Pacific Northwest Meet-Up

BTW, my neighbor came up with a simple water purifier for people in places like Haiti. His pastor works with the people of a small village and a guy who runs an orphanage in Port au Prince. The villagers have brackish swamp water while the orphans have essentially sewer.

The pastor asked my neighbor for a design, my neighbor came over here to test some ideas. He has one concept I think would work and in the meantime, he came up with a point-of-use system of common materials that would help. Which reminds me--anyone have any contacts for water purity testing or off-the-shelf kits? We'd like to have a baseline against which to test his methods.

(And my distillation idea is for fuel alcohol using a very common and invasive plant species, both fruit and canes.)

I think I can come up with feedstock from aforementioned invasive plant species (or the must from winemaking operations, which is not only great for this use, but makes excellent compost when it's spent). Since this is for fuel, it doesn't matter what kind of yeast I use as long as I get maximum alcohol.

I want to the either/or pre-heat the feedstock prior to distillation by feeding it through solar vacuum tube collectors (the ones for heating water) or something similar, to lower the overall amount of heat energy required to distill alcohol from the feedstock.

If I use a vacuum distillation process, I can in essence lower the boiling point of the alcohol in the feedstock. The challenge is in pulling the vacuum. One basic way is to use gravity---a weight on a lever pulling a sealed lid up with a solenoid powered by DC current that will fire when the lever has reached a certain point or the requisite temperature is reached. But my ideas are very rough and I'd like to talk with someone who has done some vacuum distillation.

Flipside, some vacuum tubes heat fluid to over 180-degrees F, which might work for my application, provided the sun shines.

My goal here is to design a very simple system of creating fuel alcohol without using excessive amounts of energy.

Or saying to hell with it and starting a craft distillery. But the only vacuum I'll need then is to suck up all the money I'll be making.

Or clean up after?

And I won't let the big bad ghosts hurt you. During the day, there's the Lost City of Wellington, which is actually kind of sad, and the Skykomish Hotel in, surprise, Skykomish. At night, there's the GAR cemetary and Oxford pub in Snohomish, the Maltby cemetary, and some other places. Now, as a member of B.O.O. (the Bureau of Occult Occurences---we have badges and everything), it is my sworn duty to point and laugh at anyone who believes in ghosts.

Yes, we've done ghosthunts, but not like Ghosthunters on TV. We're the debunkers and we've done some great bustin'. And we're not crackpots---says so on our t-shirts.

The ghosthunting thing is really fun because we do a lot of local history research before we do one. So I know a bit about the places around here and the stories people tell about such places. And then, of course, everyone has a ghost story and after a cocktail or two, they start telling them. Or not. I love how the least scary things become terrifying at about three in the morning.

Don't worry, I won't make you swing a hammer. It's my reaction to jibber-jabber: I'm done with theory, can we just get on with it? Of course, I could ask my neighbor to bring his forge over and we can make some nails. That's metal and fire and---oh, forget it. You got to swing a hammer for that, too.

Will send you home with a piece of real cake.

We can alwaysbhead south and scoop up g on our way down. What counts is meeting up and exchanging gossip, er, discussing serious issues seriously.

If darling husband is at all interested in strawbale, solar, woodworking, etc., he'll think our house is pretty cool. If he doesn't, well, does he like to carry things? Kidding. He can go to the fair with the kiddies and you can have too much wine.

Now we gotta do it. It has a name and everything.