Locavoya in Bywong, New South Wales, Australia | Grocers

Locavoya

Locality: Bywong, New South Wales, Australia

Phone: +61 1300 619 770

Address: 1293 Bungendore Rd 2621 Bywong, NSW, Australia

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24.01.2022 This is the original inspiration for my latest brain fart. The documentary is a bit dated but it's not bad...

22.01.2022 This video is approx 20mins long but provides an excellent overview of earthship building techniques. The hut that this couple have built is essentially the model for our shower building at Locavoya, the dimensions are about the same, however rather than going below ground we are building upwards. We will also be roofing slightly differently due to the availability of local materials & skills. Well worth a watch with a glass of wine or cup of tea.

18.01.2022 The next step in the Locavoya journey is to begin building my house. I will be building an earthship style modular house using used car tyres, glass bottles and tin cans as building material. In order to test the concept I will, today, begin work on the bathroom module which will be a 4m diameter circle and will use all the techniques I will use on the larger structures. I also need to start getting my materials sorted so a trip to a local vineyard is definitely in order. Only to see if they will be kind enough to save empty bottles from their cellar door for me... ;-)

16.01.2022 Today we continued working on our earthship foundations by laying another 6 tyres. As you'll see from the video these tyres are being cut into the ground surface and being leveled as we progress, both individually and against their neighbour. These additional 6 tyres consumed about half a metre of soil so my current estimates for this building is 350 tyres and ~35m of soil. This is a great start but the plan from here in is keep filling & pounding, filling & pounding, filling & pounding....

11.01.2022 What is Locavoya? Locavoya is both a property and an ideal. The goal of the 'Locavoya Project' is to develop a sustainable human habitat for myself and for visiting WWOOFers. It will integrate sustainable energy systems such as solar, wind, biofuels, etc; it will have an educational outreach component through the WWOOF scheme and Butterfly Effect Permaculture; and it will be a prototype site for an alternative living method. To acheive this we will be building some living s...paces from recycled materials; developing food production systems to produce most of the food on the property; developing replicatable energy generation systems; and developing 'right livelihood' opportunities to interact with the rest of society. As the project progresses I will use this facebook page as something of a blog. I will post updates, successes, failures, trials, tribulations and thoughts. This is very much an experimental approach so do expect that I'll share 'learning opportunities' as well as things that work from scratch. :-)

10.01.2022 At Locavoya we will be starting a few hundred Tagasaste plants over winter, very carefully coddling them from the cold, so that we can do some planting as it warms up... a wonderful plant. :-)

10.01.2022 Accessing water for showers and non-potable uses requires a little ingenuity and a few MacGyver'esque skills. In this case I'm using an electric sump pump to pump water from our solar operated bore before carting it to the storage tanks. Longer-term the bore pump will pump directly to the household storage tanks (using only sunshine for energy) but all in good time. :-)

06.01.2022 Further to yesterdays post about the compost heating trial, we have today developed our heat exchange unit. The unit measures approx 80cm in diameter, is approx 150cm tall, and has ~100m of 3/4" Rural Greenline (Medium Density Poly Ethylene MDPE) pipe running around it. The theory is that we will now embed this unit inside a compost pile to collect the water and funnel it into the thermal batteries in the house. Hopefully it'll achieve this via a thermosyphon though this is ...still to be seen. Also today I determined that a local landscape yard has some material that will be suitable for the trial. It would be good to be able to collect this material myself however in an attempt to expedite the process (as it's starting to get rather cold) I'll probably purchase the material to run the trial. Well the next step is to decide how best to build the pile, and to plumb the pipes through to the house. This will mean lagging the pipes to and from the compost pile, as well as building at least one thermal battery.

02.01.2022 Over the weekend we started to develop the first structure to be built at Locavoya... an earthship inspired bathroom. For those that don't know, earthship building techniques are a way of using local recycled materials to build human habitats and were first described by Michael Reynolds. Invariably these homes are built out of used car tyres (which are endemic to the whole world except perhaps Antarctica), metal cans and glass bottles. The concept really is terrific, and I be...lieve will build beautifully functional and wonderfully aesthetic structures. At Locavoya we will be building a freestanding bathroom, 4m in diameter, to test the building technique and 'cut our teeth'. We will post a video documentary of this building on this page and this short video outlines 'the beginnings'. Thanks must go to David Burger for the assistance chipping out the grass...

02.01.2022 I have most recently been concerned with heat, or more precisely the lack of heat in my little house. Let me explain, my temporary house is insulated but not very well and, as it's a hire unit, I can't do too much with it re: modifications. I have therefore been looking for solutions which are safe in small areas, and which don't require wholesale modification of the container and I think I have found it... COMPOST POWERED HEATING The principle was originally developed by a F...rench Fellow by the name of Jean Pain but the concept is very simple. Basically you build a big compost heap with water pipe coiled in the centre. As the material breaks down it generates heat which is picked up by the water in the pipes and pumped back into the house. There I will have 4-6 200L drums filled with water which will act as a thermal battery re-releasing the heat. When I say a big compost heap I do mean big. Jean made compost heaps with 80 tonnes of material, however I don't think that something of this size is really necessary. Rather I am going to start with a 5-6 cubic metre heap and see if it works. I'm hoping to get 2 months of heat out of a smaller pile given that Jean managed to get 60 degree celcius water out of his heaps for 5 months. Admittadley that's at only 4L per min but still that's amazing! The beauty of this system is that the water entering the house doesn't pose any health risks (apart from scalding risks if I am insanely optimistic), the compost is quiet and works day & night, and at the end of the process I have some lovely material to build gardens with to produce food. So the next step is to source some composting materials, develop a stand to hold my pipe in a coil, and build at least 1 thermal battery to test the concept with. If that is successful then adding a few additional batteries in series (to increase amps not volts! ;-)) will be an easy addition. I'll update as we go along...