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Ajishima Clean Up - Day 30 - 1 Month - Rainy Snow Day Edition!

2/12/2013

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It seems that the universe is conspiring in my favor to see that it either rains or snows every 5-7 days on the island. This means that I get a much needed day to rest from gathering up garbage, and I get to post about some past projects where we were able to repurpose tsunami and dump debris.

Today I give you the Driftwood Hidenka Reizouko 非電化 冷蔵庫, or

Non-Electric Refrigerator:
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Driftwood, wooden box, styrofoam box tops, insulation and recycled water bottles
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Oh! And, some pallets for spare parts, like legs.
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Closed-cell foam and plywood panel for the sidewall insulation
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More pallet scraps for the bottom door
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An old sidewall of a dresser became the lid for our fridge
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Four hinges, some nails and some screws, from the 100 yen shop
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Next came 25 2-liter bottles of thermal mass (i.e. water)
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Which we dropped in...
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Styrofoam box top insulates the top
Picture it. The year was 2007 and I was minding my own business in the public library in Mizusawa City. After exhausting all my options at finding any English language materials in a Japanese library that did not include a 1978 World Atlas, a Beta tape copy of the Karate Kid or a 1981 Passenger Car and Light Duty Truck Service Manual Supplement (GM-Canada), I was delighted to stumble upon the periodicals, amongst which there were many, vaguely, English-titled selections...

Something generically camping-related caught my eye, and I took the current copy and all those tucked away behind it to a nice little table for further perusing. Beyond the magazine's Roman alphabet title there was little of interest or anything intelligible to my non-kanji comprehending brain. The pictures were nice, though! And that is what brought me to flip through a stack of magazines in a matter of mere minutes, only to pause for the flashy color spreads. Some dutch oven advocate here, some car campers there, but in the midst of so much mediocrity something did catch my eye: a man pulling a seemingly cold, deliciously perspiring bottle of beer out of a shiny box on a hot sunny day. There was no ice, there was no cord. From the complex drawings annotated in an even more complex language, I deduced that the sun somehow cooled that delicious bottle of beer. 

While that assumption proved false upon having my trusty translator (Michie!) exercise her kanji-skills, it was revealed that the box was in fact a non-electric refrigerator. The key points turned out to be insulation, thermal mass and radiative cooling (English), (Japanese).

So, four years ago, we photocopied that article and filed it away for future reference. Behold the future: when we first arrived in Japan, late February 2011, we tooled around Tokyo for a couple days, and the first thing we did after that was to head directly to see the Japanese man who had invented the non-electric fridge. The guy turned out to be a bonafide inventor, with all kinds of non-electric gadgets and gizmos all over his studio. The showcase version of the fridge (seen in the link above) was made from customized stainless steel parts and cost hundreds of thousands of Yen (thousands of dollars) to build. Thankfully, this guy was as practical as he was creative and he put together several more cost effective models that he said he had built from off-the-shelf materials from the local hardware store, and all that for under 10,000 yen or about a hundred dollars, give or take.

We studied the fridges intently and snapped as many pictures as possible while there. Little did we know that within three weeks time the whole country would be thrust into a situation where "non-electric" wouldn't just be some tinkerer's dream, but a viable way to comfortably survive.

With all of this in mind, one of the first scraps I snatched up when we landed on Ajishima was that long-narrow, yellowish panel in the picture above. It is actually a thick slab of closed cell foam insulation framed in wood on four sides with a sheet of plywood over one of its faces. The other items include a couple styrofoam box tops, an old fashioned wooden rice bin, a bag of 2-liter water bottles from our first couple weeks on the island with no running water and a few bits of wood.

One afternoon last summer, Michie and I cobbled this little version together. All we needed extra were a few nails and screws, plus four hinges and a piece of screen from the 100 yen shop. Our old friends the handsaw, hammer and cordless drill payed us a visit too. That about wrapped up the project, except for a driftwood wood handle for the top lid, which we found on the beach during a romantic stroll a few days later.

The idea behind this contraption is that at night you open the top lid and let the heat radiate out into space which in effect cools the contents and, most importantly, the water. You close the top lid in the morning and the insulation combined with the relative thermal stability of 50 liters of water keeps everything cool.

