Posts by — Alexbenady

Dutch John works on his gasifier

Whenever Dutch John goes into town, which is as seldom as possible, he tends to walk or take the bike.

He describes himself as a “low profile anarchist and an off-gridder in the broadest senses of the word”. But it’s not just his environmental beliefs that prevent him from taking the car.

Every time he uses his twenty year old Volvo 240, first he has to clean up the cyclone bin, dump the char dust on the compost, fill the fuel bin with sixty pounds of wood, stacking a few sacks on the back seat for extra mileage, spark up the gasifier with a diesel glow plug, wait four minutes for it to heat up,  flare off the surplus carbon monoxide and hydrogen. And then he’s off. (more…)

Yet these things exist. They are called ram pumps. And the mystery is not how do they  magically raise water to a higher level with no external power?  It is, given that they are so simple, so cheap and so effective at what they do, why are they so little known?

For those who haven’t been paying attention, a ram pump is a pump that uses the force of moving water –a stream for instance, to pump a smaller amount of water, sometimes hundreds of meters uphill with no external power source. (more…)

Leary, his bike-powered-water-pump and friends

A British engineering student has invented a bicycle-powered water pump that could enable huge areas of ‘off-grid’ land to be irrigated for the first time.

Jon Leary, 24, a masters student at Sheffield Department of Mechanical Engineering was tasked to ‘make something useful out of rubbish’ for his dissertation. He came up with the idea of a ‘bicicomba movil’ –an inexpensive mobile bicycle powered water pump made from salvaged materials that can be used for irrigation and general water distribution almost anywhere in the world. (more…)

Theis and Kerr with salad spinner centrifuge

Vinegar, a salad spinner and a toilet plunger are some of the everyday materials being used in a low-tech medical revolution that is transformomg healthcare off-grid and in the third world.
The new developments come as a reaction to the increasing complexity of modern medical technology which is not only expensive, but can only work in large centralised hospitals. Great if you live in a city. Not so great if you live in the boondocks, or in a country without medical infrastructure. (more…)

Kyle Wiens

Repairs to complex kit can be hard in the boonies.  Just because you live off-grid doesn’t mean you want to live in the stone-age.

Quite brilliant low tech devices are sometimes developed to provide modern creature comforts. Only, yesterday we reported on a washing machine made from a bucket and plunger.

But there are areas where only hi-tech will do –most obviously in the field of electronic goods.–computers, phones, MP3 players, consoles and the like.

(more…)

The UK Green Party manifesto for the upcoming general election explicitly attacks the idea of centralised power and  promises to take from the rich and give to the poor.

Speaking before the launch of the manifesto, Green Party leader Caroline Lucas (pictured) promised a “signifcant increase in decentralised energy.” Arguing against the inefficiencies of the grid she said, “many centralised power station waste as much of two thirds of their energy in heat through their cooling towers and in distribution losses.” (more…)