PeakOilDesign

• We've moved!

  Number of comments: 12
  Come check out the new site at peakoildesign.com! Please update your links to PeakOilDesign if you have a chance.
  
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  Posted: December 21, 2006, 6:28pm EST
  

• Forest Soil Managment

  Number of comments: 0
  Continuing with the topic of soil management, this article on the importance of forest soil nutrition for carbon sequestration was intriguing. If you hope to help fight global warming by planting trees, make sure you pay attention to soil nutrition or you may end up doing very little [...]
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  Posted: December 20, 2006, 10:06am EST
  

• Exciting news!

  Number of comments: 0
  In the near future, PeakOilDesign will be transferring to a new site with a lot more functionality! I hope to make the switch within a week, so stay tuned for the link to the new site. In the meantime, here's a teaser from the "How to use this site" document:[...]
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  Posted: December 19, 2006, 9:06am EST
  

• Newfound sites

  Number of comments: 3
  I've come across some sites in the past week with some very encouraging information and strategies. Oil, be Seeing You by author Richard Embleton takes a view remarkably similar to my own regarding the best approaches to mitigating Peak Oil effects. An excerpt:
  
  
  I am not one' [...]
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  Posted: December 16, 2006, 11:33am EST
  

• Global Warming meets Peak Oil Design

  Number of comments: 3
  Continuing with the discussion of weather effects from a couple posts ago, there are a lot of other requirements we can define.
  
  Jeff pointed out that we need to more carefully examine how much rain falls during the growing season, rather than just the whole year’s average. I’m [...]
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  Posted: December 13, 2006, 10:34am EST
  

• How much space do we really need?

  Number of comments: 7
  According to some sources, typical work area requirements are 4-12 m^2 (43-130 ft^2) depending on the nature of the work or even desk configuration.
  
  An interesting research paper (pdf) out of the U.K. on current trends showed that households in the “fuel poverty” band had an average [...]
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  Posted: December 11, 2006, 10:58am EST
  

• Soil Management

  Number of comments: 3
  The Energy Bulletin had a fascinating post on modern soil science and management. There is so much we don't understand about how we grow our food, yet so few are willing to question the practices. It sounds eerily like Peak Oil and the way we use energy...
  
  An' [...]
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  Posted: December 08, 2006, 6:06pm EST
  

• Weather effects on Peak Oil Homestead design

  Number of comments: 2
  In the previous post we picked a specific location for our Peak Oil Homestead Example Problem, which enables us to do quite a bit. With these new assumptions we can better see our true requirements. With 34”/year of precipitation, we can modify our water requirements to take advantage of nature’s [...]
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  Posted: December 07, 2006, 5:25pm EST
  

• Homestead Updates

  Number of comments: 3
  Development of the Peak Oil Homestead Example Project has been really dragging, so I’m going to kick it into high gear to keep things exciting and also more relevant to all types of PeakOilDesign projects.
  
  We need to create more assumptions for the Homestead Example in order to develop [...]
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  Posted: December 05, 2006, 8:57pm EST
  

• Shuttle launch on the horizon

  Number of comments: 1
  Discovery is ready to take off Thursday night, and my activity here on the blog should pick back up again once it's launched. If you have a chance to see the launch in person, take advantage of it. Night launches are rare and spectacular, and there aren't many shuttle missions [...]
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  Posted: December 03, 2006, 9:14pm EST
  

• Defining the garden

  Number of comments: 6
  As promised, I pulled together a list of unordered requirements for the “Peak Oil Garden Project”. These are intended for general use, rather than a specific size garden in a specific area. We’ll deal with that later.
  
  So, here are what I consider important requirements for an easy-to-maintain, productive [...]
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  Posted: November 29, 2006, 7:21am EST
  

• Engineering beauty

  Number of comments: 5
  On the last post, DJEB commented that his aesthetic garden designs may not fit very well with the concept of modularity. I agree that engineering does have the tendency to suck the beauty out of designs or appears at odds with permaculture principles, but this is only when applied in [...]
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  Posted: November 28, 2006, 4:58pm EST
  

• Subsystem design: Garden requirements

  Number of comments: 2
  Gardening is an inexact science, which can make for difficulty when trying to apply Systems Engineering. I’m very much a beginner in the realm of gardening, but I’ve gathered a short list of items from various readings that we can develop into requirements. For more in-depth help on permaculture and [...]
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  Posted: November 21, 2006, 10:57pm EST
  

• Peak Oil Money

  Number of comments: 8
  An article at LiveScience today discussed the results of a study showing that even thinking about money can lead to a reduction in selfless behaviors, even when the selfless activity has nothing to do with competition for wealth. It's unfortunate that we're wired this way, but it's something to' [...]
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  Posted: November 17, 2006, 5:55pm EST
  

• Florida gardening

  Number of comments: 8
  The growing season in Florida is just barely underway. I’m brand new to gardening (I haven’t gardened since I was a kid), so I started small with a couple raised beds. One is shown in the pictures below.
  
