Selfsufficientish.com

My partner is pregnant and will be doing a home birth like she did with her daughter, which is really nice. She has a thyroid problem though and is using her own herbal/homeopathic treatment for this, but she is uncomfortable about medical people making a fuss and pressuring her to take the standard...

Thanks Pumpy! That was very useful, all I need now is a clamp ammeter.

Thanks for the solar calculator, it's very useful in helping to work out the amp hour rating of the batteries. It's the damn washing machine that really pushes things up!

By the way, I love your signature Big Al, very amusing.

I think we prefer to delay the cost of buying batteries for a year or two if possible, as it's probably nearly 1000 pounds for the batteries alone (I saw a 400 Ah solar deep cycle lead-acid battery on ebay for about 250 pounds and I suppose we would need at least three of those), but you have a good...

I already suspected it, but I'm really coming to the conclusion that the only way to get power without hassle and constant worry is to get a 6-8 kw generator and then try adding solar and wind later to reduce fuel costs. Can anyone advise on the choice of diesel or petrol generators? I notice that f...

Yes, I was aware that the inverter surge rating is the max transient load it can handle, apologies if I didn't express myself clearly enough. :) Thanks for your note about motor surge being dependent on physical load. I presume then that a drill or vacuum cleaner will have a much lower surge than sa...

It's been a while since I posted here but I have a conundrum. My friend and I are hoping to buy six acres of cheap low lying land in Somerset (yes, we checked the flood risks) and build a straw bale house. But I am really stuggling to estimate our electricity generating requirements, and to make mat...

Looking back at what I wrote earlier, I would be inclined recommend table salt (sodium chloride) rather than MSG. I've read that table salt will not dissolve in alcohol, whereas MSG is partially soluble. Which means you'll end up with a little bit of MSG in your fuel mixture. Unlikely to be a proble...

Ha, yes, if you can find it, probably the best place to go is a Chinese store. I've seen my Chinese housemate buy a half kilo bag of pure MSG. How well any particular salt will work depends on its ionic binding strength with water. I don't know that so find a chemist (the technical kind not the phar...

Ok, I've found this: http://www.haverford.edu/educ/knight-booklet/propofwater.htm Near the bottom it says: "The MSG, an amino acid salt, should dissolve in water, but only partially dissolved in the alcohol. If rubbing alcohol is used instead of pure isopropyl alcohol, you may observe a liquid ...

Wombat is right, if you want a really simple homebased method then just use a reusable desiccant. After looking into reverse osmosis more it seems to be harder than it first seems. Often the alcohol goes through the membrane with the water (like when the wine industry uses it to remove alcohol from ...

Yes, that's a good point. You could use very small boiling chamber heated by solar radiation. It would be effective but slow, but if it's only for a lawnmower then you can afford to wait weeks for a few litres of alcohol.

Alternatively maybe he could remove most of the water by reverse osmosis.

By the way, if you're interested in distilling alcohol, either to burn directly or to try making biodiesel (usually made with methanol but can be made with ethanol too - but much harder apparently) then you might find these pages useful: http://www.journeytoforever.org/ethanol_link.html http://www.m...

I forgot the obvious point. Why bother spending 30-40 pounds on a second-hand scooter carb when you can just drill a hole in your current carb and use a small electric pump to feed the oil in. The trick is getting the right flow rate for oil. Too much is better than not enough though. You might need...

Hmm, well when I as a wee kid I did get a 50 cc moped to run on acetone (nail polish remover), just poured into the empty fuel tank and spent a few minutes trying to start it. Worked pretty damn well. I doubt you would have any problems running a small combustion engine on ethanol (yeast alcohol) - ...