We monitored the temperature difference on the hottest days of about 31 degrees Celsius and the internal temp came in between 25-26 all day long. Maybe we could wrap the whole thing in foil or mylar to reflect more of the day's heat as well.

The contents can only ever get as cold as it is at night and they may even freeze in the winter, although despite sustained subzero temperatures just last month, it do not freeze at all.

Aside from the fact that nearly every disparate scrap we salvaged and repurposed matched the exact dimensions of the other components, we had consumed exactly 25 2-liter bottles of water, no more, no less, before the water lines were restored. Those 25 bottles, no more, no less, fit into the box without any gaps

Since we have chosen not to buy a regular fridge, at least we have a place to keep our produce cool, and it will work whether or not we have electricity flowing to our house. Plus, one more great advantage of this fridge is that we have an additional 50 liters of emergency water on hand now, as well. If only it were 50 liters of beer...
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Ajishima Clean Up - Day 23 - Rainy Snow Day Edition!

2/5/2013

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It is cold today. And wet. And raining. And snowing. All at the same time!

The inclement weather is a great segue to another project we did last spring. We employed the usual components: tsunami debris, dump finds, hand tools, cordless drill, and 100Yen shop hardware to produce a nifty little contraption we dubbed:

The Driftwood Cold Frame
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It all started with a bed frame, a pallet and some plywood...
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...then came an old sliding door frame...
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...with seven different panes of glass...
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The cold frame in action in our field with complimentary recycled desk drawer seed trays
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A Driftwood Trifecta!
Cold frames are awesome ways to get seeds started earlier in the spring and to keep plants warm longer into the fall and even winter. You basically need a box or 'frame' with a cover that lets in light, and can be opened or shut to keep in or let out warmth as needed. You can half bury the frame into the soil for more insulation and stable temperatures. We left ours above ground over a 'hugel kultur' bed as an experiment to see if the decomposing wood under the bed would warm the cold frame. We weren't very scientific about it, but it may have had some effect.

The funnest part of this project for me, was getting the seven different glass panes for the cover. We went to the dump and found a massive pile of interior sliding doors used to partition off rooms in Japanese style houses. These were collected from demolished houses and discarded. Most of the frames were broken, but the glass was intact, so, to the pleasure of my inner child, I karate chopped and kicked the doors to pieces and rescued the narrow windows. I then affixed six panes to a door frame that already had one pane in it, then used some hinges to attach it to the box.

We had great success growing just about everything we planted in the cold frame. We used old desk drawers for seed trays and recycled discarded plastic seed pots for some fruit seeds. Still in the cold nights of spring we were able to germinate tomato, corn, zucchini, pumpkin, melon and herb seeds, among others, as well as sprout persimmon, date (tropical fruit-bearing palm tree) and citrus trees from seed.

We learned some important lessons from the cold frame last year. Towards the end of spring we needed to go to the mainland for some family functions but knew that a hurricane was heading towards the island. I watered everyone well and closed the cover to keep our plants safe. Because of the hurricane and a second one that followed it, the ferries back to the island were cancelled, so we had to stay away longer than expected. Once we finally got back to the island, most of the plants had doubled or tripled in size due to the long exposure to the heat trapped under the closed cover. However, the sudden growth spurt was spindly and not hardy enough to withstand a short coldsnap, and most of the veggie starts either died or failed to produce later in the season.

Towards the end of summer I left the lid open with a wire screen on top to keep the crows out. This let our pumpkins explode out of the cold frame and cover an area outside the box more than twice the size of the actual box! That was the good part. The bad part was I left the cover opened and propped up with its foldable legs, well into winter. Either the wind or a massive amount of snow knocked the cover down and one of the window panes shattered and another one cracked. The glass we used was not tempered glass, and therefore is very brittle.

So, cold frames are a wonderful tool for extending your growing season in cool climates but they need to be adjusted daily and should have safe tempered glass covers (or plastic in a pinch if it can be recycled properly at the end of its use). They can be built out of just about anything like: bricks, stone, logs, driftwood, bed frames, and even straw bales. Give it a try and let us know about your experiences growing in a cold frame.
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Ajishima Clean Up - Day 21 - Week 3 - Rainy Day Edition!

