The Good Life Lab

by Wendy Jehanara Tremayne

  If you need a tincture remedy in a hurry, just follow these instructions and strain and use the tincture right away. You won’t have as strong a tincture as you would if you waited a few weeks, but you will have a remedy when you need it.

  Mikey and I steep horehound leaf and osha root in honey, then use the honey in hot teas as a remedy for cough and sore throats during cold and flu season.

  Topical Medicines

  To make topical medicines from medicinal plants, use oil instead of water and alcohol. Olive, almond, and coconut are among the most popular oils for this purpose. Let the chopped plant and oil mixture sit in a mason jar for a month or so, shaking often, and then strain and store in a dark, nontransparent container. Add a few drops of vitamin E or vegetable glycerin to preserve.

  Poultices for wounds, swelling, and bruises are easily made from garden plants such as comfrey, yerba mansa, and yarrow. (Use that local plant book to determine what plants to use in a poultice.)

  To make a poultice, chop the fresh plant and add it to boiling water. Steep for 15 minutes, then scoop out the plant material onto a washcloth, add a few tablespoons of the liquid, let it cool for a few minutes if it’s too hot, and wrap the area of the body you wish to treat with the washcloth. Cover with a plastic bag.

  One day on my way out the door I kicked a wooden chair and broke my toe. I was about to drive to the airport (I was on my way to visit a friend, who happens to be a doctor, in Los Angeles). I decided to go with the broken toe, but first I hobbled out to my garden and filled a bag with fresh comfrey. Comfrey’s alkaloids mend bone. I added yerba mansa and chamomile, since they were growing nearby. I made a poultice that I wore on my foot for the 2.5-hour drive to the Albuquerque airport. When I got to LA, I continued making a poultice each morning. My doctor friend watched me curiously. By the week’s end, his wife and kids were calling me a superhuman. He said, “I’ve never seen a broken bone heal that fast.”

  Herbal Smoke

  Many plants can be smoked. If you have or are trying to quit smoking tobacco, or if you just occasionally like to smoke, consider this medicinal blend made from dried plants.

  Instructions

  1. Mix 1 cup mullein (an expectorant), 2 tablespoons chamomile (calming), 2 tablespoons marsh mallow (adds depth), 1⁄2 teaspoon lobelia (eases nicotine withdrawal), and 1⁄2 teaspoon of hops (adds depth). For a menthol effect, add 1 tablespoon mint.

  2. Makes about 20 hand-rolled cigarettes.

  Rosemary Hair Detangler

  Mikey calls this recipe Rosemary’s Chicken because the smell of rosemary reminds him of his mom’s roasted chicken. But don’t worry — there’s no meat in it!

  Ingredients

  water

  thumb-size piece of Yucca elata root (or any saponin-containing local plant)

  handful of hibiscus flowers

  a handful of rosemary

  strainer

  funnel

  empty shampoo bottle

  white vinegar

  Instructions

  1. Boil 3⁄4 of a shampoo bottle’s capacity of water and remove from heat.

  2. Chop the yucca root and add to the water. (If yucca doesn’t grow in your area, look up local saponin-containing plants, such as soapberry or soap nut.)

  3. Add hibiscus flowers and rosemary. Cover and let sit a few hours.

  4. When cooled, strain the liquid and pour it through a funnel and into the shampoo bottle. Compost the plant matter.

  5. Fill the remainder of the bottle with white vinegar. Use after shampooing, as a detangler that adds shine to hair. Rinse.

  Homemade Kitchen Appliances

  Some appliances are expensive or too obscure to find, such as a fermentation chamber to let dough rise or to make tempeh and yogurt. A sous vide water bath can have a price as fancy as its name. But these devices can be made at home and require only a temperature controller and some found objects.

  Fermentation Chamber

  To make a fermentation chamber, place a standard lightbulb with a plug-in cord inside a camping cooler. You can drill a hole in the cooler for the light’s plug or let the plug cause the lid to remain slightly open. Plug the lightbulb into the temperature controller and set the temperature as needed for what you are fermenting. Yogurt, tempeh, and dough each have different temperature requirements. The temperature controller will hold the internal temperature in the chamber.

  Sous Vide

  In sous vide cooking, food is cooked in vacuum-sealed plastic bags in a temperature-controlled water bath for a long time at low temperatures. Sous vide cooking breaks down collagen and protein, making for softer textures in foods that might otherwise be tough, such as parsnips, carrots, and gamey meats like deer and elk. Sous vide cooking perfectly poaches eggs and seeps marinades into meats and veggies.

  A sous vide water bath can also be used to separate honey from wax. To do so, place a screen over a small bowl and pour unseparated honey and wax on top of the screen. Place the bowl, with the screen holding the honey-and-wax mixture, into the sous vide water bath and set the temperature to 118°F (to keep the honey raw and unpasteurized). Let stand. Bottle the honey that drips through the screen. The wax will remain on top.

  To make your own sous vide, simply plug an inexpensive slow cooker into a temperature controller and set it to the desired temperature. Most vegetables are cooked in a sous vide for 1 hour at 185°F. Meats cook for 10 hours at 135°F.

