8/12/09

Okay, I was talking about insulation, which is a subsection of alternative utilities because it is part of heating the house, by whatever method.
Our options are few because of where we live: in the wettest, moldiest part of the world, apparently. Nobody does blown-in cellulose insulation around here because it just rots in the walls (this is according to a conversation I had with the manager of the biggest insulation business in town). They will do it in new construction before the sheetwall is up - I guess because they can take action to retard/counteract the problems? - but not in existing homes. The spray foam chemical stuff (which I'd rather not use anyway) is falling out of vogue (according to the same dude) because it's performance over longer periods of time is not what it was hyped to be. It shrinks; it warps, it makes your walls bulge, it cracks.
They can and will insulate the attic and crawlspace. That's better than what we got now, which is nothing in the crawlspace and very, very old fiberglass batting in the attic. Like maybe thirty years old. I haven't seen it personally but Homero says it is not really even attached anymore. Unfortunately, I don't know, in general, what percentage of a house's heat is lost through which various avenues. Attic seems likely to be a fairly big one. If I were to guess, I'd say it is either one or two, along with windows. Crawlspace? I just don't know. Heat rises, not sinks. But in any case, at some point the law of diminishing returns has to kick in. Walls are the most expensive to insulate. How much does it really help?
The the issue of cost must be addressed. Everything I've looked at so far -solar electricity, insulation, wood burning insert, diesel generator, handgun - costs about three times what I expected it to. I'm not naive, I don't think. I figured that outfitting this place as a true homestead, making it as self-sufficient as I could, would cost about one third of all my available funds, or $100,000. Now, I think that estimate was horrifyingly low.
Of course, if I truly believed that the survival of my offspring is on the line, I'd spend whatever I got and the consequences be damned. But that's not sustainable. My offspring will need cash into the foreseeable future. Cash may lose a lot of it's value, but it's not going to become obsolete anytime soon (and if it does, then probably things are in a state such that the only thing my offspring will have that might be useful is a gun). I envision that we will still be paying property taxes to a government for a long time to come. And we'd better be able to. We certainly don't want to give anybody the slightest legal reason to take any of our land. Land will be the king that displaces cash eventually, of course. As it always has been in the past.
But back to reality for a minute. Worry-time is almost over and I don't just want to spend it in a negative-utopian trance. We're pretty broke. Moving Homero's operations up here has proved - like everything else - to be much more expensive than we planned for. And he hasn't been making any money for a couple of months. We've been getting by by not spending any money. The farm and the trade network is providing us with most of our food because it's high summer. But large expenses are due now: house insurance on two houses, car insurance for the year, tuition, fall property taxes.
Bottom line - I think I will only be able to swing attic insulation this year. Luckily we are in good shape vis-a-vis windows and doors. Okay. Worry time has ended for the day. See you tomorrow.

8/10/09

Spray foam insulation is not suitable for this climate.

8/9/09

Boy did I go off on a tangent yesterday. That's okay. When I want to keep filling in the rest of my body of work, I'll do it in the same post, rather than scattering poems of varying and dubious quality all through this book, which is after all supposed to be a planner.

So how about I tell you what I learned about solar electricity. First I learned that we use a lot of electricity, even though I go around turning things off all day and night. We use approximately 12,000 KwH/year. Buying an installed system that generates one third of that would cost - today, from these guys I went to see - $31,000. What is that, like 100 years of electricity bills?

However, here are some more facts that make it cheaper:

1. federal rebate: 30% of installed cost. Bing, we're down to $22,000.

2. Since the system is grid-tied without battery back-up (more on this later) we'd be selling surplus electricity to the grid. The grid has to buy it from us at an artificially high rate - whereas we pay $.08/watt when we buy from them, they have to pay us $.15/watt when they buy from us. The law says they have to do that at least until 2020, and it might even go up.

2.a) What surplus energy? I thought this system only produced one third of your energy? Right, but that usage is concentrated at certain times of the day/year. And our system would produce most of it's energy at different times of the day/year. We use most of our energy in the winter. The sun gives us most of our energy in the summer. We use at night; it produces during the day. So, on any given sunny summer day when we aren't at home or are outside doing something that doesn't use electricity, our system is spinning our meter backward. We save the nine cents we pay for each watt, plus, when the meter goes back to zero for that month, they pay us fifteen cents. So theoretically, each watt we produce is actually worth 24 cents to us. Some of them, anyway. The piled up surplus from the summer months will lower our bill in the winter. Some people with big systems actually get checks from the utility.

