Kind of curious what tech people own, everything from small to big tech. Assuming solarpanels are a given for a lot of peeps here, or maybe will be in the future. But what other tech do you own that you’re happy with?
I’ve got a few bicycles and a tree in my backyard that produces edible nuts.
Nice, you rocking e-bikes or classic analog bikes :D ? Also what kinda tree we talking?
It’s a black walnut tree. The bikes are analog, lol. I prefer the warmer sound.
Absolutely! Thanks for sharing :)
A rain barrel, fruit and but trees, guerrilla gardening knowledge
Edit: guess which word was autocorrected
I’m not sure this counts, but the best upgrade I ever made for my home was having new windows installed 20 years ago. I couldn’t open the old ones.
During the summer, most days I can avoid air conditioning just by opening the windows and getting a cross breeze. I hear my neighbors’ airco turning on, while I am smug with the knowledge that I made a long-term frugal and green investment.
I’m so jealous :( we just got new windows to improve the insulation rating. I’d love to open them and do the same but I legit start having medical issues over 73° which we hit most days in the summer.
I’m so sorry you have that problem. The window insulation should still help, though.
Right now, not much but building quickly!
My troupe and I just bought camper trailers to live in on a farm and have been fixing them up. In mine, the stove and fridge both run on electricity and gas and we’re excited to set up a biogas digestion system, so I’ve been researching how to build that as well as convert the appliances to methane.
Excited to set up a biogas water heater for showering as well!
Currently, I am about to set up LoRa nodes and receivers. We already have two in my city and I’ll be adding two more stationary nodes and getting some folks set up on the system so that’s super fun!
Otherwise, we also have a communally owned household e-bike as well as a whole apothecary fit with multiple interesting tools for processing herbs and foraged food.
We of course also have our garden and have been planting lots of veg and herbs at the farm site we’re moving too!
We’ll be setting up solar panels eventually (a little out of our budget right now for our full energy needs), but biogas can tide us over a little while we adjust.
will be utilizing a composting toilet system as well as a hand-wash and hang dry laundry.
There’s also a greenhouse in shambles that we’ll repair and some goats, geese, & a pond on the farm :)
Doing permaculture style
Otherwise, we’re also low waste and getting lower by the moment so gradually replacing all home items with sturdy, no-plastic alternatives. Working on repairing lots of clothes sewing by hand, repairing our shoes, and working with saponin-rich plants for soap is an ongoing process
So many interesting things going on, hope you share your progress as things move along
Yeah, it’s super exciting! I’m just now starting to write and publish a somewhat weekly journal on our efforts, so perhaps (if it’s welcome) I’ll share that somewhere around here.
I’m super new to the Fediverse and specifically Lemmy, so I’ll have to learn etiquette around promoting my own work first 😅
But I will be sharing what I learn for sure!
Your message is welcome, and does not sound to be breaking any etiquette to me.
Please share! My wife and I are starting a homestead and are always looking for ways to make it more solarpunk. We’d love the inspiration you could provide!
A wrench, hammer, screwdriver set, and pliers.
- Renault EV hacked with OVMS and mostly running on locally produced electricity. Runs 80 km/h, seats two and always finds a parking spot.
- Kon-Tiki Oven to produce bio charcoal which we use a lot to make our soil somewhat less compact.
- Small Solar Power Roofs to keep the rain or the sun away when sitting on the bench (one can be seen behind the car).
- Total of about 50 kWp Solar, which we enjoy a lot - produces reasonable energy even during the Winter. Unfortunately, when the grid goes down, our own solar will go down also. People often underestimate the effort and investment needed to make a large solar system workable off-grid.
- New facade with about 25 cm of insulation made from wood fibre. All materials locally sourced, mostly from our own grounds. Keeps the building cool in summer and warm in winter.
- OpenWB EV charging of EV only when we have excess solar production.
- Rain water is not sent into the city collection system but kept on the grounds and further down is collected in a little lake.
- Cheap Solar Lights with motion detectors. Help a lot to not tip over during the night - even works reasonable during winter when the days are very short.
- Home-grown power management system: In winter we use excess energy to heat up the workshop ensuring it does not freeze during the night (if that’s not enough, and it cools down below 1 C we automatically use grid power to keep it from freezing.
- The fridge for the drinks is only run on excess power.
- Well insulated workshop build beside the house, providing additional insulation to the living quarters.
- Reactivated the old well, added a manual frost resistant water pump
- We are looking into using solar power to fill the reservoir from the well on demand. But this will need some trench digging.
