Amazing Off-The-Grid Tiny House Has Absolutely Everything!
This tiny house is ready for anything! Completely off the grid, this tiny home on wheels generates it’s own solar power, collects rain water, uses solar water heating and even generates it’s own biogas for cooking.
Paul and Annett had been living the city life, in an apartment in Sydney, Australia. A desire to lower their impact on the earth and live closer to nature lead them to designing and building their own eco-friendly tiny house powered by renewable energies and moving onto a remote property outside of Byron Bay.
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Engineering Mystery Solved: How Ed Leedskalnin Built Coral Castle
This video appears to have solved how Ed Leedskalnin’s ‘free energy device’ was built and operated. This is the machine Ed, a slight 5’ tall man, used to cut and shape giant blocks of coral stone to build the Coral Castle in Florida.
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The Aranya story: turning barren land into a forest garden using permaculture
Padma and Narsanna Koppula have turned a barren piece of land in Telangana’s Medak district in India into a food forest by engaging the community that lives around it. Here’s their story.
YouTube
Search our blog for many related stories on different ways to turn degraded, dead, run down land into productive farmland. This is one of the best ways to create an affordable homestead.
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How to Make a Free, Super Easy Twig Stove in 5 Minutes
In this video I show how to make and use my favorite soup can camp stove. The stove in this video is an excellent little wood stove that burns fuel cleanly, and unlike DIY alcohol stoves can burn for long periods of time without needing to be extinguished to refuel. I also prefer wood stoves over alcohol because you don’t need to carry fuel with you; sticks are a renewable resource you can find almost anywhere.
YouTube
Search our blog for related videos on twig stoves, camp stoves, rocket stoves, etc. If you’re not a camper just realize these stoves make great backup stoves if the power ever goes out. I love all of these simple low cost DIY stoves so there’s quite a bit of content here on this subject.
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Natural Building
Living With The Land
Natural buildings are an ancient tradition with a modern appeal. Creating healthy, beautiful homes from natural materials such as earth, straw and timber, building naturally is the ultimate expression of ecological design. Building isn’t ‘done’ to us – it can be done by us. The skills and techniques used in natural building are hands-on and accessible, enabling us all to design our own healthy living spaces bringing people and the elements together.
The UK has a rich tradition of natural building and natural architecture that is seeing a renewed interest. Building naturally is one such response to Living With The Land.
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Few or No Residential Building Codes in Brewster County, Texas
Brewster County, Texas has minimal building codes
From time to time we feature areas around the U.S. that have few or no building codes. Today we profile Brewster County, Texas. Codes typically skyrocket the cost of construction ten-fold, so we encourage natural builders to seek out rural areas with minimal building codes. Search our blog for lots of other counties with few or no codes.
From Wiki: Brewster County is located in the western part of the U.S. state of Texas. As of the 2010 census, the population was 9,232. Its county seat and only city is Alpine. The county has a total area of 6,192 square miles (16,040 km2). It is the largest county in Texas. The only substantial water is half the width of the Rio Grande river. The largest state park in Texas is Big Bend Ranch State Park at 300,000 acres (1,200 km2).
Brewster County Texas.com
Image: Classic Country Land
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DIY Primitive Water Filter
Learn how to make a no cost, simple water filter using three baskets made from vines. The baskets are filled with charcoal, river sand and pebbles to purify the water.
I’ve been watching other videos on this same YouTube channel called Primitive Evolution. They show lots of interesting primitive camping/surival techniques.
There are other similar YouTube channels such as Primitive Survival Tool with interesting videos such as making a water filter tank out of bamboo and homemade lime plaster.
I agree with the commenter Anubus MaAt who states: “gravel at the top, sand in the middle, charcoal at the bottom — charcoal should be fine like sand.” (Actually, I didn’t know the characoal had to be crushed to powder. That’s why I watch similar videos from time to time.) Also, I’d boil the water after filtering, and use a different container to scoop it out of the lake. You want to be extra careful if you are not native to the area. Natives often have a certain amount of resistance or adaptation to local organisms in the water and food that visitors to the area do not have. Lakes, river, streams and the groundwater nowadays is often contaminated.
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Tiny Hobbit House with Amazing Green Roof & Straw Bale Walls
Video tour of an incredible underground hobbit home in Canada that is completely off-grid. It is built with straw bale walls and limestone plaster, log roof rafters and support columns, and a stunning green roof with a glass dome in the centre to bring in a lot of natural light.
The hobbit house has solar power for the lights, a single-burner propane cooktop in the kitchen, a portable solar shower and composting 5-gallon bucket toilet with sawdust in the bathroom, and a woodstove for heat.
In addition to being sustainable and off-grid, the interior design of the tiny house is quite stunning. They’ve used natural, unfinished wood for countertops, benches, a table, and more. It all adds to the feeling that your house is a part of the woods. It’s minimalist living at it’s best.
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Underground Cities of Cappadocia
Underground cities of Cappadocia, Turkey extend 11 levels deep
I reported on the Underground Cities of Cappadocia back in 2014. What I didn’t realize then was how vast these underground cities are. There is a network of over 200 underground cities in the Cappadocia region of Turkey. Some of these cities are at least 11 levels deep (total of over 200 feet deep) according to National Geographic. Scientists are not sure how they were built.
Overhead view of the underground cities of Cappadocia
As I reported in the previous blog post, the underground cities are quite complex. They’re filled with kitchens, ventilation shafts, store rooms, animal pens, etc. so that 20,000 or more people per city could live for months at a time if needed.
Image 1: Underground Cities of Cappadocia http://www.fazturkey.com/show/1358/underground-cities-of-cappadocia.aspx
Image 2: https://www.goreme.com/kaymakli-underground-city.php
With soft stone, a pneumatic drill and a conveyor belt it would be practical to build a small underground home. This has been done in modern times. But chiseling and removing rubble by hand would be very hard, slow work. To build cities by hand would take thousands of workers decades or centuries.
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