  Tip: To blacken and crisp meats cooked in the sous vide, sear the cooked meat with a small blowtorch.

  Solar Oven

  If you live in a sunny place and work from home, you are a perfect candidate for a solar oven. To run a solar oven at exact temperatures, you need to reposition it as the sun moves, so this requires you to be home to watch it. Good commercial units can be obtained for $200. They are also easily made out of scrap. Solar ovens reach temperatures of 400°F and can maintain specific temperatures. This is achieved by turning the unit so that it is either more or less directly aimed at the sun. A built-in thermometer shows the internal temperature. Solar ovens can be used to bake breads, cook soups, boil beans, and reheat leftovers.

  Large Outdoor Plant Dehydrator

  Dry climates like New Mexico’s dehydrate plants quickly. How quickly your plants dry — a day? a week? — will depend on your climate. Our dehydrator is placed in the shade.

  Materials

  4 yards of screen

  baling wire

  a few plastic bread trays

  Instructions

  1. Cut screen to make a box a few inches larger than your bread trays. Leave one side of the box open. The open side is for slipping the screen cover over the stack of bread trays. It will keep out critters.

  2. Sew screen with baling wire.

  3. Cut a piece of screen the size of the bottom of each tray and place on each tray to prevent drying plants from slipping through the tray’s spacious pattern.

  When our local supermarket went out of business, I picked up some bread trays and converted them into a dehydrator.

  Power, Electronics, and Technology

  We have arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

  — Carl Sagan

  If you are considering taking on a new technology or creating a new device, begin by asking:

  Can I afford it?

  Can I maintain it?

  Does it fit my lifestyle?

  Kill A Watt

  A Kill A Watt device shows you the amount of power home appliances use. Learning the power draw of home devices has helped us reduce our power consumption by more than five times.

  It’s also important to know exactly what kind of power your home appliances are running on. Find out where your local electric company gets its power. Our power comes from our onsite solar array. Our town’s power — the power we�
��d be getting if we were still on the grid — is a combination of hydroelectric and coal. Even though T or C is located a few miles south of a dam that produces hydroelectric power, the hydroelectric power T or C uses is from Utah. Strange.

  CNC Kits

  Mikey purchased a computer numerical control (CNC) machine in kit form so that he could home-manufacture parts he had once bought for the gadgets he designs and sells in our cottage industry store. A laser cutter was an option that offered even more sophistication and a greater variety of uses . . . at the cost of $7,500. The CNC kit for $700 (including accessories and shipping) matched our budget. While the CNC machine is slower and less accurate, it is able to satisfy the needs of our home-based manufacturing. Since Mikey had the time to build and then master the CNC, buying it in kit form and assembling it himself made sense and matched our lifestyle.

  Our CNC from Zen Tool Works was super easy to assemble. When something this inexpensive is available and only takes a few days to put together, it didn’t make sense for us to try to build our own.

  Make a New Device

  There is no reason to design custom hardware when commercial products can be obtained for reasonable prices. But sometimes there is a gap in the functionality of what is available. This is a prompt to consider designing a new version. Mikey and I wanted a temperature controller that could do things that commercially available products were unable to do. Since there wasn’t an open-source hardware controller able to meet all of our needs, we designed our own (see page 170). Today we run four custom temperature controllers in our house and have sold hundreds of others to people like us who needed the functionality that we built into it.

  Electronics Repair

  No longer are electronics the domain of engineers. The open-source movement has welcomed everyone into the world of electronics. You can understand, hack, build, and repair your own electronics. At first we have to get past things like planned obsolescence and bad designs. Planned obsolescence — the intention that a product has a limited usefulness or becomes obsolete after an unnecessarily brief time — encourages consumers to buy more goods and create more waste. Many products are designed without the user’s tinkering in mind: cases are impossible to open, making items hard to fix.

  Where possible, we prefer open hardware design products. These are accessible to the consumer; they are built with tinkering in mind. These products have firmware, circuit board designs, and a bill of materials that are open and available to the user.

  Kits are a great example of open-source hardware. Because the user builds the product and assembles each part, he or she is more likely to be able to repair the item if it breaks. The assembly of an open-source hardware kit is a lesson in and of itself. Building a product using such a kit helps one learn about electronic components, design, and functionality. And kits cost significantly less than finished goods.

  Modern homes are filled with electronics. When they break, we have an opportunity to acquire mad skills. These broken goods offer you a chance to hack and learn.

  Many electronic repair projects have to do with common household devices. But there are other reasons to tinker. Here, Mikey works on a flaming doorbell.

  Common Problems with Electronics

  Before hacking into an electronic item, disconnect the power source. Then look for the most common problems. Loose wires can be found by lightly tugging each plug and wire. They are easily repaired with a quick soldering weld. Check the vitality of your power source and/or batteries with a multimeter. Look for blown fuses indicated by a broken metal strand inside the glass tube of a fuse. These are easily replaced. Blown capacitors appear as cylinders that have become bulbous and expanded from pressure. Look for burn marks anywhere. If none of these common failures have occurred, then go to the online forums and look for people talking about the same issues you are having with your device.