But wait a minute. I though independence was the goal here. How does a grid tied system give you that?

It doesn't. The power goes out, it goes out for us too. But batteries are WAY more expensive than I thought. And the system requires more maintenance. And the batteries need replacing every five, ten, or fifteen years depending on how much money you spend on them in the first place. I'm not worried about the occasional one or two day outage. I'm worried about the day the grid goes down for good. And I doubt that day will come within twenty years. I think electricity will get much more expensive fairly quickly, but I doubt it will become unavailable that soon.

So my thinking is, it makes sense to save money on the batteries and maintenance now, and worry about adding that expense in ten or fifteen years, or twenty, when the shit can be seen from the fan. Or alternatively, when it becomes clear that I was wrong and the shit isn't headed this way at all, I will have saved a huge amount of cash and hassle.

I have to go get the girls ready for church. Worry hour is over for today.

3.

8/7/09

Focus on Solar

In about an hour, I'm going downtown to meet with Mr. Solar Electricity. Unfortunately, Homero is not coming with me. He got a job, and we need money. That's that. So, my future grandkids, when you wonder who is responsible for the state of the place you live in, it's me. Whether you are thanking me or cursing me, I take responsibility.

I do not understand electricity. There are too many damn measurements.. watts, ohms, amps, hertz... I thinks watts and amps are what I care about most. I have a magazine in front of me which I think I had better peruse before I go. One of the cover articles is "2009 solar electric panel buyer's guide," and that looks like a good place to start.

Okay, one point: whatever system we have needs to be protected from our extreme winds.

Rated power per square foot (watts): power output at STC (ideal conditions?) per square foot of module area. Also called power density. Higher density means less space needed, but usually more expensive.

Power Tolerance: the +/- percentage by which the unit will perform as compared to its STC.

Look for a unit with a low negative number or positive only.

Warranty: Most manufacturers offer full replacement or free servicing of defective modules. A "power warranty" is to guarantee a level of output that is advertised to produce for a certain period of time, should be 20 years.

Batteries: they don't last forever. They're expensive. And you need a battery monitor, which is much more than a voltmeter.

I have an electric bill from January to bring with me (the highest use month). What I want to know and haven't been able to find out is how much electricity (watts? Kilowatts?) does my essential battery of appliances use (fridge, freezer, stovetop, furnace fan, two lights) and can we reasonably supply that much?

What kind of maintenance do panels need? Batteries? What kind of output can we expect in winter?

okay I'm late

8/6/09

Preliminary Thinking, or Planning how to Make a Plan.

When I envision the homestead I want to create for my kids and grandkids, I think about a place that is safe, comfortable, and which can provide for many of the essentials of life. In what specific ways is my homestead of the future different from our current homestead, and what steps need to be taken to bring those changes about? 

Many things are the same, of course. The physical place is the same. This is it; this five acres. That's what we have and we're working with it. Is it a good place, in the context of climate change? Well, who really knows? We just don't have any ideas at all yet about how regional climates may change. One of the stupid oversimplifications that annoys me (and everyone else who has a smidgen of knowledge about the issue) is that the term "global warming" means things will just get hotter, everywhere more or less equally. Some places will get colder, most likely, as ocean currents shift around. Some places will get hotter in some seasons and colder in others. Some places will experience more and stronger hurricanes... and on and on. We just don't know yet which places will experience what.

That being said, though, I think this place is better than most. The climate is historically mild, neither hot nor very cold. There are still abundant water resources, though of course those might be drained/expropriated more quickly than I hope. And more specifically, we live on the broad flat top of a high hill, and we can see the weather coming in all directions. Or any other things that might be coming. We get lots of wind for power generation and have full sun all day long. We have decent neighbors who have the same amount or much more land than we do. My future homestead also has the same house on it (in better repair). This house has some very nice features which I'll discuss further later on. Mostly, enough storage to lose a horse in.  

When I think about the differences, I mostly think in broad categories. I'll list them as I see them now, and then go over each one in  more detail. In the future, we will need to have new functioning systems to replace the old systems that will presumably not be available or not be affordable. I'll call these alternative utilities. We will need new knowledge and skills. We will need supplies,  and we will need to have some provision for security. I lost my train of thought for a while while I was having coffee with my guests, so I think I've temporarily forgotten something. It'll come back to me. I think, actually, the fifth thing is food security. It might go under "supplies" but because of the size and complexity of the issue, it gets it's own category.

