Self-Sufficiency: How Far Have We Come?

It's been a few years since I started down the road to self-sufficiency, and started checking out of the pervasive corporate-culture that dominates the average US lifestyle.  It's a road I never expect to reach the end of, because I know that complete self-sufficiency is not really possible.  I don't see this as a negative thing.  There are endless shades and degrees of self-sufficiency, and building real community is the other side of the self-sufficiency coin.  Today I want to talk about a few key areas where we have - seemingly - achieved self-sufficiency, and explore the reality in those cases.

Garlic - This is one product in which we come very, very close to genuine self-sufficiency.  I bought garlic seed stock in 2007 and have not paid for any more since then.  Garlic grows well in our area, and I managed to salvage a decent crop, including viable seed stock even during our incredibly wet year of 2009.  Potentially, I could go on indefinitely saving seed from each year's harvest, with no need to purchase garlic ever again.  The fly in the ointment has been that so far I have not really managed to keep us in fresh garlic 12 months out of the year.  I'm working on bridging the garlic gap with green garlic, garlic chives, and garlic scapes.  And we can use the garlic I dehydrate when the last of the harvest begins to go off, though that requires electricity we don't generate ourselves.  It's fair to say that garlic is a core product in our lives.  We eat a lot of it; I don't really know how to cook without it; and we deeply resent having to pay for it.  So self-sufficiency in this food would mean a lot to us.  I'd say that we're 70-80% of the way there, and there's a good chance that we can narrow that gap further.

Eggs - On the face of it, we're self-sufficient in eggs.  With a backyard flock of just four layers, we have more than all the eggs we can eat.  But the devil is in the details.  We buy most of the feed for the girls.  True, it's milled locally, so potentially we could continue to obtain that input even if TSHTF.  It's a long drive though.  And the thornier issue is that we don't keep a rooster.  Even if we did, our girls are production birds, with all the broodiness selected out of their ancestors.  Laying hens are very productive for a good two to three years, but then their output tapers off.  With no chicks from our flock, we'll need to buy more birds.  I've taken several steps to supply more of the girls' feed from our own resources, and it's my plan to increase these efforts this year and next.  Less-than-prime garden produce, our kitchen scraps, weeds, Japanese beetles, and acorns are all part of the girls' diet, free for the taking from our own 2/3 acre homestead.  But if I'm honest I have to say these all add up to less than half of what the girls need to lay productively.  And without the ability to produce a new generation of hens, we'll never be truly self-sufficient in eggs.  I'd say that we're only about 40% self-sufficient in eggs, despite the fact that we never buy them.

Potatoes - We now grow all the potatoes that we eat.  When we don't have potatoes from our own harvest, we eat other things.  Although it's potentially possible to save seed from one harvest to begin the next year's planting, there are significant limitations to that practice.  The major obstacles are late blight and, to a lesser extent, viruses that can carry over from one year into the next in the seed potato.  Late blight can destroy a crop of potatoes outright, while the viruses can damage a lineage of potatoes progressively over time, so that yields slowly dwindle year by year.  It's certainly possible to save a few potatoes for seed from one year to the next. I've done that.  But since we had late blight last year, none of our potatoes can be used for seed this year, and any potato plants that crop up in the garden will need to be destroyed.  Late blight makes the whole prospect of self-sufficiency in potatoes kinda dodgy.  We could go for years without another outbreak.  We could decide to grow only blight resistant varieties, and take our chances with saving seed even in years we know the blight was prevalent.  So far, we haven't done that.  I've bought seed potatoes every year.  Even if blight were taken out of the picture, there are the less obvious viruses that simply reduce yield over time.  Given these challenges to genuine self-sufficiency with this crop, I'd say we're only 50% self-sufficient in potatoes.  Our prospects for achieving real self-sufficiency over the long term seem low here.

