Monthly Archives: March 2018

Boiling and boiler-making

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The first batch of new little wood fired dual/fuel kilns takes shape in my workshop. I could say ‘rolls off the assembly line’, but I’d be telling a lie. My kiln shed is only just big enough for 8 of these little gems at one time and there is definitely no assembly line, just a kind of organised chaos as all the parts get made individually and then assembled. I have 9 kilns ordered this time round. I can’t fit them all in comfortably, or even uncomfortably, so I decide to split the work into two parts. The 6 large and then 3 small units.

I spend an extraordinary amount of time making all the fiddly parts that go into handles and locating lugs etc. I spend 3 days on these parts, even with a bit of help from my lovely Swiss intern Catherine assisting. There are 100 lugs to be manufactured for just one small part of the first 6 kilns. Each part needs to be filed on all 4 sides and also have the corners filed down and rounded for safety, then a safely edge folded over to make it extra safe. In all there are about 1,000 individual actions that need to be performed on these tiny bits, just make one small part that no-one even realises is there.
That is until it is not there!
After three days of this monotony, I need a day in the garden!
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While all this industry is going on, there is still gardening to be done to continue the flow of food from the garden in 3 months time. The equinox is the time to plant garlic, as well as leeks, brocoli, cabbage and Kale. Cauliflowers and Brussel sprouts were already planted in January. Today I am planting radish seeds to make sure of a continuous supply of salad next month. The lettuce seeds are already up and thriving.
The 2nd planting of corn is all over and we are onto the 3rd crop now. The few small 2nd cobs on the old corn plants are rather small, but I pick them and dry them in the sunny kitchen window to dry them out. when they are fully dried, I’ll mill them up into polenta for winter comfort food.
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Today, I also harvested half of the coriander crop, as it is at peak leaf just now. This is the seed from the summer planting, which was the seed from the spring planting etc. I decided to make a coriander based green chilli paste.
Recipe;
A bucket of fresh picked coriander leaves
A hand full of green onions
4 long green chillis (hot)
The juice of one each, lemon and lime
Some salt to taste, I keep this to the minimum, but without it the full flavour profile insn’t realised.
Salt is evil stuff, it hardens your arteries and causes hypertension. It is added in far too greater quantities than is really needed to every processed convenience food. We all get way too much of it without even realising it! It’s up there with sugar as a harmfull ingrediant, simply because we eat too much of it.
We don’t buy any junk food, and hardly ever buy much processed foods, but it is still very wise to limit the intake of salt. As a result we don’t have high blood pressure. I think that the two are related.
Still, a tiny pinch of salt goes really well with just a few particular foods like; tomatoes, eggs, curries, pickles and this coriander paste.
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I manage to fill 2 plastic tubs with the concoction. It’s tangy, spicy, hot and very aromatic. 3/4 of it goes into the freezer in this way, so that it will keep for the rest of the year, as needed. The rest goes into the fridge for immediate use.
Items like pesto and coriander paste are not cooked, so can’t be sterilised with heat to preserve them. We don’t own a freezer, so we have to limit what we choose to freeze. This raw paste, pesto, bone marrow stock concentrate and a couple of meals, cooked in excess at the time to be frozen for emergency meals.
The last of the summer beetroot crop needs to be dealt with before it bolts, so I give them a fast roiling simmer for a few minutes to boil them and soften them a little and then drained and straight into hot bottles from the oven with preserving vinegar. i.e. cider vinegar with a spoon full of sugar plus a 1/2 of salt and brought to the boil with a few spices like, cloves, cinnamon, star anise, pepper corns, bay leaves, chillis and mustard seeds. Such a mix is variable and is different with every batch, as it takes my fancy. Pour the mix over the sliced beets and cap straight away while almost too hot to touch. They vacuum seal as they cool.
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Best wishes from Steve the industrious, well-preserved, boiler and boiler-maker.

The Equinox and Preserving Autumn in Jars

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The Autumn equinox has just passed and the vegetable garden is doing well despite the prolonged dry spell. We have now had a little rain, but the dams are still very low or empty.

There are still some summer crops lingering on even though the night-time temperatures are falling, some of the days can still be quite hot. We pulled out a lot of spent summer plants and made room for the winter season plants.

