Essential System #4 – Illumination

...o bags, but we also are looking into a new generation of LED bulbs for our Urban Homestead’s interior lighting. As far as house lighting goes, while LED efficiency is rapidly advancing, compact fluorescents are still better from an economic perspective even though there are concerns about the trace amounts of mercury that compact fluorescents contain contaminating landfills. Still, compact fluorescents are far better than incandescents since they...

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The Survivor

...of articles about rainwater harvesting for important breaking news at our urban homestead–the development of the SurviveLA signature cocktail–the Survivor. For a long time we’ve cursed the previous owners of our compound for their useless, inedible landscaping. One of the plants they left us that we’ve lived with for all these years is an ornamental pomegranate tree (Punica granatum) that, while attractive, we had previously assumed was useless d...

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The Tiny House

...can find a vacant lot, such a small house could be the ideal start of your urban homestead, leaving plenty of yard space for growing your own food. And these small building literally sip utilities making them ideal for hooking up to solar power and very cheap to heat and cool. They are also expandable as your needs or family grows. And perhaps most importantly, they prevent expansion of all the things we don’t need, the giant plasma screens, the i...

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Saturday Linkages: Of Granola and Turlets

...02/06/how-to-install-a-toilet/ … DIY Wax Seals: A History and How-To | The Art of Manliness http://artofmanliness.com/2013/02/13/wax-seals-a-history-and-how-to/ … Emergency Bench http://www.dudecraft.com/2013/02/emergency-bench.html … Bike flat tire repair kit inside tire levers: http://boingboing.net/2013/02/18/bike-flat-tire-repair-kit-insi.html … Building a bottle tower for container gardening: http://youtu.be/-uDbjZ9roEQ A just plain cool gard...

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