Greetings, On Mon, 2009-05-11 at 11:24 -0700, lance95 wrote: > This is my first day on this discussion board. And I want to thank > everyone for the work that they have done. I am impressed.
It is quite impressive. > I’m very interested in empowering myself and others to survive in a > battered economy. I have, for the last couple of years, studied a wide > range of options for those with only minimal resources. And, if you read some of the essays our Fearless Leader has put out, there is lots of information on how to transport and build minimal-resource infrastructure, starting with a shipping container full of supplies, and ending with housing and a field-hospital. > I am very involved with alternative medical treatments, especially > those associated with Qi Gong. I believe medical issues to be very > important area since our quality of life depends largely on the state > of our health. You might want to talk to Dr. Evan Hughes about such things, he has several good talks about such balances. > My research suggests to me that one might be well advised to remember > that threats to one’s plans to survive a calamity can arise from many > sources, which include the federal, state and local governments. Indeed, although most of the focus here has been on disaster recovery, theoretically with the support of the Federal, State and Local governments, rather than in opposition to them. Most of the work, here has been on temporary structures, rather than permanent ones, with the exception of the co-op farm (search the archives for more information) > Consider the harassment that can come for simple vagrancy. Vagrancy is a whole other topic, that I'm not sure this is the correct forum to focus on such within. Safer to talk engineering, rather than causes. We all want these, for our various reasons, and when they effect the design (as my reasons did) it makes sense, but ... if it is outside the design reasons ... we should leave that to the business of the private individual. > In regard to semi permanent shelters, I’m greatly interested in both > the traditional yurt designs and the hexayurt. Has anyone extensively > tested the hexayurt in cold climates where there is the possibility of > heavy snowfalls? I have experience with both ger (yurt means village and ger means house) and hexayurt designs. Last fall, I was experimenting with the Hexayurt design, for winter storage (due to a sudden lack of my standard 12' diameter, 5' high ger, because one of my friends needed to live in it for the winter, his contractors royally screwed the building of his house, and his "newly poured" foundation was crumbling within weeks of it being poured) and found that the simulated snow-weight on the roof, with the extra weight of the building materials (orient-strand board, ledger-board, and flashing, basically) wasn't going to hold up to a New England winter. So I erected a Pentayurt (well ... at the moment, just the roof, up on cinder blocks, then it started snowing, the rest will be going up as soon as I have time in the next several weeks) and the pentayurt roof, with 2-foot cinder-block walls worked just fine, structurally. In terms of living in it? I'd want to do a lot more to it, to keep it warm, and habitable. It also survived winds that the Thermax design might not have survived. A ger is also well-suited to wind-swept snowy areas, the more the wind, the more the convection pushes the yurt closer to the ground, as opposed to taking off with it, like a circus tent. Ask some Pennsic Hurricane veterans about what structures were standing and what structures were just gone. > And what about heating the hexayurt? Wood gasification stoves—forced > air stoves—are fine for cooking out in the open, but the don’t meet > the needs of someone cooking in a hexayurt that lacks some kind of a > chimney. For my ger, that was lived in, up in northern Maine, there is the outer-layer (canvas), a vapor barrier layer (tyvek attached to felt), the khana, and then the inner wall layer (duralon (I believe that's the name of it)). About 2 feet away from one of the walls was a pipe-hole, surrounded by cement-board/insulating foam sandwich inset in the rafters (and had things attached to it, to make an appropriate vapor barrier as well) that the pellet-fed wood/cook stove was vented. We didn't really have to worry about a snow-load, although the plug for the standard ring-hole was a bit of a problem (not as tight a water-seal as he would have liked, even though he insisted on being able to open it, all winter long, because he liked the sky and the airflow through his house) but he lived comfortably in it for the whole winter. I would _not_ have been comfortable putting the stove in either a wood or an insulation-board Pentayurt. Too much structural dependency on the setup, and not enough space to be able to safely separate the heat from the stove, from the construction materials. Also, it might burn up too much oxygen, and not leave enough for the residents. > I realize that there are archives. And I will try to access them. > Possibly concerns such as mine have already been fully addressed. Much more is in the archives, it's well worth the look. > Thanks again. > > Royce Percival --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "hexayurt" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/hexayurt?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