Bread - I can't say that I never, ever buy bread.  There's a special loaf made by a local baker who turns up at my farming friend's monthly on-farm markets over the winter months.  I buy some of her bread from time to time.  But that's about it.  All the other bread we eat is made by me, and my baking skills are good enough that we would turn our noses up at the sort of bread supermarkets in our area sell.  However, we don't grow wheat, nor even grind our own flour.  It's all bought in bulk.  Even if I wanted to grow our own wheat, the high-protein "hard" wheat needed for producing good bread does not grow in my region; it requires an entirely different climate.  And even if that weren't an issue, we don't have near enough space to grow the amount of wheat we go through in a year.  It's true I bake some breads that do not require hard wheat, and potentially those could be made from wheat grown nearby.  In other words, we're a long, long way from self-sufficiency with bread.  The little bread we buy is hardly an issue.  We could give that up without any hardship at all.  I also know how to begin and keep a sourdough starter, and have done so in the past.  So if I couldn't buy yeast, it wouldn't be the end of bread for us.  We even have a rarely used manual grain mill, meaning we could grind our own flour if we had the grain. But we will likely always be dependent on purchased flour or at least purchased grain.  And then there's the whole issue of how the bread gets baked.  Right now we use an electric oven tied to the grid.  We generate no electricity of our own, and even if we did, running an electric oven is extremely costly in terms of energy consumed.  Potentially we could build a wood-fired outdoor oven, and that's certainly feasible for the long term.  Right now I'd say we're only 25% self-sufficient in bread, despite the fact that I bake virtually all we eat.  Having that outdoor oven might add 10-20% efficiency, and a sourdough starter maybe another 5-10%, in my estimation.

Fruits and Other Vegetables - It's hard to be precise about this, but I think it's fair to say that we grow more than 50% of all the fruits and vegetables we eat.  There's room for improvement, certainly, and we're working on that.  Some of the perennial plants we put in over the last few years are nowhere near their maximum productivity.  In fact some have yet to produce at all.  We don't need to do much else but prune and tend them for those plants to displace purchased food in future years.  So at this point we can "coast" to a greater degree of self-sufficiency in fresh fruit and veg over the next few years.  A good portion of the fresh produce we still do buy comes from local producers, especially fruit in season and greenhouse salad greens over the winter.  But I still buy a lot of onions, herbs during winter time, and the occasional citrus fruit or avocado at the grocery store.  We now have both a lemon and lime tree, though neither has produced a crop yet.  We have mostly weaned ourselves off fruits and vegetables that just don't grow in our area.  Bananas were dropped without fanfare some time ago, and avocados are treated like the treats they are.  At this point I think we've done most of the work we can do, both on our mental/dietary habits and the infrastructure needed to be really self-sufficient in produce.  There are two concerns over the long-term. Seeds and rootstock.  I need to learn more about saving seed and then put it into practice.  And learning to graft scion wood onto rootstock would mean more real self-sufficiency over the long haul.  The second concern is that right now we have the luxury of supplementing what we grow with lots of purchased carbohydrates, meat, and dairy.  In the future our diet might have to rely more heavily on the fruits and vegetables we can grow here.  What counts for 30% of our diet right now might have to be 50% or more of our diet in the future. I'll give us 50% self-sufficiency in fresh produce, with an additional 20-30% already in the pipeline.  The remaining 20-30% could be covered by a combination of buying from local growers, a few more of our own cold frames, and more skill development on my part.

Heat/energy - We are in the (agonizingly slow) process of having a passive solar thermal heating system installed for our home.  This will make us independent of oil so far as heating goes, and it may at some point give us hot water out of the tap.  We don't live in the harshest area of the US so far as winters go, but getting through a Pennsylvania winter without heat would be no joke at all.  Our zone 6b means the average low wintertime temperature is -5 F, or -21C.  We heat our house intermittently from as early as mid-October through mid-December, steadily from at least mid-December through mid-March, and again intermittently from mid-March through at least late April and possibly into May.  And our thermostat is never set above 64 F/18 C.  So really, there are only about five or six months out of the year when lack of heating would be no big deal for us.  Despite the fact that our heat will now be generated "for free," (and the cost of the passive solar system is nothing to sneeze at) we're still completely dependent on the electrical grid.  If we lost power, we'd also lose our heat when the pumps no longer moved warm water through our radiant floors.  Can we remedy this?  Possibly.  We're weighing the decision to install PV panels that would supply enough power to run the systems we consider really critical to our lives.  Having enough electricity from a grid-independent system to keep the chest freezer and a few pumps running would make me feel pretty secure.  Enough homegrown power to run some lights and our computers would be gravy.  This is entirely possible - in theory - but the expense would be significant.  Right now I'd say we'll be 40% self-sufficient with heating.  We've already done plenty of work to improve the energy efficiency of our home.  So most of the remaining 60% could only be achieved if we were to shell out for a PV system.  Then of course, in the long-term there's the thorny issue of replacing components of either the passive solar or PV systems in a low-energy world.

