We’ve been planning this test for a while now and we finally had a chance to run it. Since the workers took off for Songkran, they’ve been busy with other things. But we finally got a simple sprinkler on the roof of BaanMae. Our main goal here was just to do a feasibility test of…
Cooling a roof with solar panels or a double roof
We are past the Songkran holidays here in Bangkok now and the weather is really getting quite hot. The good news is that the low thermal mass design principals we’ve gone for have been very successful in releasing the heat of the day quickly at night allowing the house to be cool enough to sleep…
Using sprinklers to cool off the roof
Originally, I decided to go without insulation on the roof of BaanMae to reduce the chance of critters building nests between the insulation and the roof tiles. Our old house had rats in the attic, and all kinds of bugs and mold in the walls, and Praew has allergies that made her miserable much of…
BaanMae indoor lighting finally finished
With all the other things going on, we’d been too distracted to finish the DC solar powered lighting in BaanMae. So while staying there, we had be reliant on plug-in AC lamps. Except in the main room and bathroom where we had been working on prototypes. Once we were happy with the prototypes, we sent…
Building a keyhole garden, complete with hydrogen cyanide exuding millipedes
Praew is always reading up on new kinds of (easy) ways to grow plants. Particularly food plants. One concept that caught her attention is called a “keyhole garden“. So we went ahead and built our interpretation of one over the weekend. Ours is a little smaller and simpler than the typical variety, but should work…
A custom counter top in BaanMae
We’ve been meaning to build a counter top in the indoor part of the kitchen in BaanMae for a while, and we finally got to it. Here is how it looks on the back balcony before we installed it: And here it is installed: The kitchen is fully furnished now. 🙂
Custom built gate lock
We built a short fence around BaanMae for keeping our actual pet dogs (the ones from our current house) in at night. We don’t normally let them in the house at night, and it would be nice to keep them separate from the pack that took over our land during construction until we are sure…
Slow sand filter: installing a float switch to control the water pump
Since the aerobic treatment system (ATS) dumps the water out into a 1 cubic meter cistern below the ground, and the slow sand filter we want to use to filter this is above ground about 5 meters away, we are using a large aquarium pump to pump the effluent in the cistern to the slow…
Passive cooling against the setting sun
I’ve previously noted that the setting sun heats up the west facing wall of BaanMae to an very uncomfortable level. And since the house uses a low thermal mass design, the heat radiates into the west bedroom (the one Praew and I sleep in) quite readily. For the example in the previous post, when it…
Hacking a better switch for the UV light
My biggest problem with all of the UV light based water filters on the market is the switch on the UV light. The cable from the switch to the filter is only about 50cm long. If the filter is installed under the sink (where else would you want to install it if you had a…
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