Oct 12 2017
2 Comments
Tags:
air conditioning,
catch and store energy,
house
If you live in a hot house, don’t feel bad for using air conditioning! There are a few things you can do to make your house more comfortable, but at the same time, its difficult to overcome the original design. So far our secondhand house has been cool enough without air conditioning, but we were pretty carefully to position it to take advantage of passive solar design and hilltop breezes.
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Nov 30 2016
0 Comments
Tags:
catch and store energy,
cattle,
chickens,
garden,
water
When I first wrote this post back in 2011, Queensland had too much water, but usually water is very precious to us. Being in a rural area, we rely on our own rainwater supplies for drinking water and septic to treat our sewerage. I’m quite happy with that arrangement, as it means we don’t have to drink the unnecessary levels of fluoride and chlorine in town water. It also means that we have to...
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Feb 25 2013
1 Comment
Tags:
catch and store energy,
house,
permaculture
One of the places that this principle can be applied is within the home. In most homes, the largest use of energy is in either heating or cooling the house to a comfortable temperature. This can be achieved for free by considering the orientation of the house and the building materials.
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Feb 22 2013
0 Comments
Tags:
catch and store energy,
food forest,
perennial,
permaculture
Ideas for creating a perennial food forest - saving seeds, planting perennials and non-food trees.
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Feb 11 2013
0 Comments
Tags:
catch and store energy,
permaculture
In his book Permaculture: Principles and Pathways beyond Sustainability, David Holmgren, one of the founders of permaculture, has written about 12 design principles. Catch and Store energy is the second permaculture principle. In this post I summarise this chapter and give examples from my own experience.
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May 09 2011
0 Comments
Tags:
catch and store energy,
chickens,
garden
We have decided to keep Rhode Island Red and White Leghorn chickens, even though they don't produce as many eggs as some commercial layer breeds. There are some very good reasons for keeping alive heritage chicken breeds (see
this website for a very good explanation):
- Maintain diversity in the available chicken genetics
- Stop multinational companies from owning chicken genetics
- Heritage breeds are...
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