Ngo Practical Action is working with communities to make zeer pots – very clever fridges made using clay, water and sand. They consist of two earthenware pots of different sizes, placed one inside the other. The space between is filled with damp sand that’s kept moist by adding water, and the smaller pot is filled with food. The top is covered with a damp cloth, then as the water in the sand evaporates towards the outer surface of the larger pot, there’s a drop in temperature of several degrees. This keeps the contents of the smaller pot cool. A zeer pot can keep 10kg of food fresh for up to 20 days.
Pottery Refrigerators
March 5, 2012 by Filed Under: Food storage, Refrigeration
India’s Ancient Stepwell Architecture Cools Modern Building
February 28, 2012 by Filed Under: Air conditioning, Architecture, Cooling, Pools, Water
“At the height of summer, in the sweltering industrial suburbs of Jaipur, Rajasthan in north-west India, where temperatures can hit 45C Pearl Academy of Fashion remains 20 degrees cooler inside than out, by drawing on Rajasthan’s ancient architecture. While the exterior appears very much in keeping with the trends of contemporary design, at the base of the building is a vast pool of water — a cooling concept taken directly from the stepwell structures developed locally over 1,500 years ago to provide refuge from the desert heat.”
Read more: Ancient ‘air-conditioning’ cools building sustainably.
Traditional Repair Techniques: The Japanese Art of Kintsugi
The Japanese art of Kintsugi, which means ‘golden joinery’ or ‘to patch with gold’, is all about turning ugly breaks into beautiful fixes. Most repairs hide themselves – the goal is usually to make something as good as new. Kintsugi proposes that repair can make things better than new.
Kintsugi is a technique of repairing broken porcelain, earthenware pottery and glass with resins and lacquers that come from trees. It dates from the 15th century. The kintsugi artist carefully repairs the broken vessel with a sticky resin that hardens as it dries. The resin can then be sanded and buffed until the crack is almost imperceptible to the touch. After that, the artist takes a lacquer that has been combined with real gold and covers the crack.
Check it out: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5. The first link mentions a couple of DIY-kits using cheaper binding materials.
Solar Cookers That Work At Night
February 20, 2012 by Filed Under: Cooking stoves, DIY, Random, Solar
The solar cooker only works for a few hours in the middle of a sunny day, but not at night or in the mornings when people actually want to cook. Working better means working at night. Climate Healers, an international development technology organization, issued a design challenge last year after their traditional solar cookers failed to catch on in mountain villages in Rajasthan, India.
The challenge was to design a low cost stored energy solar cook stove that could store solar energy without requiring manual interventions from the user. The energy should be stored for at least an 18 hour period and should then be delivered at the users’ control to cook their traditional meals at the times that they choose, which may not necessarily be when the sun is out. People should be able to cook indoors, sitting down. The stove top temperature should be about 200ºC, with heat delivered at approximately 1 KW to the cook surface.
Three US university teams accepted the challenge in early 2011. Later that year, dozens of Indian university teams entered their proposals into the Shaastra Social Innovation Challenge at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. Engineering For Change has published the finalists’ papers online. The ten designs follow different strategies, using materials such as sand, aluminum cans, rice husks, water, salt, straw, or olive oil to store solar heat.
Find all the papers at Engineering For Change. Via Makeshift.
More Waste = More Money
February 20, 2012 by Filed Under: Trash
A battle is brewing in Delhi, India over access and control to garbage. For decades, informal wastepickers and recyclers have turned garbage into cash. They cost the government and taxpayer nothing yet they significantly reduce the waste sent to already overflowing landfills, improve recycling rates and “cool the earth” by reducing carbon emissions. But recent government plans to privatize trash collection have put the livelihoods of the wastepickers under threat. Meanwhile, new plans to build incinerators funded by carbon credits mean the resources the recyclers depend on may soon go up in smoke. Watch the movie: Delhi Waste Wars.
Japanese Tub Boats
February 17, 2012 by Filed Under: Boats, Fishing gear, Random, Travel
“Taraibune (tub boats) were once found along the Echigo coast of the Sea of Japan and on Sado Island. Now they are used only in six small fishing villages on Sado Island. They have survived to the present because of their low cost and durability.”
“Tub boats are made of local sugi (Japanese cedar) and madake (timber bamboo). The woodwork in a tub boat is not at all beyond the skills of an experienced carpenter, but the braiding of the hoops is now an extremely rare skill.”
“Japanese tub boats are used for nearshore fishing and seaweed collecting. A key tool of the taraibune angler is the glass-bottomed box which is floated alongside the boat. This enables him (or more frequently, her) to clearly see the bottom in shallow water to identify likely prey or harvest. A variety of long-handled tools is trailed behind the boat — to collect the fish, shellfish, or vegetation at hand. Tub boats are propelled facing forward with a paddle, though in one village the men use outboard motors.”
“In spite of their ancient appearance, they date from only the middle of the 19th century. Prior to that, dugouts and plank-built boats were used to collect the rich shallow-water sea life around the southern tip of Sado Island, but in 1802 an earthquake changed the area’s topography, opening up a multitude of narrow fissures in the rocks along the shore into which it was impractical or dangerous to take long, narrow boats. Derived directly from the barrels in which miso is brewed, tub boats proved to be adept at navigating these narrow waterways. Indeed, they can be easily spun in their own length.”
More at Douglas Brooks Boatbuilder & Indigenous boats. Previously: The woorden work boats of Indochina.
