We built our first square foot garden last month! You can do a quick google search to find out more about square foot gardening.
Go to THIS LINK and check out the photos and try to build your own!
You can build them out of anything really, I've been looking for scrap plywood now and just cut it up instead of buying 1x6s again.
Today was cool! I decided to buy some 16-2 lamp cord to drop a light in my room that would run off my inverter. Luckily I work for Lowe's and got a great deal. 1000 feet of 16-2 lamp cord for 40 bucks! That's enough to wire every overhead light in my house.
To test it, I also bought a plastic overhead single bulb fixture and an outlet connector. I drilled the holes, ran the wire and wired it all up and so far it works fine. I'm only going to leave it on while I am actually at home until I can feel comfortable knowing it will not burn my house down. It is not grounded but neither are most lamps and I think the inverter would stop any craziness.
To test it, I also bought a plastic overhead single bulb fixture and an outlet connector. I drilled the holes, ran the wire and wired it all up and so far it works fine. I'm only going to leave it on while I am actually at home until I can feel comfortable knowing it will not burn my house down. It is not grounded but neither are most lamps and I think the inverter would stop any craziness.
I've been cleaning my own rainwater with a PUR filter for a few weeks now and I have to say it's great fun. I made a couple mistakes real fast. First was I kept about ten gallons of water in a plastic tote in my utility room. Which may be fine for you, but something got into my tote and turned the water into a light brown color. Made me sick just looking at it. So I had to harvest more water from my 32g reserve outside. Awesome.
I've also learned that you need to filter the water before you boil it. It will make the process much easier. I have a Brita filter with a tap given to me so I simply placed the tap above the pot I'd boil it in so it will pour directly into it. I'd simply keep filling the Brita tank up with water and when my pot reached 4 gallons, I'd stop the flow of water and start boiling the pot.
Afterwards I pour the water into various plastic containers.
It's great tasting fluoride-free water.
I've also learned that you need to filter the water before you boil it. It will make the process much easier. I have a Brita filter with a tap given to me so I simply placed the tap above the pot I'd boil it in so it will pour directly into it. I'd simply keep filling the Brita tank up with water and when my pot reached 4 gallons, I'd stop the flow of water and start boiling the pot.
Afterwards I pour the water into various plastic containers.
It's great tasting fluoride-free water.
Hello readers,
I've created this blog and this youtube account to help other people interested in off-grid living, solar panels, and clean drinking water. I had a hard time when I started to investigate into this lifestyle distinguishing between real solid information from stupid bullshit. Anything you find on this blog or on youtube.com/lifeoffgrid is either something I've tried myself or something that has enough evidence to be feasible.
If you have any questions feel free to post a comment or email me directly at goingoffgrid@gmail.com. I will check my email every Sunday afternoon. If you have any suggestions or videos to share please contact me and I will gladly share it here.
I've created this blog and this youtube account to help other people interested in off-grid living, solar panels, and clean drinking water. I had a hard time when I started to investigate into this lifestyle distinguishing between real solid information from stupid bullshit. Anything you find on this blog or on youtube.com/lifeoffgrid is either something I've tried myself or something that has enough evidence to be feasible.
If you have any questions feel free to post a comment or email me directly at goingoffgrid@gmail.com. I will check my email every Sunday afternoon. If you have any suggestions or videos to share please contact me and I will gladly share it here.
This is a combination of 2 blogs from my myspace page.
Well, they finally arrived! 3 15 watt solar panels. I bought them from Harbor Freight you can see them here.
They are a little over a foot wide each and almost 36.5 inches tall. Took them outside this morning and leaned them up against a sawhorse and ran a few things off the DC car input like a CB radio and connected a little 12 volt motor to it. It was a cloudy day (and its winter) so I could only get about 15 watts out of all 3 panels. Everything ran fine and as far as I can tell the panels are in good working order. It was a very exciting time for the nerd inside me.
Soon (when I get paid) I will buy a deep cycle 12 volt battery from walmart and use the panels to charge that up and see how many lights I can run and for how long. Also I will buy a 400w power inverter from Lowe's ($45) so I can run some AC things like charging my cell phone, running a laptop, charging my 18v tool batteries. There also several camping DC powered things I want but most notable is the 12v stove top.
I can already tell it won't be long before I'm hooked on being self-sustaining and I'll have a crazy shack full of batteries!