I could probably carry on further with this sort of evaluation of my life, but I'm sure you get it, and it's probably already gotten a bit tedious.  My intention was to explore the real issues of a self-sufficient lifestyle, and to encourage you, dear reader, to think about what challenges you might face on the road to self-sufficiency.  So what about you?  I know the challenges and resources differ enormously among the readership here.  I think it would add a lot to the discussion if you posted about this topic on your own blog, or if you add a comment to this post.  I'd be especially interested to see anyone report on other areas they've tackled, such as health care, education, transportation, dairy, etc.  Let me know if you do post something along these lines on your blog, and I'll be happy to add a link here.  Some general issues you might want to wrestle with:

• How much does our own skill/labor "count" for in terms of self-sufficiency if we must purchase inputs?
• How do you factor in dependence on a locally produced good versus dependence on something produced very far from where you live?  Are we more self-sufficient if we can get something from our neighbor, or make a bicycle trip to obtain something locally produced?  Why, or why not?
• If you depend upon "infrastructure" (e.g. fruit trees, livestock, PV panels, etc.) that you own, but that will eventually die or wear out, how do you gauge your level of self-sufficiency?

Take Away Lessons From Our Energy Audit

We had contractors in the house in late October to work on air sealing our 130-year-old home. (For those of you in Europe, any home this old is considered venerable in the US.) We'd had our home evaluated for energy efficiency earlier this year, so this was the follow-on work to improve our "envelope" as they say in the business. We were pleasantly surprised to find that as old as our home is, the efficiency was no worse than the average new construction home. Still, there was room for improvement.

That's a picture of a blower door up above. We latched the other exterior doors and sealed all the windows in our home. Then this was installed in our front door and the fan shown there was turned on. It's a powerful fan, and it depressurized our entire house. Then the workers went around checking for any points of air infiltration from outside, and did their best to seal them up. (I'd done some work on this myself since the initial energy audit.)

Of course, these improvements cost money, and not a trivial amount. For what we spent on energy efficiency improvements, we could have made a couple mortgage payments. We see this as a necessary precondition for installing any form of sustainable energy heating system though. Where we live, we heat our home fairly steadily from mid-November to mid-March, with an extra two months of at least occasional heating. If we're to spend money on passive solar heating, or even if we stay with oil heating as long as that's feasible, it only makes sense to make our home as efficient as possible. It's simply the right thing to do, and we can afford it at the moment.

I know a lot of people out there can't even contemplate spending a few thousand dollars on energy efficiency, no matter how much sense it makes. I've posted recently on cheap insulating strategies, and I urge you to check them out if you haven't already. There are tips there for both renters and homeowners. But I picked up a couple extra tips on air sealing from the contractors that I want to share.

Install safety guards in all electrical outlets on exterior walls. You know those little plastic plugs that prevent toddlers from sticking their fingers in sockets and electrocuting themselves? Put them to good use even after your kids or grandkids are grown. Electrical outlets are very often heat leaks because they reside in gaps in the insulation of your walls. The plastic guards can significantly reduce the infiltration of cold air through these gaps.

Look to the cobwebs. Maybe you're such a tidy housekeeper that there are no cobwebs in your home. We've got 'em in spades. Spiders spin their webs where there is airflow. So when you see cobwebs near windows or doors, it's a good indication that there's an air gap somewhere very close by. Cracks in plaster walls are another major culprit.

Check the trim work around all windows and doors. Very small gaps between the wall and the trim allow for an amazing amount of heat transfer. This can be true even if you have modern double- or triple-paned windows. Silicone caulking is your friend. Use it to seal those gaps, even if they look too small to be significant. Believe me, they are significant. Silicone caulking is cheap and simple enough to use that anyone can learn to do it. Get a good scraping tool for the excess caulk to make it look neat and tidy. After a little practice you'll do very nearly as well as the professionals.

