june 2020 kickstarter for wofati greenhouse

I’m in Paul!  You got my support and $ when you launch

Dc Stewart wrote:

sauron's shadow

Excellent! You brought it to life perfectly! And thanks for avoiding the Bombadil ending. The world breathed a sigh of relief when Peter Jackson decided to leave the whole "ring-a-dong-dillo" business out of the movies.

I'm compelled to protest!

Tolkien invented Tom Bombadil in memory of his children's Dutch doll, and wrote light-hearted children's poems about him, imagining him as a nature-spirit evocative of the English countryside.
https://infogalactic.com/info/Tom_Bombadil

Jackson missed the entire point of Tolkins' writings when he ditched Tom for an epic socialist action adventure extravaganza.
If you recall Tom was the only character completely unaffected by the RING OF POWER - quintessential power, corruption and devastating industrialisation.
This, I theorise,  is because Tom is the incorruptible male aspect of nature, - think Greenman - where as is wife is the feminine aspect of the same.
There would be no grand adventure to save Middle Earth without the resurrection and blessing of the Shirelings by The Greenman from Death personified as a Barrow Wright - literally Grave Rite http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Barrow-wights

Casting Paul as Sauron is bafflingly ill-conceived.  If anything he is the the Jolly Green Giant; the Greenman of our generation saving the merry-folk from the coming Long Cold Winter with carefree expressions such as "ring-a-dong-dillo."

Paul, I'm ALL in and will support it right now!

Looking through all this, the key point To emphasize for newbies is that the Kickstarter funds an experiment and the documentation of the experimental setup, ie your Kickstarter campaign is a grant proposal (sorry, science research is my day job). I can see you have the temperature sensors listed, 2 questions: Where are those being placed, and are there being done in a fashion that they can be replaced when they or their connecting wires fail? What are the data collection plans, and will there be data summaries? Or opportunity to somehow acquire the data?

I just mention this because, really, what all your work here is, is citizen science. It is important. The area you do research in is obviously interesting to a number of people. It certainly isn’t boring, and it is achievable science foe anyone to replicate.

Having the long-term data available in some fashion aids the people who build on your work. Simple images of graph paper with data points plotted by hand go a long way toward achieving this goal. Electronic measurement reduces the workload tremendously.  I personally would be interested enough in your experiment to contribute a couple of microcontroller boards set up to do data collection and could discuss some of the cloud platforms for data display.    

i would suggest at trench phase, go ahead and dig it down.  this way you could eliminate the earth berm stage & go straight to the oehler stage.

of course. im not there digging, so easy for me to say.  but, if you got to rent a back hoe, i wd get it done.

i did a similar trench design, passive solar greenhouse along the side of a brick house.  i used a platform to create a french drain of sorts.  mine was only 8 ft long.  dug by hand, took me a while.

Dan Sunderland wrote:Paul, I'm ALL in and will support it right now!

Gotta wait about 8 or 9 days!   We still have so much work to do to get it set up!

But!   If you go to the kickstarter page and click on "notify me on launch" (at the top of the page) you will get an email within seconds of the launch.   And if you back the kickstarter within the first couple of days, you will get the huge mountain of earlybird stuff!

Sue and Ana,

Your questions/points are excellent!   And we hope to address that sort of thing during the design sessions.  I hope you will both support the kickstarter at the level to be part of those design sessions.  

For now, we are scrambling to get the stuff together to pull off the kickstarter at all.  If you look at the kickstarter page right now you will see some notes on the page calling for us to add more stuff.  And there's still a lot of other work to be done.   So we are hyper focused on "make the kickstarter" and design details are being pushed into the space of "we'll explore that during the design sessions."

i say platform.  it was a 2x8 pt board laying on top on rock base, just so i wouldnt twist my ankles.

There was a question posted to the kickstarter page about a bigger greenhouse.   My response is that there is possible merit to that on a later build - using the lessons learned from this.  

im signed up !!  thanks.

For those that wanna talk about the design of the wofati greenhouse click here

Wondering how your drainage is. We have problems in winter with greywater because of so much more water added via rainfall and melting snow. Might some need more gravel for percolating down? What about hitting ground water with the pipe? And could you show the greywater processing in the video? Are you using cattails or plants to help? Is there input and output? Does the output freeze? Or does it return to the ground water? If groundwater is at 10 feet could you build a mound?
What about gassed and fumes. Will there be a vent that could be opened?
Just a few questions. I definitely support the project! There is a house in Norway or Sweden that has greywater recycling. Greenhouse over house. But very high tech. Passive off grid important. If necessary you might be able to run a passive fan to vent?
Our greenhouse is passive and doesn’t freeze hard enough to kill the lemons since we insulated the back. In Oregon not Montana!

