Build A Community

[assassin]

I am often asked what a community is and the answer is never simple but I will give my opinion on what it is and how it should work.

Communities are a group of people who come together to achieve an objective or multiple objectives by pooling their experience and skills and working with each other to help others to achieve their objectives.

Most people today have the attitude of "what can I get from it for free" and here is the first problem, selfish people, any community group member has to have the attitude "what can I give" and it will be repaid in a variety of ways which you may never even consider.
Many of these community groups are formalised? and by formalised they are registered in some way; this needs to be avoided at all costs, how many of these community groups require you to register and pay an annual subscription? avoid these with your life. Most important avoid those with any form of authority involved in them as local councils often run them for profit and assume they have control of the group and introduce rules and regulations and you have to comply with them, more importantly they use them for information gathering for them to sell or to see what people are doing in a specific area as information is power and believe me they will use any information they will get.

For me its always best to avoid any form of authority, avoid any form of money such as subscriptions at all costs, and avoid formalities as much as possible. Most problems in life can be resolved using simple communication so stick to communication and always go in with an open mind to achieving a resolution, and let everyone have an equal voice.

Most community groups begin with a few friends and neighbours who often share something and as more people come along they join your informal group, everyone has skills or a trade and it may be something as simple as being fit and strong and making a handy labourer, another member may have a particular trade skill such as a plumber, another member may be a metal fabricator. You have a leaking pipe so you call on your plumber and he comes and fixes it for free, you are a keen gardener so you repay him with some fresh veg from your garden, or your metal gatepost breaks and your fabricator comes and welds it for free and he goes home with a lot of fresh veg.

You can take it much further and if you have a single elderly neighbour with a large garden which they are struggling with; and a young family unable to get an allotment you can speak to the neighbour and they let the young family use half the garden for their veg growing, the elderly neighbour may have been lonely but now she has regular visitors with the young familyand gets some free veg, and half a garden they dont have to maintain so its a win win and an elderly neighbour isnt isolated as so many are.

You are only limited by your own inabilities.

[urchinatheart]

Great post, thank you. What you describe is the ideal community we would all like to belong to, and maybe some of us do. It feels as if this is the natural organisation of men and women when unprogrammed by anything else. As you say, a group of friends is what can begin it most succesfully, and an attitude of wishing to give, as well as to get or learn something of use to us or our loved ones. A small local group of friends who can gather regularly is probably the best support for someone who is struggling with perceived or alleged debt, and is priceless in value for any who attend court hearings. Helping neighbours is great and all the things you suggest can work really well.
The best example I experienced was with a Local Exchange Trading group, started by nine or so friends who were all broke but saw the value in each other. The Trading Tokens were primarily to help transition through the "cash barrier" but also to prevent exploitation as far as possible. It proved to be an excellent way to grow a friendly community as more folk joined in. The tokens became unneccessary after a few years,
as we gave to each other in a way that harmed no-one, and improved our bargaining skills greatly. As with GOODF , it proved that giving really works far better than using some foreigners' expensive tokens !

[assassin]

This is very true, but when you operate a community in a different way which is free of money you can get so much more, the sharing of skills along with the teaching of those skills to other people; children raised in an environment where they want to contribute and are not forced into contributing, and bygone skills from older generations passed on to the newest generations. Our oldest resident is 94 and many people of her generation are often those who are ignored by society but not by us as she contrubutes so much in many ways and nearly always has someone visiting and the children see what she can do and they learn from her. Although she has slowed down in recent years she still wields a 20" chainsaw and can often be seen mucking in when we fetch a load of wood (several tonnes) after very windy weather.

We undertake many community projects such as jam and chutney making and nearly everyone sets up on the village green to form a production line of washing and sterilising glass jars, producing and bottling jam and chutneys, and bottling foods as they come into season, this shows children there is another way and not only do they learn but they want to do it. Apple season is another event when children and adults come together to pick apples and put abour 500Kg of apples into the crusher at a time to produce 1000's of gallons of apple juice by crushing, pulping, and pressing the apples.

We share skills and as an engineer it allows me to work on, and develop viable ideas which is why I have a deep bore geothermal heating system which works solely on thermo-syphon, my own water powered generator for mains electricity, and we have produced HHO gas which rund four eco houses we built from industrial waste.

Community brings ideas, the kids use any broken glass (we dont throw it away) and crush it into powder and sell it to a local shot blasting company; they save ass the wood chips and sawdust and all the village paper and steep them in water and add some cow muck and produce reconstituted logs and give them to most of the community for their log burners which most have.

[urchinatheart]

That sounds truly amazing, thank you. I've tried the paper log thing but gave up as they took so long to dry..never thought of cow muck..collecting that will add a new dimension to country walks! Your geo thermal heating is a great idea,and shows what can be done with practical skills and intelligence. It is so heartening and encouraging to hear your successful building and heating projects, are you in the uk and coping with our wet and chilly climate ?

[assassin]

Of course I am in the UK, and yes I deal with the Uk climate, it is these types of projects which have to be proven to work so companies will invest in them. Mine is a deep bore to over 80 M and lined with scrap drilling rods from the oil industry which have an 8" bore, instead of using a "U" tube at the bottom mine is a series of home made coils as the greatest heat is at the bottom. Standard "U" tubes are fine for profits but making coils slows the brine solution down and gives a massive length of tube to collect much more heat, mine was unstalled and sand filled with dry sand and concrete capped. It heats my home, travels through 4 barns to get the temperature differential to allow it to work correctly so I also have 4 warm barns to work in.

A couple of engineering degrees and a chartership also help.

