Exercise: Generate Electricity

Although good for our bodies, running on treadmills, rowing on machines, pedaling stationary bikes or exercising on elliptical trainers and step machines waste valuable resources if this effort dissipates as heat (requiring air conditioning), or worse, consumes fossil generated power in the process. I can think of no better way to appreciate the amount of energy we use than to see how much we can displace every day by using our muscles. One goal? Quantify how much power my computer uses and see if I can generate that much, at least while I’m surfing. Others are way ahead of me in developing equipment that does this:

http://www.los-gatos.ca.us/davidbu/pedgen_pppm.html and http://www.pedalpowergenerator.com/index.html

and there are many more.

But commercial equipment that turns exercise into electric power is expensive. Rather than spend money, it will be more fun to convert an old bicycle into a generator that I hope will be 30% more efficient than those that use friction to connect a bicycle wheel to “cost effective” high speed motor/generators. My target? Build one that converts more than 80% of my effort into electricity. Besides, it will be good mental exercise to figure out how to utilize steel laminations from the stator of an AC electric motor into an appropriate generator. Books and websites have instructions for building your own low RPM generators basing them on a variety of available components like brake drums, transformer cores, and motor laminations but the approaches I’ve come across seem to take more work than I’m willing to do and reports show that do not perform that well.

It would be inappropriate to describe any approach until it works well for many weeks and others concur. Documented performance has to be included with lessons learned and open issues. Too many promote theoretical recipes for technologies that won’t work as described. So when I can quantify how much power a separate electric motor takes to drive the system to deliver 50 to 200 watts, I’ll let you know. Quantifying how much power the same system and the driving motor alone require in the same speed range when not delivering electricity should help us derive performance.

How long will this take? It’s not at the top of the list. Only half of next year’s wood is ready to make into firewood, there are thousands of little plants that need transplanting into old yoghurt cups, garden beds and surrounding fences require attention, our water system and tractor need maintenance and then there’s the real work.

Gathering and Putting Away Firewood

Early spring is the best time for working wood. Unless one has draft horses, whose work may be easier when sliding logs over snow, the perfect time to gather branches and logs is over frozen, snow free ground. I use a tractor and cart to gather the six or seven cords of wood we use for cooking and heating. Most of it comes from fence rows along hay fields and if you wait too long, traveling over emergent grasses damages them. Also, many areas become very wet as frost leaves the soil which severely limits how much weight a cart can carry without getting stuck and really hurting the grass.

I don’t have a cart, yet, for my electric tractor and still use a small diesel powered tractor that can pull its cart with at least half a ton of wood. The smaller electric tractor will have to make many more trips. There are four steps involved in working wood:

1. Preparing space in the wood crib for the new wood;
2. Gathering it: cutting dead trees, fallen limbs and hanging branches into manageable pieces that stack well and are easy to carry;
3. Making piles where they can be covered until it’s processed; and
4. Cutting and splitting it into firewood that fits the stove and throwing it behind neatly stacked firewood walls that will allow access to wood that has been drying the longest next heating season.

Our garage has a high bay that holds both the wood crib and has enough space to stage the logs and branches to make a cord of firewood at a time. The ideal for us is to process wood as quickly as possible so that there is always room to pile a new load indoors. Up to four loads can readily fit inside where it can be cut and split even when it’s raining or dark.

Only about half the wood I gather needs to be cut to length. This is very easy to do with an electric chop saw for branches up to six inches in diameter. It’s permanently mounted to a bench next to the opening of the wood crib so it’s easy to throw pieces after cutting them to length. Using split firewood, I build walls that provide access to well-dried wood and allow throwing most of the wood randomly, without stacking. The loose piles also allow air to flow through so it dries well.  The wood crib is ten feet tall and constructed out of 2” x 6” studs with 1” x 2” slats. The retaining walls of stacked split wood are constructed in stages topping off at about eight feet high so it’s easy to toss pieces over the top, without having to climb. The final process involves building a wall across the wood crib opening and filling the volume behind as it goes up. This last section is the first to get burned so it’s important to finish it by the end of April to give it time to properly dry.

All the small pieces of wood: short lengths, branches smaller than 1″ in diameter and bark I store in bags. We have been reusing bags that chicken feed comes in for years but they are now getting fragile and sticks poke holes that let sawdust leak out on the kitchen floor. We keep a bag next to the stove so that kindling is always available. I’m starting to replace these paper bags with heavy duty fabric bags that I make out of tarps. Cutting a 6′ by 8′ tarp into four pieces and sewing two edges makes four great three foot tall bags. Filled, they stack like firewood when laid on their side and minimize handling wood.

I still use a gas powered chain saw for cutting manageable pieces to fill the cart but use electric saws for making it into firewood. Next year I hope to add an inverter to the electric cart that allows me to use the electric chain saws in remote places. That way they can all use electricity from sunlight. And I won’t have to wear hearing protection anymore.