Yes, I want to see you try. There are some bits about this build that I cannot envision working out, and I would love to see either: 1) I am totally wrong and this will come together successfully, or 2) the questionable bits fail but are solved in future iterations. Let's experiment, document, and share!

Where do we go to make a payment?

Katherine Myer wrote:Where do we go to make a payment?

Gotta wait about 8 or 9 days!   We still have so much work to do to get it set up!

But!   If you go to the kickstarter page and click on "notify me on launch" (at the top of the page) you will get an email within seconds of the launch.   And if you back the kickstarter within the first couple of days, you will get the huge mountain of earlybird stuff!

I'm just adding this comment to get updates of this thread.

paul wheaton wrote:...If you go to the kickstarter page and click on "notify me on launch" (at the top of the page) you will get an email within seconds of the launch.   And if you back the kickstarter within the first couple of days, you will get the huge mountain of earlybird stuff!

Thank you for posting that link.  I didn't know there was a draft Kickstarter page... and now I have no anxiety about missing the launch!

I want to build a wofati greenhouse on my property so bad now!  Can't wait to see this Kickstarter go forward!

I'm wondering if it would be good to to have a ABOUT section at the top above the story. Maybe something like

"This greenhouse has multiple super powers, granted by the earth, sun and water. It requires no electricity to maintain. Since it is underground, the earth moderates temperature so it's never too hot or cold for the plants. It is south-facing to capture sunlight. It clean grey water (water from your sinks--not toilets!) and rain water. It also heats the water with the power of sun, so the water helps maintain the temperature, too. With this greenhouse, you should never need to use power to heat or ventilate your plants. It's totally off-grid, and will allow tomatoes to be grown in winter, even in cold regions like Montana."

I'm afraid without that at the top, people might get lost in the long story about the greywater, and not really know why this greenhouse is so cool.

I like your summary Nicole!  Although I think tomatoes in the winter will be a serious stretch.  Picking ripe ones that ripened in early winter is one thing, getting them to fruit in January's low sunlight hours is another.

I added in some bios! I'm thinking we might need some better wording, especially for Jen and the Boots. Link to Kickstarter preview page

I'd love input on wording!

Mike Haasl wrote:I like your summary Nicole!  Although I think tomatoes in the winter will be a serious stretch.  Picking ripe ones that ripened in early winter is one thing, getting them to fruit in January's low sunlight hours is another.

I changed it to "survive." I'm thinking since Oehler was able to harvest tomatoes in December that this would allow the same. And, it might allow someone to start tomato seedlings in February, too, right? (I do not have much experience with tomato starting or greenhouse growing...and by "not much experience" I mean none!). February is winter as well...

Yes, definitely at least as good as Oehler.  I just didn't want to be telling people we'd have ripe tomatoes every week of the winter with this greenhouse.  

I would like to contribute but do not know how kickstarter works.
Also concerned about water table issues.

Douglas Campbell wrote:I would like to contribute but do not know how kickstarter works.

Kickstarter is "crowdfunding".  I'm about to offer a movie - if enough people support the project, then I will make a movie.  I will have 30 days to get the funding.

When the kickstarter begins, you can "pledge" support.  The more pledge the more you receive.  If there ends up being enough pledges total, your card is charged and the funds are sent to me.   You will get your product(s) after they are created.

The kickback page has been set up:

https://permies.com/t/kickback

Wondering if some modification of this would make any sense for those of us that live close to the equator?

Hi Paul, You've done it again!

Just viewed the draft video with my husband. This is the man that regularly points out 'our' (my) unfinished projects and gets a bit arsey.

He says we're in for $100 and we're building next year.

You play an indispensable role in fiendish cunning plans.

Thank you!

Lesley

Douglas Campbell wrote:
Also concerned about water table issues.

We're in the wet northeast and have water table issues too.  If we build this we'll be building at ground level and using fill to cover.  Fortunately we're planning to build several ponds.  So there's our source of dirt to cover.  If my understanding is correct, none of Paul's earth-sheltered buildings are "underground" in the sense of below grade level.  I believe they're all built into the slope using dirt from the excavation to cover.  So none of this should become a giant swimming pool.

