I Fixed a Dead Chest Freezer and Turned It Into a Chest Fridge

My old superefficient Sundanzer freezer was DOA when I got back to Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage from Florida last spring. This time, I wanted to convert a chest freezer to a fridge with an external thermostat. That way it would be more efficient because it wouldn’t dump the cold every time I opened the door. But when I looked into chest freezers, they were not available and were on backorder for months into the future.

But I noticed a number of appliances on the curb in the village waiting to be brought in for recycling, one of which was a small freezer that still looked in good shape. I thought I’d do some troubleshooting and see if I could get it running again.

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Supercharged SOLAR DEHYDRATOR that doubles as a COLD FRAME

When I was thinking about building a solar dehydrator, my unused cold frame caught my eye and I thought, hmm, that would make a great solar dehydrator during the off season. I use a cold frame in the spring to get my starts going early because it’s like a mini greenhouse. It gives full natural light early in the season when I start to run out of space under the grow lights.

But once I’m done with starts, the cold frame just takes up space in my backyard until the next season. I thought, why not have it double as a solar dehydrator. With a few modifications, it could become a dehydrator and not only conserve space, but save me the trouble of having to go to the trouble of building a separate dehydrator.

I’ve been frustrated with the inefficiency of an electric dehydrator since it uses over 600W and seems like just a waste of solar electric power when the sun is right there in the summer. So in this video I design and build a new kind of solar dehydrator that can double as a cold frame.

How Sustainable Living Prepared Me for a Pandemic

I return to Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage for this video to talk about what awaited me on my return and how I was appreciating sustainable living systems I have set up because they have also prepared me in many ways for a pandemic. I have rainwater catchment, solar power, perennial fruit plants, seed supplies, renewable fuels, lots of food stores, some I grew myself and some purchased, and of course TP.

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Do THIS to your Fruit Trees in the Spring for a HUGE Harvest

I’m posting this video a little ahead of the season but it will help you hit the ground running. In a time of pandemic, we need to do all we can to ensure our food security and get a bigger harvest, so it’s no time to neglect your fruit trees. If anything it’s a time to planting more of them in your yard. Every year I spend a little extra time doing a simple maintenance task for my fruit trees and it not only makes the fruit a lot bigger, it reduces insect pests and produces more perfect fruit. Some people scoff at thinning fruit trees because they think it’s too much work, but it can make a huge difference in the harvest and in controlling insect pests and disease.

Fall Permaculture Bounty: Hazelnuts, Pecans, Mushrooms, Persimmons

Our ecovillage features many permaculture plantings that have been maintained over the years by many people. The village is kind of like one big permaculture project. Fall is a time when a lot of perennial fruit and nut trees produce abundantly and in this video I went around the village to see what kind of a harvest I could find. I ended up checking the hazelnuts on my warren (what we rabbits call our yards), did a trade of wine for shiitakes, picked some persimmons from the Dancing Rabbit orchard, and went outside the village to harvest some delicious hardy pecans (ours are still too small to produce fruit). A lot of times you only see the planting of permaculture projects and not so much the actual production of them. But that’s where this video is different. https://www.instagram.com/hardcoresustainable/ https://www.facebook.com/HardcoreSustainable/ http://hardcoresustainable.com

My SIMPLE OFF GRID WATER system and fixing a pressure tank problem

Off grid water systems that meet most household needs can be set up with relatively little expense. A DC pump, a solar panel, batteries, and a pressure tank are pretty much all you need to get cold water into a house or to a field for agricultural applications.

I knew something was wrong with my system because the pump would kick on every ten to twenty seconds while I was using the water. Normally it should be kicking on every few minutes of extended water use. In this video I do some troubleshooting to figure out the problem and fix it so that I can extend the life of my pump. You might have the same problem sometime with your system.

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