Karakung Reef is our home base.
It contains:
We are powered by solar and have internet :)
The name Karakung Reef is a mishmash of the Leni Lenape word for what we now call Cobbs Creek and Reef as in Coral Reef. The Coral Reef is a place of interorganism symbiosis, just as our cities are places rich in symbiosis. Both reefs and cities are holobionts. 🪸 (see history)
We are going to be using this space for our own work and for gardening, film screenings, workdays and workshops.
This page is under construction.
the container
This is our power supply, workshop and space for storage.
It's our laboratory for experimentation, battery recycling, assembly and repair.
Our solar setup:
- 4 400W Q-cell Panels
- 5000W Growatt inverter
- 20KW LifePo4 recycled battery
- JBD BMS
We set this up to double as a demonstration setup to be able to showcase a basic off grid solar PV install.
The panels were bought new and mediate our container's interface with the sun. 🌞 They're mounted using DIY unistrut mounts. The rear panels are mounted using specially made solar mounting brackets for shipping containers. The front 2 panels are mounted with magnets rated to match standard ballast mounted solar racking. They've already withstood the tests of numerous high wind events, but happen to generate unexpected remote anxiety during such events (so we may change this soon).
Our Growatt inverter takes the power generated by the PV modules and charges our battery. It also converts the DC battery power into household AC to use in the container and shipping container for lights, computers and tools.
Our battery is a formidable beast. Sourced at our favorite battery recycling warehouse in Bensalem, we bought this at an auction. It holds about 20 kilowatt hours of power and was formerly used in some sort of industrial application (maybe a crane or forklift). Getting it running included several steps. The most difficult was to move it. Battery Hookup kindly plopped it down on a pickup for us with their forklift. But moving it into the container involved a small crew of locally sourced muscle, plenty of cursing and a bit of common sense engineering to minimize the pushes and lifts.
We added our own BMS and then later had to surgically bypass a bad cell from the bottom of the metal box. Other battery adventures followed, but those are out of scope of this page.
Thanks to Steph, James, Petri, Isaiah especially for helping with the wiring and moving!
tiny house
This is where we have our meetings, occasional workshops and work out of.
Garden
Part of this project is an aspiring community garden. We own just the crowded bit of land in the middle, but are surrounded by vacant city owned lots.
Please reach out to us if you live nearby and are interested in this project. We'll put you on our list of people to contact when anything moves forward.
We have a vision of a participatory community garden run by the neighborhood. You can help make this happen!
For now as we are barely maintaining the few beds that line our fence
In the fall of 2022, before we aquired our structures, we planted a series of raised beds to grow flowers for the Black Mama's bail out day.
Gardening at the Reef
Life at the Reef
Occasional events at the Reef fill our sleepy lot with life. One of our first events was a collaboration with our dear comrades from the People's Paper Coop. We set up a small demonstration solar powered blender to pulp legal documents from which we made paper for mothers day cards. Those cards were given to the mothers bailed out for the Black Mama's bail out day.
People's Paper Coop event
History
As we decided to come up with a name we also dug into the history of the land. Before European invasion and colonization, this was of course Leni Lenape land.
A cotton mill was later built on this location:
Since moving to Cedarhurst, we've heard the land where we are based contained several homes, demolished in the 90s due to underwater streams eroding the foundations.