Sept 15, 2008 - Home Sweet Yurt

We picked up some used cabinets and used them in the yurt. For now, we've got plywood countertops. One thing that is hard about living in a yurt, is trying to figure out how to use furniture, that was made for a rectangular building, in a round one.

The seccond picture shows our hand crank grain and nut butter mill that we bought a few years ago from Lehmans. It's a workout to use, but is well built and has lasted us for about six years now. We grind all of our grains for breads with it, and even can make nut butters with it (with a lot of effort). In the background is the icebox salvaged out of our storage camper. We make the ice in the solar powered freezer.

Third photo is a view of the sink area with a hand pump that pumps water up from the 500 gallon tank in the basement. The sink, also salvaged from camper, just drains through a mesh pasta strainer into a bucket in the cabinet. We dump the food scraps from the pasta strainer into a compost bucket (also under the sink). The food scraps compost bucket gets emptied into a 55 gallon steel drum with bolt-on lid (to keep it safe from black bears). We hand carry the dishwater for now and use it to water the trees around the yurt, but eventually hope to pipe it directly to fruit tree mulch basins.

Next picture is our second wood cookstove. This one is a Baker's Choice, made by a group that separted from the Amish. We bought ours at the factory in Kentucky when we moved back out to Colorado from Maine. The stove has a large, airtight firebox that can hold 18" long standard split wood, instead of kindling. The oven is large enough to bake a turkey. They offer a hot water tank and a single pass heat exchanger that installs in the firebox to allow thermosyphon heating of a water tank installed above the stove. We didn't bother with the tank or heat exchanger, but did use the heat exchanger on our first Baker's Choice stove to heat all of our domestic hot water at our house in Maine. Cooking breakfast usually produced enough hot water for the day.

The Bakers Choice is overkill, heating-wise, for a 200 SF yurt though. We definitely don't have any trouble staying warm inside in the winter with this thing idling along. We did find that it doesn't draw as well with the chimney running up outside the yurt as it did with an interior two story chimney in our house in Maine. Without adequate draft, we can't damper it down all the way to hold a fire, but maybe that's just as well - fires without enough oxygen pollute a lot more.

Also, this stove seems to use a lot more wood than our little summer kitchen stove. I figure it's going to use about five cords of wood each winter for heat, hot water and cooking.

I think that eventually, we'll have a passive solar house that won't really need much heat. I think we'll need to come up with something more efficient for cooking by then. Maybe a solar cooker for sunny days, a rocket stove cooktop, and a rocket stove bake oven? My goal would be to get down to 1 cord of wood per year for cooking, hot water and heat. The last picture shows the finished yurt from the front, with a ramp entrance made of salvaged pallets. We bought our yurt with the rainwater catchment gutter accessory, but are wondering whether the rainwater collected off of the plastic coated roof canvas might be too toxic for use in the gardens. Maybe for a small garden pond?