There are also many intersections; for example, a big subsection of knowledge and skills is maintenance of the alternative utilities. But that will straighten itself out as I write and think more specifically. So far, I've done the most thinking on the categories of alternative utilities and food security. So let's start with one of those.

Alternative Utilities:

Tomorrow morning, Homero and I are going downtown to talk to a guy about installing a solar system. We've done a fair amount of background research - Homero more than me, because he understands the language of electricity and I don't - and we know more or less what we want. In terms that I understand, we want a grid-tied electricity generation system with batteries that is capable of providing emergency power for the whole house. By that I mean, keep the fridge and the chest freezer running, the stovetop, the furnace fan, and a couple of lights. We don't need to run the computers and the TV too. At least, not yet. Solar systems are modular, we can always add on. Because of our excellent southern and western exposure, I think this is feasible. Now is a good time to buy because of generous tax incentives. So:

1. Solar electric.

2. Rainwater Catchment.  Right now, water is cheap, plentiful, and of excellent quality. But if there's one thing I know for sure, it's that that situation will change. Eventually, water will be very expensive. And we will be growing a large part of our own food, and that means using more water. So I want to put in a large rainwater catchment system with an underground cistern of at least 10,000 gallons. I don't know much about those systems yet, so that's an area of more research. It's also something that can wait a little while.

3. Alternative Heating. We use propane now. It's already expensive, and because of the state of the house, not even very effective. Last winter, when the temperature stayed in the teens for weeks on end, we had to run the furnace full blast 24/7 just to keep the house at a chilly 60 degrees. Gotta do something about that! I'd like to take a three-pronged approach: a) insulate the house and make needed upgrades to windows and doors. b) get an insert for our fireplace that is capable of heating the house at least mostly, and c) eventually convert the furnace to biodiesel, assuming that Homero ever gets the biodiesel processor running well. Insulating will take place within the next three months. The other two are probably further along.

Okay, my allotted worry time is over. I'll be back tomorrow to continue planning. 

8/2/09

I'm going to treat this diary as a planning tool, and also as a way to try and explain and record the world I live in now. Yesterday I was listing the things that we still take for granted, which I doubt very much we will still be taking for granted in a couple of decades. Besides clean water, health care, and electricity, which I wrote about yesterday, here are a few more things we all still can count on:

- The grocery store has at least fifty different kinds of fruits and vegetables, whether in season or out, doesn't matter. Strawberries in December? Yep. Might not be very good, but there they are. I remember reading that the average grocery store carries 40,000 products, from produce to the twenty brands of laundry soap and the fifty kinds of breakfast cereal. And of course there are the very poor, but generally speaking, food is cheap for most of us. We can mostly afford to buy many, many more calories than we need on a daily basis. And we mostly do, too. 

- There will be gasoline in the gas station down the street. No shortages yet, and it's still cheap, too, at least compared to nearly everywhere else on Earth. Today, a gallon of regular costs $2.59, I think. I buy diesel, which is about the same. I can still drive across the country for only a couple of hundred bucks. Our house is heated with propane (gotta get on that) and while I can't call it cheap, it isn't unaffordable. 

- Air travel. Everybody flies. The price of air travel fluctuates, but your basic middle class family will fly somewhere once a year. We flew to Arizona to visit my dad last month. I've been reading that airplane manufacturers are beginning to make new planes with a much larger proportion of composite materials (synthetic polymers?) and less metal, as they plan that the price of fuel is permanently rising. At least one of these new planes, the Boeing 787, has failed several stress tests relating to these new materials. There was a terrible crash recently; a flight from Venezuela to France simply broke up over the Atlantic in the midst of a storm. Airplanes aren't supposed to do that. I don't think an official explanation is out yet, but the fact is that it WAS a new generation plane with more composite. 

- The rule of law. Maybe I'm showing my white, middle class status here, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Americans trust the law. In the sense that we believe there IS law. We have a functioning justice system, with all of it's branches - police, judicial, prison - intact and more or less working according to the theory. I'm not trying to minimize the very serious problems of racial and class injustice, of for-profit prisons, of unequal access to protection, among others. There certainly are major problems. But still, I believe the majority of Americans feel safer because we live under the rule of law. Most of them, of course, have never been to a place where there IS no law. I have, and it's scary. I'll take our imperfect system over no system at all, thanks. 

Oh I'm sure there are lots more things I take for granted that I take SO for granted that I can't even think of them now. How about regular seasons? Do y'all still have those? 

