» 2011 » January Solar Burrito

Jan 14 2011

Wood-fired Shower and Sauna

Check out this cool off the grid hot water heating setup in Northern California. It’s a tower built out of metal scaffolding with a plastic water tank on top. Water is pumped up into the tank and gravity feeds out of it. The part I like is the Shower and Sauna is under the water tank and takes up little room while giving great water pressure. He’s got a wood stove providing the heat via the smoke stack to a a metal keg full of water that the smoke flows around. There are 2 videos below that tell the story, so stop reading this and click play.

Wood fired shower/sauna in the making

2nd Stage of the wood fired shower/sauna

Would you change anything?

Tagged sauna, wood-fired hot water heater

Jan 06 2011

2 Comments

3D Models, Cabins, Security

Secure Shipping Container Cabin

Secure Shipping Container Cabin Design

Just found this cool project blog at Tincancabin.com. Steve is making a very secure cabin using 3 shipping containers. His goal is obviously the security of his remote cabin while he’s away. I really wish we had something like this after 2 break-ins, yes I said 2! Maybe more on that later, but I digress. Shipping containers really make sense here and he has a unique idea arranging the containers so they are intact and there are no windows when the doors are shut. The Cabin has a gable roof which is another interesting idea and makes it much more cabin like.

Secure shipping container cabin doors shut

Container doors shut

Container cabin interior

Steve’s really good at Google Sketchup too so follow his blog and check out his interior designs of his cabin. It’s very spacious and well thought out for it’s use even though it’s only 450 square feet. Read more about the initial design here: http://www.tincancabin.com/?p=17.

Keep up the great work Steve!

Tagged secure cabin design, shipping container

Jan 03 2011

2 Comments

Alternative Energy, Video

Micro Hydro Powered Systems

How awesome would it be to make all the naturally clean power you can use? Very Awesome! We have a heck of a hill but no stream. Something to think about if your looking for land. Hydro power is usually running continuously day and night so you don’t need the storage capacity of a similarly sized solar system. Here are 3 Micro Hydro Videos with totally different systems.

This guy in Northern California explains his system well and it’s one of the larger private micro hydro power systems I’ve seen. The generator is putting out about 475 Watts continuous or roughly 10-11 kW per day. The entire system cost about $5,000 to build. The hydro location is about 250 ft from the cabin. With the solar panels, I get about 12.5-13 kW per day in the summer.

micro-hydro power bucket

Very cool portable system

Tagged hydropower

Jan 02 2011

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 24,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 5 fully loaded ships.

In 2010, there were 47 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 303 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 429mb. That’s about 6 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was August 31st with 453 views. The most popular post that day was Small Cabin Building Costs.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were tinyhousedesign.com, countryplans.com, relaxshax.wordpress.com, facebook.com, and Google Reader.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for cabin foundation, solar burrito, folding cabin, small cabin, and container building.

Solar Burrito

Cabins, Shelters, Off-The-Grid Tech and other Fun Stuff

Posted in January 2011 …