With a blower door installed, every air gap in the house becomes evident. If paying a professional to install insulation or air seal your house is out of the question, you might want to schedule an energy audit that includes a blower door anyway. Many utility companies apparently offer free energy audits to their customers, or some portion of their customer base that qualifies based on income. Ours does not. Even if you have to pay for an audit, it will likely cost a small fraction of what the air sealing and insulation work would, perhaps a few hundred dollars.

The blower door will show you exactly where the air gaps are in your house. Some of them you may not be able to address with silicone caulking and a little ingenuity. It may take professional expertise and/or tools. But if you're better set up than we were to mark the air gaps that are evident when the blower door is in place and operating, you could then go about remedying many of them yourself after the audit is finished. I recommend you use brightly colored sticky notes to mark the location of air leaks. Trying to write down all the locations of leaks while the blower door was in place didn't work for us. There were too many to list, and we sometimes weren't sure afterwards what was meant by our own notes. If you take the time before the energy audit happens to work on sealing the obvious visible gaps, you'll be ahead of the game, with fewer air leaks to record during the brief time the blower door is running.

Adding insulation to an attic is also work that can be done by non-professionals. If you've got a weekend and the motivation to do so, this is a job you can do for yourself. Check out a book from the library for some basic tips if you feel you need them.

If your furnace resides in an otherwise unheated, unfinished basement, you might want to put some insulation on the walls around the furnace. Unfinished basements are very common in our part of the country, and furnaces tend to be situated out of the way and right up against a wall. The basement walls in our house are stone in the oldest part of the house, and that stone obviously conducts heat away from the furnace and into the earth. Stopping that constant draining of heat away from the furnace makes a big difference in how often it must fire up and consume fuel.

The good news after all of the expense and work we put into these efficiency improvements is that our home is noticeably warmer and the temperature steadier. We can tell that the house is losing less heat overnight, and it warms up faster when we put the heat on in the morning. It's nice to have such a noticeable and pleasing improvement for the money spent. We now feel ready to seriously consider alternative heating for our old home. More on that to come soonish.

Heating Oil Vent

I live in the relatively small part of the US where most homes are heated with oil. This makes the relevance of the whole peak oil situation quite obvious to us. When the price of a barrel of oil fluctuates, we're very aware of it. Other people might be able to heat with sustainable electricity, but we're looking down a dead-end street as far as our heating system is concerned. With the rather severe winter weather we've been having lately, we're down to a quarter tank of heating oil. Which means it's time to order a refill of our 275-gallon capacity tank. It's going to cost us about $440 if we pay cash. We spent almost that much for a smaller amount back in October when oil began its descent from the painfully high summertime prices.

This really ticks me off. Despite my frugality streak, it's not so much the expense that gets to me. We can handle the cost, at least for now - and I am very mindful that we're fortunate to be in such a position. It's just a mounting feeling of helplessness and dependence that unnerves me and then makes me angry. You see, we pull out all the stops to conserve our heating oil and try to minimize our carbon footprint in an admittedly carbon-heavy set up. We heat only two rooms of our home, and the daytime thermostat setting is never above 64 F (less than 18 C). Overnight it gets set down to 52 F (~11 C). I wear multiple layers, fingerless gloves, and a fleece hat indoors all winter long. I play with the shades to let sunlight in when it's available, and close them when there's none to be had. We close off little used rooms and on some days rely on several warm cups of tea to feel comfortable. Living this way looks extreme to many people. We've gotten used to it and don't mind. I feel we're doing what we can and should be doing to save money and conserve resources. And yet, with the days and nights of sub-freezing temperatures we've had this month, we've gone through more than 50 gallons of heating oil in three weeks.

Just at the beginning of this month, Julie over at Towards Sustainability posted an update on her Riot for Austerity efforts for this year. This was the first article that made me really stop and think about what it would mean for us to consume only our fair share of the earth's remaining resources. Turns out if we did that, we'd have to find a way to heat with just 75 gallons of heating oil per year. That didn't seem even remotely possible, but it prodded me to at least record the level of our oil tank on January 5th. And now, three weeks later, I see that even with all our "extreme" efforts we've already blown through more than two thirds of our annual fair share of heating oil. We're really trying here, and we're not even coming close.

