Making It

April 26, 2011

...by-step instructions for a wide range of projects, from building a 99-cent solar oven to making your own laundry soap to instructions for brewing beer. Making It is the go-to source for post-consumer living activities that are fun, inexpensive and eminently doable. Our goal in this book was to provide really stripped down, simple projects that use only inexpensive, easy to source materials. We also tried to use the same materials and ingredients o...

Read…

DIY Solar Space Heating

Mr. Homegrown

October 9, 2013

Solar, Water and Power

6 Comments

...thern hemisphere it’s time to consider heating. The always useful Build-It Solar blog has a detailed link to a DIY solar space heating system in Virginia (pdf). Collector panels mounted on the roof heat a reservoir which is circulated through a floor-based radiant heating system. It even has an Arduino based data acquisition component that tracks performance. There should be a DIY Nobel Prize for this project! If you live in a place that’s both co...

Read…

Camping and Solar Cooking

Mr. Homegrown

September 15, 2008

Bikes, Solar

7 Comments

...n at home, are the perfect occasion to deploy a solar cooker. Best of all you can build a solar cooker yourself for pennies out of cardboard and aluminum foil. For some foods, such as rice, it’s actually easier to cook with a solar cooker than it is on a stovetop. Put some rice in a pot, place the pot in the solar panel cooker, stick it out in the sun and two hours later you have lunch. Read the rest at The Cleanest Line via the Patagonia Company....

Read…

Saturday Linkages: Battling Herbicides, Solar Wall Ovens and Jaywalking

Mr. Homegrown

February 8, 2014

Saturday Linkages

3 Comments

...the Cane Toad http://ensia.com/voices/consider-the-cane-toad/ … Commercial Solar Wall Ovens http://feedly.com/e/nrC8gJXU Wilson Solar Grill for outdoor cooking http://www.examiner.com/article/wilson-solar-grill-for-outdoor-cooking … America’s public transit routes, mapped: http://boingboing.net/2014/02/06/americas-public-transit-rout.html … LA residents: The city offers free native trees for street planting. Coast Live Oaks are approved as street...

Read…

Meet the Solavore Sport Solar Oven

Mrs. Homegrown

April 29, 2016

Solar, Solar Oven Summer

15 Comments

...It is simply no big thing to move it around, and until you get the hang of solar cooking, and learn the way the light moves in your yard, you’re going to be moving it a lot. It’s light weight makes it good for camping and picnicking, too. The oven is made to hold two cooking pots at a time, which is handy, because you can do a main dish and a side at once, or a pot of something for dinner and a pot of something for lunch.The Solavore comes equippe...

Read…