I’ve always been interested in biofuels. Cooking gas, cooking oil, diesel fuel made entirely from your own land. Sounds pretty cool. There are lots of DIY biogas projects on the net. I’m curious to try this after we move onto the land, particularly if we ever get larger animals like goats. I’ve also done some…
Impellers, impellers, and more impellers
Since I first thought of designing my own impeller for a small test pump about a week ago, I have test printed several versions of it. The original print looked like this: You can see the ragged edges caused by Slic3r’s imperfect coverage for source material while it was printing: I decided to remove…
New really fast bamboo growth rates
A few weeks ago I noticed this new shoot popping up from the same bamboo cluster I had posted about the growth rate before: This is the first actual bamboo shoot coming up from the ground that we’ve seen from our new plants. The earlier measurements I was taking were from branches coming off of…
Prototype axial flow water circulation pump
Here are some pictures of a work-in-progress prototype for a simple axial flow water circulation pump: After my test of the “pump payanak”, I kept thinking about the fact that it is pumping the water up 1.5m, making the water do a 90 degree turn and then dropping the water back into the pond. I…
Making a custom propeller/impeller
Since I’ve been exploring various pump options, of course it occurred to me to make one from scratch. I have a pretty cool prototype in the works using a 12.5″ boat propeller as an impeller, cut down to fit inside a 12″ PVC pipe. But that will take a week or two to have anything…
Fixing the problems with the pond level
Here’s the process I’m working on to fix the problems with the pond level: Dig some clay soil up to build a temporary water wall. Pump the rain water out of the part we are fixing the level problem and behind the temporary water wall. (This step is because I would like to fill up…
Testing out two water pumps
We purchased a “pump payanak” from a local agricultural machines shop. (This maybe translates to “naga pump” in English. Because of the shape?) It has a 2.2kW Mitsubishi motor mounted to a belt that drives an impeller. The impeller is mounted vertically inside an 8″ stainless steel pipe. Thus, when the impeller turns on, it…
Measuring the water level
Here are 2 pictures of how we are measuring the water level. Using the bunyip water level from my previous post, we are now able to choose a water level based on being a bit lower than the lowest “shore line” point of the pond and mark it all around the pond using red ribbons…
Bunyip water levels and problems with the pond
During the time that the workers were digging the pond, I was very busy with work. At least that is my excuse for why the pond isn’t level now. 😉 Over the weekend, I was reading up on a number of resources for digging ponds and discovered this very good PDF about building natural swimming…
How fast does the excavator crawl?
So how fast does this excavator with no drive capability crawl? First, bear in mind that it really does crawl. Literally. It moves by lifting up the arm, extending it out, putting it down, then pulling itself forwards. And repeat. Second, bear in mind that this process is really slow. (Third, please bear in mind…
-
Recent Posts
Recent Comments
Archives
Categories