This guy has the same set up I bought. Clicky
Below is also a video of a kit similar to mine:
Yesterday I bought a very large deep cycle marine battery from walmart and it came fully charged. So I bought a 400 watt power inverter and proceeded to hook up various things and you know that it wasn't long until I was playing mario kart with both the wii and television plugged into my battery. I did that for about an hour then I went out for a while and came back and fell asleep with the tv plugged into the battery and that was on for about 6 hours until I woke up. I was surprised the battery lasted that long on my big ass old tv.
Later dad came by and helped me install the solar panels on the roof. I made a brace for them out of scrap wood and it looks like shit, but will do the job. The battery was down to 11.5 volts and in the small amount of sun we had today has brought the battery back up to 12.1 which is almost topped off. Not to shabby for some harbor freight and walmart shit.
Tonight I'm going to plug my pc, monitor and speakers into my battery and see if I can't get a couple hours usage out of it for testing puproses.
*update* I did run my crt monitor and pc off the battery for about an hour, but because of the recent overcast I wanted to be sure I had enough battery life for emergency usage.
Well, they finally arrived! 3 15 watt solar panels. I bought them from Harbor Freight you can see them here.
They are a little over a foot wide each and almost 36.5 inches tall. Took them outside this morning and leaned them up against a sawhorse and ran a few things off the DC car input like a CB radio and connected a little 12 volt motor to it. It was a cloudy day (and its winter) so I could only get about 15 watts out of all 3 panels. Everything ran fine and as far as I can tell the panels are in good working order. It was a very exciting time for the nerd inside me.
Soon (when I get paid) I will buy a deep cycle 12 volt battery from walmart and use the panels to charge that up and see how many lights I can run and for how long. Also I will buy a 400w power inverter from Lowe's ($45) so I can run some AC things like charging my cell phone, running a laptop, charging my 18v tool batteries. There also several camping DC powered things I want but most notable is the 12v stove top.
I can already tell it won't be long before I'm hooked on being self-sustaining and I'll have a crazy shack full of batteries!
This guy has the same set up I bought. Clicky
Below is also a video of a kit similar to mine:
Yesterday I bought a very large deep cycle marine battery from walmart and it came fully charged. So I bought a 400 watt power inverter and proceeded to hook up various things and you know that it wasn't long until I was playing mario kart with both the wii and television plugged into my battery. I did that for about an hour then I went out for a while and came back and fell asleep with the tv plugged into the battery and that was on for about 6 hours until I woke up. I was surprised the battery lasted that long on my big ass old tv.
Later dad came by and helped me install the solar panels on the roof. I made a brace for them out of scrap wood and it looks like shit, but will do the job. The battery was down to 11.5 volts and in the small amount of sun we had today has brought the battery back up to 12.1 which is almost topped off. Not to shabby for some harbor freight and walmart shit.
Tonight I'm going to plug my pc, monitor and speakers into my battery and see if I can't get a couple hours usage out of it for testing puproses.
*update* I did run my crt monitor and pc off the battery for about an hour, but because of the recent overcast I wanted to be sure I had enough battery life for emergency usage.
This is combination of two blogs from my myspace page.
Lately the idea of harvesting my own rain water has sounded better and better. The first, and most important reason is cleanliness. The shit added to our tap water is disgusting. Fluoride, arsenic, mercury, lead and that's just the beginning! It's weird how everyone will tell us that if we ingest tooth paste we will get sick and if we swallow mercury we will die and then say we need to drink 10 glasses of tap water everyday. I'm not going to ramble on about how bad these chemicals are for you in your blood stream. I'm quite sure you are capable of using google for it's intended purpose.
The second reason for clean water is disaster. Any type of disaster you can think of will certainly mean our city tap water resource will be empty not long after, if not immediately. Being able to harvest your own drinking water to survive even a short period of time is a good idea. The human can only last 72 hours without fresh water. Clean water is more important than shelter!
With all that said, my quest for clean water began.
Of course how to capture the water was my first question. There are couple of great videos on youtube.com that have people showing off their set-ups. Most people have the style I want and I'll post a couple below that are my blueprint for water harvesting.
Cool rainwater video
Between those two styles I decided on how to build my own system customized to my house, my need and availability. This is were I am at in the design phase. My house does not have gutters (because it is on a hill) so I will buy one 10ft vinyl gutter from Lowe's ($5) place it on the back side of my roof and place a plastic 55 gallon food grade barrel under it. (which I have not bought yet) and that's about it. Nothing too fancy, just keeping it simple at first until I find out if it works.
