Permies In 2000, Wheaton shared his views on
lawn care on his website richsoil. Later that year, he launched the website Permies, a place for people to discuss lawn care and permaculture. By 2012, Permies had become the largest online community dedicated to permaculture and homesteading. Called the Wofati, it is a type of natural earth-sheltered building developed by
Mike Oehler and expanded upon by Wheaton. Wheaton coined the acronym, which means
Woodland
Oehler
Freaky-cheap
Annualized
Thermal
Inertia. "Woodland" because it is the optimal location for such a building; "Oehler" after the pioneer, "Freaky-cheap," due to the Fairly-cost effective or frugal materials; and Annualized Thermal Inertia from a book by John Hait called "Passive Annual Heat Storage" which inspired much of the reasoning behind the Wofati design. The site has attracted notable personalities such as
Geoff Lawton and
Toby Hemenway,
rocket mass heater developers
Ernie and Erica Wisner, medical
herbalist Michael Pilarski, and others who explore a range of eclectic permaculture topics.
Coderanch In 1997,
Kathy Sierra created javaranch.com, which she transferred to Wheaton In January 2000. In 2009, Javaranch was extended to a new
domain coderanch.com with a
forum. As of May 2020, Coderanch had more than 3 million posts created by over 332,000 registered members.
Other projects In 2013, Wheaton produced a
documentary of
wood-burning stoves, highlighting sustainable ways to heat, which consisted of four segments called
"Fire Science",
"Sneaky Heat",
"Boom Squish", and
"Hot Rocket". The documentary was distributed in
DVDs, in addition to
online streaming and downloadable videos. According to Wheaton, his design of wood burning stoves uses 1/10 of the wood compared to conventional wood burning stoves. He also claimed that his stoves only produce 1/1000 of smoke compared to other stoves. Later in the same year, Wheaton produced another documentary titled
"World Domination Gardening", which featured a 3 days workshop of Hügelkultur,
earthworks,
ponds, and
swales. The documentary was distributed in sets of three DVDs, called
"Sealing a Pond Without a Liner",
"Ditches and Swales", and
"Hugelkultur and Terracing". In 2017, Wheaton hosted a
Permaculture Design Course and an
"Appropriate Technology Course" which consisted of a 14 days workshop. The project was able to raise the pledged funds within 22 hours after its Kickstarter project was launched. Later in 2018, Wheaton produced a documentary called
"Rocket Ovens", which he described as an efficient way to cook and bake food making less than 1% of the carbon footprint of that of an electric
oven. Distributed in DVDs and streaming videos, the documentary featured environmental friendly ways of cooking, baking, and dehydrating food with lesser amount of wood compared to other forms
wood-fired ovens. ==Experiments, demonstrations, and opinions==