Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands

“The bricoleur, says Levi-Strauss, is someone who uses “the means at hand,” that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of them at once, even if their form and the...

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The Great Greywater Debate- PVC or Polyethylene?

...reywater installations it ain’t practical. Aqua-Flo does carry a new HDPE product called Blu-lock. You can get 1-inch Blu-lock in-100 foot rolls for a reasonable price (more info to follow in another post). Blu-lock uses special proprietary fittings that are easier to assemble than conventional mainline drip tubing and, intriguingly, allow for disassembly. I’m going to test Blu-lock and will report back on the results....

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Licensed to Rant

As someone who uses a bike to get around it scares us to think about how easy it is to renew a driver’s license, as one of the Homegrown Revolution compound members did this week. Can you breathe? Great! Here’s your license. Are you homicidal, schizophrenic, elderly, partially blind, or all of the above? No problem! Just step up, have your picture taken, take a vision test that could easily be cheated on, pay $27 and you can legally get behind th...

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Doing the doo-doo with you

...days in jail. Since then, he says, he’s heard that a law professor at UCLA uses State of California v. Dundon as a case study to suggest that “the right rhyme for the right crime will get you less time.” For us we’re hoping that Dundon’s compost will give life to the dead soil excavated and spilled out on the front slope of our house during extensive foundation work that we had to complete earlier this year to keep our 87 year old house from slidi...

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Build a Solar Dehydrator

...ydrators work by increasing air flow to dry out the food. The one we built uses a clever strategy to get air moving without the use of electric fans such as you’d find in your typical store bought electric dehydrator. Our solar dehydrator is constructed out of plywood and consists of a heat collector containing a black metal screen housed in a box with a clear plastic top. This screen heats up on a sunny day and feeds hot air into a wooden box abo...

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