Sunday, January 28, 2007

Odds and Ends

Hi All; We do a lot of things here at Woodhenge. Yesterday we had a two high School classes from Saranack Lake High School come for a tour and explaination of how to build axial flux wind turbines. They could only stay for four hours and really needed eight! I'm hoping that some of them come back for the longer tour and explaination.

Is anyone interested in turkeys? My wife has put the challenge forth for me to grow everything we need for this coming Thanksgiving dinner. I'm going to order either eggs or poults from one of the hatcheries. They come in batches of 15 to 20 and there is quite a variety. If anyone wants us to grow their turkeys for them or wants some birds that are ready to move and grow on their own just drop us a line.
We'll hatch and grow the birds for the first 8 weeks or so in our school's agriculture classroom. We might include some guinea hens in the batch, just for the fun of it..I've heard they are good (noisy) watch birds.

Who'd like to earn $100 in a finders fee? Woodhenge is looking for a water pumping wind turbine. New ones go for over $10,000! We want to buy a good used one for well under $1000. The most important part is the gearbox that is on top of the tower. We can fix the blades, we can build our own tower. We'd like the part of the pump system that goes into the well, but that's not necessary. Anyone interested in going on the hunt for us; it would be really appreciated!

Well Ive got to go off and finish my grades, insulate a wall and fill our fuel tanks.
Enjoy your day.
-Jim-

Sunday, January 21, 2007

The odds and ends of our world and my community

"We're an intentional community; what are your intentions?" This is a quote from Phil the other day...we we're wondering how to approach people who expressed an interest in moving to our community. To further that thought I should put into words what I forsee as the result of 'forming a community'.

First, I grew up mostly on suburban Long Island (near New York City) and realized early on that I didn't want to live there for the bulk of my life..too crowded, busy, too many mindless activities (lawn mowing, competitive consumption, etc.) and I get a 'trapped feeling' when I'm there. I wanted enough land to support myself and family no matter what life brought along. Woodhenge's 52 acres is much more than enough to do this. Sharing the land with others helps me to realize my ever evolving philosophy of living. The more participating people, the smoother the pace of developments here.

I'm also paranoid, I don't think our planet can support 6 billion people. I can imagine a number of scenarios that would lead to the demise of half or more of the beings alive right now. The primary of these potential disasters may have already begun. It's called "Peak Oil". We're not running out of fossil fuels! We're running out of cheap fossil fuels. There's a big difference. What we have left in the ground will serve mankind for generations, but at an ever increasing monetary cost. The oil that's left is the thicker stuff that has settled into the bottom of the wells (that's a vast oversimplification), it has to be pumped from deeper and deeper regions and in a lot of cases we don't have the technology to do this. The coal deposits are vast, but what remains is dirtier (containing more impurities, including sulfur) and will provide less energy per ton and more pollution. Natural gas is simply running out. The tar sands and oil shale deposits are enormous, but it takes two barrels of conventional oil energy to derive three barrels of new oil; plus thousands of gallons of water for processing each barrel...lots more pollution.

That said; the real crisis will be economic. The populations and economies of India and China dwarf that of what we've come to call 'western culture'. We've surrendered the bulk of our manufacturing and a lot of our technological service industries to those countries. China alone owns over a trillion dollars in United States securities (Treasury bonds, etc.). In a bidding war for energy products both of these countries and those that are economically linked to them would be the hands down winners. If this crisis were for some reason to occur, it would make the "Great Depression" of the 1920's-30's look like a party.

The biggest single factor stopping this economic crisis that is the fact that world oil is traded in petrodollars....any nation thinking about switching to "petroeuros" has had some problems. Let's see, these nations would include Iraq, North Korea and Iran,....hmmm makes you think.

Western nations represent around 17% of the world's population and consume over 45% of it's non renewable resources. That's a fact. I don't make judgments, I just try to set an example. The interdependance of the world economy will lead to it's downfall more assuredly than any number of bombs. Speaking of bombs, the style and face of war have changed. It isn't giant armies massing on a battle field with huge ships and convoys of trucks to support them. It's small carefully planned surgical style strikes by small bands of people. The small attacks on our shores (no, I'm not trying to belittle the twin towers/pentagon/etc. incidents) were just that, small. Think what would have happened if four or five of our major economic centers and shipping ports had been bombed, worse yet, with nukes or dirty bombs...our economic and living conditions would rapidly move down to that of Cuba.

