JacobCoffinWrites

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That sounds like a fairly elaborate rig! I don't want to pry into your location but what kind of seasons/temperatures were you dealing with and did you have to do anything to keep from overheating the water lines? Could you connect and disconnect the stove?

JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 3d ago

Same! I'm actually about to start posting around asking for anyone's favorite examples, and digging into permiculture forums which are often a gold mine for this stuff.

I'm 100% with you on linux, I've run into the same situation and conclusions a few times. In fact a lot of how I live tends to involve having to explain the quirks of whatever system to people who want to use them, and I'm still in an apartment with standard up-to-code water, electricity, and sewer hookups. I've known homesteaders who were far and away further along on that stuff than I am. I'm excited to see what we can gather up here, as one of my ongoing projects features a mostly-abandoned region where people likely would have introduced some high-context systems just to get by once the grid and everything else started to fall apart. And those systems have had decades to metastasize until each location is weird in its own way.

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JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 5d ago

One of my British friends was kind of horrified at how we do things over here, especially in rural areas. The houses I grew up in only had electricity and phone lines (and eventually cable tv/internet) run to them. Individual wells and septic tanks/leach fields is very much the norm, even in planned developments. Lots of redundancy and you need to get your water tested occasionally to make sure the groundwater hasn't been contaminated by industry or neighbors (and basically no recourse if it has).

Once you get into adding rainwater collection for showers/toilets and switching to small scale solar, especially stuff like partial or whole house conversions to DC power to reduce conversion loss, things get complicated enough that a houseguest probably can't safely assume things work the way they expect. It's possible not every outlet is lit the usual way, or maybe they can only charge a device when the sun is out, or maybe you need to know the right valves to open to draw water from a cistern.

IRL building codes and consumer mindsets in first world countries have standardized a lot of things and offloaded/hidden a lot of the complexity that underpins our day to day existence. For many of us our power and water are handled by specialists in dedicated facilities, and the equipment which goes into our homes have strict codes and expectations to keep the experience of using them fairly standard.

But in a solarpunk world, especially one that's rebuilding, and relying on salvage and diy, I think we'd see many more retrofits and 'bespoke' solutions which are more efficient but leave the complexities of filtering water or generating electricity or disposing of sewage more exposed to regular people. I think there's some cool worldbuilding potential in that.

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JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 6d ago

I applaud the research! At first glance that actually sounds like it might be a bit overkill depending on what kind of forging they're doing - a single solar concentrator made from a fresnel lens from a large rear projection TV is enough to burn a hole through a skill saw blade on its own. That wouldn't be a great experience for forging (though I'm still planning to set one up and try it out) but if you can burn steel you can technically do forge welding. It's just that the concentration of heat on such a small area would be really unpleasant/impractical to work with.

I'd be interested to see the math if you've still got it, it's extremely possible I'm way off and you'd need way more light for a really effective forge. I would have figured even a dozen mirrors would be sufficient.

Wait are they smelting steel too? That would be closer to those molten salt solar thermal towers out west or the big parabolic mirror/heliosat combo the smelters use IRL.

When I was learning from a blacksmith we used coal, he favored it because it was traditional and you could do forge welding (propane forges don't get hot enough) - I couldn't really manage the temp on my little diy forge well enough to do do it often but he had a full out smithy with the big brick forge, bellows, and everything, and I learned there. Mostly I made basic stuff with thin stock I found at the dump, hooks and shelf brackets and such. At his forge we made andirons, trivets, railings, and all sorts of heavier or fancier stuff.

I'm between forges at the moment but I'd really like to get into blacksmithing again. If I ever build my solar forge I figure it'll probably be a single big screen fresnel lens on an adjustable frame, with a brick lined fire pot laid out so the focal point isn't concentrated completely on the work but instead diffused over a wider area. I don't expect it to work anywhere near as well as even my rickity old coal forge but as long as it's equivalent or better than a burnzomatic propane torch will no shielding it'll be a step up from where I'm at now.

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JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 6d ago

It's been a busy month! I shared this photobash, added a page on levee removal to our worldbuilding writing resource wiki, and made additions to a bunch of other pages.

We also made solid progress on the TTRPG campaign - we've finished the final text edits and page layout tweaks, and I'm working on the final tables of contents. Once that's done I'll make sure the maps, character/location art, and other handouts all organized, zip em up, export the PDF, and we'll put the whole thing online. I'm really excited to share it - it represents two years of work on the biggest fiction project I've taken on so far, and it's as much a manifesto on rural solarpunk worldbuilding as a guide to running a game.

I hope to finish it up in the next few days, work on some more solarpunk postcards, and to add a wiki page on 'high context living' - a term I'm borrowing from a zine that I think provided an excellent name for the kind of bespoke systems people living off grid often grow accustomed to, but which baffle their guests. I think we'd see a lot of these sorts of custom arrangements retrofitted into any solarpunk society with a collapse or crumbles and recovery in its backstory.

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JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 1w ago

The article mentioned designs that negate the need for chimneys but I wonder if that's a place where mounting it (sort of) through a wall could work - the flue/exhaust in a chimney is generally extremely hot (likely too hot?) and any heat in the chimney is just waste about to escape through the top anyways. If you could mount one of these through an exterior part of a chimney you'd have below freezing winter air on one side and like 400 degree heat on the other. I suspect that's the sort of thing you'd have to build in from the start as conventional chimneys probably don't like the kind of uneven heat a hole through the side would produce.

Edit: haven't gotten to read in depth yet but it looks like there's a bunch of research papers on thermoelectric generator chimneys

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JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 1w ago

Thanks! I think I tried that once when I needed a really lightweight OS for a old laptop that was being picky about what Linux OSs it would run

JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 2w ago

I'll take that warning as a vote of confidence in my ability to configure systems for reliability! Honestly if we get to the point that systems are failing for hardware lifespan reasons we'll have exceeded my expectations and I'll issue some new ewaste. Fortunately the return policy at the free stuff swap shop is very generous.

JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 2w ago

Thanks, this is the second rec for cage so I'll try it out on a spare laptop and see how it goes

JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 2w ago

Thanks! That seems pretty straightforward!

JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 2w ago

Seconding big thanks for the wiki! The way you folks have integrated all these different projects into one site is amazing to me

JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 3w ago

This is great

JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 3w ago

Thank you! I really like researching these images. The postcard project has been a nice way to focus in on specific bits of worldbuilding research - at this point I'm also writing book-length solarpunk fiction stuff but it feels good to come back and work on these smaller, quick projects

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JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 4w ago

It's funny, I spend tons of time out in the woods and on trails and I've never gotten it, no idea how often I'm exposed. I don't do landscaping or roadside work but I still see it occasionally. I've always wondered if I'm chipping away at my immunity with each encounter or if it's age based and I should be getting my money's worth before it runs out

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JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 4w ago

I'm told by formerly-immune relatives that repeated exposures to poison ivy can make you start reacting to it. I'm not sure how that works or if something changed in their bodies as they got older but a few of them were certain it happened (they were older state workers and landscapers so they'd had plenty of contact and know how to identify it).

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JacobCoffinWrites @slrpnk.net 4w ago

True but from what I understand they can also uncompress more lift gas from onboard tanks to fill partially-full gas cells (and recover/recompress gas rather than venting it).