Dinner is served!

Here's my first ever solar meal! Jalapenos, lentils, hominy and hard boiled eggs. Cooker got to 200 degrees on 95 degree day. Not bad for a flower pot and a bunch of mirrors!!

Reverse disco-ball solar cooker

Possibly the craziest and best idea for a solar cooker yet. Why make it square and put round pots in it? Make it round! This is made from a wooden slat planter, pottery plant dish, wood glue, outdoor adhesive, canned expanding foam insulation, window. Insulation tape and spray paint from lowes. Mirrors and glass are from hobby lobby. Galvanized tub and wood stove thermometer from tractor supply.  Cast iron enameled pot from my house and I have no idea where it came from originally. The whole thing cost about $100 to make, but could be done for way cheaper through scavenge and thrift store. This is my third attempt and I wanted it cooking asap! This could be done with a round wooden tub or two galvanized tubs with more insulation.  Thrift store mirrors could be found or larger ones broken but gotta be super careful and wear gloves. These are a bit out of order but having difficulty getting photos to play nice today! I still have to seal all sharp mirror edges with silicone and put tile on gap between the containers to keep rain out, but the damn thing finally works! The old man will help me with an azimuth tilt table soon for efficiency, but un-sexy patio bricks work great for now. Use any slow cooking recipe in this and come home to dinner or don't heat up the house cooking! 

Step 1. Wooden planter, glue seams, plug hole, flat black outside, inside chrome. 

Step 3. Glue mirrors on the inside, a small stick will angle top mirror light reflection back in for efficiency.

Step 4. Place painted pottery plate in bottom but dont glue it, put adhesive on window weather strip and hold down with heavy glass lid for a few hours until set. Thermometer will show you it is warming up already! 

Step 2. Galvanized tub, paint outside flat black, leave inside alone. Put wooden planter inside after painting and fill space between the two with something for insulation, I used expanding spray foam, but it is messy as hell. 

Step 5. Place flat black painted pot with tight fitting lid, wide rather than tall, with food in cooker. Prop up toward sun slightly with a brick or stick. This works like a crock pot, slow and low temp. 

Sucess! Almost 200 degrees inside with condensation when it is 90 degrees from a bunch of crap is pretty good. Free solar crock pot without worry of cats knocking it over starting a fire in the house. If I can utilize it the 6 hottest months of the year in Texas, then this has been worth it! First meal is jalepeno rainbow lentils, which I had at the national rainbow gathering a long time ago and loved ever since. 

Back in the saddle

There has been a huge hiatus in posting which I will happily fill in soon. Even those of us who are aware of the false hope of the corporate slave merry-go-round must give up our freedom to it to get ahead - for a time. My house will soon be done, job change to rural hospital for me, soon rural job/homesteader/knife crafter for my partner and rural school for my child.  Updates on all soon!!!

Roof trusses are done!

It was a long wet weekend, sometimes hot and sometimes cold, but in spite of the rain, we got the rest of the roof trusses up! Tim still thinks we will be in this house in 2 weeks, but I know better! Even if the the basic structure is done, and it sure should be, it will essentially be a "wooden box" and not a house quite yet. The last month will be finishing up interior rooms and closets and shelves and such. Tim could have done almost all of this by himself up to this point, but he says it helps immensely to have me there. Since he is the brains and the brawn of this operation, it makes me feel good to be a small part of getting it all finished. Next weekend, we put up roof wood and then more tar paper. Darn! I do hate the tar paper! :)

And the walls go up!

First, we put the plywood up for the walls. This was pretty hard, as Tim had to measure and get stuff in the right place and I had to hold it up. It did not work so well! But thanks to a beautiful rig of 2 x 4's and a car jack, we got these suckers up on the vertical surfaces. Next, we got the ceiling of floor one/floor of floor two up. Again, with very little variance over the 16 x 24' area. Way to go, Tim! He framed up the door openings while I sealed cracks with expanding foam sealant. Lastly, we put tar paper up as the first step in the stucco process later on. It is a total bitch! Now we know why people put this stuff up on roofs, and not walls! Our fingers were sore and bruised for days after we did our big push over a weekend for this miserable part of the project. Glad to see the end of it....

Wooden skeleton and a redneck stud

Wow! This stuff was super-heavy, not to mention super-expensive! Tim had this planned down to the last inch so we had as little waste as possible. We made side wall sections in 8 ' chunks, and did the end sections in one 16' piece each. We roughly planned doors in, and I got to use a little Feng Shui since my doors do not line up perfectly to let our good chi from the front meander around before it heads out the back. And the wind will move through better as well. I was very impressed at how well this worked out with very little variance. This is Tim's first house or project of this size, and while he may drive me with nuts with details I do not understand, he is the boss of this project! I do a lot of holding things up, or standing on things. I am basically a 5'1" paperweight! And I hate to tarnish his rough and tumble reputation, but that is a Zevia stevia soda he is drinking up there - not beer!

More about Piers than you ever want to know...

These are a few photos of the 28 piers that make up the foundation of our house and (Phase II) porch area. We used trash aluminum siding found on site. All of these holes are 4 to 5 feet deep, and about 12" across. They have rebar holding their shape open against the pressure of the sand on the outside and the 8 to 10 bags of concrete on the inside. Rebar is also pounded down a few inches into the clay at the bottom of the hole to serve as vertical support internally. Tim gets all the credit for these. He dug every huge hole, and cut all rebar because I tried to do it and found out I can't! But I did cut a lot of the siding, and helped Tim hold the "tube" in shape while he screwed them together. Cardboard tubes were about $10 each, so we did not spend about $300 while we made these. Yes, they are time consuming, but pretty cheap! Tim is very meticulous about things being even, level, perfect and a lot of other stuff I do not know about as a mere siding wench! I don't understand everything he has to do, but the end result will be a solid house that will be safe for us all, so it will all be worth it....