Video and Summer Schedule
Here’s a little video to celebrate the gifts from the sky! Our water tanks have been full through the Winter and into the Spring. And we are enjoying some wonderful Spring wildflowers.
We are also introducing our Summer schedule of classes below. They are all held at our sustainable site near Cerrillos, NM. Please RSVP Thanks!
Video by Amanda Bramble
Ampersand’s Summer Schedule
May 22 Solar Cooking and Sustainable Kitchens
May 28 High Desert Gardening
June 5 Natural Building and Earthen Plasters
June 18 Rain Harvesting and Greywater Systems
June 26 Arid Land Restoration
July 10 Open House
Tinkering for Hot Water
We love the sun! The way we appreciate this gift of nature is by harvesting it whenever we can. One way is by heating water.
We have three solar water heaters that we cobbled together from items at salvage yards, auto part stores, as well as manufactured solar collectors. One is made from a pigmat (I’ll explain below), one includes an imported Swiss panel with a selective surface (I’ll explain that too), and they all can heat water to scalding temperatures. Thankfully we have cold water too.
There will always be a special place in my heart for my first solar water heater, so I’ll start with that one.
Way back when our bathroom was made of pallets wrapped with plastic!
Some call this design a breadbox heater. The design is simple, much like a solar oven. A dark tank holds the water. The tank is housed in a box, with a window, tilted towards the south. The box is insulated. Simple, right?
A ten gallon tank was perfect size for us. We’re frugal with our water. And the smaller the tank, the less time for the sun to heat the water.
Salvaged materials, whenever possible is one of our key design principles. A salvaged double paned window retains heat. We also insulated the inside of the box with two inches of foam board. Then we lined the inside with reflective mylar. Sun shines through the glass. That which doesn’t hit the tank reflects off the mylar towards it. The dark tank absorbs all that heat.
When I show this to folks on a tour of Ampersand, they usually ask How does the water get into the bathroom?
People see that the water heater is below the window and they wonder how could there be any pressure when it comes out the tap. Here’s the secret. The water line feeding into the bottom of the batch heater actually originates way up the hill at our large rain catching cistern. The bottom of this cistern is above the roof of the bathroom. The water line is buried underground to prevent freezing, so it’s not visible. But there is plenty of pressure that goes right through the heater into the bathroom just from using gravity.
A few details worth sharing. The pipes in and out are wrapped with insulation. The pipe out from the heater goes through a wall into our community bathroom, where the water is used. We installed a valve and a drain on the inlet. In case the tank should need to be drained for repairs or any other reason.
This batch style heater is still not as efficient as our thermosyphoning ones. But it was easy to construct with salvage materials and a few extra plumbing parts.
Reflectors would increase the sunlight and therefore the heat entering the water tank. I keep thinking I’ll build reflectors for it, someday. Ones that can withstand our high winds
I recently inspected the batch heater to get started on the reflector project, but then realized other work was needed. The wooden box needed more screws to hold it together, the window was sagging. Basically there were air gaps where we were losing heat. And the hose connecting the heater to the bathroom plumbing inside? That needed better insulation. When we have bitter cold spells in the winter, down to 10 degrees F or below, this is where the water freezes. When it does it blocks the warm water in the tank from coming inside. So that was the last round of repairs for the batch heater, and again I postponed the reflectors.
Over the years, we’ve upgraded this heater bit by bit. And I’m impressed that it has served us for so long. In the summer it provides hot water pretty much all the time. In the winter you may have to wait till noon if you want your shower hot.
The winter nights are so long and the outside temperatures are so cold that the heater will lose much of it’s heat by morning. Removable insulation helps retain that heat. In the past we’ve just thrown a blanket over the heater at night. That does make for earlier hot water. But we didn’t always remember to remove it in the morning. And then, when that happens, the blanket doesn’t help at all! It’s a ten gallon tank though, so it heats up pretty quick once it gets some sun.
With anything solar, placement is important. Tall structures that cast a shadow will decrease the amount of solar gain available. We constructed a garden arbor nearby, with some interns and used that task as a design exercise. Together we calculated how to not obstruct the early morning winter sun.
That’s a lot of solar design for one day, but there’s always more. Here’s a glimpse of our fancy thermosiphoning solar water heating systems, a whole other concept.
Six years ago Steve Baer and Zomeworks helped us install a solar thermosiphoning heater on our main house. Thermosiphon is a way of saying that water rises from the panel into the tank above by using the natural qualities of water as it heats.