We have already harvested the first cauliflowers and broccoli. We still have some late lingering tomatoes and the last planting of corn to go. But the capsicums, aubergines and chilis are thriving. I managed to get some late zucchini seeds in after Xmas and they have been producing modest numbers of fruit, so ratatouille and all its variations is still on the menu. There is even enough for me to make a couple of batches of passata pasta sauce.

   

 

 

I use some of the last remaining brown onions from our Xmas harvest and a few small knobs of our garlic, lightly browned in good olive oil. The smell fills the house. It’s one of life’s simple pleasures. Hot olive oil with onion and garlic frying. I simmer all the roughly chopped veggies down with a bottle of red wine to make a chunky style pasta sauce. Once its been reduced well and thickened up some what. It is ladled into our 40-year-old, glass Vacola jars and lidded and clipped down to be simmered for 40 mins to be sterilised and vacuum sealed. In this way, it will keep for a year at least, if not longer, if required.

The spring clips are removed the next day after the jars have cooled over night. We test the seal to make sure that they are all perfectly vacuum sealed. Then they are transferred to the pantry cupboard.

Autumn is also the time for preserving quinces. The quince crop is very small this year due to the drought, but there are a few fruit to pick. This is only because Janine was out in the garden early and netted and bagged the fruit to prevent the birds from getting them. The birds have been very aggressive this years, as I assume that the drought has driven them to hunger. We have more wallabies coming into the orchard too, looking to find extra tucker during the dry. Not to mention the influx of fruit bats or flying foxes, that have migrated up from the colony in Picton recently, possibly also driven by hunger?

The quinces are washed to remove the ‘fluff’ coating then peeled, cored and sliced. I baked them in a light sugar syrup with some cloves, cinnamon and star anise, and after baking, they turn an inviting ruby/russet colour.  We have some immediately for desert and then again for breakfast the next day. Totally yummy! The remainder are vacuum sealed in ‘Vacola’ jars for use later in the year.

 

 

We have harvested the last two late season almond trees and spend the evening de-husking and shelling the small late crop. We have 14 almond trees in our nuttery. We have many different varieties, from very round and almost spherical, to very long and thin. Some are hard shell and others paper shell. Some are slightly salty tasting, while others are somewhat bitter, I suspect that this bitterness is from the naturally occurring cyanide that is found in all the almond/peach related stone fruits. What ever it is it doesn’t seem to be doing us any harm over the past 40+ years of eating them.

 

Warm autumn wishes from Steve the nutter.

Firing on Sunshine

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We have had our new Tesla battery for a couple of weeks now and we have just done our first electric kiln firing on sunshine.

We have had 3 kW of solar PV panels on our kiln shed roof for over a decade now, but we have only recently managed to get our hands on a new PowerWall 2 lithium battery, after being on the Tesla waiting list for over a year. The battery is working perfectly, just as we imagined, and now allows us to run our house and pottery almost totally independent off the grid. We had decided to stay connected to the grid however, as we generate far more solar electricity than we use ourselves most of the time, and up until recently we got a very handsome rebate payment for the power that we sold.

Now that the generous rebate program has ended, it is much better for us to store our daytime solar electricity excess and use it ourselves at night, instead of paying the premium cost of buying back ‘green’ power from the grid at night.

Of course we don’t have to buy ‘green’ power. We just choose to, because we made a decision 13 years ago to remove ourselves from the coal economy. Which we have done. We are of the belief that global warming is real and that it is man-made. Burning coal to make electricity is a very big part of the problem, and green power is going to be part of the solution. It’s affordable, it’s here now and it’s the future. In addition to going solar, we have also declined to use concrete slabs in our building construction and we choose to drive the smallest fuel-efficient car that we could afford.

When we put the first Australian made solar panels on our roof 11 years ago, we didn’t do it to make money. We did it for ethical reasons. However, as it turns out, we paid off the panels and made a slight profit over the decade, because we were paid one or two thousand dollars a year for the power we sold to the grid, but we also didn’t have an electricity bill for that decade. A saving of many more thousands of dollars. These original PV panels still have another 15 years of full productive life in them, before their output starts to decline. I’ll be long dead before they stop working. We recently added another 3kW of PV at the same time as the battery. As I intend to buy a fully electric car as soon as they become available at an affordable/reasonable price.

