This is a guest post by Mikhesh The Steamer.

It does not have to be just about the winter regarded with apprehension, which did not prove to be as much problematic in Europe at all. In the outlying hills, there is a lack of electricity or gas source. On the other hand, there is usually water and wood nearby. A steam heater can be assembled from things you find in a garbage dump, thrown away in a workshop or in a hobby market.

In a cabin with a fireplace after thirty minutes, the temperature is at best slightly higher, but with steam heating, a T-shirt is enough for that time. You can also spread the steam behind several corners and you don’t have to rely on heat radiation. Wood consumption is equal to a regular fireplace. The difference is in how we deal with its energy.

Steam, that’s what it’s all about.

It is not surprising that many cities used steam for heat distribution in the past. Steam has a much greater heat capacity than water. A supply of 10 liters of water in the tanks is enough for my system to heat a 30m3 brick house from an internal temperature of 5-10°C to 30°C within 3.5 hours. The heat will then pass into the walls and I will last until the morning at 18°C with an outside temperature of 5-10°C. I reach a comfortable temperature within 30 minutes.

I heat these 10 liters of water in pipes which are forming a tank with a total volume of 20 liters. I expect a reserve due to bubbling water and easier regulation. The water itself evaporates according to the intensity of the heating. You will know the appropriate volume after a few tests of your setup and its sound: It manifests itself with a strong bubbling sound.

Disadvantages and risks

The system works with minimal pressure, at a rough guess up to 0.3 atmospheres. I solve the risk of overpressure with a plug loaded with a small weight directly on the tank. I covered this part with a metal cover into which I enter through the small door.

Blowing the plug could be unpleasant. It would flood the room with rapidly cooling steam, which is why I cover it. This has never happened in practical use. The steam must have free passage through the pipe at all times. For this reason, I lead the steam through a rubber hose near the ceiling and gradually slope it downwards so that at no point can the condensing water freeze.

It is not necessary to vent the heating steam system. The penetration of steam through the system and the displacement of air is spontaneous. Only at the end does another exhalation occur – plain water, which I take out of the building through the walls. The captured water can be reused.

Common use

I pour water before starting the fire, never during it, because I might get scalded. The heating does not retain heat and cools down immediately after the fire burns out or the water runs out. In practice, however, the room stays warm for many more hours. Then I repeat the cycle.

Kit sheet

When constructing tanks, you cannot avoid welding. The evaporation containers are sunk into the interior of the fireplace and pass through the plate. They consist of 4 pipes connected in pairs and these are immersed in the combustion space itself, which reduces the internal volume of the fireplace. A tank placed on top of the stove alone would not be efficient enough.

We need:

*A fireplace with a cooking plate that will be adjusted for:
*Thick-walled non-galvanized pipes with a wall of 4 mm and a diameter of 40-50 mm for the tank itself in the fireplace. We plunge these through the stovetop and connect them at the top. Their shape therefore resembles a “C”. From there, we lead the couple further to…
*Ordinary water pipes with G thread. An oakum impregnated with vaseline is wound on the screw-threads. Never use a rubber gasket. The steam continues to..
*Brass taps for regulating the given distribution branch. Previously, these taps were used for gas in Central Europe. From here we take the couple out to…
*Thick-walled rubber hoses of the required length. Hoses from compressors for the distribution of compressed air have proven themselves. Subsequently, the steam passes into..
*Old radiator. We are already draining the water from it outside the building.

Tips:

*All elements must be resistant to 100°C.
*Try to assemble the device in a smaller version in the workshop. You will learn to regulate it and check if it makes sense for you.

I successfully conduct steam up to ten meters away. But it depends on your enthusiasm for experiments. I built my system myself from scraps from work and landfills. Even yours can be unique, where the steam will warm you, also with a great feeling of using discarded items and well-done work.

Plan:

Steam heating (10m)

1. The wall
2. Possible retention of condensed water
3. Pipe weldment with a diameter of 100mm
4. An old tin heating element
5. Tilting (drainage of condensed water)
6. Water
7. Partition without a hole
8. Partition with a hole
9. Water heater insulation
10. Silicone funnel cap
11. Weight
12. Valves resistant to 100°C
13. Hose resistant to 100°C
14. Different forms of enlargement of the transmission area
15. The body of the steam generator placed on the stove instead of the hot plate.

Images

1. Overall view:

2. another example of a heating element:

3. Evaporation tank inside the fireplace:

4. Opening to fill:

5. Fulfillment:

6. Operational water supply:

7. Heating distribution throughout the building:

8. An old heating element is enough:

9. Demonstration of transition of rubber hoses:

10: Securing the hole, the steam does not escape, but no explosion can occur:

DIY: How to build your own bike generator.