[urchinatheart]

Thank you for the detail, it is a real eye-opener, I had no idea such things were possible.
You must have a fairly big place if you have 4 warm barns. I obviously need to go away and research the whole geothermal thing before I'm fully able to understand what you have achieved, but it seems like the answer to to living in the cold. I bet you'll be one of the few to survive if we have another ice age! Well done, you're certainly making the most of your education.

[assassin]

Thank you Urchinaheart, it is people like you which make the expense and expertise of testing such things worthwhile, unfortunately geothermal has been contaminated by commerce for huge profits and there are two main types which are shallow bore and deep bore types, the shallow bore is merely another way of extracting money from people with no reward.

Deep bore geothermal is nothing new and has many other uses and a lot of potential, are you aware that deep bore was used in the 1960s/70s in the USA to power electrical generation for the grid? this involved drilling into pockets of steam trapped well into the earth and usually near the Magma layer which heated trapped water and turned it into steam. Drillers would drill until they hit a pocket of steam and this was piped to the surface, they installed standard generators to use the steam with rock filters ans gas seperators and they condensed the steam into water and ran it into rivers. Its downsides were that you could only guess what quantities of steam they had and many were small and quickly ran out meaning the original investment was never recouped, but one clever man understood hydraulics and hydraulic pumping and bought a lot of these defunct sites up and didn't condense the used steam into water, he pumped it back down a return pipe under hydraulic pressures and recirculated it.

By recirculating the steam he had a continual supply of steam and no chance of running out of it, then the environmentalists moaned about the gaseous emissions from the steam and they successfully shut several sites down. By recirculating the steam it only dropped a small amount of temperature and it didn't need fully re-heating, merely having its temperature topped up sufficiently viable for steam production.

[assassin]

http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/our-energy-choices/renewable-energy/how-geothermal-energy-works.html#.WJkoxsJviUk

[urchinatheart]

Thank you for the link and information about your system, assassin, once again I'm shocked but not surprised that bandits intervene and prevent such simple solutions from being applied instead of the destructive and inefficient 'renewable' energy schemes that do get built. Chatting with my plumber friend I found that one of our local stately homes had all its water and heating supplied from a 70m Artesian well, installed in the 1920's, until a few years ago.
Trying to picture your installation, we guessed that the pipes with coils must have been fed into the 8" pipe, then the whole thing filled with sand and capped off, leaving just the open ends of the pipes sticking out to be filled with saline and attached to generating system. Is that right? Elegant and functional, a constant heat supply by the sound of it. Thank you for taking the time to explain it. Now I have to look at the HHO !

[daveiron]

I remember when i was living in Cornwall some 30 years ago there was the "Hot Rocks project" based in an old granite quarry & i believe that used the system Assassin described with the water being forced back down .
I dont know what success it had or what happened to it .I would guess that if it showed potential it would be quietly shut down.

[assassin]

Incorrect, the heating system is not connected to a generating system as that is a different system all together, the heating system is a series of pipes with coils inside the 8" pipe which simply connect to the house heating system. The generation system is totally seperate and consists of a small dam with an outlet which feeds something called a "vortex acceleration tube" which is simply a tapering spiral leading to a compact generator and uses the weight, or head of water to create a pressurised system of water inside the vortex accelerator to create more pressure at the generator.

Our generators are a new thing and designed in cooperation with one university and our technology department to provide a compact generator unit which doesn't suffer from the problem of heat which occurs when you generate such power outputs from such compact units, and of course they are water cooled with accelerated water. These were tested in Derbyshire during the winter months where water run off runs off the edge of rocks and cliffs, some were actually visible from the A6 between Matlock Bath and Homesford.

Other units were installed in the run off water soughs of the old lead mine workings which run all year and although they were prototypes, many have been bought by the land owners (various) and remain in place and will recoup their initial costs in less than 2 years.
They work in conjunction with our geo-technical department who sculpt the rocks to install them and cover them with a new systen we have developed which allows rocks to form over them and then cover them with native plant materials so they aren't visible and they dont upset the natural landscape. Currently we are producing around 100 generator units per year and mine is one of the original prototypes, orders are outstripping demand and Switzerland alone have given us an open order for "whatever we can produce or have spare" which means a lot of our guys having a Swiss holiday several times per year. The real issue is that the Swiss Government have guaranteed to under write them which gives Swiss companies the impetus to say yes and invest in them, and they are.

[assassin]

Dave:

The Hot Rocks project was something different, this was a shallow bore system designed solely for producing hot water al low pressure and a variant of that technology is used in the Eden Project to provide additional heat, and yes you are correct as it was closed down but the technology remains.

[urchinatheart]

Thank you Assassin and Dave. I think the rocks in my head will need the attention of your geo-technical dept before I fully get what you are talking about here, but I'm getting there slowly.The coils in the 8" pipes make sense, and also that heating alone would be the most sensible use of the hot water if one had a head of water above groundand knew what to do with it. You are demonstrating we are surrounded by potential energy generators that will bring good returns on a small input of machinery and well-applied engineering principles. If the Swiss like your generators they must be good, its great you have a way to produce them, and customers with plenty of mountain streams ! I am very grateful for the infomation and inspiration as I'm thinking up a way of using what's pouring down from the guttering even now...

[assassin]

Using what comes down the guttering is easy.

[urchinatheart]

Community Rights vs Corporate Power
Many communities in United States now passing their own laws to prevent corporations harming them, by polluting or interfering with local economy. Very powerful use of their inalienable rights, inspiring and do-able in common law countries like ours......

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