Depends a lot on what you want from it. Trees, hedges, shrubs, plants?

My garden is mainly shrubs because its quite small. If I had more space I would add fruit trees.

What is the realistic output? Seem some thermoelectric camping stoves and they can barely manage to charge a phone.

Also sounds like a lot of fuel would be required which solar panels don’t need. As some kind of backup power maybe it could have a use, but no chance at being a good primary power source. And isn’t a steam turbine much more efficient than thermoelectric?

Reject their web development culture and make your own sites that run smoothly on devices using a fraction of the bandwidth theirs do.

Oats, enough water to form a dough. Maybe some salt.

Tempted to try using an oat sourdough starter though.

CAN be very expensive. If you are doing it with a car radiator and a hose pipe it costs very little and there isn’t even a heat pump involved.

You can take it up a step by using a heat pump of course. Which you can also do fairly cheaply if you are willing to modify a portable AC unit or tbh anything else with a heat pump in it. All you need to do is water cool the hot side of the heat pump and send that water through your ground loop.

Depends how much you want out of it. Are you heating and cooling the entire house year round along with providing hot water. Or are you just taking a few degrees off the peak summer temperature in a room or two?

IIRC the latent heat of fusion of water is about 333kJ/kg. So 666kJ for 2L. With ice that averages out to about 23w over a nights sleep. Heat capacity of water is 4.2kJ/kg/k, so even if its 0c as a liquid, to warm up to body temperature is under 300kJ.

TLDR: Water going from a ~0c solid to ~0c liquid takes more than twice as much energy as ~0c liquid water warning up to body temperature.

The ice also only melts to 0c, so you get that benefit as well.

At this point I’ll gladly bake oat bannocks over the burning ruins of the US economy to survive.

Luigi did the right thing. Can I join?

Wouldn’t cold water get warm very quickly? I have thought of ice though. If you wrapped it up enough so that it takes up heat fairly slowly.

Oh we talking about outdoor knives? Then yeah morakniv is good for the budget end and you don’t really need to spend more unless you are just showing off

20 is one thing, sounds like those knives are a lot more though. Getting the impression £20 or so is a pretty good price point for a knife.

So far I have sharpened a few times using the base of a mug. Its not a great surface to use but I have a few shitty novelty mugs no one is going to use so it works.

Got some clay in the garden, almost tempting to form it into a tile and use that as a sharpening stone. But stone probably lasts longer.

Think I will stick with my current knives then. Around £20 or so for the small ones, maybe twice as much for the big one.

Do need to sharpen them at some point. Probably could do with a decent sharpening stone too. Have thought of just smoothing a stone tile/brick and using that as one.

That is kinda like earth tubes isn’t it? Which you could retrofit. More powerful cooling can be achieved by using the tubes as part of a geothermal heat pump. Bonus there is that its also even more efficient than a regular heat pump in winter too.

You can ventilate periodically, air doesn’t hold that much thermal energy. You can also use heat recovery ventilation, should work in reverse to keep the heat out too.

Pretty sure a butter knife sharpened on a brick would be serviceable

How much per knife? I don’t need an entire set, I need 1 knife. Maybe 2. A small one and a big one and I use that for everything.

Does sound like a pyramid scheme through.

Where I live its always luxuries that people steal, like fancy wines. If someone is stealing bread or vegetables that is actual food.

What is the endgame if we just let everyone steal everything? A lot of theft here is done by gangs to resell for profit and I am absolutely not OK with encouraging that kind of behaviour.

Earth tubes could pump water instead of air and then pass it through a car radiator or similar kind of heat exchanger.

I find the idea interesting but haven’t actually tried it. Could cost a bit and not sure how effective it would be.

“Food pricing” is usually an average. Meat has gone up a lot but veg remains very cheap. While I am not fully vegan I also don’t see why anyone needs to eat meat.

If I was under the poverty line again I could go back to feeding myself for under £25/month and it would still be a fairly healthy diet. Housing costs so much more, even renting just a bedroom is like £500+ per month now.