So now with everything in place, we have just completed our first electric kiln firing using our own solar power, firing through the day on sunshine up until just after lunchtime and then into the afternoon on a mix of solar and battery, then ending in the evening mostly on the battery power. Yes, it works. You can fire on sunlight. The future has arrived!

Below you can see a graphic of our power usage though the day.

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The high blue spikes are the electric kiln switching on and off. The golden-yellow hump in the middle, above the line is the solar panel output from the roof. The green areas below the line is the battery being charged up from the solar PV panels in the morning and corresponds perfectly with the yellow solar area above the line, up until noon. The solar panels are both firing the kiln and charging the battery up to noon.

After 12 noon, there was some cloud that came over and the solar output dropped down. By about 3 pm. the PV panels no longer generated sufficient power to both fire the kiln and charge the battery. After 3pm the clouds cleared and solar output increased again and fired the kiln with the assistance of the battery. From 4 pm onwards, the battery fired the kiln with assistance from the solar. Solar production ceased at about 6.30 and the firing finished at about this time also, more or less solely on battery power.

The small zigzag ripple on the base line is the household usage, mostly this comprises the fridge compressor switching on and off. I should also point out that I was also working in the kiln factory throughout the day and using some very heavy 3 phase sheet metal machinery, welders and plasma cutter. This is included in the blue spikes. The lower line of blue spike peaks is the kiln alone, and the higher level of blue spikes is the kiln and the heavy electrically powered machinery working at the same time.

The following day, the PV panels charged the battery back up to full power again by about 1.30pm. Solar output is shown in yellow. The battery shown in green is being charged below the line. Once the battery is fully charged, the solar output is then switched to sell back into the grid for the rest of the day. Shown in white below the line. Household usage is shown in Blue above the line. You can see that we run a very energy-efficient household. The blue spikes represent the toaster and jug in the morning, then the washing machine and then me using the heavy 3 phase welders, and sheet metal machines intermittently in the kiln factory through the day.

By way of explanation, I downloaded this screen shot at 3.30 pm, so that is why the graph suddenly stops.

 

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From this brief explanation I hope that I have illustrated that it is possible to live a ‘normal’ life, carry on working and fire an electric kiln, all from a solar array and a lithium battery.

Food for thought?

Some technical details;

The battery is a Tesla Powerwall 2 lithium-ion battery with a 15 kWh rating.

The solar array is 6 kW. Made up of 3kW of 11-year-old BP solar panels made in Sydney, and 3kW of new ‘Tindo’ solar panels made in Adelaide. In both cases, we paid a premium to purchase Australian made panels to support Australian industries and Australian jobs. If there had been a comparable Australian battery. I would have bought that instead.

The Tesla Powerwall 2 lithium-ion battery is 15 kW/h rating. Made in the USA. The closest Australian contender was ‘ZPower’  also from Adelaide, but at almost 3 time the cost, it was out of our price range. All these things will change quickly and dramatically over the next few years. Watch this space. You can be sure that whatever will replace our battery at the end of its life in 15 to 20 years time, hasn’t even been thought of yet, never mind being built!

The kiln is one that I made myself. It is a half metre cube 500mm. x 500mm. x 500mm.  constructed out of light weight RI bricks.

 

latest little wood fired kilns

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I have just finished and fired the latest little wood fired kiln prototypes.

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These two new kilns are a slight improvement on last years model. The big difference is the increased volume. The big kiln is built in 2 parts. This new bigger kiln is 50% larger than the older model. When fired with gas burners, the 2 part design allows the top to be taken off and the lid placed on the lower section. The lower section can then be fired with gas burners and it can be used as a small test kiln. Alternatively, the top section can be replaced and it can be fired as a small production kiln.

In wood fired mode, it must be fired together, as the bottom section is the fire box and the top section is the chamber.

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I’m very pleased with them. The bigger kiln got to stoneware, cone 10 down in reduction in just 2 1/2 hours. If I can fire it this fast, then it can be slowed down and fired as slow as you like, with plenty of power in reserve.

I’m taking orders for this kiln now.