The pace of technology and the changes it brings to society has surpassed our psychological ability to handle the change. Most have lost sight of what we've been given a life for. We're no longer 'stewarts of our land'. Consume and let others figure out how to fix the problems associated with that consumption.

What we're trying to do here at Woodhenge is to set up a place that will exemplify how to not mindlessly waste our resources. We're doing it as a place where people can come to look and learn how to take a little step aside and view what they are doing in the small and big scale of things.

My first thoughts were to build a survival enclave (imagine barbed wire, poured concrete, guard dogs and stacks of freeze dried foods). I rapidly reached the conclusion that this was a bad idea, because it was limited in both scope and time...barbed wire rusts, dogs die, food is consumed...to do something on a longer scale takes knowlege and thinking. That is the stage we're at now. We're beginning to understand the skills and constraints we're under to create something that will endure. Material goods do not last, knowlege and skills, when learned well and passed on carefully last virtually forever.

The old quote; if you give a man a fish he'll eat for a day, if you teach him to fish he'll feed himself for a lifetime" isn't quite enough. It should be more like "if you give a man a fish he'll feel he's entitled to get one from you every day, if you teach a man to fish he'll be hungry until he gets good at catching fish".

I don't want to tell people how to survive a crisis. That's too short of a timespan. I want to show them that sometimes the simple stuff works the best, but just like advanced technologies have their pitfalls, so do simple technologies. The problems of modern technologies are pollution, resource depletion and depersonalization of peoples. The problems of simple technologies are having to learn them and practice them until you become proficient at them. No instant gratification here! You actually have to ask and talk to people to learn how to do stuff efficiently. Yes, you can learn from a book or how to DVD, and I do this a lot of the time, but I find my efficiency level goes up at least an order of magnitude when I learn directly from 'them that's doin'.

O.K., enough babble. -Jim-

Sunday, January 14, 2007

More on Woodhenge Infrastructure

This is another letter I sent to an inquirer about Woodhenge. He was asking how we took care of laundry and water heating here.

Right now we have a 40 gallon propane water heater in our home, nothing fancy. We just got a 4' x 12' solar water heater from one of my old professors..it's 20+ years old, but still servicable, I also buried 100' of 3/8" flexible copper pipe in my central column - both systems will be used, in their season, for preheating my domestic hot water. I'm offering a workshop[ this summer on making solar water heaters and the other buildings will get solar heaters this summer. I'm trying to renovate two nat.gas instantaneous water heaters to propane for the common house.

Neither the common house or Phil's place have running water yet, let alone hot water. We're within a weekend of getting water connected to the common house though! All of the greywater lines are in and all of the supply water lines are in. All that remains is to connect the line that is buried between our house and the common house and do the final connections to the sinks. Phil has a food grade water barrel with a hand pump on top for his cold water, he heats water on top of his wood stove.

Methane is on the list of things to explore for water heating as is cogeneration of power and hot water when we get the diesel generator set up.

We dry our clothes on a clothes line in good weather and on racks during the rainy/snowy season. Krista has expressed an interest, but not a strong one, in getting a gas dryer for our home. We're going to have a washer and dryer in the common house for people in our little community. There's also a hand powered washer that my friend Richard uses for his family that in combination with a manual wringer keep their clothes clean....too many interesting things to check on....too little time.

Phil and I took a cheese making class at the Jefferson County Cooperative Extension. It was really neat. We had two instructors; one was from the NY Agriculture Department he talked about the rules and regulations for making cheese for retail sale, he used a local goat cheese operation run by a retired couple who were frustrated by having to live only on social insecurity...they have accumulated 29 purebred dairy goats and gross over $30K a year for their cheeses, mostly at local farmer's markets.

The second teacher is a local doctor that makes cheese as a hobby. He showed us how to make mozzarella in 30 minutes with our store bought milk. He also demonstrated how to make ricotta and explained how hard cheeses were made and aged. We can make and sell as much cheese as we want without any regulations IF we don't exceed what would be 'normal' for a home kitchen. There is a lot of wiggle room there. For now we're just going to try making cheeses we'll eat here. When we get the root cellar in and buy the small cow....you get the point. -Jim-

Sunday, January 07, 2007

THings that are going on around here.

I said I was going to post more often and use the letters I write to people that cover the 'business of Woodhenge'. The following is a letter I just sent to my friend Steve Spence. He lives in his own intentional community near Canton, NY. We visit each other regularly and help each other out on a wide variety of topics. He built the Woodhenge website for us, fixes our computer problems and likes to drink our hard apple cider. He is trying to fufill the same kind of destiny as we are at Woodhenge. Look his site up at www.green-trust.org.

