The long story short is that I am only working on a part time basis these days (DW is working full time by choice). I will go more in depth in a later post about financials, but due to some unforeseen circumstances I consider myself [mostly] financially independent. I need to do some more thinking on how to track my financial accounting going forward as I don’t believe it is as straightforward as it was during my accumulation phase.
Housing
For the last few months, DW and I have been living in a small 500 sqft city apartment. Although initially I was stoked for the network effects and walkability of city living, I’ve found them to be quite lackluster in my current situation. I also find living in a concrete jungle apartment to be a bit stifling in a way that was not the case when I last did it a decade ago. Over the last few years, I’ve grown fonder of peace/quiet and nature. Additionally, I now crave control over my living situation more than access and optionality.
The good news is that we are in the process of changing our living situation to a sticks and bricks single family home. I will go more in depth on the house specifics in a later post since we are still a few weeks away from the official closing, however it has rekindled my motivation to work on various Mickey Mouse projects related to sustainability that I would often ramble on about here in my younger years. And since my mind is on them, I might as well put some of them down here.
Project 1 – The Compressed Air Gym
First, I’d like to quote a post from my old journal that discusses my thoughts on a home gym:
I like working out and for the first time should have the opportunity to have a home gym. I am less interested in this from a financial perspective because I’ve found the ~$30-$100 cost of a gym membership to be worthwhile for me in most living situations. I am more interested because it gives me the opportunity to tinker with some systems and integrate ideas that have been rattling around in my head for years.white belt wrote: ↑Tue Mar 08, 2022 3:16 pmThe issue for me up to this point is that providing appropriate lower body stimulus at home is quite difficult. Of course there are exercises like lunges, pistol squats, and so on, however they are difficult to add enough resistance to for someone like me who already has a very strong lower body. Upper body exercises at home are much easier. Overuse injuries can occur using only bodyweight exercises because there isn't as much exercise variety. I don't have the space to go all out with a home squat rack, platform, weights, and so on.
I think I could make the same strength and hypertrophy gains at home with the following equipment:
1. flywheel platform (DIY: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om5VSJdQ0Gc)
2. adjustable dumbbell set up to 100 lbs
3. flywheel that can adjust on wall/vertical post so that I can do horizontal pulling motions
4. ceiling hook or pull up bar that I can attach flywheel pulley to in order to allow pull down motions
5. adjustable bench
6. universal machine converted to run on flywheels (nice to have but takes up a lot of space; would give me a wider variety of possible exercises)
1-5 would be the essentials, while 6 is a nice to have if I can have a dedicated gym space. I think they other equipment is small and portable enough to allow me to store it off to the side or move outside depending on the situation.
One idea is the compressed air gym; a gym that converts the mechanical energy generated from strength movements and stores it as compressed air. This concept is not new or novel so I’d like to discuss a few links.
First off, we have the prototype of the Human Power Plant (https://www.humanpowerplant.be/human_po ... plant.html). The aim of this project was to make working out fun and sensory stimulating to a group of people; however they do have some ideas that can be used for inspiration. I am most interested in the machines they created that compress air as I believe incorporating the water batteries and pumps makes the system needlessly complex for my purposes. The hack squat design shows the most promise, however one critical weakness is that the resistance level is not adjustable. Another weakness is that it is a very large footprint for a machine that can only be used for one exercise, so not feasible for my home gym.
The second resource I’ll point to is this mechanic who converted a bicycle to produce compressed air for his workshop. I think this is a decent plug and play design that could be tweaked and incorporated to add a cardio machine to the home gym setup. I am not that mechanically inclined so I found his diagrams and step by step explanation helpful: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/ ... ge-system/
So all things considered, where am I going with this? I believe a prototype designed similarly to the flywheel platform to be the best starting point for a number of reasons. Capitalist version here to give you a visual of what I'm talking about: https://exxentric.com/store/kbox/
First off, the footprint is very small for a garage/basement gym setup, in fact it’s even smaller than half of a power rack. Second, the exercises that will generate the most force (which my understanding is ideal for air compression purposes) are going to be lower body dominant compound exercises like the squat and deadlift. Finally, it is quite expensive and space consuming to train lower body at home because usually it requires hundreds of pounds of equipment and a floor that can handle those loads. It’s easy to imagine how this design could be expanded upon later to accommodate various movements in the vertical and horizontal plane.
I considered just using a (exercise) flywheel design as it is used on the Kbox and similar builds, however this would be suboptimal for energy capture purposes because all of the resistance is created in opposition to the direction the flywheel is spinning at first. Perhaps a better solution would be to directly connect the axel to an air pump, however I would need to figure out a way to relatively easily adjust the PSI to provide different levels of resistance for each lift (multiple air tanks is one method but I’m not sure if turning knobs and trying to get PSI to a certain level would be too fiddly in between sets). I also would need an intermediate part (maybe end up using flywheel anyway?) because the axel would spin one direction on descent and another direction on ascent. It’s also possible that a piston design makes more sense for this application. Another way to think of this is that basically I’m making a belt squat machine but instead of using weight plates as resistance I’m making a big air pump.*
*= I’m also not sure if this design makes any sense from a physics/mechanics perspective. I think it does but I have limited experience with this kind of stuff.
Project 2 – Basement Recirculating Aquaculture System (RAS)
Aquaponics seems to get some hype in permaculture systems, although I’ve never been that impressed with the yields as it seems to be a suboptimal way to grow fish and produce. At household scale, it is relatively simple (not easy) to grow produce outside. However, I’ve found it to be relatively hard to grow protein sources at household level. The most common method is to keep chickens for eggs, but this is not legal in every jurisdiction and feed conversion ratios can vary widely based on situation. In my jurisdiction it is still not legal to have chickens, however there is a proposal that might change that soon.
So that brings me to aquaculture. I think one thing that aquaponics does well is the use of small scale RAS. You can google what all that means, but basically it’s a closed system where you circulate the water between a fish tank and various filters. These are often built indoors to better control environmental variables and I believe my unfinished basement to be a suitable place to build a small scale system. Notably, I am not losing any food production space by using my basement. By virtue of being mostly underground, the basement is climate controlled year around. The lower basement temperatures are not suitable for the most popular aquaponics fish (Tilapia), however it also does not require any energy to heat or cool the water.
Speaking of fish, my first idea is to grow Minnows**. These are typically baitfish in the USA but were historically consumed by some indigenous tribes. I have not eaten them before but cursory internet research compares them to other small fish currently that are consumed whole around the world. It is well understood that eating lower on the food chain is more efficient from an energy conversion standpoint, and minnows who typically consume insect larvae, algae, and duckweed among other things are towards the bottom of aquatic species fit for human consumption. The fact that they are small enough to be consumed whole also makes energy conversion more efficient. It's also possible down the line I could grow duckweed in outdoor containers to feed the minnows.
The system would need a fish tank, biofilter, solids filter, and pump. I plan on starting with a small prototype system with a fish tank of 25-40 gallons. I’d like to play around with a pneumatic ejector pump which seems like it might be more efficient than a traditional water pump while also allowing me to run the entire system on compressed air down the line. Weekly cleaning of the solids filter would allow me to manually transfer the fish waste via bucket to parts of the garden outside that require fertilization (note that from what I’ve seen, this step is still required even in aquaponics systems with growbeds). I’m unsure what my unfinished basement temperature will drop to in the winter, but Fathead Minnows will continue to spawn down to water temperatures that are 60F. The bigger concern is that the biofilter performance may degrade below 65F.
** = https://extension.rwfm.tamu.edu/wp-cont ... -Tanks.pdf