- AirPods Pro or any other good noise-cancelling equipment to avoid getting def and dumb by roaring farm machinery.
- We have a shepherd’s wagon without any electricity. Basic services like warmth, light, coffee and pizza can be provided by fossil means.
- We have something like a tiny house completely running on off-grid on solar: electric stove, baking oven, warm water, floor heating, etc. Works very well for 10 years now.
Holy shit, username checks out! You’re absolutely mad (in the best possible way) 😅. Thanks for sharing this extensive list. A lot of neat projects you’ve got going on, am quite jelous 😊
do you happen to know if buying an old twizy around 1500euros is a bad deal? for having to change battery for example
Unless the thing is seriously broken 1500€ sounds cheap. Most twizys have rented batteries - Renault rents you the battery for 50€/month.
We have a large window in our living room the cats love but got way too hot. Planted grape vines to cut down on the light back there so we can keep the curtains open but still let the cats see birds.
On the actual “tech” side we’ve been going the opposite of new things to reduce usage. Wax paper wraps, older wooden everything where possible (cutting boards, furniture, wicker laundry baskets) most of which we got used from my wife’s family, those all will get recycled somehow when their time comes.
I’m hoping when our water heater finally goes we can get one of the new heat pump models. Reduce some AC needs and not need a humidifier in the basement (which I try to run as little as possible already).
Ah yeah, also keeping most things in the “format” of wood here haha, just feels like much better quality most of the time and lasts longer, thinking specifically about kitchen utensils.
I need to get more, my last two plastic spatulas broke so it’s time to do it guilt free. All the wood.
A stack of ewaste laptops I’m fixing up to give away, and this jailbroken Chromebook I reinstalled with Alpine Linux which has become my writing computer whenever I’m out and about.
Also; had never heard of Movim before, seems like quite the cool project - am also planning on startin my own blog so this might be the perfect solution for me :)
Movim is awesome! PoVoq put a bunch of work into getting it set up and linked with Lemmy so if you have an account here, you can just start using the microblogging platform too! I use WordPress for my art and writing and Movim for my making-and-fixing-type projects, and I mostly prefer Movim - the interface is nice, it’s free, doesn’t spatter everything I write with gross ads, and it’s not corporate. I’d very much recommend it.
That’s interesting, thanks for sharing that platform. I’m in the process of setting up a plot of herbs for folks at the local community garden and I’d like to have a simple website for people to go to get information on each of the herbs for harvest/storage/recipes/etc, and am hitting a wall on what platform to use for this.
For longform blogs we host Movim (which is also a nice federated chat app for Jabber/XMPP) and in addition we have a Dokuwiki where community moderators can make a dedicated wiki. Both are integrated with our Lemmy instance here, so you can just use your existing account user and password to log in.
This is one of those situations where I wish you were local so I could give you produce and pickles & jams in exchange to pick your brain on this :)
On first glance: So I could hypothetically make a community here, eg. ‘the community herb plot,’ and direct people to posts on French Tarragon et. al. via links/QR codes in that community (instance? Is that the right term?)…? If people wanted to post a question they’d have to sign up, though, I imagine…?
I don’t think I need to have a long form blog on this; there’s probably 74 different herb societies that would have a page for French Tarragon that I could possibly link to, but it’d be nice for folks to be able to ask questions, share additional information, etc in the post containing that link.
Feel free to poke holes in this…or tell me to bugger off…or say “yes, but…” or whatever 🙂
Yes, for example there is /c/balconygardening here on the SLRPNK Lemmy and all the moderators of that community with an SLRPNK account can also edit the community specific wiki over here: https://wiki.slrpnk.net/balconygardening:start
These permisions are automatic and you can create as many wiki pages as you like under the specific wiki namespace.
Edit: Let me see if there is a nice QR code externsion for Dokuwiki that I can add. Edit: Ah: if you click on the menu and select “Export as PDF” the resulting PDF also includes a QR code to the page already.
Edit2: after reading your post again: yes you can of course also just link to external already existing website in a new Lemmy community that you create here.
whoa, thanks a bunch, I think this might be the way forward…plus one can’t underestimate the cool factor of having slrpnk.net/c/whatever I figure out to call it as a web address that a bunch of oldies are scanning/clicking on :D (semi /s implied - I might be able to breadpill a few)
Really appreciate your input ✊
Edit: behold, the initial beginnings: https://slrpnk.net/c/plot18 (I’m not overly creative when it comes to naming stuff)
Wow! Thanks for sharing! LOVE that logo you spray painted onto the laptop - a nice touch. Did you design the logo yourself too? It should totally be the logo for the Solarpunk Technology Community!
