I had to check, but I had !climate blocked since … ever? Never missed it, but the occasional discussions around it seem to show it’s not the most agreeable place on this instance.

Hiking, collect plants and turn them into useful stuff, repair things, garden, raise animals. Exchange stuff with my neighbors. Much like I’m doing now.

bUt ThE eCoNoMy

Oh there’s a lot of info in this that I didn’t have, thanks for sharing!

I don’t think anybody knows them around here. I showed mine to my neighbour and explained her that it doesn’t use electricity or fuel and she looked quite impressed. The mountain areas here with water running from every hill are just ideal grounds for the rams. I’m still trying to figure out how they could be not just used for gardening, but wisely integrated into fire prevention. I know I can’t just water an area indiscriminately with a ram pump - the pump works till July or August, grow lots of vegetation, which then dries out and is a fire hazard. But maybe something with restoring vegetation around old waterlines first, or storing the water in reservoirs. Ram pumps in combination with reservoirs make great energy harvest and storage as well.

Exactly, I’m working with just 60cm head, which is on the lower end of it working at all. Maybe next year I add another 100 m of tube to reach a spot where the pump can sit outside the stream.

If you have been diving into ram pumps before, I’m curious if you have found any infos about one thing I haven’t had time to research or experiment with: does the distance between the two valves make any difference in terms of efficiency?

Sorry, just those two for now. I’ll need to gather courage before I wade into the stream again for a closeup, especially with my phone in hand. With the heat returned I also was busy installing the hose from IBC to garden to water the veggies. I’m still figuring out the connection between the two IBCs and mixing water coming from a heating panel, and waiting for a washing tank to arrive to go next to it. And then the summer heat and the corn field will dry the stream out in no time … I hope this system runs till End of July at least, but to be honest I don’t know. But even if I have this running only one month on ‘stream energy’ and 11 on electric it will be worth it.

I think ram pumps are lovely, they are so robust - it just took a couple of hours to get it back into the stream and back working (it also got a couple of hours of maintenance in the workshop, of tightening the connections again). This year it runs on a really slow frequency compared to year 1, and it seems to pump the water higher. I’d like to get some numbers one day, but it’s hard to measure anything exactly around here with our installations. Only thing I know is they run so robustly. They find their rhythm and then they just go and go and go.

This reminds me very much of Riddley Walker, have you read it?

Is physics true now? Is truth something with exactly defined borders?

Big Hurra!!! for the functioning wiki! You guys rock. I’ll be populating the permacomputing wiki, hopefully in a somewhat timely manner, but trying to run CS:GO on the Exxon alarm clock has been keeping me busy these last couple of days, and is admittedly a little costly in terms of fuel consumption because of the overclocking.

Have a lush green sunny April, keep the punk times coming!

I can understand you. It would also probably make sense for who uses older hardware.

Interestingly I find that many of people around me who do start to engage in sharing activities still like holding on to some transactional approach - giving out tokens, noting down hours of work … It’s like people feel freaked out by just receiving something out of a void, or giving it away into a void, where the only thing between oneself and misery is the kindness of others. Even though a gift economy creates less overhang by not having to register transactions it might take one or two more generations of casual trade and barter and getting annoyed with token systems before people start feeling comfortable.

I like that you make a conscious effort to break that scheme, but it might ease some people into sharing their excess.

Sometimes I wonder if all of us spectrumy people carry some kind of personal or deep family trauma.

Same with real people out there. I grew up in conflict with my parents before the internet and had the exact same issues you describe, just offline. it comes down to taking any and every advice with a grain of salt, no matter. Online and offline self help groups can be great, and life saving.