There is no pump needed to circulate the water. It happens on it’s own because heat rises.This panel also has a selective surface. Our friend Steve Baer imported it from the Swedish company Energie Solaire. It’s not sold by that company to install the way we did. But Steve is a solar pirate and he helped us get it together anyway.
At low pressures (under 32 psi), the Swiss panel (as we like to call it) can freeze and expand with water in it without breaking. That means no need for glycol solution and a heat exchanger, which many solar heaters employ. If the Swiss p
anel is frozen outside, we can still access the hot water from the tank indoors (a re-purposed 20 gallon electric water heater tank) just by turning on the tap. Once the sun comes out again, the reflectors around the distribution tubing (we used truck radiator tubing) help the ice to thaw and permit the thermosyphon to work again.The black pigment has worn off over the many seasons. This year I repainted the panel with high temperature barbeque paint. It’s important that
the panel rest on a layer of insulation so that it doesn’t lose heat to the ground through the back.We love the Swiss panel. This photo of our on-demand propane heater, the backup water heater in the house, should explain how well it works. Honestly we have not turned the propane on once since installing the thermosiphoning heater.
This is our other thermosiphoning water heater. We use it in the summer for outdoor showers. It’s a great system for demonstrating the thermosiphon set-up because you can see it all in one place.
The panel is below the storage tank. Whenever the sun is shining the water in the tank gets hotter and hotter. This mold for producing this panel was originally constructed to warm nursing sows, that’s why we call it the pigmat. The white tank above
(also a re-purposed 20 gallon electric water heater tank) is the gravity feed tank. The hash marks on the vinyl tube tank gauge mark one gallon of water, allowing those using the shower to track their water usage.I know many of you will want to know how to get the pigmat or the Swiss panel. All I can say is to contact Steve Baer at Zomeworks. I can’t guarantee he will be able to help you, but the inquiry will put a smile on the face of this true solar inventor genius. He will be pleased to hear that there is interest in these simple products, and happy to know that people are interested in using direct sunlight rather than focusing on photovoltaics and pumps when they are not needed. I’ll leave it to him to tell you about the downfalls within the solar industry and why these simple products are not readily available. Happy tinkering!
Ampersand has posted our Spring Schedule! We are excited to offer a Geology Hike, Archeology Hike, Floodplains and Flowforms Hike (new!), as well as Picnics, a Volunteer Day, Homeschool Day, and an Open House. We would love to see you!
Written by Amanda Bramble (with help from Andy Bramble- any incomplete sentences are included because he insisted)
Rainy Day Reflections
Sometimes I forget how nature can swoop in and save the day. A good rain recharges not only my cisterns, but also my sense of abundance.
It started a couple days after our mushroom cultivation workshop. We had set up some oyster mushroom mycelium to grow out of coffee grounds indoors, and we also installed three storm-water-harvesting mushroom beds. I came out of the weekend a bit overwhelmed with all of my new responsibilities. Not just with learning to maintain the environments for our new growing creatures, but also dealing with the five syringes of liquid spore culture in my refrigerator. They need to be transferred to sterilized medium within the next couple weeks. Add that to the maintenance and repairs of going into winter on the homestead, and I assure you it’s a formidable list.
Then the rain came. It was a gentle one. Like music. I could hear the water seeping into the land, into the plants. It brought a deep sense of well being, and even relief. I’m not saying my list got any shorter, but watching the new mushroom beds fill with storm water was quite fulfilling. This rain was not only gentle, but there was a well timed pause in the storm too. It cleared up long enough to walk out along our dirt road and arrange the erosion control rock work I’ve been meaning to do. The ground was soft as pudding and I didn’t even need a shovel.
But this time the message was clear. We’ve been meaning to fill in some flood scoured holes in the restoration project since August. This latest flood was a reminder that nature is sometimes indisputably on our side. The whole flood path in our restoration project filled with a new fine silt and no signs of erosion anywhere. I’ve been waiting for this moisture to transplant some wild cuttings out there. So I’ve started filling in the bare areas with a variety of floodplain plants in our new soft moist soil.
Written by Amanda Bramble
Cold Frame Saga
It’s a little bit sad. The old cold frame was the biggest hit on our Ampersand site tours, and we have dismantled it. It was amazing in many ways. It provided a great environment for growing greens in the winter, it had a ready made structure for throwing shade cloth over in the summer, and best of all was the Passive Solar Cold Frame Tender that opened the lid by itself, just with the pressure that was created by the light of sunrise. And it closed all by itself in the evening, all just with this contraption of bottles and tubes that we assembled. I wrote a blog post about it in 2014.
