New Home

Winter

In one of my earlier blogs I mentioned that in the mid seventies I just about wore out the rental video called the Wilderness Family and its sequels. It was a story about a family of four that moved to a remote place in Colorado, built a log cabin and had a lot of wilderness adventures.

Right around the same time I checked into the Homestead Act at the library and found out it had just ended in 1976. It took me another thirty four years to fulfill that dream. In 2010, Laurie and I moved to the mountains of Eastern Washington State and created our little modern homestead.

We don’t live completely off the land and we don’t have a log cabin. We do however live off grid, grow and harvest most of our own food, and live a fairly independent lifestyle. We are both in our late fifties.

Canning on a wood fired stove.

Canned Goods

I just met a couple online who live just a few miles from us and they started their adventure in their mid sixties. We met another couple who are doing the same thing near here in their early thirties with three small children. I’m sure we all have our different circumstances that dictate when and how we do things.

I am contacted on a regular basis by people who want to do what we have done. They all seem to have a timeline based on their own life experiences and circumstances. We met Maya through our Off Grid Works website who worked on a cruise ship for many years until she had enough money saved up to start her own homestead in South Africa all by herself! We’ve met people from Canada, the East coast, the Missouri Ozarks and everywhere in between. They come in all ages, genders and backgrounds. All have a common dream of someday wanting to homestead.

Our First Garden

Chickens!

It has been painful at times to listen to the stories of people who want to homestead but have been stopped by personal tragedies – divorce, injuries, death of a partner. Our next door property owners started their lifestyle change here but had to stop due to a tragic accident their son had and now they are tasked with taking care of him for the rest of his life.

Anyone who lives this lifestyle knows it isn’t for everyone but if you have a desire to homestead I would urge you to re-examine all of the reasons that are keeping you from making your move. I had reasons for thirty four years. Looking back I can’t honestly say that it had to be the way it was. Sometimes you just have to re-prioritize and a healthy, productive, and meaningful lifestyle should always be at the top of your list. So when is it time to homestead? The answer is easy – as soon as possible.

Ed and Laurie Essex live off grid in the Okanogan Highlands of Washington State where they operate their website goodideasforlife.com  and offgridworks.com.

ED:

Laurie and I don’t mind admitting we were inexperienced in our canning knowledge and at the same time striving to become more self sustainable in any way we could so we hope this blog will be informative to all of you out there just like us – learning to be more sustainable and trying to provide our families with homegrown safe and quality food items for years to come.

LAURIE: My experience with canning was non-existent until we decided that we were going to be moving from our condo to the wilds of Eastern Washington and the Okanogan Highlands. Our nearest neighbors are about 3 miles away and the closest town is 20 miles, and being as self sufficient as possible is the name of the game out here. My Mother-In-Law was my biggest and best help getting me started with learning how to can. She grew up growing and raising all their own food and continued right up until a few years ago. I had read several books and watched some videos, but until you actually get in there and do it you really have no idea what is involved.

So, I started learning to can while we were still living in the condo. That was a great time to start to learn. If things failed and didn’t work out like they were supposed to I could still walk 2 blocks to the grocery store and get what I needed for dinners. That’s not the case here. We’re lucky if we get off the mountain once a week now.

Even doing the small amount of canning we were doing while still living in town I hated throwing away the lids. So I got on line to look up what other people were doing with their used lids. You can only make so many Christmas decorations and shiny scary things to hang in trees to scare off the birds (although they didn’t seem to work for my birds). Ed had seen an ad in the MEN for the reusable lids and we went ahead and got some to try.  My first batch of canned green beans with the reusable lids did fine, but I had 3 or 4 jars that didn’t seal properly, so I went back and read the instructions, followed the instructions closely on my second batch of beans and haven’t had any trouble with the lids since. The method you use to can is essentially the same as with the metal lids, with just a little tweak. It has to do with allowing the jars to vent while they are being cooked and then tightening the lid while they cool down.  It’s nothing more than that.  They come in widemouth and regular sizes and you can purchase the rubber rings separately if you should lose or damage them. So far we have not needed to replace the rubber rings. The ones we are using have held up for 3 seasons of canning, and a lot of those lids and rings have been used 2 and 3 times in the season.

