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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 13 - Snow Day Edition

1/26/2013

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I couldn't find any garbage today, even if I wanted to!
I loved snow days when I was a kid. School was cancelled, I drank lots of hot cocoa and watched the People's Court and Pasquale's Kitchen all day on TV. I have yet to see this much snow fall on Ajishima; we got dumped on with over 20cm (8+inches) overnight, so I am gonna take a break from garbage collecting today.

I would like to highlight one of the other projects we have done in the past using only garbage, driftwood and disaster debris. Introducing our first ever shipping pallet driftwood compost bin with water catchment, constructed two months after the disaster:
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All materials are disaster debris gathered primarily from the shore, with a few bits from the dump
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Shipping pallets galore and huge plastic buoys
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An entire wall from someone's house respectfully given a new lease on life
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Four pallets and four posts set on four broken cinder block footings...
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...all different sizes and shapes...
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...but it all ended up square, level and plumb!
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It took me two days to figure out how to layout the roof with literal scraps, then an hour to build it!
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The roof was only as big as the biggest scrap of wood, yet...
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...it perfectly fit three sheets of corrugated metal roofing on top!
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I then cut bamboo poles from the grove behind our garden...
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...and wove them into a retractable cover...
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...to keep the crows out
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The water collecting buoys filled up sooner than I expected!
All this compost bin cost us was a few bags of screws and nails from the 100 Yen store (dollar store) and the electricity to charge up my cordless drill! I used hand tools for everything else, because at that time: 1. We only had a couple hours of generator electricity per day, and 2. I had no power tools!

It actually took me three days to finish all components of the compost bin. I spent almost all of the second day trying to figure out how to piece all the misshapen scrap wood together into something sturdy and coherently roof-shaped.

After designing, scraping and redesigning, building, demolishing and rebuilding several versions in my mind, I ended up with four rafters and three purlins as the basic structure of the roof. Incidentally, at that time I did not have a ladder nor access to one, so...I built the roof on the ground.

For the final weatherproofing, I nailed and screwed three bent, rusty pieces of sheet metal with all but the last four nails and four screws I owned. I even pulled several dozen rusty nails from the scrap pallets and straightened them out and used those too, because I knew I might not have enough.

Next came the fun part...I lifted the roof up and maneuvered it into place. It only weighed about 45kg (100lb), so I heaved it up and over the posts all by myself. It turns out that the patch-work purlins made excellent hand holds as I stood over the open pit of the bin with a foothold on the front and back pallets. I had propped the roof against the left side and then proceeded to hoist it up a few inches at a time. With the last four nails, I hammered the side rafters to the posts, and with the last four screws connected the beams to the underside of the innermost rafters.

In retrospect, I probably should not have lifted the roof up all by myself. For that matter, I probably should not have built the roof on the ground in the first place! I suppose I could have built a ladder, but then I wouldn't have had any more wood for the roof. Such are the conundrums one faces when building a driftwood compost bin.

We have been using this bin for almost two years now and the compost we get has really livened up our garden beds. The more we compost the better and more productive our gardens will become once we add it back to the earth. If we are able to incorporate a composting toilet down the road, we will also be able to complete the nutrient cycle, returning as much as possible to the land that feeds us.

I have drastically improved designs in my head on a new two bin composting system for our new house. I have already gathered up some materials during my Ajishima Clean Up adventure, and I will post more about those later on. We will probably get started building it later on in the spring, once all this snow melts and it warms up a lot more.
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    Dream Seed Farmers
    夢の種光房

    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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