Em Bracken

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since Nov 20, 2020
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Recent posts by Em Bracken

Wild, crab, and otherwise less palatable apples also still produce excellent BBQ/smoking wood when pruned so that's another reason to keep them around in my book.
2 years ago
Without more information about the precise setup it's hard to say whether you're doing something wrong, but my guess would be it's probably mostly just a mismatch between your expectations and the capacity of the system you've got.

460 (ah) * 0.50 (usable capacity) * 12 (volts) = 2760 watt hours

90 (watt starlink usage) / 0.8 (inverter efficiency guess) = 112.5 watt usage

2760 (watt hours) / 112.5 (watts Starlink usage) = ~24.5 hours

That's assuming the batteries are new, getting fully charged every day, and you want to discharge them to 50%. In reality you probably don't want to discharge your batteries that far and there probably will be days where they get less than fully charged.

Once you add in the freezer - if it really uses 150 watts on average - it is easy to explain why you'd be running out of power...

150 (watt freezer usage) / 0.8 (inverter efficiency guess) = 187.5 watt usage

2760 (watt hours) / [112.5 (watts Starlink usage) + 187.5 (watt freezer usage)] = ~9.2 hours

Voltage isn't a good predictor of lead acid battery capacity so you can't expect a low voltage cut-out to reliably halt usage at a given percentage of charge. Also, these are best case scenarios. Any wear on the batteries or imperfect care (watering, sub-optimal charge profile, etc) will make things dramatically worse.

Starlink power consumption: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2021/using-shelly-plug-monitor-starlinks-power-consumption

Best lead acid battery reference (IMHO): https://www.sevarg.net/2018/04/08/off-grid-rv-lead-acid-maintenance-charging-failure-modes/
3 years ago
I use farmOS to keep track of a moderately large rabbitry ~70 rabbits. farmOS doesn't have any rabbit-specific functionality out of the box, but it does have a rock-solid data model for keeping track of animal locations, weights, and various other data - photos, logs, etc.

On top of that I have written a prototype tool I call "Rabbit Link" which is linked to by a QR code on each rabbit cage. The tool helps automate some of the routine data management and works offline as a PWA. The tool wouldn't be trivial to share at this point, but I'm eventually hoping to release it as a contrib module for farmOS and would be happy to collaborate if that's of interest.
3 years ago
I'm also curious whether this worked out for OP...

In case others run into this and are looking for a good beginner/intermediate reference on how to get started with the tissue culture stuff, check out 'Plants from Test Tubes' by Kyte, Kleyn, Et al. You definitely don't need perfect lab conditions to get started with tissue culture.
3 years ago
I've had really good results with Aphidius colemani (a kind of aphid wasp) for resolving aphid outbreaks on rice plants in indoor growth chambers. Unfortunately, they were a bit too effective and would wipe out the whole aphid population then experience a population crash when the "food" was gone - growth chambers are a bit too small of a system to easily establish a stable equilibrium.
3 years ago

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:
Other options, as you've noted: Some people try to insulate their fridges from the outside.



For others reading this thread and getting ideas, make sure to not insulate the part of the fridge where the heat is supposed to escape. In some cases it may be prohibitively complex to add very much insulation value at all since large parts of the surface may be designed as heat sinks. Fridges work by pumping heat from inside to the outside, but if you insulate around them it will trap that heat and make them inefficient, run all the time, and prone to failure.

It's also worth noting that if the fridge is electric, inside your house, and you're heating that house with electricity, any inefficiencies in the fridge will be in the form of waste heat which would otherwise need to be created by your primary heating system. This means that during the cold months you might not be saving energy by modifying/upgrading your fridge - though your could certainly improve your peace of mind by making it run less if it's noisy.
3 years ago
Not sure about buying it, but we make poplar salve by by soaking the buds in oil (usually olive) in a warm place like near the wood stove for a couple weeks/months.

Applied topically it seems to help rabbits with healing of all sorts and can be used to treat ear mites also.
3 years ago
Some kinds of seeds may actually germinate significantly better if they pass through a bird gut first. Not sure about blackberries, but I might guess they'd be one of those.
3 years ago
Not to alarm you, but depending on how your rabbitry is protected, it could also be a predator attacking from outside the cage - or even just scaring the rabbit into hurting itself.

If the floor of your cage is rough/wire, a temporary solution can be to give the injured rabbit a board they can sit on. They will poop/pee on it though so it has to be taken out and cleaned/replaced periodically.
3 years ago
One interesting nuance to this topic that doesn't seem to be getting much airtime is that "real sounding" is super subjective and (perhaps naively on my part) appears to be mostly influenced by western/colonial roots.

A westerner can jam together a common first name and a slightly less common last name as a pseudonym and be pretty confident that it will fit in with the other "real names" on this forum. However, as an example, I'm guessing quite a few of the top names someone from South Africa might consider normal (ref: https://www.businessinsider.co.za/the-most-popular-names-in-south-africa-right-now-2018-8 ) wouldn't pass that same test. (e.g. "Junior", "Gift", "Prince", "Innocent")

I'm not trying to start a fight here or attack the idea of promoting a certain flavor for this forum, but I do want to point out that it creates a kind of bias and potential inertia against greater multiculturalism if an existing population is dictating whose names do or don't "sound real".

Why should some folks have to be more careful about using their name or choosing pseudonyms from their proximal culture(s) than others? Does that really promote the flavor this forum seeks to cook up?