With all the news these days about additives and unnecessary chemicals used in growing and processing foods, (not to mention all the GMO foods that are the norm for foods in the grocery stores) canning and freezing food we have grown ourselves is what we can do to make our lives a little safer and healthier.  The reusable lids are food grade and BPA free and can be used with the hot water bath or pressure canning methods.

We can a lot of fish we get from the lakes nearby, much of our garden produce, and we buy fruit from the local organic orchards and can that. We raised a batch of broiler chickens and canned most of the meat. We did freeze some of them, but freezer space is limited and canning is a great way to process your meat. Canned meat will store longer than frozen meat. This next season I think we will tackle canning more meat so that our freezer doesn’t get so full.

ED: Over all we have found these lids to be as advertised and anytime you can reuse something over and over again, it just has to be a good idea.

Ed and Laurie Essex live off grid in the Okanogan Highlands of Washington State where they operate their website goodideasforlife.com  and offgridworks.com.

We average 8-10 hours per day seven days a week which leaves very little time for fun so you might imagine how excited we were when friends (Will and Gail) called and said they would like to come to our neck of the woods and bring their snowmobiles and go ice fishing! Ice fishing and snowmobiling were both something Laurie and I had never done before.

Five days before the “Big Day” I went to the Doctor for a routine checkup. That’s the only place I went. The next day I became violently ill. A few days later Laurie caught it as well. It turned out to be the Norovirus. That was by far the worst flu I ever had and worse yet, it was going to ruin our big day on the lake. Because we were still not feeling well, they had to go without us.

A month later our friends decided to try it again. Wouldn’t you know it? The night before the “Big Day” we had a storm and a lot of new snow. We were snowed in!
I got up at 5:00 and was out the door at first light to plow the road so we could get out of there and go have some fun. The plowing went well and we were down the mountain at 10:00 AM and headed for the lake. Finally!

We met our friendly tourist guides at the lakes resort. There was some kind of Snowmobile Poker Run that day and the place was jammed with snowmobiles and riders. They must have wondered who I was. I’ll bet I was the only one there who had a snowmobile suit from Montgomery Wards from 1985. I had purchased it to ride my new 4 wheeler in the winter way back then. Here I was 28 years later wearing it again and actually climbing onto the back of a snowmobile!

My friend Will took me out onto the lake to go scout for existing holes. We only had a hand auger to drill holes with. I got up to 40 miles per hour and that was fast enough for the first time. After finding a few holes we headed back to pick up the ladies and our gear.

We loaded fishing gear, a hand auger, and chairs for the four of us. Most of it was carried by hand by whoever was in the back riding double. Out on the ice we went and headed down the lake.
When we got to our spot, Will and I started auguring holes. The ice was 16” thick. It took about 8 minutes per hole except I used a couple of old holes and re-drilled them a little faster.

We baited our hooks and sat down to wait………………and wait………………and wait. Not much biting at first.  I finally caught the first fish after an hour or so. A 14” rainbow trout. I then caught a Kokanee trout (landlocked Sockeye salmon) but that was it.

We had a really nice visit with friends we hadn’t seen for a few months. The weather was beautiful and about 3:00 pm the fish attack began. We had three on at the same time! They were all Kokanee and ran about 12’ long. Beautiful thick bright fish. I was so busy baiting Laurie’s hook and taking care of her fish I finally pulled my line out of the water. It was fast and furious for over an hour. It never did end but we just had to get started for home because the horses and chickens needed to be fed and it’s best to go up our road in the daylight this time of year. We had caught 14 fish between the four of us.

We packed everything up and headed back to the resort. Once everything was put away we went inside the restaurant and treated ourselves to a rare meal out – Prime Rib Dip Sandwiches and an ice cold beer. The grill for the prime rib was located just outside the entrance door in the compacted snow. Inside the fireplace was going full bore with 3’ long logs. Our table looked out over the ice covered lake and the steep forested slopes beyond.