Low-tech Magazine’s bike generator powers a record player. No batteries are involved: a buck converter in the control panel keeps the voltage output constant at 12V. Power use is very low and pedaling is easy. Record: Jean-Jacques Perrey et son Ondioline.

Build your own bike generator.

We also published a video of our pedal powered video projector.

Human-powered dot-matrix printer. Direct power. No batteries are involved. Directly powering a dot-matrix printer is challenging, especially when printing longer documents. The power demand is variable and can increase suddenly for a short time. You must pedal very fast to anticipate these peaks. If you fail, the voltage drops, the communication between the printer and the laptops breaks down, and the machine prints the document all over again. Capacitors could solve this. A laser printer has a very high power use during startup and is incompatible with a bike generator (or a small-scale solar installation).

DIY manual for the bike generator: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2022/03/how-to-build-bike-generator.html.

History of office equipment: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2016/11/why-the-office-needs-a-typewriter-revolution.html

Musician Germán Canyelles uses Low-tech Magazine’s bike generator to power his electric guitar. The guitar amplifier and pedals are plugged into an inverter connected to the 12V circuit of the bike generator. No batteries are used. Recorded at Akasha Hub, Barcelona.

“Solar energy often appears a technology without a history, perpetually new and oriented towards the future. This sense of perennial novelty has gone unchallenged by historians, who have generally neglected renewable energy outside the rich world and all but ignored solar energy everywhere. Left to industry professionals, solar history is typically narrated as a triumphalist tale of technical innovation centered in the global North. Such accounts often conflate solar energy with solar photovoltaics (PV) for direct electricity generation… It is tempting to draw a straight line from this innovation to the huge solar PV installations of the twenty-first century; India’s largest, Rajasthan’s US$1.4 billion Bhadla Solar
Park, sprawls across an area the size of Manhattan.”

“Rejecting the eschatology of climate change, such huge mega-projects have reignited the high-modernist idea of progress. They fuse an optimism about the possibilities of science, technology, and human innovation to deliver sustained improvements in economic production and the satisfaction of human needs. In this bright new age, endless rows of solar panels promise to square the circle of economic growth and environmental preservation by providing virtually infinite amounts of clean power for all—and empowerment for women to boot. These utopian ideas, the environmental humanists Imre Szeman and Darin Barney suggest, are coalescing into ‘one of the sharpest and most powerful of ideologies’ today…”

“After the oil shocks of the 1970s, activists in the rich world saw in the sun’s dispersed rays a revolutionary path towards a decentralized ‘energy democracy’, emancipating newly self-reliant citizens from the authoritarian infrastructure of the fossil-fuel-fired electric grid via rooftop solar panels or designer solar homes. Before this point, though, solar energy was more often pigeonholed as something much drabber. A postwar generation of experts cast solar as the ‘poor man’s energy’, to quote a phrase from the period’s best-known international advocate, arguing that the diffuse and intermittent quality of sunlight made it a second-best energy source suited to the scattered rural populations of ‘underdeveloped’ nations… Together these experts imagined solar not as a post-carbon energy source, but a pre-carbon parallel track for those left outside the modern energy economy—a substitute for firewood and dung rather than the abundant and flexible energy of fossil fuels and grid electricity…”

“In the contemporary rich world, going off-grid is framed as a choice. As this earlier episode suggests, though, for much of its history solar energy did not signify the empowerment of the high-tech ‘prosumer’, but spartan compromise with a low-energy past. The physical characteristics of solar energy—available in immense quantity, but diffuse, intermittent, difficult and land-intensive to capture—shaped expert assumptions about its appropriate deployment. In and for the arid tropics, it was seen less as a substitute for fossil fuels than a way to circumvent the expensive expansion of electric grids, marking an admission of the postcolonial state’s inability to deliver public power to the rural majority. Even after independence delivered regimes committed to rapid industrialization, research into solar technologies continued along a low-modernist parallel track. Not simply energy modernization but energy dualism was the pragmatic prescription of the day: large infrastructures for industry and cities, cheap and simple devices for the vast hinterlands of the rural poor. The result was a two-tier energy system, structured by hierarchies of town and country, class, race, and the traditionally gendered division of household labour.”

Read more: Chatterjee, Elizabeth. “The poor woman’s energy: Low-modernist solar technologies and international development, 1878–1966.” Journal of Global History (2023): 1-22.

