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Paperback ISBN: 978-1-5107-3845-4
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-3846-1
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Table of Contents
Introduction
There is no better way to become self-sufficient than to get free energy and water from the sky, and free eggs from chickens housed in your own backyard. Projects to Get You Off the Grid showcases twenty-one exceptional step-by-step projects around the themes of solar and wind power, rainwater collection, and raising chickens. Each project is authored by an expert with a strong desire to share their knowledge and contains multiple images and written instructions to help you follow along, step by step. Let these projects inspire you to make your own green infrastructure to get you off the grid and become more self-sufficient.
All of the projects in this book are from Instructables.com. Instructables is the most popular project-sharing community on the Internet, and part of the Autodesk family of creative communities. Since August 2005, Instructables has provided easy publishing tools to enable passionate, creative people to share their most innovative projects, recipes, skills, and ideas. Instructables has over 80,000 projects covering all subjects, including crafts, art, electronics, kids, home improvement, pets, outdoors, reuse, bikes, cars, robotics, food, decorating, woodworking, costuming, games, and life in general.
Noah Weinstein
Editors Note
The wonderful thing about Instructables is that they come in all shapes and sizes. Some users include hundreds of high-quality pictures and detailed instructions with their projects; others take the minimalist approach and aim to inspire similar ideas than to facilitate carbon copies.
One of the biggest questions we faced when putting this book together was: How do we convey the sheer volume of ideas in the finite space of a book?
As a result, if youre already familiar with some of the projects in this book, youll notice that selected photos made the jump from the computer screen to the printed page. Similarly, when dealing with extensive electronic coding or complex science, we suggest that anyone ready to start a project like that visit the Instructables online page, where you often find lots more images, links, multimedia attachments, and downloadable material to help you along the way. This way, anyone who is fascinated by the idea of converting a car to run on trash can take a look here at the basic steps to get from start to finish. Everything else is just a mouse click away.
Special thanks to Instructables Interactive Designer Gary Lu for the Instructables Robot illustrations!
Backyard Chicken Coop
By robbtoberfest
(www.instructables.com/id/Backyard-Chicken-Coop/)
I made this little chicken barn a few years ago to house three to five laying hens in my back yard. Im in town and had to design a pretty one to keep people from having a chicken coup. This one was inspired by some Kansas barns Ive seen. The total cost was about $40 when fully completed. Chicken wire, some 2 4s, and damaged siding were the costs. Damaged siding is half price at my local lumber store. Other things I used were scrap wood from old bathroom cabinets, leftover hardware, paint, and wood from house projects, plus a lot of scraps and hardware from a condemned house down the street (I got permission to take things before they bulldozed it). Shingles were given to me by my neighbor, leftover from roofing his garage. There are some basic rules for designing and running a good healthy chicken shack:
Adequate floor space per bird.
Dry with good ventilation.
Temperature control.
Predator protection.
Keep it clean+fresh water/ food=happy and healthy birds.
Many towns actually allow up to five chickens but no roosters. Check local rules on this if you plan to build. If you do get chickens in town, be courteous to the non-chicken majority so the rest of the city chicken people dont get punished through politics and zoning. I submitted pictures of this coop to someone who was working on a coops book a while ago and they included a picture of it in Chicken Coops, 45 Building Plans for Housing Your Flock , by Judy Pangman. Sources for my chicken knowledge: Building Chicken Coops by Gail Damerow; The City Chicken; Raising Backyard Chickens; Feathersite; and the Poultry Page. I recently posted another coop, a chicken outhouse with a beer can roof at diylife.com.
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