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…
Strange jelly like organism in pond
Over the past few days, I have been monitoring a strange jelly like organism (or colony?) growing in the pond. It grows root like (or tentacle like) strands down into the water. The top part accumulates bubbles inside to make it float, and the part the floats out of the water gets crusty in the…
Lily in bloom
Walking around the land today, I noticed that the lily pads in the pond are flowering. We planted them for aesthetic as well as cleaning purposes. All water plants consume nutrients in the water. The more nutrients the plants consume, the less is left for algae and other undesirables hopefully resulting in clearer water over…
Overflow pipe finally finished
After digging the trench and laying the overflow pipe, I thought it was just a simple matter of filling in the trench. But, as I’ve noticed with the software development projects at work, sometimes workers get distracted by other projects. Something that is 99% complete can sit unfinished for a surprising amount of time. Apparently,…
The dropping water level in the pond
According to some news reports, this is the worst drought in Thailand in the last 20 years or so. I’ve heard that the rainy season that normally starts around May will likely be delayed until August. This is good for construction since rain just makes everything more difficult. But it isn’t so good for the…
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…
Pond air pump is now on solar power
I recently posted about the air pumps we sourced from eBay. We just got the smaller one installed on a steel bracket we welded under the solar panels. The air pump is inside of the little polycarbonate roof extension just to the left of the solar panels. As mentioned before, the air pump is connected…
Installing a water overflow pipe for the pond
Yesterday, K’Tanawat finished digging the trench for the water overflow pipe in the pond. The idea is that there should be a pipe at exactly the height such that if the water level in the pond ever gets over this level, we want the excess to dump out into the canal bordering our land. We…
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″…
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