Some low-tech computing links:

• How to Start Your Blog in 2023.
• Small Technology Foundation.
• Noгma Design.
• Degrowth and strategy.
• The small web is beautiful.

The energy consumption of a single training run of the latest (by 2020) deep neural networks dedicated to natural language processing exceeds 1,000 megawatt-hours (more than a month of computation on today’s most powerful clusters). This corresponds to an electricity bill of more than 100,000 euros (figures in the millions of euros are sometimes found) and 500 tons of CO2 emissions – that is, the carbon footprint equivalent to 500 transatlantic round trips from Paris to New York. In comparison, the human brain consumes in a month about 12 kWh, i.e., a hundred thousand times less, for tasks much more complex than natural language translation.

Unlike a mere ten years ago and in spite of the improvement in desktop computer capabilities, it is no longer possible today to train a modern neural network on a personal computer (it would theoretically take up to 405 years)… One may object that it is probably not surprising that deep learning algorithms be far less energy efficient than three billion years of biological evolution and that the figures may rather suggest a huge room for potential improvement… This objection would displace the focus of the point made here: in a matter of ten years, the absolute consumption of AI learning skyrocketed to reach levels of hundreds of tons of equivalent CO2 for a single learning task. These levels are at stunning odds with the requirements for the human society to drastically reduce its carbon footprint at a rate of −7%/year, starting today.

Let us pursue on the objection line of argument: “once trained”, the algorithm can be reused billions of times, improving billions of users’ satisfaction and well-being, at a comparatively negligible cost on individual devices; this would make the initial investment, however large, possibly worth it, if not desirable. The argument here makes the untold assumption that AI algorithms do improve human welfare, which is already a debated position, but also hides (i) the fact that practical R&D in AI is a continuous process of trials and errors of deep architectures run on an increasing amount of dedicated servers and (ii) that new algorithms run on up-to-date devices or even dedicated devices, thereby making former equipment obsolete and enforcing the continuous purchase of new terminals.

Quoted from: Couillet, Romain, Denis Trystram, and Thierry Ménissier. “The submerged part of the AI-ceberg.” IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, September 2022.

“You hand pump seawater or polluted water into a bowl. Throughout the day the energy from the sun heats up this water and, instead of evaporating into the atmosphere, it gets trapped in the top section. All the fresh water will then trickle down into this bottom basin and all the impurities of the salt and polluted water stay behind. You’re going to have a left-over salt brine which is going to be a waste resource, but instead of throwing it away, this salt brine goes into the series of seawater batteries around the perimeter that can light a LED strip during the night. At night you can turn on the light and you get an energy source through the salt batteries. And during the day, this is like a skylight, bringing natural light to the interiors.”

“The power of the sun is amazing, and I was trying to copy this hydrological cycle. It can kill 99% of dangerous pathogens, remove salt brine and reduce the need of having to boil your water. I am not necessarily reinventing the wheel; solar distillers have been around for a long time, but a lot of these systems are heavy, expensive to make and with very complicated designs. I wanted to think about one which could potentially be portable and simple to construct, made out of local materials and able to Achieve a higher yield of water.”

“This new design was exactly the same but at a large scale. We created a recipe book that is a step-by-step guide on how you can create this same design using bamboo and local work. It could be flat packed into a bag and deployed very simply and quickly and then attached to a bamboo structure which allows structural rigidity but also a community shaded spot, where you can produce around 18 liters of purified water everyday.”

Read more: Low-Tech Solutions for Complex Demands: An Interview with Architect Henry Glogau, ArchDaily. Image by Henry Glogau. Hat tip to Michael.

Why deplore “collapse,” when the situation it depicts is most often the disaggregation of a complex, fragile, and typically oppressive state into smaller, decentralized fragments? One simple and not entirely superficial reason why collapse is deplored is that it deprives all those scholars and professionals whose mission it has been to document ancient civilizations of the raw materials they require… There are splendid and instructive documentaries on archaic Greece, Old Kingdom Egypt, and mid-third millennium Uruk, but one will search in vein for a portrayal of the obscure periods that followed them: the “Dark Age” of Greece, the “First Intermediate Period” of Egypt, and the decline of Uruk under the Akkadian Empire. Yet there is a strong case to make that such “vacant” periods represented a bolt for freedom by many state subjects and an improvement in human welfare.