I don't know what we're going to do about this. But my anger is really motivating me at the moment to look into alternatives - again. I've looked at this before for our home, and there aren't many viable options. We don't have the space for a geothermal system. Zoning codes make an outdoor wood furnace highly impractical. We're not in a great part of the country for solar, and topography is against us for wind power. Ugh! It's so frustrating to have no good options.

Staying Warm with the Thermostat Set Low

Winter approaches in the northern hemisphere. I'm invariably ready for the next season by the time we're most of the way through the current one. I like the significant changes of season where I live. I've lived in several places without four "real" seasons, and I always felt slightly ripped off. Still, winter is a tough sell when your region experiences prolonged months of cold and dark, and when heating is a major expense.

So, confession time. In wintertime, I keep the most popular room in the house at 64 F (less than 18 C) during the day. The rest of the house is cooler, some used areas as low as 56 F during the day. I crank the thermostat down to 52 F (just over 11 C) when we go to bed. I actually love sleeping in a really cold room with warm blankets. Sleep has never come easily for me, but a cold room helps considerably. Daytime is another story. Our house is not toasty, but we manage. So I thought I'd share some of the tips I've found useful.

Get used to it. Slowly. If you're trying to reduce your heating bills, don't crank your heat down from 72 to 60 from one day to the next. You can accustom yourself to significantly cooler house temperatures, but you're less likely to succeed if you attempt an abrupt change. So adjust the house temperature by a few degrees every other day or so. You'll find the going much easier.

Layer Up. Fleece clothing is a godsend in winter. So are a few pairs of long underwear and sweatpants. No, it's not sexy. But it'll save you money if you use it to compensate for 5-10 degrees of heating for three or more months. Invest in a really warm pair of slippers, and the best thermal underwear you can afford. Camping stores have good options for very thin, layerable clothing that can keep you very warm. Keep an eye out for sales on these in late spring.

Really Layer Up. Plenty of people have given me crap for this, but I don't care. I wear fingerless gloves and a comfy fleece hat for most of the winter. I'm cheap and I'm a wuss. I don't want to suffer too much in pursuit of saving money. Remember your mother's admonition that you lose more body heat through your head than through any other part of your body. Find yourself a comfy hat that you can wear indoors for warmth. If you're crafty, you can make pairs of these knitted fingerless gloves for yourself and other family members.

Activities I know winter is hibernation time for many people. The temptation to hunker down and become sedentary is always there for me. But I've found that having small activities spread throughout a winter day helps keep me pretty warm. Even five minutes of vigorous movement will make you feel warm for quite a while, especially when you're layered up. If a part of your day requires you to be sedentary, then try to break it up with some of these activities:

• Handwash some dishes. The water will warm up your hands nicely. This is a nice excuse for not tackling all the dirty dishes right after dinner, too.
  
• Vacuum one room at a time. Rather than cleaning the whole house all at once, break up the chore so that you get your blood moving several times during the day. If your rooms are small or few, then do the details, like using the brush attachment to get the cobwebs, clean the trim, and vacuum under the couch cushions.
  
• Shovel some snow or rake some leaves. Do a little yard work, whatever you've got. This will warm you up with aerobic exercise, and when it's cold out, the house will seem warm by comparison when you come back inside. Again, when your goal is to warm yourself up, working in 15-minute increments is totally legit. No yard work of your own? Offer to help an elderly neighbor or nearby relatives. You'll earn good karma and maybe a warm cookie.
  
• Shake that cosmic thang. No productive chores to tackle? Then just put on some music that makes you want to boogie. It's hard for frugalites, who won't pay for gym memberships, to get enough exercise in winter. A few minutes of dancing around your house like a lunatic is good for you in more ways than one.

Have a hot cup of tea. The igloo-dwelling Eskimos have a theory of warming up that differs from our own. Obviously, heating their homes is not the best option. So they warm themselves directly, from the inside out, most often by drinking warm liquids. You might be surprised how well this works, and the cup will heat your hands as well as the rest of you. Keep a supply of herbal tea on hand so that you don't need to overcaffeinate to use this trick.