There is another part after you collect the water, how do you clean it? There are bacteria and other harmful things in the air and it can collect more sitting for weeks. I did a lot of research in reverse osmosis and found that it is the best possible way to remove things like fluoride from your tap water but it is overkill for your rain water. The best way to clean rain water is to boil it and place it through a filter. This will remove the bacteria and the slightly increased salt and acid levels in your water. You could use the standard Brita or PUR filters but they are expensive and disposable. I wanted something more permanent and reliable. After a long time of researching and learning I found what I think is the best solution to this problem, The Berkey Filter. Watch the video below to learn more.
It looks very very easy to assemble, clean, and use regularly. I found more options, bigger, smaller, travel size and fluoride filters at Berkey water filter store
And that's where I am at in my quest for real clean drinking water. Leave comments if you want to help or more info!
One Week Later.....
In anticipation of the coming rain storms, I started to move a little faster to make my rain water harvesting set up.
I bought a 32 gallon plastic trash can with a lid from Lowe's for 15 dollars. My dad gave me some of his left over aluminum rain gutters and 6ft downspout. I mounted the gutter and downspout to the southern side of my roof and pointed the downspout towards the plastic can. I cut a large rectangle in the lid with a jigsaw and stapled window screen over the lid. It's not going to win any beauty contests but it works swimmingly.
Within a few hours it was full and I took about 15 gallons out and poured it into a container in the utility room. I also bought a 22 dollar 21 quart pot from Wal-mart. I brought the water to a rolling boil for about 10 minutes and let it sit for an hour. I poured it through my PuR filter and poured my new clean water into a plastic tap container that sits in my fridge. This would be much simpler with a berky filter!
The water is great and it's even better knowing it doesn't have any "additives" that tap water has.
Lately the idea of harvesting my own rain water has sounded better and better. The first, and most important reason is cleanliness. The shit added to our tap water is disgusting. Fluoride, arsenic, mercury, lead and that's just the beginning! It's weird how everyone will tell us that if we ingest tooth paste we will get sick and if we swallow mercury we will die and then say we need to drink 10 glasses of tap water everyday. I'm not going to ramble on about how bad these chemicals are for you in your blood stream. I'm quite sure you are capable of using google for it's intended purpose.
The second reason for clean water is disaster. Any type of disaster you can think of will certainly mean our city tap water resource will be empty not long after, if not immediately. Being able to harvest your own drinking water to survive even a short period of time is a good idea. The human can only last 72 hours without fresh water. Clean water is more important than shelter!
With all that said, my quest for clean water began.
Of course how to capture the water was my first question. There are couple of great videos on youtube.com that have people showing off their set-ups. Most people have the style I want and I'll post a couple below that are my blueprint for water harvesting.
Cool rainwater video
Between those two styles I decided on how to build my own system customized to my house, my need and availability. This is were I am at in the design phase. My house does not have gutters (because it is on a hill) so I will buy one 10ft vinyl gutter from Lowe's ($5) place it on the back side of my roof and place a plastic 55 gallon food grade barrel under it. (which I have not bought yet) and that's about it. Nothing too fancy, just keeping it simple at first until I find out if it works.
There is another part after you collect the water, how do you clean it? There are bacteria and other harmful things in the air and it can collect more sitting for weeks. I did a lot of research in reverse osmosis and found that it is the best possible way to remove things like fluoride from your tap water but it is overkill for your rain water. The best way to clean rain water is to boil it and place it through a filter. This will remove the bacteria and the slightly increased salt and acid levels in your water. You could use the standard Brita or PUR filters but they are expensive and disposable. I wanted something more permanent and reliable. After a long time of researching and learning I found what I think is the best solution to this problem, The Berkey Filter. Watch the video below to learn more.
It looks very very easy to assemble, clean, and use regularly. I found more options, bigger, smaller, travel size and fluoride filters at Berkey water filter store
And that's where I am at in my quest for real clean drinking water. Leave comments if you want to help or more info!
One Week Later.....
In anticipation of the coming rain storms, I started to move a little faster to make my rain water harvesting set up.
I bought a 32 gallon plastic trash can with a lid from Lowe's for 15 dollars. My dad gave me some of his left over aluminum rain gutters and 6ft downspout. I mounted the gutter and downspout to the southern side of my roof and pointed the downspout towards the plastic can. I cut a large rectangle in the lid with a jigsaw and stapled window screen over the lid. It's not going to win any beauty contests but it works swimmingly.
Within a few hours it was full and I took about 15 gallons out and poured it into a container in the utility room. I also bought a 22 dollar 21 quart pot from Wal-mart. I brought the water to a rolling boil for about 10 minutes and let it sit for an hour. I poured it through my PuR filter and poured my new clean water into a plastic tap container that sits in my fridge. This would be much simpler with a berky filter!
The water is great and it's even better knowing it doesn't have any "additives" that tap water has.