  
  
  [...]
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  Posted: November 16, 2006, 9:50pm EST
  

• If you build it�

  Number of comments: 2
  You are a genius. You just designed a 3000 square foot house completely powered by a 100-foot tall windmill and a massive rainwater cistern driving a paddlewheel. The three-story house boasts an intensive green roof, two wood-burning stoves, strawbale insulation, 2x12 framing timbers, and a greenhouse for your banana crop. [...]
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  Posted: November 13, 2006, 4:43pm EST
  

• Waste of a good woodburning stove

  Number of comments: 1
  Apologies for the drop in activity -- I've been out-of-town and my internet connections did not pan out.
  
  The other day we were looking at a house up north with a woodburning stove in the basement. Since the lot was heavily wooded, a woodburning stove was a great' [...]
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  Posted: November 10, 2006, 11:27am EST
  

• Bug Boom

  Number of comments: 1
  LiveScience had an article discussing the implications of an insect population boom in response to global warming. One sentence that stuck out at me was: “If they’re crop species, we could count on needing to use more pesticides and it could be very costly...” What are the implications for [...]
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  Posted: November 06, 2006, 4:48pm EST
  

• Child Safety Requirements

  Number of comments: 3
  There are important differences between requirements and specifications. Requirements give specific information about the project (or sub-project) at hand whereas specification give general guidelines to follow. I’ll try to illustrate the distinctions using one of the underdeveloped topics in the Peak Oil Homestead Example Problem: making the Homestead safe [...]
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  Posted: November 03, 2006, 6:36am EST
  

• Sustainable Power Resources

  Number of comments: 3
  For the vast majority of us working to transition to a comfortable post-Peak Oil life, our resources are seriously limited. We’re short of available time, money, land, and skills, and our windows of opportunity for acquiring all of these are rapidly shrinking. So, the more help we can get to [...]
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  Posted: November 01, 2006, 10:13pm EST
  

• Why not blow away Peak Oil?

  Number of comments: 3
  RobTzu called me in to an interesting thread on LATOC discussing challenges to the notion that we can't save the world from energy decline after Peak Oil. In the thread, we calculated the required cost to replace the current world power usage fully with wind energy. Here' [...]
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  Posted: October 27, 2006, 11:36am EDT
  

• Peak Oil Homestead Helpers

  Number of comments: 0
  
  Adjusting to life without TV
  
  Trained farm dogs were essential in the past and will be so again in the future. Dogs help with herding livestock, fighting off predators, warning against intruders, and (of course) entertaining the children.
  [...]
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  Posted: October 25, 2006, 2:09pm EDT
  

• Water Requirements Throwdown

  Number of comments: 0
  Once you’ve reasonably developed the high-level requirements for your design, it’s time to whip out as many requirements as you can. As one of the major concerns following Peak Oil is adequate water supplies, we can start by focusing on water requirements. We’ll also explore a few examples of effective [...]
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  Posted: October 23, 2006, 9:39am EDT
  

• Peak Oil dividing lines

  Number of comments: 5
  The Peak Oil community is divided into three main camps: “doomers”, who anticipate devastating and total collapse; “optimists”, who believe technological breakthroughs will mitigate most of the crisis; and “cornucopians”, who believe any potential peak is decades or centuries away (or non-existent altogether).
  
  Personally, I would fall somewhere between [...]
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  Posted: October 19, 2006, 8:39am EDT
  

• Homestead Example Problem Update

  Number of comments: 0
  The link to the Objectives and Requirements Document for the Peak Oil Homestead Example Problem on the right sidebar now links to an updated document. The free site I'm temporarily using doesn't allow hot-linking, so there's an intermediate click required. This is just a temporary fix until I get' [...]
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  Posted: October 18, 2006, 6:02pm EDT