Bake something. Wintertime is a great time to use your oven. Not only does it warm up your kitchen, but the smell of something freshly baked, whether it's bread or brownies, is just incomparable in a winter house. Consider stocking up on homemade goodies now if you have the freezer space to store them. That way you won't have to heat up the house in the summer months. Pot roast, casseroles, and meatloaf are great choices for oven dinners too. (While you've got the oven going, throw in a head of garlic, some beets, a winter squash, or a few potatoes to maximize the value of the energy you're using to heat the oven. There are lots of good uses for leftover baked potatoes.)

Cuddle up with a loved one or a (mammalian) pet. Body heat is the best blanket, in my opinion. Get cozy with someone you love for a reading session, a movie, or something more interesting.

Go to the library, or somewhere else that's heated, preferably where you won't be tempted to spend money. Make a day of it; hang out for hours. Hey, I'm not above mooching heat off someplace that's funded by my tax dollars anyway. The library is one of my favorite places: cool in summer, warm in winter. It's a great way to save money on books, magazines, movies, music, and heating or cooling costs. You're paying for it, so you might as well get your money's worth. Before you leave, turn down the thermostat halfway to your overnight setting.

Devices The old standbys are old standbys for good reason: they work well and cheaply. A hot water bottle will warm your lap during the day or your bed at night. When I was a poor student, I rested my feet on a hot water bottle while I studied and read for hours each night. Hot water bottles are cheap enough to replace on a regular basis, and they do need replacing every so often. Eventually the rubber breaks down and makes a catastrophic high-temperature leak a real possibility. Check your rubber hot water bottle carefully each winter before you begin using it. Or make your own substitute with a one-liter plastic bottle stuffed into an old sock. Old tube socks can also be used to make the "bed buddy," which is just a cloth tube half filled with whole grain barley or rice. Sew up the opening and any holes or just tie off both ends of the tube sock to prevent the grain from coming out. Then microwave for 2-3 minutes and enjoy the steamy warmth for 30 minutes or more. This project is easy enough for kids to make one for themselves.

Eat hot foods, especially soups. I remember reading an account of an obscure part of World War II, the Russo-Finnish theater. The border between Russia and Finland is a rather chilly part of the world in wintertime, which is when most of those battles took place. The history book I read said that a hot meal often meant the difference between life and death for those soldiers, which occasionally played out in tragic ways. No joke. Warm foods affect our body temperature powerfully. Include a soup in your weekly meal plans for the winter months. You can make great soups with beans or potatoes, two extremely economical staples.

Did I miss anything? Sound off in the comments if you've got a good way of staying warm when the heat is set low.


Related post: Stop Wasting That Heat!

Wrong season for you? Check out Stay Cool Without Touching That Thermostat

The Upside of Down, & Longterm Plan Musings

Well, things do not look at all encouraging in the markets or the economy as a whole. The one silver lining that I can find right now is that the price of oil has dropped to around $96 a barrel as I write this. How quickly we rejigger our ideas about "good" oil prices! Like many people in the northeastern US, we heat our home with oil. So right now feels like a "good" time to top off our fuel supply for the winter.

We're equipped with only one smallish oil tank, giving us just a 275 gallon capacity. Right now our one tank is at 3/8 full. Our delivery service hits us with an extra delivery charge if we don't have at least 175 gallons delivered. In other words, we have to get down to about 1/4 of a tank before we can dodge that extra fee, which of course we want to do. They never completely top off the tank when they deliver. I guess they don't want to risk overfilling and causing a spill. Even if we start the winter with a full tank, we'll almost certainly need another delivery to get us through 'til spring. Of course, I pull out the stops as far as frugal tricks go to save money on heating expenses (on which, more to come soon). All the same, at today's prices we're looking at a cost of at least $1200 to make it through the winter. Ouch.

Our backup heating system is a propane fireplace insert in the new addition of our home. It would do for us in a power loss of short duration, say five days at the outside. Our stovetop runs on propane from the same tank, so we can cook and heat part of our house at least for a little while without electricity. We're very close to a major hospital, and I'm pretty sure we're on the same electrical grid, because we've never lost power for more than a few seconds, when others not all that far away have gone without for several hours. So chances are that things would have to be very bad before we would go without electricity for any significant length of time. Still, our propane supply is in small tanks we have to refill ourselves, and propane is a fossil fuel, which means it too will be problematic in the years ahead.