I don't have a south-facing slope I can use, so if/when I build one it'll be on level ground.  I am super concerned about the hole flooding, though.  Maybe the greywater system will address that?

I'm also concerned about keeping small critters out. It's so dry here in my part of NM during late spring/early summer that small varmints will eat anything that provides moisture, such as seedlings and even older plants. The greenhouse would be a super attraction to them. Then there are snakes that will come in if small critters come in, and I don't love the idea of a rattlesnake choosing my greenhouse to hibernate in the winter. And of course, moles and gophers.  So I hope I can figure out how to make a wofati greenhouse I build critter-proof.

paul wheaton wrote:

Timothy Markus wrote:I'm in.  Does streaming mean no down-loading to watch later?

Correct.   And, more importantly, we seem to get close to zero support needs.    Nearly all of the support time seems to go to downloading big files.   At the same time, a lot of people very much want to download.  So we are doing our best to find the optimal path.

Would it be possible to grant access to rewatch the video via a link on permies to those that support at a certain level? Maybe this would create similar tech and support needs as mentioned earlier, but if this could be done without much trouble, it could be a way to avoid a lot of large downloads.

I think all of our videos allow you to rewatch as much as you want right now.

We have made oodles of changes to the kickstarter page:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/paulwheaton/1222100718?ref=8zrzi6&token=c19f680c

I am about 30 minutes away from submitting to kickstarter for their approval.

I submitted it and ...   well .... this is new ...

There is now a "pre-launch page":

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/paulwheaton/greenhouse-1

We added "building a cob style rocket mass heater" to the $5 level.   So I now think the $5 is crazy heavy.

Jennifer and I put this together for the dailyish today.   We will probably send it in an hour or so.   Any other suggestions, typos, etc.?

Kickstarter has approved our totally passive wofati greenhouse kickstarter! We go live on Tuesday at 2pm (mountain time)!

We have made a LOT of changes to our draft kickstarter page.  It's been a busy week!   Please take a look and tell us about typos, dumb ideas, and things like that:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/paulwheaton/greenhouse-1?ref=8zrzi6&token=c19f680c

Pay particular attention to the beautiful and magnificent artwork created by Paul that shows the 7 things that will be done above and beyond a typical greenhouse.   I think you will be able to tell it was made by Paul (cough cough).

There is a new page offered by kickstarter and this one makes it really clear how many people are watching this kickstarter.   As I write this, the number is 241.  I need to tell you:  the email I send out will take 12 hours to send to everybody.   The 241+ people will probably be notified within 7 seconds.  So the people that click on the "notify me on launch" thing at kickstarter will get a 12 hour jump on the people waiting for the dailyish email to go out.  

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/paulwheaton/greenhouse-1

So many people wanted to talk about the design RIGHT NOW, and we are hyperfocused on getting the kickstarter rolling, that we ended up making a thread just about the design.  

https://permies.com/t/141902/permaculture-projects/wofati-greenhouse-design

You can click on the "notify me on launch" button at the top left of the kickstarter page to be notified when the Kickstarter goes live!



And we changed the rewards at the five dollar level to include the full movie "Building a Cob-Style Rocket Mass Heater."

I think we might be all done with the list of the early bird goodies.  40 items adding up to more than $500.  All can be yours for supporting the kickstarter in the first couple of days.  Even if you support for just $1.

https://permies.com/w/earlybird


We have the thread set up for the kickback program.  If you want to get a referral code right away, please reply to this thread.  The people on this thread get the referral codes first!

https://permies.com/t/kickback



Nicole's earlier email suggested that this greenhouse was "underground" - we want to be clear that this greenhouse is definitely above ground - it just happens to have a thick earthen roof.

The big thing right now is that we intend to launch the kickstarter



       TUESDAY AT 2



(mountain time)

stuff we still need to get done:

- last bit of polish to primary image
- move primary image into video
- finish getting the media kit ready
- write to all people with an f-code
- alert people that harvested kickbacks from the last kickstarter
- last bits of changes and polish to the list of earlybird stuff
- last updates to earlybird image for the ks page
- get final video up on youtube as unlisted
- finish rewards from last kickstarter
       o hugelkultur book - alpha
       o fallacy book - alpha
- get banners made
       o for permies forums
       o for permies home page
       o for richsoil pages
- go through the kickstarter page looking for typos, bad grammar, etc.
- create FAQ
- make a list of all the things that must be done the moment the kickstarter goes live

I feel the urge to say this over and over ...

paul wheaton wrote:



       TUESDAY AT 2



(mountain time)