8/1/09

I allow myself one hour of worry per day. This is it. For the rest of the 23  hours in the  day, I simply say to myself "you can think about that during your worry hour. For now, you have to think about something else." During my alloted worry hour, this is what I do: write. I ought to be writing in a notebook in longhand, but for now, this is easier. I expect that, if anyone is reading this, they are in fact reading it on paper. Perhaps this first entry is printed out and pasted into a journal, or perhaps I have copied it out longhand. Who the fuck knows? That's what this is about: communicating with an unimaginable future.

Hi. It's midsummer, 2009. August first. Do you all even use the Julian calendar? Or is it the year 14 or 28 or 112 of some new calendar? What might you be dating from? The fall of the American Empire, perhaps?

Okay. Here's where I'm coming from. Right now, the world political structure is pretty much intact. My name is Aimee. I was born in 1972, an optimistic year. The American Empire was more or less at it's apex, unless I'm totally mistaken. We were bestride the world, one of the two superpowers, along with the Soviet Union. My personal historical consciousness doesn't really come into being until about 1984, when Reagan was elected for the second time. The kinds of things my parents were concerned about were nuclear war, communism, abortion rights, and ... well, that's about all I can think of. I know from my own personal research that global climate change had already been identified as a threat, but only in rarified scientific circles. My own mother, for example, would not have heard of it at all.

Here's the weird thing - you might have a hard time even believing me. Climate change is currently considered - in 2009! - to be a topic of only moderate concern, sort of like acid rain or illiteracy. I live in a strange time: the scientific community is totally aware of the seriousness of climate change. There is almost complete consensus among scientists that climate change is happening and  that it threatens human civilization. In fact, the current state of scientific consensus, as accessible via the internet, is that climate change will likely obliterate all human societies within the century - yet there is little or no political action to address the problem. 

According to my personal research - which I admit and fervently hope may be mistaken - the population of the Earth may be reduced by 90% within the century. There's a book out called "the vanishing face of Gaia" which I am so far too chicken to read. The author, a respected climatologist, believes that by the year 2100 there will be only approximately 500,000 people on earth, "clinging to the circumpolar regions."   I have often wished that people might voluntarily decide on negative population growth... if every woman were to bear only one child, the human population would halve itself in every generation. That would go a long way toward solving our ecological problems... though not all the way.

I, of course, have three children. My oldest is fifteen. When I got pregnant with her, I was a child myself. Global warming was a tiny blip on the horizon that I think I MAY have  heard of once or twice... not that I would have paid any attention, at that age. Even my more recent children - two beautiful daughters ages almost six and four and a half - were born at a time that climate change was a subject unknown to all but those few involved in the science. 

I swear to God, if I were starting over now, if I were twenty years old instead 0f thirty-seven, I wouldn't have any children at all. It's too early to tell if I'm merely paranoid or prescient, but I feel pessimistic enough about the future that I wish I were not responsible for the lives of young children. My god, friends, if you are in a similar situation, if the future looks to you as though it might be a lot worse than the past - if you can't see any way that you can provide for the security of your descendants - for God's sake, don't have any. If you already have children, you know exactly what I mean; and if you don't, there's no way I can explain. To have a child is to become a hostage to the future. Your hear, your very soul is forever forfeit. 

You, who are reading this, already know if my worry and my planning was legitimate or not. You know what I do not: was I a nut-case, or was I a prudent planner?  I have small children, and so I have no choice. I must try as best I can to plan for their future. Believing, as I do, that they will not be able to rely on a centralized government for basic needs, I must try to provide for those basic needs as best I can. I don't know if it is obvious or incredulous to you, the reader, what I myself was able to count on. I took for granted:

- Clean drinking water. Right now, in 2009, I pay $18/month (a very nominal sum) for as much clean water as a family of five needs. If I go over my five thousand gallons, I  pay something like $2 per thousand gallons extra. It's completely ridiculously cheap.

- Affordable electricity. For approximately $100/month, I can keep the lights on all night. I can run the computer all night. I can cook, I can run a compact air conditioner, I can pretty much  run whatever appliances I feel like without concern.

- Health insurance. Although it's expensive - perhaps 20% of my income - I can more pr less count on receiving whatever care I need. Maybe I'll go into debt, but nobody is going to repossess my home over health care. 

Okay, my kids have called me. They are concerned about  the air conditioning. Ha! I assume that if you have kids they are concerned about filling their empty bellies. Gotta go. My half hour is up.