Our sixth year on the land (blog)
Guest bathroom started[edit] |
| Posted by Nad on 4 March 2018 at 23:48 |
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This post has the following tags: Our sixth year on the land
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| We've been so flat out with so many different things that we haven't made enough progress on the guest house and Mum and Dad are arriving in less than a week! So when the neighbour Vladimir and his friend Bento offered to get the bathroom started we were very happy to accept :-)
They got the main structure and roof done, and half the walls (that was all the wall boards we had), and they got all this done in just one day! The structure is positioned facing north so that I could put the old solar panels on it, but unfortunately only one of them is working now - still a single 150W panel is fine for lights which is the main thing. 
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We're on satellite now :-)[edit] | |||
| Posted by Nad on 9 February 2018 at 14:35 | |||
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This post has the following tags: Our sixth year on the land
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| We were in São Francisco a few days ago for a few bits and bobs when we noticed a shop which did satellite internet connections. We'd tried to get satellite a few months ago, but found that we really needed to have our solar system upgraded first, and also the guys didn't want to install it on our house as they said it was too weak :-( they said we needed a strong pole supported by a concrete slab installed before they could come back. Well we told this to these guys in the shop and they thought it sounded a bit suss, so we showed them photos of our house and they said it would be no worries to attach the dish support to the wall like normal :-)
They came and did the installation yesterday, it all went very well except for the fact that the bandwidth provider's system was down and they had to stay here for almost six hours talking to various companies on the phone and waiting for them to return calls! Finally at 9pm we had a connection! It's working at about 20mbps which is about 15 times faster than we were getting over 3G from VIVO - actually we were getting 3-4mbps from VIVO, but their service has been steadily declining over the past year or so. 
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The new wood fire[edit] |
| Posted by Nad on 4 February 2018 at 12:54 |
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This post has the following tags: Our sixth year on the land
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| We really love our 'Coski, but we decided that a much smaller one would be better for our tiny house, and also one that's optimised more for heating the place up. So last week when we were in Canela we picked up a small cast iron one with a glass door.
At first we couldn't understand how it could work since we couldn't see any place for the air to enter, and the store owners had no idea that fires even needed air! Eventually we noticed that there was some open space around the ash box underneath. But then we we got it home and gave it a test run, the fire would only stay alight with the door open! A few second after the door was closed and it would go out and smoke would pour out everywhere! We were almost ready to take the thing back saying that it was a total design failure, but then I thought it may be best to try it with a chimney first. Well it turns out the chimney's essential, it worked perfectly after we stuck one on the back! It seems that the design relies on the chimney to create a constant airflow outwards so that new air is sucked in through the bottom :-) 
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Back to the land for 2018[edit] |
| Posted by Nad on 3 January 2018 at 13:41 |
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This post has the following tags: Our sixth year on the land
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| We just arrived back at the land after spending Christmas and new years in Brasília. We were only gone for two weeks but everything's extremely overgrown, so there's a lot of weed-whacking to do over the next few days.
We missed out on some of the first blueberries, but there are still hundreds of new ones growing. The potatoes that we planted directly in the mulch in Bed E were ready too and were almost a success - they were really easy to find and remove and didn't need to be washed, but for some reason, only one of them was a reasonable size, they hadn't developed and were only tiny, so there's still something missing in our process there. 
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