What I wish to challenge here is a rarely examined prejudice that sees population aggregation at the apex of state centers as triumphs of civilization on the one hand, and decentralization into smaller political units on the other, as a breakdown or failure of political order. We should, I believe, aim to “normalize” collapse and see it rather as often inaugurating a periodic and possibly even salutary reformulation of political order… The “collapse” of an ancient state center is implicitly, but often falsely, associated with a number of human tragedies, such as high death toll. To be sure, an invasion, a war or an epidemic may cause large-scale fatalities, but it is just as common for the abandonment of a state center to entail little if any loss of life.

Such cases are better considered a redistribution of population, and, in the case of a war or epidemic, it is often the case that abandoning the city for the countryside spares many lives that would otherwise have been lost… What is lost culturally when a large state center is abandoned or destroyed is thus an empirical question. Surely it is likely to have an effect on the division of labor, and scale of trade, and on monumental architecture. On the other hand, it is just as likely that the culture will survive — and be developed — in multiple smaller centers no longer in thrall to the center. One must never confound culture with state centers or the apex of a court culture with its broader foundations.

Above all, the well-being of a population must never be confounded with the power of a court or state center. It is not uncommon for the subjects of early states to leave both agriculture and urban centers to evade taxes, conscription, epidemics, and oppression. From one perspective they may be seen to have regressed to more rudimentary forms of subsistence, such as foraging or pastoralism. But from another, I believe broader, perspective, they may well have avoided labor and grain taxes, escaped an epidemic, traded an oppressive serfdom for greater freedom and physical mobility, and perhaps avoided death in combat. The abandonment of the state may, in such cases, be experienced as an emancipation.

This is emphatically not to deny that life outside the state may often be characterized by predation and violence of other kinds, but rather to assert that we have no warrant for assuming that the abandonment of an urban center is, ipso facto, a descent into brutality and chaos… Just as the meaning of collapse merits close and critical inspection, so the term “dark age” needs to be queried: “dark” for whom and in what respects? The term is often a form of propaganda by which a centralizing dynasty contrasts its achievement with what it casts as the disunity and decentralization that preceded it.

Quoted from: Hough, Walter. The lamp of the Eskimo. US Government Printing Office, 1898.

Though the Eskimo live at a temperature of zero Fahrenheit, travelers have noticed their idiosyncrasy with regard to cold. The clothing is designedly left open at intervals around the waist and the bare skin exposed to the cold air. As a rule the Eskimo strip when in the house and sleep naked. Another indication of their feverishness is the consumption of great (quantities of ice-cold water. No explorer has failed to notice the Eskimo lamp, around which the whole domestic life of this people seems to focus. Far more remarkable than being the unique possessors of the lamp in the Western Hemisphere, the Eskimo presents the spectacle of a people depending for their very existence upon this household belonging. Indeed, it is a startling conclusion that the lamp has determined the occupancy of an otherwise uninhabitable region by the Eskimo, or, in other words, the distribution of a race.

Not the least value of the lamp to the Eskimo is the light which it affords. Simpson remarks that the Eskimo never seem to think of fire as a means of imparting warmth,- and Kane observes that their lamps are used for cooking, for light, for melting snow, and for drying clothes, rather than to warm the air.’ Nevertheless, the lamp does afford con- siderable warmth, as Simpson admits in another place. Light, however, is highly necessary during the long darkness of winter and the darkness of the Eskimo dwelling. Nanseu has several times remarked that the Eskimo do not sleep in the dark like other people. Perhaps the inconvenience of rubbing out fire with the fire drill to relight the lamp is one reason. Likewise the feeling of companionship, security, or sociability given by light is appreciated by the Eskimo in common with all other human beings. These instinctive feelings determined in no small degree man’s first overtures to his fire ally.

The Eskimo hut may be likened to an inhabited oven with the lamp as its internal heat. The utilization of the heat is as complete as in the Samovar. The lamp is placed upon its support, above it hangs the cooking pot, and above this, suspended from the ceiling, the frame of slats, network of pegs, on which are placed articles to dry in the ascending warm air. Thus the lamp, which has a single function in other parts of the Avorld, has added among the Eskimo that of the fireplace and cooking stove. The Eskimo Lamp is classifically the homologue of the fireplace in the center of the houses among the majority of tribes in America and Asia.