We finally headed back up the hill at dusk to our little homestead where we were greeted by the horses, chickens, dog and two cats. They were all very happy to see us.
After unloading our gear and taking care of the animals I built a fire in the masonry heater.  It wasn’t long before we had our own nice warm fire to enjoy and to help us reflect on what a wonderful time we had that day and how much we appreciated our friends for sharing their knowledge and time with us.

Ed and Laurie Essex live off grid in the Okanogan Highlands of Washington State where they operate their website goodideasforlife.com  and offgridworks.com.

We got these chickens fully grown a couple of years ago. Not being experienced we weren’t really sure what to expect. Our chickens are free range chickens. That means no one owns the property they graze on and whatever they find they get to keep for free. Horse pooh, dog pooh, crickets, and many other disgusting things.

Our chickens also have feathers so I figured we were good as far as winter goes. One of our friends told us they would be able to survive clear down to zero degrees. I was a little concerned because when I was a kid we had a Bantam Rooster called Popeye and one morning we woke up and ‘Ol Popeye was frozen solid in time never to thaw out again in our presence. We were told he was old and that’s why he froze. My sister and I never bought that one. Our parents were old and they never froze.

We live in the mountains at 4200’ and it does get pretty cold here but we also live off grid. That means no forced air furnace and hot water heater for the chicken coop. These guys were just going to have to tough it out. That’s the way I was raised and it worked for me and my sister, well it worked for me. Our parents would always say things like “just tough it out” and “quit whining” and we seemed to get through the winters okay with good parenting skills like that.

I did put insulation in the chicken coop and cover all the holes. We even had a freeze proof faucet nearby so we could get fresh water every day. Laurie made me get some sawdust for the coop floor. I guess I had to “cave” on something.

Fall came and I thought we were as ready as we were going to be for winter and right then all of the stupid chickens lost their stupid feathers when the stupid temperature got down to freezing at night. Well, how smart was that? All my life I had been told how “Mother Nature always gets it right”. Well apparently Mother Nature never had to live off grid. I just knew we were going to have to buy new chickens in the spring – ever y year.

Well it got down to minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit that winter for a couple of days. Our chickens really sucked it up. We were proud of them. The rooster had frostbite on his comb but he never really complained. I guess it’s easier to take care of now, kind of like being bald, and the hens seem to be attracted to him okay. Other than that they didn’t seem to be affected much.

The one thing I noticed that first year is that they never came out of the coop. I guess they didn’t have to. Laurie took them hot meals and warm water every day. Cooked rice, cooked oatmeal, and other things like that. I guess they would have to wait for summer for the disgusting things they like to eat.

We have a new generation of chickens who have grown up here and seem to be a little more used to the winters than the original gang. They still stupidly lose their feathers in the late fall but on a nice day they will venture out of the coop. I go out and shovel trails in the snow that lead to other areas I shovel and they do go out and scratch.

It’s hard getting used to snow. One hen shakes each foot after lifting her foot to take a step. She’s got it down though and does manage to go forward. It’s like a cadence – lift, shake, and step. Lift, shake, and step. We’ve also found that they can get bogged down in powder snow.  We’ve had to rescue more than one stranded in a snow drift. They act like a beached whale. Scientists are puzzled by the strange behavior.

Our original batch of chickens never left the coop. Our newer “evolved” chickens do. It wouldn’t surprise me to see their feet eventually develop webs like tiny snow shoes and their feathers turn white in the winter. I wonder if the government will give us a grant?

Ed and Laurie Essex live off grid in the Okanogan Highlands of Washington State where they operate their website goodideasforlife.com  and offgridworks.com.

Many people have written us asking how the EzGro experiment turned out and also for more detail. We are pleased to say it has been a success. I’m not sure the creator of this hydroponic unit ever intended it to be used the way we have but I know he would be happy with the results.

EzGro Garden – This is a brand new experiment for us and it is going very well. It is a vertical hydroponic garden. It doesn’t take up very much space (14” x 14”), it uses less than 1 Amp of power for 18 minutes per day and is easy to use and takes very little time to operate.