Starting Seeds

Many varieties of flowers and vegetables are planted directly in the soil where they produce blooms and food. Others require more time to produce a full crop where seasons are short.  Or you may simply want to see flowers and eat tomatoes in July and not wait until September. For these you start seedlings indoors and transplant them outdoors when the soil warms up and it no longer freezes. Gardening literature and seed packets recommend how one should approach each variety.

Not every seed grows. One approach for starting plants indoors: plant two tomato or pepper seeds directly in a vessel that will support a seedling until ready for transplanting. I use thousands of yoghurt (6 or 8 oz. with a hole melted through the bottom with a soldering iron) containers or reuse commercial six-packs that nursery’s use, when available. If both plants grow, transplant the second into another container or discard it. Another method: sprout many seeds in a flat, and transplant each small plant, before it’s an inch tall, into its own vessel.  I usually put 25 to 100 seeds of most flower and vegetable seeds in small containers, like 4” x 6” x 2” trays that supermarket mushrooms come in. After watering them, I wrap them in clear plastic film to keep the seeds moist. Hard to germinate varieties like eggplant, tomato and peppers can be jump started by warming these small containers, stacked one on top of another, above the woodstove (never letting them get warmer than 100 degrees F). Check them twice a day for progress. Once they germinate and peek out above the soil, remove the plastic film and place them in a sunny window.  There are heating mats available to help sprout seeds but they are expensive and use electricity (and fossil fuels).

Commercial seed starting mixtures that have sphagnum peat moss, perlite and vermiculite work well, but I’ve also successfully used a variety of potting soils. These mixes have no weed seeds, retain moisture well and typically only need to be watered every second day, when the plants are small and indoors. As they grow to 3” tall, we move them from our small greenhouse attached to the house to our large greenhouse. The latter gets much more sun, gets quite warm during the day and requires watering every sunny day.

Another system for planting vegetables utilizes 10.5” x 21” “plug” trays that have 72 each 2.5” tall truncated cone pots that you fill with seed starting mix. Place three seeds in a shallow depression made by fingers, pouring more mix on the top, and leveling it off. I’ve used this method for beets, onions, cabbages, broccoli, leeks, turnips and other varieties. Do the two or three plants that grow so close together in the average plug do well outdoors? Absolutely! This technique minimizes the effort in transplanting (each hole and transplanting motion cares for two or three plants) and the plants grow apart so they all access sunlight and water. There is no noticeable difference between those that grow singly and triplets. Second and third crops can be planted directly in garden rows.

If you have room, grow many more plants then you actually need and find folks who would enjoy them. We grow at least twice the amount we can actually eat and periodically bring the surplus to a food pantry pickup point. We use most of what the garden produces when we’re making salsa, tomato sauces, and freezing vegetables, but when we’ve had enough, or don’t have time to process it, it’s easy to drop off any extra food on our way to work or errands.

Plans for Growing

It’s time to think about starting seeds. Some plants need time to grow to a healthy size before they can enjoy frost free nights outdoors and deliver early crops. Our date for setting tender plants in the gardens is June 1 so we still have a few weeks before its time to sprout early garden varieties like carrots, onions, peppers, tomatoes, and the many varieties of “green” vegetables. But it is time to start many of the tiny-seeded flowers like impatiens, portulaca, snapdragons, and cleome. It’s getting a bit late to order seeds from folks who participate in the Seed Savers Exchange: http://www.seedsavers.org/

I start planning the varieties and quantities to plant by taking a quick inventory of the pantry shelves and the freezer. How many jars of tomato puree and sauces, salsas, pickles, and soups? How many packages of frozen pesto, veggies, beans, and corn? How many pounds of dried corn (sweet, blue flour, and pop), squash, and beans? And what did we miss most this winter? What new varieties would we like to try this year? What varieties should grow in the Three Sisters Garden?

It rained too many days last summer and, like many others in the northeast, we lost our outdoor tomato crops. This year I will try a large variety of blight resistant red tomatoes because we overdosed on green tomato chutneys, salsas and sauces. Although pink, purple, yellow, and striped tomatoes are attractive, they just don’t make proper sauces, at least to the palates in our home. Too few jars in the pantry sport red!

Since I have been saving our seeds for many decades, every year I plant only four varieties of each vegetable that bees pollinate. We have three widely separated gardens and a large greenhouse where we grow different varieties of beans, tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, melons, and peppers. This year I’m going to plant more than a dozen types of red tomatoes and forgo saving their seeds. In 2011 I’ll replant and save the four best producers.

Yesterday I removed the mower from its mount under the tractor to prevent its plowing muddy fields and getting us stuck. This will make it easier to pull carts of wood home through thawing soil. We still have snow that’s too deep to allow venturing along the windrows but I’ll start today gathering branches along roads that are plowed.

One task for a vise that I forgot to mention earlier: securely holding the bar of a chainsaw while sharpening edges and shortening “tangs”, the projections on each link that controls shaving depth. It takes quite a bit of force to do this properly. Free to move on a bench or lap often lets the respective files slip, often resulting in cutting glove leather, and hopefully not deeper.