Hi Steve; I was sorry about your migraine at the NCPOSAG (North Country Peak Oil Study and Action Group) meeting at Patricia's place. I think a lot of my present and your present health problems is because we're both going through the same kind of angst over working conventionally in places when we'd rather be developing our own sustainable communities/businesses.

WOW! What a great meeting though! This is more of what I'd imagined going on at an action group meeting. To be handed a hot bowl of delicious squash soup and mingle with a crowd that is activly doing things about a danger filled future was cathartic! To further have these people active in a group that was beyond their own families is amazing. I'm glad they allow me to participate from Jefferson County. I'm ordering a copy of the film we watched "The Community Solution" so I can continue to corrupt our youth in the public school system. Do you know where it came from? I'll check with Patricia if you don't know.

There were some major topics and minor topics discussed that you might have missed out on. Major ones included the fact that there are other groups that are overlapping some of our efforts and it would be good to combine forces to reinforce and take advantage of our mutual interests. Cooperative extension was one example, the historical societies and hands on museums were another. Minor ones included a sign up sheet at Richard and Aimee's Arc neighborhood party later this month. The list would include topics people would feel comfortable teaching to small groups and topics that you wanted to learn about. Patricia also wanted to get a women's skill study group started that would cover topics such as woodworking, home repair, home wiring, plumbing and welding. I offered to teach them with her.

I mentioned the fact that I have a new acquaintence that has his "Curio and Relic" license and regularly buys servicable firearms and ammunition that come under this category. Mostly rifles from the former USSR. Many of them are available for under $100. A mix of bolt action and semi-automatics are available. If anyone else is interested drop me a note. Maybe we can do a group purchase and later a group lesson on their safe use, and maintenance.

I'm looking forward to the trip to pick up your Listeroid Diesel power plant. If the timing is right I can come up to your place, pick you up, go to Canada for the engine and lesson on how to use it, come back to your place, help you unload and set it up, pick up my Todd wood fired cook stove in Potsdam and get home....it sounds like a busy weekend.

The rental house we have in Watertown still hasn't sold. Krista and I have pretty much decided to spend the next few months fixing it up so it looks really good and market it in the Spring. We'll be putting on a steel roof, redoing the bathroom, sheetrocking the second floor rooms, new supply plumbing, new floors in the kitchen, bathroom and living room, removing the rotting entryway addition and installing a small deck in its place. Phil has agreed to do between ten and fifteen hours a week on the place. I think that adding about $10,000 worth of improvments will gain us about $30,000 more in resale price from the low offers we've been tentativly been given. My kid workers had all of the old flooring in the kitchen and living room out (including moving appliances) in under an hour. That gave me some hope for the future work. I'm going to try to deliver the sheetrock to the place today and get some of the painting done next week.

Phil, maybe Shane and I are attending a Jefferson County Cooperative Extension workshop this Tuesday evening on home and farmstead production of cheese. It could be a future Woodhenge 'cottage industry'.

All for now. -Jim-

Monday, January 01, 2007

Our power system

I have been sending a large group of individuals e-mails answering their questions about Woodhenge. I have also been negligent about posting more frequeently on the Woodhenge site. A flash of the brilliantly obvious hit me the other day...I could be using the individual notes to post to the site to give you all an idea of the scope of projects we do here. The following is a description of most of the electrical power systems we use here

The electrical system can be broken down into several parts. The energy production systems are covered several ways: We have a Bergey XL1 wind turbine on a 105' tilt up tower (tower, turbine and control system cost $3200, this price is not what you are lead to believe if you call a home wind power dealer...they usually think grid intertie and $30,000 to $50,000), a Whisper 400 at Phil's place and an Air 403 at the common house (these are salvaged units that I rebuilt with students on 30' - 35' homemade towers).

Our house has 500 watts of photovoltaics, the common house has 30 watts and Phil's place has 50 watts. We have a 10' diameter concrete block building with a 5000 watt generator - just a gas generator from the local hardware/lumber yard. It is connected with a twist plug to our house and if you switch plugs to the common house. Phil is a bit further away and has his own recycled gas generator. All of the generators run through the inverters in each of the buildings - the inverters act as battery chargers when the generators are running. We hope to switch to a diesel generator in the generator building this summer...I got a Kubota 3 cylinder diesel engine on a two wheeled trailer and want to tune it up and attach a generator head (10Kw) and convert the unit to run on waste veggie oil or, at least biodiesel. The long range goal is to get a 'lister' type engine and go with technology that will last decades.

