in a home with several members?

I was looking back at reddit posts (while deleting them), and I realized I'd written a book worth of stuff about this topic. I would write it all again, if it is helpful. But for a brief synopsis of "how it works", here is what one does:

Assess power needs - look at your living standard and catalog all the devices you power, and estimate the time they operate - power is measured in watts, and time in hours. Multiply to get watt-hours; then divide by 1000 to get kilowatt hours. Compare with your utility bill.

Have you heard of a system for RV campers that lets the user take long showers using the same filtered water over & over? Has anyone heard of or used such a set up? Any recommendations?

Here's some of what I've found so far. Loopz: https://hamwells.com/en/loopz/

Overview of Our Recirculating Shower | RV Renovation Ryan & Su: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhpBTra9bXs

I've been using rainwater for a long time. Back in 2001 we rigged a rain catchment when we were living on a sailboat, and we were hooked. Great tasting water and plenty of it, at least here in the tropics.

We built a house in 2013 with roof runoff collection and a pair of cisterns under the house. A pump at the lower level sent water up to a tank located about 12 meters above the house - so there was always water pressure from that 350 liter reserve. We added a 200L first-flush drum to catch the first debris-laden water draining off the roof.

When we moved in 2021, of course we bought a house with a cistern - but it had no roof drain collection, so we had to retrofit that. The first flush tank is a bit larger now at over 400 liters.

Rainwater from a roof can have bacteria and parasites in it, but during storage, almost everything settles to the bottom of the cistern. One thing that does not is Giardia cysts, so it is wise to filter the water with a one-micron cartridge before drinking. Other household uses are adequately pure after a coarse 50 micron filter at the pump, but the one micron filter is on the cold side at the kitchen sink. The first flush capture and the 50 micron prefiltering are so effective the one micron filter is good for a year or more. Even the 50 micron filter shows no sign of clogging in a year, but when we change it, it LOOKS like it needs changing (very dark brown).