Category Archives: Old School Tech

Testing Emergency Solar Christmas Lights

Old School Tech has released a new article in the emergency solar Christmas light series, a topic of interest to self-sufficiency enthusiasts who need a little bit of extra light in those dark corners but don’t want to use valuable inverter capacity. This time, an easy-to-make test fixture is described which overcomes the quality problems […]

Extracting Potash

Old School Tech has released an article about extracting raw potash from wood ashes. Future projects will refine and use this raw product for interesting things. Not only does this project make a great homeschool chemistry lesson, it also sets the stage for some chemical processes of interest to self-sufficiency enthusiasts. As mentioned in that […]

Emergency Solar Christmas Lights

Old School Tech has posted an article about converting Christmas LED light strings into emergency DC lighting for use directly from an off-grid battery array, no inverter required. This kind of lighting is great for safety-critical areas and allows a reliable backup source of lighting when other sources fail. Annoying AC flicker is also eliminated. […]

Freezer False Alarm

Old School Tech has posted a new article about a little scare we had with our freezer this morning. Although it turned out that this was just a simple thermodynamic misunderstanding, it does help highlight some of the issues involved with debugging appliances.

Ground Solar Part VI, Wiring, Connectors and Tools

Old School Tech has released a new article, this time on solar wiring, connectors and tools. Although this is the final article in the hurricane ground solar series, it isn’t our last article on solar. This past week, we interviewed a system designer at Iron Edison about their nickel iron and lithium iron phosphate batteries; […]

Ground Solar, Part V, The Batteries

Old School Tech has released a new article in its ground solar series, this time about the batteries. Originally intended to only run a freezer, we were able to also run two refrigerators off this system, but only for about four hours per night. One of the missions of the nightwatch during the hurricane power […]

Ground Solar, Part IV, The Inverter

Old School Tech has released a new article about the ground solar array we deployed during Hurricane Matthew. This time, it is about the inverter, or in this case, the 24 volt MicroSolar 1000 watt pure sine inverter. As you will read in that article, we had to derate it by about 3x, which is […]

Introducing Caveman Chemistry

OST has posted a new article introducing the book Caveman Chemistry, by Dr. Kevin Dunn. “Starving the Monkeys” readers will recognize this book from our recommended reading list; we use it all the time for our homeschool chemistry lab manual to supplement text books. If you only have room on your self-sufficiency shelf for one […]