Even if we get a "deal" on our heating fuel oil this month, I look ahead and know with certainty that we need to find some other way to keep ourselves warm through the many winters to come. Our home is not well situated for an outdoor wood furnace; the neighbor's houses are too close in most directions to easily meet code with one of these. We could put in an indoor wood stove, but we have no significant supply of our own wood. So that would mean buying wood, which I expect to go up in price through the years. And then we'd have the mess of an indoor fire. Regionally, we're in a marginal area for solar power, especially in winter, and our micro-region isn't all that great for wind either.


Given all these imperfect solutions, I'm thinking about the outdoor furnace for the long term. I've seen one of these at work in the home of an acquaintance, and they seem quite manageable for our current lifestyle of two healthy, reasonably active, youngish adults, with at least one person home most of the day. Getting one would involve some retrofitting of the house, which I know would not be cheap. In fact, I'm sure it would be downright expensive. And it would lock us in to buying our fuel no less than we need to buy oil. Perhaps most worrisome is that the furnace still needs some electricity to pump heated water to and from the house. In the very long view, I can imagine a world where that's a problem. But at least it offers the prospect of clean heat (both in terms of pollution and indoor mess) and a renewable fuel source. We could work on generating a little electricity with solar power, and sourcing cheap or free firewood too, though I imagine through the years that market will become much tighter. Another downside is that I'll never be able to cook on an outdoor furnace.

There just aren't any perfect options for us. Long term we'd like to build a home on our land. The plan is to build a masonry heater into the core of our home, as the house goes up. The advantages are several. Masonry heaters are incredibly clean and efficient, they can be built to include a cookstove, they don't need any electricity to run, and our land is very well situated to take advantage of plentiful hardwood to burn. Alas, we aren't in that house yet. And truthfully, with the way things are going, I'm not confident we ever will be in that house. But we can hope and plan.

What are your plans for your longterm energy needs?

Save Heating Oil During the Summer Months

A great many homeowners in the area I live in rely on heating oil to keep their homes warm during the winter. The most common arrangement is an oil-fueled water furnace that heats water for baseboard radiators, and sometimes radiant heat floors. Seems like a no-brainer to save on heating costs during the summer, no? But there's a simple way to save more oil, beyond just not needing any heat for the home. Because in most cases, the temperature for the hot water that comes out of the tap is controlled by the same setting as the water for the radiators.

I've found myself lately taking very tepid showers, trying to cool down during the hottest period of the year. I don't take truly cold showers, but I'm guessing that the temperature that feels good right now is somewhere around 80 to 85 degrees F. Given that the house can be as hot as 80 degrees during the day, there's no risk of a chill. But the wintertime setting for our hot water is 160 degrees. For our personal use, we don't need water anywhere near that hot. Our dishwasher heats our water to an appropriately scalding temperature on its own. And I use cold water for nearly all our laundry.

So the simple fix is to lower the setting on the furnace as soon as we no longer need to heat the house. Our gauge actually has two settings, a kick-on setting for the lowest acceptable temperature, and the kick-off setting for the highest necessary temperature. I set the kick-on temperature as low as it could be set: 110 degrees. And the kick-off temperature is a mere ten degrees higher. The water that comes out of the tap is still plenty hot for washing dishes, so I don't worry much about sanitation. If we cook anything particularly bacteria-laden, like meat, we either put the cutting board and kitchen tools through the dishwasher, or sterilize them with bleach. We eat so many vegetables during the summer anyway, just trying to keep up with the output from the garden. In other words, there's no downside. The savings may be small, but it costs us nothing but a minute or two of time to accomplish.

I have no idea how much oil this simple switch is saving us, but at more than $4 per gallon for heating oil, it's something worth doing. I only wish that I had thought of it earlier in the warm months. We've got at least a few more months before we'll need to raise the temperature to effectively heat our home.

If any engineers or heating specialists out there know a way to calculate the savings, please let me know!