  Here are a few questions to ask before taking apart busted electronics.

  Is it under warranty? If it is, send it to the manufacturer for repair or replacement. Fulfilling warranties on broken goods is equal to money not spent. For each warranty upheld, fewer goods are purchased. For example, we have five digital door locks. They cost $100 each. They came with a lifetime warranty. Three of the five were replaced free under warranty — $300 we did not have to spend. Holding companies responsible for what they manufacture helps set a high standard for the quality of goods consumers expect.

  Can I repair it myself? Some devices are too difficult to repair, and opening them voids a warranty or destroys them. Sometimes a device can be fixed, but to do so creates a situation in which it is impossible to put the item back together; when the repair is finished, the lid no longer fits or wires are left hanging out, and the item is rendered useless. Open your device, if it can be opened, and see if it has room for tinkering and repacking.

  Does the item have resale value? Before hacking a broken device, see if it can be sold in broken condition on eBay. When our cat knocked Mikey’s iPhone into a water bowl, Mikey scratched the phone getting it open and then found that he couldn’t repair it, but he was able to sell it for parts to someone who likes to tinker. He sold it on eBay in nonworking condition.

  A neighbor came over with a poorly running laptop. Mikey ordered a replacement hard drive for $50, saving a $500 laptop from becoming landfill and preventing our neighbor from having to buy a new one.

  Is there a third-party product that can get the item working again? Forums are good sources for information about third-party products. When Mikey’s Apple display stopped working, he checked the forums and learned that people were having success using a new-model power supply, not the one that was designed for his display. A $200 third-party item saved his $1,200 display from becoming waste. Our robotic cordless vacuum battery packs die regularly. Mikey replaces the cells in the pack with a third-party cell instead of buying an expensive new battery pack.

  Batteries

  Civilization runs on power. According to Wikipedia, only 16 percent of that power comes from renewable sources. Disposable batteries are so awful for the environment that Jon Chase wrote in a Popular Science article titled “The Grouse: Assault on Batteries” that “disposable batteries, no matter how efficient, should be considered a controlled substance and, as such, should be sold under the same restrictions as, say, prescription drugs or guns.” If we’re going to use batteries, it’s proper etiquette to know how to maintain them in order to prevent them from going to the landfill.

  Acquire. Free batteries are abundant. Many can be found in auto parts stores, at golf courses, and marinas. Auto parts stores collect dead batteries that are picked up by scrappers and recyclers. Since the fee the store gets per battery is fixed, storeowners tend not to mind if people bring in dead batteries to trade for weak ones that can be revived. Check would-be trash batteries for those that have a reading of 12 volts or higher, and swap them for your dead batteries.

  Measure. To revive batteries or to get the most out of the batteries that cannot be recharged, you need to know how to use a multimeter. Whether you have AAs or car batteries, a multimeter will tell you which ones are still useful. AA batteries that are fully charged measure 1.5 volts. At 1.2 volts, they need to be recharged. A fully charged car battery should read 12.3 volts or higher. At a lower reading, it needs to be charged. A 12-volt battery reading near 0 volts can be desulfated. We choose batteries with a near 12-volt reading because they turn up in the waste stream.

  Mikey regularly manages our batteries. He makes sure they’re kept full of water and free of crystallization.

  To use a multimeter, place one of its two probes at each terminal of a battery (red is positive and black negative) and read the numbers on the device’s screen. If you mix up the probes, the display will give a negative number instead of a positive one.

  Large lead-acid batteries like those used in cars and PV solar systems require water and should be checked and refilled twice a year. Rainwater, like distilled water, has a low parts
per million of nonwater molecules and can be used to refill batteries. A total dissolved solids (TDS) meter can be obtained for about $20 to measure the parts per million nonwater molecules in water. Water is considered mineral water if it has over 500 parts per million of nonwater molecules. Drinking water should have less than 200 parts per million of nonwater molecules. Distilled water contains less than 15 parts per million. Rainwater usually compares to water that is distilled.

  When refilling batteries, wear gloves and protective eyewear. Pop open each cell cap of the battery to see if the plates are exposed or covered in a visible layer of water. If they are exposed, add water until the plate is lightly covered.

  Laptops and cell phones often have lithium batteries, which are particularly sensitive to heat. (Temperatures of 40 to 70°F are ideal for batteries.) Keep these devices out of the sun.

  Biodiesel is a solvent that can be used to clean the terminals of lead-acid batteries.

  Revive. Most batteries become junk because they sit too long. Without use, crystals form on the lead plates of a battery and reduce its capacity. There are ways to revive them.

  A battery desulfator is a device that generates a sonic pulse capable of breaking up the crystals that reduce a battery’s capacity. Mikey designed a desulfator he calls the Power in My Pocket (PIMP), a pocket-sized device that we sell in our online store. It requires simply plugging the device into the battery (a lead for each terminal) and giving it time.