Hans Egede gives the following description of the lamps of the Greenland communal houses: “Though ten or twenty train-lamps burn at once in the houses of the Greenlanders one does not perceive the steam or smoke thereof to fill these cottages. They take care in trimming the lamp, taking dry moss rubbed very small, which they lay on one side of the lamp, which, being lighted, burns very softly and does not cause any smoke if it is not laid on too thick or in lumps. This fire gives such a heat that it not only serves to boil their victuals, but also heats their rooms to that degree that it is as hot as a bagnio. But to those who are not used to this way of firing the smell is very disagreeable.” Parry, in his Second Voyage, presents a view of an Eskimo interior which shows in an interesting way the lamp and its appurtenances. It is described as follows:

The fire belonging to each family consists of a single lamp or shallow vessel, its form being the lesser segment of a circle. The wick, composed of dry moss rubbed between the hands until it is quite inflammable, is disposed along the edge of the lamp on the straight side, and in a greater or smaller quantity lighted, according to the heat required or the fuel that can be afforded. When the whole length of this, which is sometimes above 18 inches, is kindled, it affords a most brilliant and beautiful light without any perceptible smoke or offensive smell. The lamp is made to supply itself with oil, by suspending a long, thin slice of whale, seal or sea-horse blubber near the flame, the warmth of which causes the oil to drip into the vessel until the whole is extracted.

Immediately over the lamp is fixed a rude and rickety framework of wood from which their pots are suspended, and serving also to sustain a large hoop of bone, having a net stretched tight within it. This contrivance, called Unnetat, is intended for the reception of any wet things, and is usually loaded with boots, shoes, and mittens. The fireplace just described, as situated at the upper end of the apartment, has always, two lamps facing different ways, one for each family occupying the corresponding bedplace. There is frequently also a smaller and less-pretending establishment on the same model, lamp, and all, in one of the corners next the door; for one apartment sometimes contains three families, which are always closely related, and no married woman or oven a widow without children is without her separate fireplace.

With all the lamps lighted and the hut full of people and dogs a thermometer placed on the net over the fire indicated a temperature of 38°; when removed 2 or 3 feet from this situation it fell to 32°, and placed close to the wall stood at 23°, the temperature of the open air being at the time 25° below zero.

The Eskimo lamp has always been regarded a fixture of the house, subject only to the removals of the family. There are, however, small lamps which are carried by travelers or hunters on journeys whose use is primarily for light, but not less important as a means for lighting the indispensable pipe.

Most observers have spoken in terms of praise of the excellent light given by the Eskimo lamp. The flame in a well-trimmed lamp is from 1 to 2 inches, very clear and steady. The oil and fat of the northern animal furnish illuminants of the best quality. In the snow houses of the east the white walls reflect the light, adding to its power.

The Eskimo drink great quantities of water. It is curious that with its world of congealed water the Arctic should be a veritable Sahara. Water is usually supplied by melted snow or ice and the lamp is brought into requisition for the purpose, though sometimes the warmth of the hut is sufficient, especially if the vessel containing snow is placed near the flame. Dr. Kane figures a snow melter of considerable ingenuity which is reproduced here (fig. 2). Sometimes travelers carry watertight pouches containing snow, which they put under the clothing to be melted by the heat of the body.’

Hi Kris,

Unfortunately I couldn’t find your address, so my letter will reach you digitally. See PDF in the attachment.

Many greetings,

Simon

Thank you very much, Simon! Here’s my address for those who want to send letters (or comment on articles) by snail mail:

Kris De Decker / Low-tech Magazine, Apartado de correos 9, 08320 El Masnou, Barcelona, Spain.

Read more: The Fourth Revolution, Paul Kingsnorth. Via Wrath of Gnon.

Prevalent narratives of agricultural innovation predict that we are once again on the cusp of a global agricultural revolution. According to these narratives, this so-called fourth agricultural revolution, or agriculture 4.0, is set to transform current agricultural practices around the world at a quick pace, making use of new sophisticated precision technologies. Often used as a rhetorical device, this narrative has a material effect on the trajectories of an inherently political and normative agricultural transition; with funding, other policy instruments, and research attention focusing on the design and development of new precision technologies.

A growing critical social science literature interrogates the promises of revolution. Engagement with new technology is likely to be uneven, with benefits potentially favouring the already powerful and the costs falling hardest on the least powerful. If grand narratives of change remain unchallenged, we risk pursuing innovation trajectories that are exclusionary, failing to achieve responsible innovation. This study utilises a range of methodologies to explore everyday encounters between farmers and technology, with the aim of inspiring further work to compile the microhistories that can help to challenge robust grand narratives of change.

We explore how farmers are engaging with technology in practice and show how these interactions problematise a simple, linear notion of innovation adoption and use. In doing so, we reflect upon the contribution that the study of everyday encounters can make in setting more inclusionary, responsible pathways towards sustainable agriculture.

Read more (open access): Rose, David Christian, et al. “The old, the new, or the old made new? Everyday counter-narratives of the so-called fourth agricultural revolution.” Agriculture and Human Values (2022): 1-17.