It comes with everything you need including stackable pots for anywhere from 20 – 80 different plants depending on what type they are.
Once you set it up you fill the pots with the media (made from ground coconut husk) provided.
Next you mix the nutrition supplements provided with water and pour them into the base (reservoir). Add the pump to the water and program your timer. We’ve set our timer to pump the nutritionally supplemented water every hour for two minutes from 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM. Your timer programming may be different depending on what you plant.
The last step is to plant your seeds in the pots. We would recommend just one plant per pot to start out with.
We add water to the reservoir every two weeks and the nutrients every four weeks. You can grow plants even faster by cutting those times in half and a few other tricks users have come up with this past year. Use the Contact form from one of our websites for more information.

Ours plants didn’t start out too well but we aren’t using grow lights. We just set it in front of a window during the coldest and darkest time of the year – December and January. During that time period we went almost two months without sun. Once the sun started showing itself again these plants just took off. As long as you have good light you don’t need growing lights!
You plant a seed for whatever you want and they usually come up in just one or two days! We are still in the process of experimentation but what we have done so far has worked very well. Right now we are growing lettuce, cucumbers, and spinach. Why spinach – I don’t know. We have tons of it in the cold frame! We must have a lot of seed.  Anyway, as soon as we eat this crop we are going to plant something different.  Strawberries are popular with this product and so are flowers.

We have been posting our progress on our Facebook page. Several Facebook friends have been using these gardens for a while and they just love them. Some have them inside like us, some outside on the patio or deck and some on the covered back porch. They seem to be very versatile.

These units don’t fall into the “self sufficient” category. Only our garden and insulated cold frames do that. They require electricity and the routine purchase of special nutrients to be added to the water. That being said however, the amount of power required to run these is about the same amount as our laptop – for 18 minutes per day and the nutrients should last a full year.

The bottom line is that they allow you to grow your own fresh food, even during winter including the harsher and colder climates like we have. They allow you to grow food no matter how busy you are and no matter where you live, even a condo or apartment and those are all good reasons to share our success with you.

Ed and Laurie Essex live off grid in the Okanogan Highlands of Washington State where they operate their website goodideasforlife.com and offgridworks.com .

Whenever you do a home project you have to purchase materials. You always order as close to the perfect amount as you can but invariably there is a little bit left over. Maybe you only needed ½ a sheet of plywood but had to order a full sheet. What do you do with the left over sheet? You put it in your boneyard. Next time you need a small piece of plywood you don’t have to go to the store, you go to your boneyard.

I wasn’t always a big fan of the boneyard. In our construction business we did a lot of jobs every year and some of our people had a tendency to collect a lot of left over material. When a job was done you had to pay someone to sort through the left over materials – some to go back for a partial refund, some went to the dump, and the rest came back to our boneyard. We had to pay for the sorting and hauling and stacking in our yard. Then later we would have to pay someone to go out there and sort through a pile of lumber to get exactly what they needed and then stack it all back up again because what you needed was always on the bottom of the pile.

Some places like a refinery can afford to order all kinds of miscellaneous pipe and fittings and store them in their boneyard for future small projects and/or emergency repairs. Most of us don’t have that luxury to spend that kind of money and just have it sit there.

We didn’t have a boneyard while living in a condo. It just wouldn’t have been practical in a community like that. Well we have one now. We have an area set aside down by the barn with metal scraps and plastics, mostly left over fencing pieces.
We have another area where we store leftover dimensional lumber from the construction of our home.
In yet another covered area we have a stack of plywood pieces. We also have left over finished wood products in our attic storage room from the cabinet and wood trim installation.

Laurie has her own boneyard. She loves to sew and over the years has accumulated A LOT of material. It is stored in plastic stackable containers. She almost never has to go to the fabric store. She uses the left over material for all kinds of small projects and quilts.

I built a finished kindling storage rack for our wood burning kitchen stove out of left over matching cabinet pieces; the desk and shelves we use for our business and computer; the shelf and coat storage rack in our “mud room”; complete storage racks in our storage room; shelving in our garage; chicken nest boxes and roosting racks, and numerous other small projects in both the house and barn, all without going to the local department store.

