Can you believe it has been over a year since we started our blog? Neither can we. I guess its a little late for an anniversary celebration (a month late) and if this was a personal relationship we would have been kicked out of the dog house and onto the street by now, but we decided to update our goals for the blog anyways.
When we originally started the blog the main goal was to begin reducing our living expenses so that we didn’t have to rely on a job (trade activity or time for money) as much. We wanted to diversify the source of our main ingredients for subsistence in life; food, water and energy. This would help us in times of emergency so that we did not rely on a single source for any one item. In the process, we have learned a lot about how to do things ourselves. In fact, we have learned that we now hate buying anything because it is often so easy to make a substitute for ourselves. Not to mention many of the things that can be purchased are horrible for the continued development of our planet. We would really like to keep the planet healthy…mostly cause we live on it and want to continue to do so; we’ve grown attached.
Our original goals for the blog were to work through Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. First, to secure the basic needs and then start moving up the ladder to other less important ones. We have found that one can spend a lot of time on securing food and water! So far we have demonstrated a prototype system to obtain all the water we can handle in our climate. The system is by no means finalized and we are continuing development work on it to make it better, cheaper, stronger, faster, harder…sorry, dropped into Daft Punk mode.
Some of the projects that we had originally hoped to cover during the course of the blog were:
- Waste water treatment
- Rainwater collection
- Aeroponic food growing
- Vertical axis wind turbine
- Bidet
- Gray water toilet
- Heat reclamation of sinks and shower
- Cloth grocery bag design
- Homemade soap & how to get homemade lye
- On demand hot water heater
We still think that many of these projects are worth pursueing, and have added a few….like we needed more work 
- Waste water treatment
- Rainwater collection & treatment (this system is completed though still in development)
- Aerop0nic growing of food (demo system functioned sort of but still reworking massive kinks)
- Vertical axis wind turbine, or horizontal axis
- Gray water toilet
- Raising tilapia fish for food
- Homemade soap
- On demand hot water heater
- Gardening
- Raising chickens for food and eggs
- Edible landscaping around the house
You might have noticed that a lot of these are food related. That is because food is almost as important as water in terms of living a sustainable life. Why would you pay someone to ship food to your area, when you can just grow it in your back yard instead? We think we are going to be able to harvest a great deal of food this year with as many garden beds as we have. This also leads into preserving the food, because it will be useless of it is not saved. So we plan on learning to can, dry or freeze food to preserve it so that it may be used once harvest season is past.
We have also added two meat producing things to the list. The first is a tilapia fish tank. We plan on having a set up to raise tilapia fish for food purposes. We also want to raise some meat chickens and laying hens to produce food of high protein content. These are projects currently either underway or in development.
The main point here is that we are continuing on with our original goal but realizing that food and water could take up a lifetime of research. We are putting in more time on this until we get things better under control and we will stop when our food budget is cut in half from its current level. This means that we will be keeping track of our monthly or quarterly outlay of cash for food and will stop new food related research when that budget is half of what it is now. Currently our average monthly outlay–average over five months from September to December–is $238. We are making most of our own food from scratch now–including bread and crackers–and only go out to eat maybe once every couple of months. So, once we reach an average outlay of around $120 we will move on to the less food and water related research projects we have going.
As to the methodology we are using to become more sustainable, we still think tooling up is the way to go. There has been no real change in this respect, only a realization that we lack certain fundamental tools that would make production of certain items trivially easy. Therefore, throughout our research we will make occasional forays into the production of our own tools.
You will also see some changes in how we are posting about certain projects. We want to get more into having a wiki-style project documentation so we will be installing some sort of wiki shortly so that we can keep project documentation up to date without much hassle or constant re-write. This means that our posts will focus more on broad system overviews and narratives about the troubles and successes we had during the build. For each build that gets a post here, we will include a link to the blog where we keep the actual build documentation and Bill of Materials. Hopefully this makes things easier.
We are going to stop here cause this post is getting rather long. We’ll post again soon with more updates about what’s going on around our new house. Thank you to the people who have been congratulating us on the new house!
Stay safe and sustainable.
P&S