2/3/2013

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Today's garbage gathering extravaganza has been called due to rain. But, we can still look back at a previous project that utilized tsunami debris and treasures found at the dump. This little project took three days to build over the hottest part of the summer just after the disaster. Everything is recycled except for some screws, nails, hinges and door latches. And except for my cordless drill, I used only hand tools, including my trusty 100Yen-store handsaw!

I give you: The Driftwood Tool Shed!
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It took a while to gather the materials, and the weeds tried to swallow them up!
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We leveled the ground and used scavenged cinder blocks as pylons
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An old chest from the dump and an old cabinet from the beach
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We added two roofs and a rain barrel fashioned out of a huge plastic fishing buoy half
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Oh, pallets. How I love Thee!
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Our life is full of so many happy coincidences, such as the pallet planks being the same size as the cabinet
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If a regular pallet yields a small door, what do you get from a double-wide pallet?
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Voilà! Two fully functioning doors...
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...that keep the rain out...
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...and the tools safe inside!
Since we built this shed almost two years ago the steel bolts on the door latches have rusted and seized shut, so I will have to replace them with some simple hook latches I thankfully salvaged from a neighbor's shed before it was torn down by the demolition crew last week. Other than the latches, everything else is holding up. This rain barrel is the third one added to our main field and really helped us get through the hottest and driest parts of two summers when we had to hand water all of our veggies.

Whenever I post about our old projects and reusing other peoples' property, I think it bears repeating my thought process: I have had a dilemma in my own mind over using the things we find on the shore and at the dump. Obviously, these items were once in someone's home, integral parts of their daily lives. I have convinced myself that by reclaiming wreckage from the disaster and repurposing it, we are creating something peaceful and practical from the chaos and carnage. I hope it does not offend anyone to put these things to use, rather than have them rot on the shore or be burned away. We are grateful for each and every scrap that has come our way and hope that we are doing it justice and giving all the embodied energy within it new life.


I hope you agree! I would love to hear your thoughts on this, so please use the comments section and let's have a discussion about putting disaster debris to good use.
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Ajishima Clean Up - Day 8 - Rainy Day Edition

1/21/2013

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It is raining cats and dogs today!

This phrase provides the perfect segue for today's post. Since it is raining and really unpleasant to be out traipsing around the woods picking up other people's trash, I would like to highlight one of the projects we have done in the past before we even started the Ajishima Clean Up challenge.
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Presenting the Driftwood Doggy Duplex
Soon after the disaster two years ago, we started collecting all kinds of useful stuff that was washing up on the beaches. We were often rushing ahead of the burn crews, described yesterday, incinerating everything that washed ashore. Amongst the best finds were a host of shipping pallets, a bunch of plastic buoys and five bottles of booze!

From driftwood to the dump, we scavenged all the necessary components (except nails and screws from the mainland hardware store) for a nice cozy Driftwood Doggy Duplex for the new canine friends we adopted at the end of last year. Here are some pics showing the construction process:
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Pallets: the poor man's dimensional lumber!
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Isn't it funny how seemingly disparate parts often fit together perfectly
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Styrofoam box top insulation, and broken bits in bags to fill in the voids
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The roof size was limited by the available wooden planks
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Siding is likely offcuts from disaster renovations I found at the dump
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The pièce de résistance: self-watering, self-cleaning doggy water bowl / downspout combo
I have had a dilemma in my own mind over using the things we find on the shore and at the dump. Obviously, these items were once in someone's home, integral parts of their daily lives. I have convinced myself that by reclaiming wreckage from the disaster and repurposing it, we are creating something peaceful and practical from the chaos and carnage. I hope it does not offend anyone to put these things to use, rather than have them rot on the shore or be burned away. We are grateful for each and every scrap that has come our way and hope that we are doing it justice and giving all the embodied energy within it new life.
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If the overhang was a skosh bigger, we could all have a picnic under there
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    Dream Seed Farmers
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    Rick & Michie labor in love, tending their fields, creating, enjoying, and living on Ajishima, a tiny island off the northeast coast of Japan.


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