We cut the steel stake end off of a broken plastic temporary fence post and use it for staking rows in the garden. We’ve saved and reused both plastic and metal fence wire for splices when needed. Broken tools and handles get recycled one way or another. We have a huge stash of 5 gallon plastic buckets in our boneyard left over from the construction of our home. Mostly paint buckets. You can never have enough 5 gallon buckets. We have plastic pipe of all kinds left over as well. We have been using it for all kinds of things from repairs to temporary piping.

It is 23 miles one way to get to the nearest hardware store from here. The cost is currently $11.00 just for fuel to make that trip. By having a boneyard we have probably saved over 30 trips to the store the past few years. Not only did we save on fuel but we also saved on the materials! Now if I could just figure out how to get paid to sort through the pile………………

Ed and Laurie Essex live off grid in the Okanogan Highlands of Washington State where they operate their website goodideasforlife.com  and offgridworks.com.

I’ve mentioned this appliance in other articles and shown a couple of pictures but the more use we get out of it the more I become enamored with it and it’s time we put this appliance on the “highly recommended” list of low energy desirable appliances. I’m talking about our custom built wood burning masonry kitchen stove.

At the time Laurie and I were making our move from city to country life I owned a commercial masonry construction company. In talking to a product salesman one day (a former mason himself) he told me I should check into Masonry Heaters as a heat source for our new home. I had heard of them before but didn’t really know anything about them.

I read everything I could about the heaters and in that discovery process I noticed that some of the custom designed ones had kitchen stoves and ovens attached to them. That is what this article is about, our wood burning kitchen stove.

Finished kitchen stove w 42″ cast iron cooking top and oven

We use our stove for cooking, canning, and heating our home. This stove was always intended as an alternative stove to our primary cooking source, the propane stove and oven.
Who knew at the time we built what the price of propane would be in a few years? It bounces up and down with the price of oil and I didn’t like the idea of being stuck and at the mercy of the big oil and propane companies so we decided to have a backup stove. I’ve never regretted that decision since.

When we aren’t using the stove its 42” cast iron cook top serves nicely as counter space. It sits right next to our propane stove. It has two top round plates that are designed to distribute the heat evenly in the entire round space but the whole top is obviously heated as well.

The wood burner is in the upper left corner with an ash cleanout directly underneath. You can burn any kind of wood from kindling size up to about 3” round. To the right of the burner is the 10” oven. We have cooked bread, roasted whole chicken, and even a few pies in the oven. The only trick we had to learn was to rotate the food dish occasionally in order to get it to cook evenly. Even with the masonry mass heated up from a long term fire before baking it is best in this design to rotate the oven dish.

Starting from zero in the morning you can have bacon frying in about 10 minutes and coffee boiling in twenty minutes.

I’ve got a 6” fresh air PVC pipe that runs from outside the house, under the slab and up next to the firebox. That air is then taken out through the adjoining Masonry Heater mass via an air chamber built into it and then on up and out through a standard double wall stainless steel pipe and vented through the roof just like a wood stove.

We use this stove in the spring and fall (when the temperatures are only mildly cold) to heat the house because we don’t really need a lot of heat at that time of year. We also use it a few times during the winter to supplement or “add to” our masonry heater when the temperatures are nearing zero degrees Fahrenheit and our masonry heater struggles to keep up. We heat a little over 1400 square feet. It only takes two small armfuls of wood per day to heat the house or supplement the other Heater. Whenever that happens we automatically use it to cook with. In the fall when it gets cool it comes in handy to do pressure canning and heat the house and cook dinner all the same day!

The one drawback to this heater is that here in the mountains we have inversions frequently the year ‘round. If the temperature is over 40 degrees and we have an inversion this stove won’t draw. The inversion shoves all the smoke right back down the chimney and into the house. We’ve tried everything. The reason is that in this design the air flow is “indirect”. It goes by the fire and “pulls it up the chimney. In our Masonry Heater design the fresh air comes in directly under the fire and pushes it out the chimney. That design works every time. The indirect design works most of the time. It is unfortunately a design issue and there is nothing we can do about it without tearing things apart.

Laurie and I both highly recommend wood burning kitchen stoves to anyone that can burn wood where they live. It doesn’t matter whether it is a custom built masonry stove like ours or a manufactured stove. These appliances are very diverse and will give you a real sense of self sufficiency. How many people in your neighborhood wake up to the smell of bacon and coffee in a nice warm house when the power goes out?

