Rewewable House Progress

There has been considerable progress on the renewable energy house. Here are some pictures.



This is the front of the house. The front wall and rafters are in.



This view is from the west. It shows the west wall framing done. The white bucket peeking from the doorway is covering the new well.

Garden is growing! Harvest is started!

Spring has sprung and the garden is growing quickly. Almost all planting is done. Some harvesting has started. Artichokes, onions, strawberries and a variety of greens and herbs are being harvested now.

The renewable energy house is well underway and the solar power and garden lights are working well. There is a black kale experiment that is going well.

A new hand drilled well has been installed for irrigation. Here is the link for the details and instructions. This gives enough water to water all the garden. Summer tea is being processed. Blackberry, strawberry, huckleberry and red clover blossom teas are drying in the drying room now.

Grass and weeds are hard to keep up with now, but they will slow down as the weather dries up for the summer.

An earth battery experiment is on-going. When the results are in, it will be posted on the website, Winter Lake Research Center.

The greenhouse plastic has had it for the year. It has been on all winter and the winter winds finally destroyed it. Time to put new on.

Spring is here!

Woo hoo!! Harvested the first artichokes from the new bed.
Sage is blooming, alliums are putting up scapes, clover is blooming!

I have finished some experiments with solar powered outdoor flood lights. These lights will be used in the demonstration house.
Spring planting is almost done and the harvest is beginning. This is a good time of year.

Rain, rain, rain

It has been raining here for days. I have managed to get some planting done and all the weeding done. The greenhouses and raised beds are ready to plant fully. All the onion and garlic crops are doing well. The tomatoes in the hoop house are perking up and starting to grow now. This week, I will plant cole crops, lettuce and radishes. I have been working on the solar energy systems and have the box for the solar water heater almost done. I altered an uninterruptible power supply and hooked one of the larger batteries into it. So now my laptop is on solar also. Woo hoo! I am already harvesting kale and some kinds of onions. Also, I have harvested one artichoke and some fennel.

Spring cleanup and gardening

This time of year is very busy here. Cleanup from winter projects and spring planting keep us working from sun up to sun down. The big push is done now. The onions, garlic and strawberries are doing well. Tomatoes are planted and almost all the winter crops have been harvested. The only thing left from winter is black kale. I had some for supper tonight. Very good boiled until tender, chopped and sauteed in sesame seed oil. A little cheese and boiled egg on top completed the meal. Very good! Many cole crops can be grown year around here on the south Oregon coast. Preparations are being made to install a wind turbine to increase the available renewable energy. A simple solar batch water heater is in the process of being constructed. It will be the plain enclosed box type, but it should produce enough hot water for the needs here. So that will be one more step to independence.

Alternative heat

A couple posts ago, I promised a post about getting heating appliances off electricity. Heat is the easiest energy form to produce from alternative and renewable sources. It is easy to get low grade heat from solar for water heating. Very simple solar water heaters will supply a surprising amount of heat from sunlight. Small solar box ovens can even cook with the power of the sun. They can be made with such simple and cheap materials as aluminum foil and a cardboard box.
When I get time, I will be putting plans on the web site and providing links to various other plans.
Get rid of all the small cooking gadgets that use electricity for heat. They are for the most part very convenient but not at all efficient. There are a few exceptions, but the label will tell you how much power they use.
One thing you can do is to convert your cook stove to propane. Propane is easily storable and in most areas, it costs much less than electricity.
Unless you are in an apartment, you can usually install biomass appliances, such as wood heating and cooking stoves. Small stoves which burn their own smoke can be made from tin cans. I use these in what used to be my stainless steel cook top. I tore out the electric burners and installed these little burners that run on leaves, grass, sticks, wood chips, rabbit or lama dung, or wood pellets. These are all renewable fuels and you don't need a chainsaw to gather them. Since they burn their own smoke for fuel, they need no flue. Just open the window a crack for fresh air while using them.
These little stoves can be scaled up using larger cans, such as old five gallon popcorn cans, for space heating. However, for space heating, they MUST have a properly installed flue. Since they are using a lot more fuel, there are more dangerous gasses given off. If you are really desperate for cooking heat, you can get it cheaply by burning old newspapers. This must be done outside. I have a neat gadget that I bought in a yard sale. It is a big tin pot with all the appropriate air holes. I tightly wad up 12 sheets of newspaper and it burns long enough to cook a rack of hamburgers nicely. There are endless ways to use biomass for cooking. Be aware of fire and smoke danger and keep children safely away.
www.winterlakeresearchcenter.org

Cleanup and new batteries(well, new to me)

Thanks to the generosity of Steve Britten, owner of Capco powder coating in Coquille, Ore, I have a set of two good used, large, deep cycle six volt batteries. I hooked them in series and put them in the alternative energy powerhouse. It has been very dark and wet until the last couple of days so the poor little fifty watt solar panel was having a struggle charging them. They had sat for awhile and partially discharged and have been on the solar for more than a week. But the last two days have been very sunny and they are now almost fully charged. Hooray! Plenty of storage now for the one panel I have. I will be going a-begging for more panels. I have a three hundred watt controller and my calculations show that if I get three hundred watts of panels total, I will be able to run everything but the refrigerator and water heater, although I will be able to run the refrigerator for about fifty percent of the time on the solar. Since I have most of the materials for a wood/ solar water heater, I will begin construction on one this spring. That will solve that problem. My goal is one hundred percent renewable within two years. The weather was great today so I did some cleanup and got the compost pile in shape for spring.

www.winterlakeresearchcenter.org

Edible red clover

This post is a little different. It is about what I learned in my research of the edible plant, red clover. Red clover is the type of clover that has a large red or reddish-purple flower. I did some experiments with this plant and this is what I found. The leaves are very good as salad material, a little tangy but mild. They also make great tea, with no caffeine. The young stems and leaves can be steamed until tender and used like spinach or other greens. In the winter, early spring and late fall, the bigger roots are good as a starchy food. They can be eaten raw when they are tender. They can be steamed or boiled and treated much like beets or turnips or other root crops. They are very mild and take on the taste of other ingredients in the dish. So try some clover today and enjoy!

www.winterlakeresearchcenter.org

Reducing electricity use

Years ago, I decided to get off the electricity grid. I thought it would be fairly easy and cheap. Not so. My all electric house used so much power that a renewable system was far out of my reach. I began to reduce my electricity usage. The first thing I did was to kill all phantom loads. These are the things that suck up power, even when turned off. I put them on switch strips and turn them off when not in use. I then made the habit of being aware of all my energy and water use. Just by being aware and using it only when necessary, I began to reduce my consumption. Slowly, I began to see my utility bills start to decrease. Then I set about getting all possible heating appliances off electricity. Heating is the biggest user of electricity and also the easiest to switch to alternatives. But that is for the next post.....

www.winterlakeresearchcenter.org

Back to work...

Well, it has been been six painful months since I did an entry in this blog. Kidney stones, illnesses and feet trouble have all conspired against me. But these are all cleared up now and I have been moving forward. I have completed the last of three green houses and they are in production. We had a good winter crop, thanks to the intern Raymonds excellent research into suitable crops for winter in this area. Another intern, Carey, did all the calculations and most of the construction for the alternative energy power house and we now have it finished. The solar panel gives enough juice, even in the winter, that all the lights run off it. Hooray for Carey! Her angle and distance calculations were perfect. All eleven raised beds are finished, thanks to Amanda, Carey and Fon. Most of them are producing now. Only three are still fallow, to be planted soon. Many agricultural experiments were finished successfully this winter. I will be posting the results this week on the web site, www.winterlakeresearchcenter.org