Thanks! I pulled it from one of the more popular solarpunk flags. Out of all the ones I’ve seen, many of which feature the sun-and-gear motif in some configuration, it’s my favorite symbol for the movement; It’s very simple and visually clear, and easy to render with one color.
Hell yeah, saving this for later use! :)
I have a solar powered tomato plant
Would love to see a picture of this one!
I started messing about with Linux/Raspberry Pi, Arduino, LoRa/Meshtastic in the past couple of months due to being (further) breadpilled with podcasts about open source, greenhouse automation, autonomous text-based communication and such.
I’m not a tech person so I’m literally doing kid-level electronics tutorials on the Arduino (“Congratulations! You’ve made your first circuit!”) and still get a kick out of running sudo apt-get update/upgrade and seeing the lines of text scrolling by.
But I really like the concept of appropriate tech in conjunction with open source “stuff” and, since I’m in a position of being able to listen to ~6.5 hours of podcasts during my workday, I might as well learn something. I hope to get comfortable with electronics for DIY solar eventually, too
Glad to hear about this! Everone has to start somewhere :) I am upost interested in these podcasts you mention, am an avid podcast enjoyer myself, so if you wouldnt mind sharing which ones you listen to?
Back from the asparagus patch!
(drops into Atlantic Canadian accent)
“Turn yer head for a minute and those fuckin’ asparagus will be three foot tall and not worth a fiddler’s fuck!”
Anyway, I digress…
Some of my go-to podcasts | relevant episodes, are below:
Poor Prole’s Almanac | Skillshare episode on Arduino
It Could Happen Here | Meshtastic/LoRa episode | recent episode on off-shelf solar solutions
That LoRa episode led me to the guest’s website for more information on his pretty cool shit: Hydroponic Trash/AnarchoSolarPunk
He was also featured on Live Like The World Is Dying, which I had been listening to for a while anyway | S1E49 – Andre on Solar Power, DIY Internet, Mesh Networks, and Solar Punk
Less radical podcasts I listen to are some of the maker-type folks like Simple Electronics and the (now discontinued?) Make: Magazine podcast.
That just about covers it, other than some of the solarpunk podcasts I listen to, but I kinda feel they - while informative and entertaining - aren’t as…hands on (?)… as some of the links I shared above.
Cheers gang
SK0
Thanks for sharing all those. Since you mentioned arduino, I thought of sharing something that came to my attention quite recently, and admittedly I found it very disturbing. Before reading that I was an arduino fan, I’m not anymore. Anyways here it is:
Thanks a lot for sharing, got a long train ride tomorrow, will check them out then! 🌻
(drops into Atlantic Canadian accent)
“Turn yer head for a minute and those fuckin’ asparagus will be three foot tall and not worth a fiddler’s fuck!”
I read far more letters in the transcript than I heard in the speaking. ;-)
Just heading out to check the asparagus patch, I’ll make a list with links later today!
I’m also interested to see if you have any that I don’t know about
Hello there, fellow knight. I shared a list in a comment above, cheers
Solar powered battery banks which keep a few things up and running in my office (glass sliding doors, so I get plenty of light. Also use them to charge my phone and such.
My bike, which I used to ride to the bus to get into work until I went full remote. Has a small solar kit for my lights to stay charged on long rides. It’s been a bit due to some joint issues, getting back into it now, but used to do centuries every weekend. Didn’t need to it charge to full, whatever trickle worked just to extend it past the 4 or so hours it would do from full, then charge on the battery banks.
Gardening and associated sensors. Working on moving those over to lorawan, right now the updates are a bit spotty even at once every 4 hours updating due to distance.
I’ve got a bunch of stuff that’s running on lightweight chips, like esp8266’s and ESP32s, to do things like Bluetooth beaconing, lights (wled), etc.
It’ll be a bit, but we are going to need to move to something with a bit more space, so other plans (solar + battery for the whole home, indirect solar water heating, etc) will be on hold for a bit.
Damn! A neat mix of everything, thanks for sharing :)
I have a pocket-sized solar panel I bought intending to charge my phone on the go. When it arrived and I tried it out I remembered that I live in bloody Auckland, New Zealand, where we’ve never actually seen the sun, so that was a bust.
Hahhaha that is unfortunate. Had always imagined New Zealand with amazing weather myself tbh!
It’s the palm trees. They’ll fool ya.
An air-to-water heat-pump and a solar-thermal (vacuum tubes) hot water heater combination.
Solar powered calculator.
Needle and thread.
