We have begun building a prototype of our custom steel pontoons that Kong helped us work out a simple engineering design for. Here are the steel plates that we will use for the “skin” of the pontoon: In this picture, the workers are carefully covering the steel in high quality anti-rust coating. After the pontoons…
A staircase down into the pond
I’ve been wanting a way to climb down into the pond for some time now. After going swimming in the pond a few times (mostly for the purpose of doing maintenance, but it is still refreshing on a hot summer day), it is quite clear that climbing up and down the slope is quite difficult…
Roof insulation options
About a week ago, we spent some time living in BaanMae and I got to try out the experimental thermal design ideas during the hottest days of summer. One of the observations is that the sun beating down on the roof generates a lot of heat. The “wind tunnel roof” was doing a pretty impressive job…
BaanLoiNaam: Thoughts inspired by a windy day
Today was the windiest day I remember on the land since we bought it and began construction well over a year ago now. I tried measuring the wind and found gusts of up to 6 meters per second: Mostly for my own records, here is a rough estimate of the distribution of wind speeds over…
Floating house mock-up launched
Having built a mock-up of the floating house just to help visualize the dimensions and the aesthetics on the land, it was time to launch it onto the water. As you can see from the picture above, we floated it on 12x 200L plastic drums. This provides 2400kg of buoyancy against an estimated 150kg of…
First floating house mock-up
We are taking our first incremental steps towards designing a floating house. Yesterday, the workers built a very preliminary mock-up structure out of eucalyptus wood and bamboo. Here is how it looks: Note that this is a test of the size, not the shape. So it is a “house like structure” in the size we…
Floating house design update
Back in July I began thinking about how to design a floating house, and wrote up this post with images of a rough design idea. Since then, I have done a lot more thinking and design updates, and even have a name for the project (“BaanLoiNaam”, which means “house floating on water”). First, the 12″…
Designing a crazy floating house
I’ve been pondering the idea of making our house a floating house. We have a big pond. A floating house doesn’t need pilings. And I have this crazy idea that the house could be made disconnected in the sense of an autonomous propeller driven vehicle. So it could rotate to track or avoid the sun….
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