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General Homesteading thread

Bones + wood chipper? I keep asking the sales guy and all that seems to happen is a strange car follows me for a few weeks.

I'm not aiming for bone meal (Well at least not yet) but I need a better method of dealing with bones, ideally when mildly fresh.
Compost them. Or ash them. I’ve also planted over bone piles before. Good for the ground and roots.
 
Compost them. Or ash them. I’ve also planted over bone piles before. Good for the ground and roots.
+1 for bonemeal it makes great fertilizer! Dehydrate them at about 70C for 4 hours then throw them in a blender or grind them with a pestal and mortar.
Love your new(ish?) profile photo by the way Bloodwolf
 
Yes but I am dealing with a larger volume then most, that is just not practical, and this will just be going higher over time thus I need to work on a system

My thought process is course pulverize, then I can either grind to past and use as calcium supplement in dog food, and or use for compost.

At my current rate a high end machine isn't justified but if a small electric wood chipper can work I'll go that route, I planned to feed that into a custom fabricated ball mill to make fine paste to liquify and spray on yard.
I’ve gotten rid of volume through ashing better than just piling up. If you got a good hole in the ground and cage up the bones in thick chicken wire. It creates a big pocket jacking up the heat when you get a fire going. I guess a chipper could work but it’s going to be hell on the blades. Messy as hell too.
 
Bacon rubbed with cayenne pepper, smoked paprika, garlic and onion powder, sprinkled with brown sugar. Let it sit overnight. Grill it still crispy. (Damn good snack!)

canned baked beans, chop up a jalapeño and mix in. Bake 30 min till bubbly. Broil 2 minute till light crust on top. crush and sprinkle the bacon on top.

(you are welcome)
 
Chicken breast, salted with a dusting brown sugar and whole salt, Garlic, ginger, rosemerry, thyme, ground in with whole wheat flour, dusted on to the breast. Extra virgin olive oil preheated to smoke temp, drop breast on then reduce heat and cover, slow cook till browned (depends on stove) Take off reheat to smoke temp and flip and repeat.

Enjoy
Add butter to olive oil. smoking out olive oil alone has a bit of an off putting flavor. Over all, still good. I’d add lemon as well. Great balance.
 
When I bake bread, I give thousands of yeast organisms false hope by feeding them sugar before ruthlessly baking them to death in an oven and eating their corpses!
If you’re smart you have a mother starter to continue the process without the packets. although I think that may be better then slowly poisoning them with alcohol as you make house wine. ?
 
well you drop it second it just starts, I use it as a temp indicator, and I like the taste personally, all recipes user mileage may vary lol.

But next time will try a dash of butter, I normally use lemon a lot, but usually with beef dishes.
Lamb and mint jelly. Don’t know who came up with that monstrosity but it tastes so good. Kind of like the Middle Eastern people using cinnamon in beef recipes. Which is also good as hell if done right.
 
Well I just created more work for myself today. Finally got a good mattock to get the stumps out and low and behold 3 of them were sassafras. So root cutting and drying is on the todo list.
 
And here’s the end result of 6 hours of removal, chopping, boiling in sugar and the addition of a bit of vodka. This is the diluted drink of sassafras. Good fever reduction, eye inflammation, upset stomach and even helps lady cramps. Moderation though. And for you drugies out there, stop fucking it up for everyone ok. IMG_0673.jpeg
 
Off grid problems: The Azimuth drive motor been acting up, I assumed it was the motor (May still be) but then saw no S/N action (tilt) so I checked the brains, no power, so obviously the controller psu is dead. Pull that out, and to my pleasant surprise it seems simple fix, they creatively used an NTC thermister to regulate current to protect the device, that had blown (It is basically a consumable for any dynamic surge loading of the supply is done to it)

But I check the bridge rectifier to make sure no shorts, source replacement. so PSU solved *Possibly.

Now My array is stuck in sun rise home position, I will have to boot strap it with a 20v drill battery and rotate it to noon position, till psu is fixed.

Still need to replace the Azimuth drive with some thing more appropriate, some thing in the range of .5 Degrees per minute rotation.