We have a battery bank that consists of 16 L15 type batteries (130# each and 6 volts each) they're tied together to form a 24 volt battery bank (4 strings of 24v). Each string has a 2 gigahertz pulser to prevent sulfation of the batteries. I hope to get 15 years out of our present set. The common house is connected to our house with an underground wire, but it has a switch to let it run off it's own small system. The common house has two sets of batteries- I bought one set of 6 deep cycle marine/rv batteries and the next day a friend dropped off 25+ deep cycle batteries (AGM Type!) that had been surplused at his job. Phil has 6 deep cycle 12v batteries from Sam's Club hooked in series for a 12volt system. THe common house has a 24v system to be compatable with ours.

Each house has an inverter. Ours is an Outback 3824 (3800 watts continuous power and 10,000 watt surge) it is a puresine type inverter (this means that it produces power with almost no harmonic distortion). The common house has our old Trace 3524 modified sine inverter. Both of these inverters have a built in charging circuit that will deliver between 70 and 80 amps of charge. Our big battery bank only takes 2 hours to fully charge when it gets to a 20% to 25% depth of discharge and we don't have wind or sunshine to charge. Phil's place works off of a cheap ($35 from Harbor Freight) 400 watt or so inverter and a NAPA battery charger. Phil's controls and monitors are all salvaged junk that I rewired...hey, it works!

I built a 6" pelton wheel type microhydro turbine with my students several years ago and it'll eventually go into the waterfall area we have about 700' from our house. It needs a shaft that connects it to a military 100amp vehicle alternator, a housing, the weir, and pipe and heavy enough wire to run to the generator shed without too much loss to get it up and contributing to our power network.

We have no wires that connect us with the road. We have cell phones, satellite tv, and a wireless phone thingy that hooks into the side of our laptop computer for internet work.

I'm estimating that when all of the people that live here are actually here we use up to 6 KWh of power a day. A sunny day or a windy day will just about replace what we use. Many times we have a surplus of power, especially after a series of windy days and I'll run a crock pot or bread maker to use up the surplus. If we're using a lot of lights or power tools or doing multiple loads of laundry or vacuuming and my batteries drop below 24.8 volts I'll throw the generator on for a few hours. It uses around a gallon of gas per hour. If all of the renewable stuff was gone we'd have to run the generator for around 2 hours every three or four days. As we start to develop more home based businesses here I anticipate we'll bulk up both our renewables and mechanical generating systems (i.e. the waste veggie gen sets or more PV panels or more wind turbines)

I teach workshops on how to build axial flux wind turbines from locally available materials and have several under construction now. One of these home made units will go to the area that we're building guest cabins near the water falls site. Our/my goal is to show people that is really isn't hard or complicated to make enough power for a home or group of homes...it's a matter of getting over the brainwashing that you've had since birth about power companies.

Happy Holidays!

Here's hoping the holiday season finds you all in good health and in a good mood. THe past few weeks have seen some progress on several fronts. I recently experimented with some unusual home canning. Hummis and home squeezed grapefruit juice. Both worked out! I'm sure we lost some enzymes and vitamins on the juice, but we bought three cases of grapefruit from our school's FFA and I've always wanted to try this out. We also got to spin out of our combs...about a gallon and a half of our own honey! Plus wax; candles will be the next experiment...

We have this week off from teaching and we're using it to finish the wiring and plumbing at the common house. I have two junction boxes to finish up to complete the circuits. There's A bit more to do on the drain and supply plumbing; about 4 more pvc fittings will complete the below floor part of the drain system. The supply lines are going smoothly, I'm experimenting with "PEX" flexible pipe and crimp on fittings. So far I like it a lot, we'll see after I pressurize things a bit.

Phil has begun the final steps for enclosing his driveway side room. He's been working on his crafted main door and side lites with his "Woodhenge Door Style".

Today we'll be spending a couple of hours on the plumbing and wiring and then we'll be having some some fun with our "ELBG's" (Evil Looking Black Guns). In reality they are cheap former soviet bloc military surplus rifles that we got at Herb Phillipsons's. They fire really cheap 7.62 x 39 mm ammo and can make a scrap toilet really hop around!

All for now. -Jim-