Blogging has been light today. No special reason. Mainly just that nothing appeals to me to be worth the effort to write something up about it.
So, this will be something of a general type post without a whole lot of anything in it.
One thing I meant to write about was the off-the-grid project. Actually, I have been doing little about that recently. It isn't because I have everything figured out.
One thing that I have been thinking about on that subject is the climate-control aspect. The main goal all along is to use as few resources as possible. The a/c I have uses too much electricity. Even the freezer uses more than I would like. ( The freezer could be used for the making of about 50 lbs of ice each night for cooling down the joint so I can sleep comfortably. ) Actually, the a/c could be used for short periods. The way I have things set up, it may only need to run for short periods, anyway.
The key thing I figured out is to keep the sun off your living space. The sun heats things up, so if you can keep it in the shade, it would help a lot. Trouble is, out west, there aren't many trees. In fact, there's nothing out there that will give you any decent shade at all.
This means a roof with an overhang. How much of an overhang? Looks like three feet could be enough, but to be sure, maybe a bit more than that. That would be on the south side. The north side could get by with three feet. Maybe the south side could use a screened in porch set up.
Other things that could help a bit would be a good swamp cooler, and a misting system. Those things I already have, but I don't know how well they will work out there. Early indications are that there is a lot of room for improvement. Better equipment may be necessary.
The downside of using those would be the water requirements. I was planning to recycle my water anyway, so this may be possible within such a system. Such thoughts have not been tried yet, but I have thought about them before.
The dehumidifier can recover that lost water, but at a high cost for electricity.
There may be other options, like the idea to use an air well.
Another idea I had would be to use a Stirling cooler. What is that? It is a Stirling engine run in reverse. Instead of producing energy, it uses energy, and produces coldness. This coldness can be used for condensing water vapor, thus allowing water to be recovered. In order to make the idea work, set up a wind turbine outside, and connect the Stirling engine to it, with the cold side of the Stirling engine on the inside of the building. The water vapor from the swamp cooler will be re-condensed and could be recycled, you see.
Besides all this, I have been thinking about what I would build out there. I have been around and around in circles on this thinking. Lately, I thought I would do my quonset idea again, but cover it up with a flat roof. The space between the roof and the quonset roof would be used for insulation. The entire structure would be less than seven feet tall on the outside. I could make it eight feet in order to make all the pieces ready to nail together without doing a lot of cutting with a saw.
The quonsets could be made in modular eight foot pieces that would connect together for a size of eight, sixteen, or a twenty four foot building, depending on how big I wanted it.
Actually, this post ended up with more stuff in it than I thought.
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