If you are considering a custom built stove, check out the Masonry Heater Association Of North America on line. There are only a few masons qualified to design and build custom stoves and you will need to do your homework. This is a great place to start and to get ideas.

Ed and Laurie Essex live off grid in the Okanogan Highlands of Washington State where they operate their website goodideasforlife.com  and offgridworks.com.

]]> http://offgridworks.com/2013/02/04/wood-burning-masonry-kitchen-stove/feed/ 2 http://offgridworks.com/2013/01/21/home-made-water-pump-for-deep-wells/ http://offgridworks.com/2013/01/21/home-made-water-pump-for-deep-wells/#comments Tue, 22 Jan 2013 00:38:15 +0000 Ed Essex http://offgridworks.com/?p=982 Continue reading →]]> In the course of blogging for MEN we have met many people from all over the world. Recently that included Darren and Linda Holliday from Missouri. Darren contacted me to ask my opinion on a water pumping invention he had created. He wanted to know if it might be useful for off grid use.

Not only would it be useful but it is something I could personally use in keeping with my philosophy of having a backup for everything here. We can pump water three different ways but all of them require electricity. There are hand pumps available but to really get the volume we would like from a 300’ deep well without electricity is something I have never seen before short of a windmill.

It seems Darren is an inventor by necessity. He first ran into a problem with his own deep well. When he moved into his new place he discovered that the previous Owner had used the wrong rock down inside the well to help keep the sand out of the water. Instead of pea gravel they had used larger rock which not only didn’t keep the sand out but created other problems as well.

The only way to fix that was to drill a new hole or re-drill his existing one – both options were going to cost thousands of dollars.
Darren took matters into his own hands and created a rock extractor of sorts that he used to clean out his existing well. His story in detail can be seen on his website wellwaterboy.com. It is one of incredible ingenuity and well worth reading. There are several homemade inventions in that story besides the rock extractor.

Now that Darren had cleared his well with his own invention saving tons of money he decided to put his ideas and efforts into a better human powered hand pump. Something that would produce more water volume than anything out there to date.

The following is their story in their own words:

Hand Pump Machine

During the 2012 summer drought, Darren and I wore ourselves out pumping with a hand pump from a cattle pond (a depth of about 7 feet) for our small trees and plants. At less than a pint per stroke, I had to pump 10 minutes to fill a 2-gallon watering can four times. I spent two hours pumping early every morning so I could be done before the temperature hit 100 degrees. Eventually, the pump broke and was replaced.

Again, even though industry professionals told him it was impossible, Darren designed and built a hand pump machine this summer that matches the lift of a 12’ diameter (blade length) windmill. No other hand pump exists that can do the same.

According to one popular pump’s specifications, it takes a 6-foot tall, 200-pound man stroking 60 times per minute to get the maximum water out of any of their pumps – about 4-1/2 to 5 gallons per minute
at a 30-foot static water level. At that rate, the man would be exhausted after 10 gallons. At a 78-foot static water level, their pump delivers only 4 gallons per minute.

I am 5’ 4”, in my 50s, and comfortably pumped almost 5 gallons per minute with Darren’s hand pump machine. The motion was smooth and nowhere near my maximum effort. Darren (in his 50s, height 5’
10”, weight 150 pounds) pumped 6 gallons per minute in just 18 strokes. With only human power and a mechanical advantage formula, this is already an accomplishment, but it gets even better.

(Eds note – These numbers are close to the ones my 240V electric/hydraulic pump puts out)

After making some adjustments, Darren pumped 5 gallons in 30 seconds in 10 strokes, although it took more effort. Twice as much water could be pumped per minute at a 40-foot static water level. Depending on the fitness of the operator (or with 2 operators), 20-30 gallons per minute are possible, enough for irrigating gardens or watering livestock.

The pump machine uses a 4” cylinder and 2” drop pipe with a 3/8” metal sucker rod. At a static level of 80 feet, the device overcomes about 1,100 pounds of force. The force would be less with a wood or
fiberglass sucker rod and rod guides like windmills use, but we thought those choices were too expensive for a prototype.