Best I can do with the gear I have on hand is 0.96 degrees per minute at best, 1.95 Deg /p M worst with out playing with PWM drives (Which caused 3 rather bad failures when interacting with the electromagnetic breaking )
I want to add some solar trackers to my setup soon. By the way, do you have any ideas on how to get rid of the burnt plastic smoke smell? I think I'm going to have to paint or something. :(
 
Ya remediating that is hard as it is basically plastic oil, you'd need to try a few different soaps geared to cleaning oils and greases, but virtually impossible to fully get rid of it, can try an ozone generator before the electronics is back up and running.
Yeah, that's precisely what I did. That oily smoke has covered everything and won't come off with dawn, vinegar, and water. I bought an ozone generator, too, but read where it can break down rubber and plastics.
 
Ozone is very harsh stuff, run it in 30m intervals, stop second it gets tolerable, I used them shit tons in building maintenance, so long as you don't go over kill most things handle it fine, the odor molecules eat it up fast then the other stuff reacts usually
We had one inside our huge data center, and it made the place smell like a swimming pool most of the time and always gave me a headache. :( The air in there was just filtered and recirculated and no fresh air could get in.
 
well if your lungs aren't scared your safe, the stuff oxidizes the shit out of any cell on contact, so burns mucus membranes and oxidative stress through the roof rest of body. lots of vitamin C and other antioxidants are good for ya.
I've been pretty lucky since COVID hit, and I get to work from home most of the time now or anywhere I can get an internet connection. Only have to visit the datacenter's when we have to move shit. They are even thinking about going to 4 10-hour days! woohoo 3 day weekends! Of course, I'm on call 24/7, but I like to forget that part...
 
One way to get assorted roasted fowl delivered to your door as they hit the focal point!
Yah, that curvature had me wondering just exactly where the FP would be in relation to the terrain.

As I recall, there was (is?) a glass-faced building in London (I'm wanting to say it is/was the one I've heard got nicknamed "the walkie-talkie building" 'cause it looked like a giant glass hand-held comms device) that they had to do something about 'cause one of the faces formed a rather effective solar furnace at certain hours of the day - Effective enough that several cars parked in the vicinity had their plastic parts melted. Dunno if they tore it down, changed the glass, or did something else, but I haven't heard anything about it for at least a couple years now, when for a while, it seemed to get a mention every few days.
 

I plan to buy or make one unit like this, to maintain the sanitation of my water storage tanks when the system been built. I have a very old unit based on an ignition coil from a vehicle.

I plan to metal coat the inside of an old fluorescent tube, etch off the ends to increase the insulation value, as I want a larger tube for better production and ideal with less heat, for now it is quartz tube stuffed with stainless steel turnings

Need to make a strong coil driver via 555 timer



Dry air is a way to improve yield with a cheaper unit (Why I been collecting silica gell! Use a second modified tube to make the drying stacks with indicator gell interspersed)
Hmm, I just bought a cheap $30(USD) ozone generator that has a 2hr timer on it or constant on mode. I didn't know about the dry air helping. I have a bunch of those silica packets too that I could use. Thanks!
 
Ozone generators are very cheap and easy to build.

I built one years back with a 15kv neon lighting transformer.

Piece of glass, with wire screen on each side, glass being bigger than the screens and a fan blowing over it.

Will actually make way more ozone than most available for purchase, so you have to be a bit careful with it, not just on the amount of ozone it can generate, but 15kv is nothing to play with either!!

Also, activated charcoal will quickly drop the ozone levels.
 
Just have to heat them at around 180c for a few hours to fully dry them out.
I'm able to run a dehumidifer in my basement all summer just using solar but the silica packets would good for drying the air for the ozone generator use. They probably wouldn't get hot enough to dry out by just placing them in the sun on something black though. Hmm I do have a small toaster oven that will run off solar too though. Hmm…lol
 
Well homesteading you need to sort of do it all if you don't want to spend all your time working for money, and sanitation of water and home is a critical subject.

Ozone does this with out need for chlorine based bleaches and is renewable with just electricity.
I just use a 5 stage filter while running rain water. As off grind you can get you still need to be somewhat connected. I can’t personally run solar here either it be too expensive or they would have to clear too many trees. Electricity is probably the only utility I have connected. Thankfully under ground, no poles.
 
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