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| Image: YouTube |
You'll need:
- Vegetable shortening
- Newspaper
- 1 Glass jar
This short video shows you how to put these three household items together to make this simple candle:
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Showing posts with label off-grid. Show all posts
Showing posts with label off-grid. Show all posts
How to Make a Cheap, Long-lasting Survival Candle
You'll need:
This short video shows you how to put these three household items together to make this simple candle:
Awesome Pallet House Built For $500
The Pallet House. Reclaimed pallets can be used for constructing shelters, cabins, and homes. Building a pallet house from reclaimed pallets is an inexpensive way to build your off grid home or cabin. Get out there, get some pallets, build something!
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| Image: www.i-beamdesign.com |
The inspiration for the Pallet House Project came from the fact that 84% of the world’s refugees could be housed with a year’s supply of recycled American pallets. With one and a half year of pallet production in the US alone, 33 million refugees can live in a Pallet House.
Nearly 21 million pallets end in landfills each year which can house over 40,000 refugees. Pallets are specifically designed for transport and delivery – so cost is negligible when carrying shipments of food, medicine and other types of aid to refugees. A 250 square foot ‘Pallet House’ requires 100 recycled pallets nailed and lifted into place by 4-5 people using hand tools in under a week.
This pallet home could easily be built using your own plans, however I-Beam offers a how to guide for $75 which can be found at i-beamdesign.com/products/pallethouse, if you want to build this exact one.
Source: i-beamdesign.com via offgridworld.com
How to make an off-the-grid washing machine for under $50
makezine.com
A couple of years ago, I decided to concentrate my design research on devices that would be useful to poor families in developing countries — easy-to-make tools that address a specific need without disrupting the local economy, culture, or environment.
Here’s one of my designs: a manual clothes washer that does a load of laundry in about 20 minutes using no power other than muscle. It’s portable, so you can carry or wheel it to a water source, and if you wash with biodegradable soap, the wash water can easily go to a garden afterward.
They’re now using the washer in Hyanja, Nepal, where I collaborated on designing a localized version. It’s also a neat design if you’re living off the grid by choice in an industrialized area, or just conserving water and power.
Inciting Agitation
The washer consists of 3 main components: a container, a net bag, and a lever-driven shaft mechanism held in place by a simple wooden frame.
The key component is the net bag, which is designed to hold, squeeze, and agitate the clothes. The middle of the net bag is a wide, open cylinder of flexible mesh netting. End-capping the cylinder above and below are semi-rigid cones made from short plastic pipes strung together with rope.
Both cones point upward, so the bottom cone sticks up through the clothes and prevents them from balling together.
While the washer is in operation, the top cone holds fast while the bottom cone is pulled up and down by the shaft, carrying the clothes with it.
Each pump of the lever handle pulls the clothes up out of the water, squeezes them out between the nested cones, and releases them back down. The lever’s 40" length provides mechanical advantage for easy operation.
These instructions show how to build a bare-bones device for less than $50 using materials from any home supply store. You can modify the design to suit available materials and your skill level. A machine of this size can handle only small loads up to 5lbs, but the ones we made in Nepal were larger, and I think that one could be made 2 or 3 times larger and would still be easy to operate. I also built a fancier, wooden version that’s towable, with wheels and a barrel-style container.
For step by step instructions and diagrams to build this awesome off-grid washer: http://makezine.com/projects/off-grid-laundry-machine/
Source: makezine.com
A couple of years ago, I decided to concentrate my design research on devices that would be useful to poor families in developing countries — easy-to-make tools that address a specific need without disrupting the local economy, culture, or environment.
Here’s one of my designs: a manual clothes washer that does a load of laundry in about 20 minutes using no power other than muscle. It’s portable, so you can carry or wheel it to a water source, and if you wash with biodegradable soap, the wash water can easily go to a garden afterward.
They’re now using the washer in Hyanja, Nepal, where I collaborated on designing a localized version. It’s also a neat design if you’re living off the grid by choice in an industrialized area, or just conserving water and power.
Inciting Agitation
 |
| Image: makezine.com |
The key component is the net bag, which is designed to hold, squeeze, and agitate the clothes. The middle of the net bag is a wide, open cylinder of flexible mesh netting. End-capping the cylinder above and below are semi-rigid cones made from short plastic pipes strung together with rope.
Both cones point upward, so the bottom cone sticks up through the clothes and prevents them from balling together.
While the washer is in operation, the top cone holds fast while the bottom cone is pulled up and down by the shaft, carrying the clothes with it.
Each pump of the lever handle pulls the clothes up out of the water, squeezes them out between the nested cones, and releases them back down. The lever’s 40" length provides mechanical advantage for easy operation.
These instructions show how to build a bare-bones device for less than $50 using materials from any home supply store. You can modify the design to suit available materials and your skill level. A machine of this size can handle only small loads up to 5lbs, but the ones we made in Nepal were larger, and I think that one could be made 2 or 3 times larger and would still be easy to operate. I also built a fancier, wooden version that’s towable, with wheels and a barrel-style container.
For step by step instructions and diagrams to build this awesome off-grid washer: http://makezine.com/projects/off-grid-laundry-machine/
Source: makezine.com
How to turn one bicycle into an electric generator, water pump, grinder and blender
This is a DIY Maya Pedal multiuse bike machine.
Its functions include:
-knife sharpener, to maintain farming equipment
-grinder, for grinding coffee, grain, spices, or to make animal feed
-corn degrainer to simplify and accelerate a necessary but time consuming task in processing corn
-electric generator for off the grid lighting
-blender to improve nutrition and add enable home based micro industry
-water pump, capable of moving 5 gallons per minute
The tools are mounted on tables which attach to a simple 3 point mounting system. The tool tables can be switched easily using only one tool. Changing attachments usually takes under 5 minutes.
The design is simple yet versatile and I am still working on developing more attachments.
Similar pedal powered machines have proved to be very useful to subsistence farmers in rural Guatemala. My design combines these 6 machines into one simple design, to streamline production and lower costs. While it is unlikely any one user will want all 6 tools, the machine provides more utility at a lower cost.
All of the parts are locally available and it can be built and maintained with a minimal number of tools. (source)
So how do you make this you ask? It's going to take a bit of experimentation because the there are no instructions to build this specific model. However, here's how to make the 4 basic versions of the Maya Pedal bike, you'll have to combine them if you want to make the wonder bike from the video above:
Pedal Powered Blender
Pedal Powered Corn Mill
Step by step guide to build a pedal powered water pump
Pedal powered electric generator which we wrote about before. The bike generator in this video isn't a Maya Pedal model but similar
For more info and to support please visit mayapedal.org
Here is a professional promotional video in Spanish about Maya Pedal
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