According to a representative of a company with 47 years’ experience in windmills and pumps, a windmill must be at least 12’ in diameter to operate the 4” pump cylinder Darren is using at 80 feet. And, the 12’ windmill maxes out at 86’ depth with a capacity of 830 gallons per hour (13.8 gallons per minute) in a 15 to 20 mile-per-hour wind. Using only human power, Darren’s prototype can exceed that capacity per minute. Darren pumped 5 gallons in 30 seconds. With another adjustment in the mechanical advantage, a young, fit man could pump 14 or more gallons per minute. Since the water table is dropping all over the world beyond the reach of common hand pumps, we believe Darren’s invention is a viable solution for not only Third World countries and people living off-grid.

It will also enable anyone to get water from deep wells without electricity or to pump volumes of water from shallow wells. In just a few minutes of pumping daily into an overhead storage tank, an entire household’s water needs can be met, enough for watering livestock and irrigating gardens.

Darren hasn’t been able to test it yet, but believes because of its proven ability so far, this hand pump machine can reach 500 feet. It has already surpassed common hand pumps in volumes of water and mechanical advantage.
Unless our well goes completely dry, we will never have to worry again about not having our own fresh drinking water.

This article with pictures, video, and more, can be seen at their website wellwaterboy.com. It should be noted that this is a new invention in the development stage and is not for sale.

Ed and Laurie – We hope you enjoyed this type of blog. We sure did. After all, the whole point of our blogs is to create and share an information database for the common good of all.

Ed and Laurie Essex live off grid in the Okanogan Highlands of Washington State where they operate their website goodideasforlife.com  and offgridworks.com.

Someone mentioned solar tubes to me a few years ago. I had “sort of” heard about them but never really looked in to what they were. Solar tubes are a cylindrical version of a skylight. They have a plastic dome on top which sits on the roof of your home. The dome top is attached to a round polished tube which extends through your attic and ends at your ceiling. At the ceiling end you will find a diffuser or round lens which diffuses the light. Put a different way, light starts at the exposed dome above the roof and travels through the polished cylinder and ends at the diffuser. I have borrowed a picture from Google (shown to the right) to illustrate.

To start my research I called a salesman in a local glass company and asked about them. He thought they were a great product but he told me they worked so well that in one home they had to remove the solar tubes they had installed because they let too much light in. Apparently the owners were unhappy because the tubes let too much light in from vehicle headlights at night and they couldn’t sleep.
Let me put that and your main question to rest right here. Solar tubes work and work well and no, I’m pretty sure they won’t let so much light in at night that you won’t be able to sleep. I have no idea where he came up with that story but I did mention he was a salesman right?

We have six of them. We have one room that doesn’t have a window. It is a small bathroom. Without the solar tube you would have to turn a light on every single time you used the room. With the solar tube we don’t have to turn a light on any more than in any other room with a window. You only need a light at night. That’s how much light they let in. We also put one right over the stove in the kitchen, one right at the appliances in the laundry room, one over the desk I am writing my blog from and one each in Eds “hobby” room and Laurie’s “crafts” room.

For the most part, each of these areas can be used any day, rain or shine, without turning the lights on. They are in fact a miniature skylight but with a difference. Skylights are notoriously prone to leaking. These solar tubes are installed just like a common roof vent. They take up very little space and put out much more light than their size because light is amplified in the polished tube and then spread out via the end diffuser. The tubes can also be insulated.

We live in snow country. The solar tubes are always the first roof objects to appear after a fresh snow. There is enough heat loss in them to melt the snow but that being said I don’t believe we lose very much heat from them.

Over all I am glad we had them installed. In our opinion they are a must have for any home but especially an off grid home. I would guess they cut our daytime light fixture usage by about 90%. Thanks to the solar tubes we don’t have any dark corners or hallways or rooms we can’t use without turning on the lights. We confidently recommend them to anyone.

Ed and Laurie Essex live off grid in the Okanogan Highlands of Washington State where they operate their website goodideasforlife.com  and offgridworks.com.