When I noticed recently that the main bottle for our passive solar cold frame tender busted from ultraviolet exposure, I was gifted a new bottle immediately. This was a clear message that the solar tender must be used somewhere else. And I’ve got some amazing and artistic plans for it. But you will have to wait for that.
Perhaps you have already seen the new cold frame that our interns made. Maybe you read my past blog post about our friend Clair Gardner’s Water Wise Planter that she has developed. We generally followed her instructions and made one of our own.
After the interns left the tending of our various garden beds was left to me, I knew it was finally time to discontinue use of the old cold frame. So I transplanted the kale and chard into the new cold frame.
I’m excited about this new year-round growing bed. Thanks to Clair and the interns for helping this happen!
Written by Amanda Bramble
True Love and Restoration
Recently I was asked to give a talk on the subject of love. Strange as it may seem, the first love I turn to is the love bunch grasses. They hold the soil together on the hills of my home terrain. 
The New Mexico feather grass has one big seed with a really sharp point and a long feathered thread attached to the top. As the seed ripens and dries, the thread, sometimes 6 inches long coils and creates a spiraled feather. The grass seed detaches from its perch and floats away to a bare patch of ground. The sharp end of the seed drops to the ground. The spiral feather catches the wind and winds around in circles, drilling the seed into the Earth. It’s perfect and beautiful. This is what I love.
I have a great love for the body of the Earth, her crevices and critters, and for the dance of interdependence; the ritual of transformation and harmony throughout her oceans and landscapes.
Many people have lots of passions. Me, I really just have this one. My love of the living being of the Earth.
I have this memory of when I was seventeen years old, interviewing for colleges and being asked what I saw myself doing in the future, what I wanted to study. I can still see in my mind the vision I had of this ditch in the ground. I was looking down at a gash of bare soil. I knew that it needed healing, but I didn’t know what the problem was or what the solution would be.
Well, I continued down that path. And now I know not only the problems, but also some of the solutions. And that is how I have constructed my life.
The solutions begin with the grasses. The blue grama holds the sloping soil through floods, the stands of alkali muhly grass with their massive trailing root systems help soak the water deep into the ground. All the grasses in these hills create a welcoming habitat for wildflowers when the weather is right.
But the grasses are just the beginning. Ampersand Sustainable Learning Center 
started with land full of grasses and also a few of those gashes in the landscape that need healing. And we have learned about the many aspects that healing takes.
To embody my love of the earth I have always striven to live like a creature – wild and interconnected.
So at Ampersand, we create our shelter out of the Earth. Our buildings are burrows carefully designed to harvest the sunlight when we need heat. And to create cool shade when we don’t.
We grow food and gather what we can off the land. We catch rainwater and live year round off of this sacred gift. Over the years (and we’ve been building and tending this land now for eleven years) we have created quite the compound. We have our physical space, the East sloping hill where we have perched our lives. We have the yurt, the tipi, the strawbale cottages, the outdoor kitchen and our main house, along with the winding pathways, the homemade technologies, the water harvesting garden patches, the lush hiding spaces and grand overlooks. 
As we have grown as a learning center, people have inhabited these spaces we have co-created with the land, and we have discovered more of the dimensions that make up a healing space. The physical spaces themselves of course can be healing to the land. We create oasis environments that add to the fertility of the land and wildlife. But through careful design we are also healing another important part of the Earth, ourselves.
I feel the earth needs us to notice her and to speak with her through our actions, and she does respond. I’ve seen the more we participate in this dialogue, the more we realize the intelligence and magic of the Earth. She does respond, with spiderwebs floating in the descent of the evening air, and she speaks through our neighbors and comrades.
This business of healing the land; the Earth’s time scale is larger than we can imagine. She will certainly survive and adapt through this phase we are in.
I know this, but still I am called to that bare dirt ditch, and doing what I can to heal it. But now I know that I’m feeling the Earth’s instinct to heal herself. The work we are really doing is restoring our relationship with wildness and harmony and vitality and even death.
This time of year we host the internship at Ampersand. Eight curious and dedicated human creatures inhabit our outdoor kitchen, our green hiding spaces, and overlooking outposts.
Although I’m a leader in this group, everyone is equally attending to this healing process and it turns out it includes things like chore wheels, tracking water use, and saying I’m sorry.
So while my love of the Earth still starts with the grasses I’ve witnessed it grow to embrace th
ese strange human creatures because that’s where the most powerful healing potential is. Restoring our dialogue with the Earth through the actions in our lives very well may mean planting grass seeds, but it might be also in recognizing the wildness and interconnectedness between us all, here, right now.
Written by Amanda Bramble
Interested in Arid Land Restoration? We have an class coming up on Saturday, June 13th.