Yone' Ward

The big problem with LED's is that they can last 20 years, but if the engineering pushes them too hard, they may only last days. Like a lot of things, they have an operating window. They have a minimum amperage and a maximum amperage. Running them at 95% of their maximum power level will allow the manufacturer to use fewer LED's, but will also burn them out sooner. Typically, electronic components are never driven past their half capacity level if they are needed to last any length of time.

60 cycle or 120 cycle flickering can also happen if they skimp on internal parts. Like wise skimping on internal parts can also leave them vulnerable to power spikes. Unfortunately, short of building your own lights, I don't know how to determine if a manufacturer is skimping on stuff until after you have owned the bulb for a time.

The ones in my bucket in my room are 9&1/2 inches high after 6 days of growing. Now it just a question of what the ones outside will do.

I do know they are invasive in nature. I'm kind of counting on it. I have 20 acres of sulfur cinquefoil on sand and gravel. I see it as a way to rapidly build up organic mater in the soil and maintain soil water content. Eating the stuff and being surrounded with 9 foot flowers is just a nice plus. I just hope it will grow in our borderline desert.

Venison is Polyculture fed meat that is significantly organic. Deep fry it with some fries, don't see a problem.

It might be more sanitary to mount two tires on bearings so that they are tread to tread, have one driven by an electric motor, and drop the shells down between them so they get crushed between them. Just make sure you don't get between the tires. You will also get processed if you do. That's the bad way to add protein to food.

Brenda Groth wrote:if you aren't planning on burning it for firewood you can use it for mushrooms or for deadwood around plants, esp baby trees..great for holding in moisture and protection

small wood piles here and there in the garden are wonderful for hiding places and homes for a lot of small animal life and sunning areas for others..

Ok, that gives me an Idea. With a rocket stove and enough room, maybe you could grow mushrooms off the wood for a few years then burn it for heat. The wood might be a bit punky by the time the mushrooms stop growing, but with the efficiency of a RMH, maybe it wouldn't matter. That or Hugelkulture.

Your traveling distance will be a factor. If you can stack functions on each trip, as in: Can you do your shopping on your way home? will help save trips into town. When we make a shopping trip into town, we usually go to at least 6 stores, if not over a dozen, and come home with the car packed. The up side is there are a lot of hidden expenses to living in town that you may never think about unless you have lived in both places. It comes from both housing costs, to municipal fees and requirements, to added taxes. Cities typically have strict requirements on how building have to be built and you have to pay for the inspector to come check to see if you did as you were told. In the country the leading building requirement is: You are going to be sleeping in this place, do you trust it while you are sleeping to not fall on you or set you on fire? This usually ends up being much cheaper and allows for significant experimentation.

We are working on a wood shed that wraps around the chicken house. This will shade it in the hot summer and theoretically insulate it in the winter. Of course this will depend on how much of our wood is consumed each winter and how much wood my RMH ends up saving us, but maybe it will atract small rodents and bugs that the chicken will find yummy.

Hypothetically possible. If they are injecting water inside the combustion chamber, I can certainly see efficiencies of better than 50% being possible. Keeping that water from freezing in a car in the winter could be a problem though.

I would definitely go with the energy monitoring equipment. Knowing what is using how much when if the first step to knowing what needs attention. Anything that uses electricity to directly heat stuff, should get replaced by something that burns something. Gas clothes dryers instead of electric, gas hot water instead of electric, etc. Electricity BTU's are much more expensive than gas BTU's.

Putting watter coild in the mass portion of a RMH should be ok as long as you give the water somewhere to expand. I saw another guy used a car radiator on top of his RMH bell and pumped it directly into a fish pool which allowed for water expansion and he did ok. Putting water coils directly inside the bell apparently leads to steam explosions, so don't do that. I'm currently getting ready to add a RMH on the outside of our house building a straw wall around it, and pump the air into the house. Not the best solution, but it should turn this ice box section of the house into the warm part of the house.

Since you are going to be moving in a couple of years, don't spend too much on improvements. Make sure it's actually possible to recoup the expense in the time frame you will live there.