visitors!

Our friends Wendy and Mikey from Holy Scrap Hot Springs visited Boulder recently. And boy, did they rack up a lot of good guest karma! In addition to cooking meals and walking dogs, they brought us some awesome wildcrafted tinctures and teas, which you can find in their store.

Sesame and François had lots of fun together:

What chill dogs...

And what a great thank you/goodbye present...it's amazing what joy six pints of ice cream brings!

(made locally too)

temperature controller

We finally got around to making a batch of tempeh. In order to maintain the proper temperature for incubating it in a cooler, we came up with this control device made from a spare thermostat, a light bulb, and a 120V to 24V doorbell transformer (thanks Jack!). All of which are scrap parts that can be attained inexpensively.

Most home heating and cooling system thermostats require 24V, so this makes the transformer necessary. At 24V, a 60W incandescent lamp will use 6W, which is close to the 7W light bulb recommended by the tempeh culture instructions.

The thermostat we used only goes up to 82°F, whereas incubation is supposed to be in the 85-90°F range, but hopefully it works out! We also added some thermal mass (water) to the container to moderate the temperature swings.

Off the shelf options include:

reptile terrarium temperature controller (60-105°F)

brewing temperature contoller (20-80°F)

Or get the deluxe Fridge/Fermenter Controller from Holy Scrap Hot Springs when it is ready!

The reptile controller would not be good for controlling refrigeration as it isn't designed with the proper hysteresis to prevent wear and tear on the compressor. However, you could get away with using a peltier/thermoelectric refrigerator for cooling.

Update: The 6W wasn't enough to keep the temperature up, so we switched to a 75W lamp (9W) plus 11-16W of uncontrolled Christmas lights, which let us get up to 90°F.

holy scrap hot springs

This past weekend we went to the Holy Scrap Hot Springs homesteader gathering in Truth or Consequences, NM, where we met some great people and learned a lot of DIY skills. Subjects included how to make tempeh from scratch, how to transform coconut flakes into coconut butter and raw coconut "cheese" cake, how to cook in a dutch oven, how to carbonate soda, how to keep bees, how to work on a bike, and how to maintain and care for batteries.

Other highlights included doing yoga in the mornings, soaking in the hot springs under starry skies, finding ridiculous Halloween costumes, plasma cutting a keg, and scoring loofah seeds in a seed swap. Soon enough I will be growing my own sponges!