From soil and seeds to livestock, preservation, and off-grid power.
By the Homestead Team A dark asphalt roof on a summer afternoon reaches about 170 degrees Fahrenheit. A white membrane on the same building on the same day sits near 105. That is a 65 degree difference produced by nothing but color, and it is not controversial: you can calculate it from first principles, and … Read more
By the Homestead Team We built one in a barn on a permaculture homestead in Colorado, the kind of barn that holds tools and equipment rather than animals, and the thing nobody warns you about is what it does to the room. We expected a heater. What we got was the place everyone ends up. … Read more
By the Homestead Team This is the technical companion to our piece on how rocket mass heaters work and whether you should build one. That article covers the decision, the code and insurance problem, and the safety case. This one assumes you have made the decision and want the numbers. Nearly every failed rocket mass … Read more
By the Gear Team Open most people’s gear drawer and you will find a graveyard of batteries: a couple of odd 18650s from an old flashlight, three dead AAs, a headlamp cell that fits nothing else in the house, and a charger that only works with one of them. None of that is useful in … Read more
By the Gear Team A phone at ten percent is not just an inconvenience during an outage, it is your weather alerts, your family group chat, and your flashlight all going dark at once. A good power bank is the cheapest, smallest piece of insurance you can buy against that, and unlike a whole-home generator … Read more
By the Homesteading Team When the power goes out, one of the first quiet questions is a simple one: how do we eat something hot, and how do we boil water? For all of human history people cooked without a grid, so the knowledge is old and the tools are cheap. What trips people up … Read more
By the Gear Team The most common backup-power mistake we see is not buying too little. It is buying blind: grabbing whatever “solar generator” the algorithm served up, discovering during the first real outage that it runs the fridge for ninety minutes, and concluding that backup power is a scam. It is not a scam. … Read more
By the Self-Reliance Desk Flip a switch and the lights come on. Turn a tap and clean water flows. Tap a card and food appears. Modern life runs on invisible systems so reliable that we forget they exist, until one of them fails and we discover how utterly dependent we have become. Reducing your dependence … Read more
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