Inventing the walls [not wars]
I try not to operate within consumerism and refuse to earn enough money to pay taxes. As soon as you pay taxes, use the banking system, invest in a non-ethical pension, you are responsible for the arms manufacture and usage taking place across the world. The UK is the second largest arms manufacturer in the world and before I go into a distracting rant about this – here’s a link to the actual figures.
https://www.simonthescribe.com/2020/02/17/government-protects-us/
Here at the beginning of 2023, we are already in World War 3. At the moment by proxy, selling our weapons to the highest bidder and I just refuse to be part of the Earth destroying madness. I want my soul clean and going into denial about this is for people who can live with lies.
Likewise I have never driven or owned a car and many years ago decided to take only paid work that I could walk or cycle to. I take a flight somewhere maybe once every 10 years and plant trees to make up for it. I feel guilty about the one-gallon of petrol I use to mow the grass here. My carbon count of less than four tons per annum is an achievement that I have a right to feel proud of.
Imagine my horror when someone told me that having a dog is equivalent to taking a flight every year, just in the manufacture of steel to make dog food tins. So I saved every single one and this is what I did with them.
The tins have their tops and bottoms taken out and recycled. They are then stacked and taped and sprayed black, then put in a box covered with a sheet of recycled glass. When the sun shines on them, the air heats and rises. In this box I put a small solar powered fan so that when the sun shines, the air is drawn up. I mounted this box on the front door and sucked the hot air through into the house. Did it work. Well, yes in that you could feel warm air coming through. But no to the extent that to create any real warmth in a 1620 granite cottage with 3 foot thick walls, one actually needs something more akin to a nuclear dewice.
So with my massive collection of dog-food tins I upscaled the idea to wall size, and installed 2 walls of these tins into the yurt. The heat from the tine comes out inside the yurt and is vented further inward by angled interior windowsills. The results are nothing short of fantastic! When the sun is out the warm airflow is enough to dry hanging herbs in a couple of days. The yurt is dry and warm because the airflow keeps it so, not having to compete with cold, cold granite like the cottage. The heat from these tins helps to keep the yurt dry even in our wet winters in Cornwall.
There were even enough tins left to create a third wall section, although these are just stacked for an insulation layer as they are not often in sunlight.
wall section 3. I sandwiched about 250 used dogfood tins between two layers of polytunnel material left over from an earlier project. This provided surprising structural strength and a good level of ‘tinsulation’.