#permaculturevan

The savings can finally be deposited in a bank! This is about 6 weeks worth of food scraps from #vanlife in NZ that have been repeatedly compressed and layered with bacteria active sawdust. This #bokashi is not as pickled as expected, possibly due to the cooler weather of the South Island in winter. It's a small contribution to the massive hot compost heap soon to be built at #makinghome in #dunedin

Otago received a nice little bit of snow earlier this week and the solid frost this morning reinforced the feeling that it sure ain't getting warmer. Over the last week I've been working on several ways of heating the van. I don't have insulation, so that's a big strike against me, but I'd still like to find a way to heat the van a few degrees (Celsius) for the early nights that have me wrapped in blankets and incessantly boiling hot water for tea. In the pictures above, you'll see the evolution of the project. I started by assembling old pipes and fittings from the metal scrap yard in Dunedin into a mini rocket stove. A rocket stove is a way of heating a small space or cooking using relatively little fuel compared to a traditional stove or fireplace. However, designs for heating differ greatly from cooking as the focus for the former is on creating thermal mass that will radiate heat into a space rather than dissipate once it's left the flame. The guts of a rocket stove consist of a J-tube. During the R&D phase we were working strictly with the j-tube before adding the thermal mass cylinder around it and an exhaust flume. This J-tube ended up being restricted by the distance between the exhaust pipe and the combustion chamber underneath the feed tube. It needed to be shorter. It had moments when it was drawing perfectly, but this design required constant attention and proved to be too finicky for a practical installation in the van. A wider feed tube and larger combustion chamber would likely bring more success but also take up too much valuable space in the van. It's still inspiring that this design was completely sourced of junk metal pipes from a metal recycler in Dunedin. A mini stove design is possible if the parts are made for the design rather than piecemealed together. However, that's not in the budget or the general philosophy of what I'm trying to do with this van. Huge thanks to Nick Holmes and a north coast local named Basil on this project. I'd be way out of my league without their help.