On Splitting Atoms to Boil Water

Most of the time, we cook on a wood cookstove, which is also our only heat source.

The model we use is a modern Amish design called the "Baker's Choice" - it cranks out a ton of heat fast with a relatively small firebox and big oven. With a good woodstove, tight and well-insulated construction, and passive solar design, the temperature in our house is super comfy.

This year we will be hooking up our household hot water to the Baker's Choice too--it's designed so that you can heat or pre-heat your hot water by running it through pipes in the firebox, and send it back to your hot water heater for storage.

Our main fuel source for the stove is scrap wood from pallets that would otherwise be headed to the landfill.

We don't use a wood cookstove because of some romantic notion of picturesque old-fashioned homesteading. We do it because household appliances that create heat (namely hot water heaters, ovens, and ranges) are major consumers of energy.

Where we live, our electricity is produced mostly by burning coal and splitting atoms. (The mix for our household, according to the EPA, is about 40% nuclear and 50% coal, with renewables making up less than 3% of the remainder, of which most comes from massive hydroelectric projects involving dammed rivers). You can find out where your electricity comes from by entering your zip code here: http://www.epa.gov/cleanenergy/energy-and-you/how-clean.html.

To get the bigger picture of how electricity is made, you can also see maps by state with sites of coal and nuclear power facilities here: http://www.eia.doe.gov/state/state-energy-profiles.cfm?sid=NC.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not out here on the farm huddled over a fire in the dark. I like my modern conveniences - refrigeration, lights that turn on with the flip of a switch, my trusty Toshiba laptop, and the occasionally-used kitchen appliance (I'm particularly fond of my hand blender). But I just can't justify splitting an atom or blowing up a mountain to boil water for my cup of tea in the morning.

Knowing that the lion's share of our electricity comes from Mountaintop Removal coal and dangerous and toxic nuclear power makes me highly motivated to cut our consumption as much as possible. Similar to knowing where your food comes from, knowing where your power comes from is a good first step.

The nuclear disaster in Fukushima has brought all of this to the forefront of my mind, so I thought I would post a little something about energy here. Not that I expect everyone in the United States to install a wood cookstove, or that even if something that ridiculous happened that it would solve our energy problems.

But I stoke the fire in our stove as a small prayer for sane and simple solutions to our energy needs, solutions that work with the planet's natural forces - air, water, sunlight, tides - rather than destroying the earth and leaving toxic waste behind for future generations. It's a tiny act of resistance to the ridiculously complicated and irresponsible energy systems that humans have created.

My hope is that we learn from the tragedy at Fukushima - that the contamination of air, soil, water, and food in Japan and the low-level radiation dispersing around the planet are finally enough to teach us the lesson we need to learn about nuclear power: it's not worth the risk. Even without accidents, it's not worth the burden of the waste. (Here's an article I read recently that sums up the opportunity for learning and changing our behavior: The Lessons of Fukushima).

More broadly, my hope is that we begin to understand the foolishness of the philosophy that leads us to engage in acts like Mountaintop Removal and the creation of nuclear energy. The idea that the goal of science is "to attain a gradually greater and greater control of nature" as Oppenheimer famously put it, is arrogant and naive. The earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident in Japan have shown us nothing if not that the idea that we can control nature is delusional. I want us to look back at Fukushima as a turning point: the moment when we stopped trying to control nature and started working with and for the natural systems of the planet, understanding that we are part of the community of life on the planet and dependent upon those systems for our survival.

Rant complete. Now off to check on my nuclear-fueled tomato seedlings.

On Refrigeration

At left: our strange and wonderful fridge.

Refrigeration Revalations

In building our little house over the past two years, CF and I have nerdily obsessed over many things, logging hundreds (thousands?) of hours of research in choosing the most ecological options within our limited budget. One of the things we decided to spend some serious money on was our refrigerator.

Our goal is to be on a solar/photovoltaic (PV) system in the near future. With that in mind, we have been working to get our energy load as low as possible so that our whole house can soon be powered by a small and simple solar array. In the meantime, we want to buy as little as possible of Progress Energy's power, which mostly comes from the Evil Twins of energy: coal and nuclear.

As a sidenote here's an energy-saving tip: I have found that when you refer to your appliances and gadgets as the "coal- and nuclear- fired whatever," it tends to help motivate you to reduce desire to use it. For instance: "I'm going to go get the wrinkles out of this shirt with the coal-fired iron" kind of puts ironing in perspective.

So back to the fridge. Refrigeration is a big energy suck. Almost 100% of American households keep a relatively large amount of food chilled and frozen 24-hours a day, which requires a lot of electricity. In a typical US household, refrigeration can account for up to 20% of the total energy load. In our household, we calculated that refrigeration would be a lot larger percentage of our total since our total load was so small relative to the typical US household. So we set out to see how little energy we could expend keeping food cold.

The refrigerator we finally decided upon after much agonizing is pictured above: the Conserv by Vestfrost. Tall, elegant, efficient, and made in Denmark, Vestfrost fridges are styley enough that some people buy them just for looks. But they are brainy as well as beautiful.

Here are some of the very cool features of Vestfrost refrigerators:

• No CFCs used to manufacture or run the appliance; CFC-free refrigerant and foam
• Freezer on the bottom because cold air sinks and warmer air rises. Duh! Why are all fridges not designed this way?
• Smaller footprint (see "downsize your fridge," below)
• Less than 1 kwh/day to run, which is way ahead of the standard "Energy Star" rated fridges widely available on the US market. More information on the inadequacy of "Energy Star" ratings here.

After much consideration, we ordered our Vestfrost about a year ago from brandsconnection.com out of Brooklyn, which had the lowest price and best deal on shipping that we could find. Oasis Montana also sells them, and has a lot of good information on Vestfrost fridges here.

Our Vestfrost was shipped as freight and was definitely more complicated to acquire than a standard fridge from the local bigbox. It was also considerably more expensive up front (just under $1,000), though it will pay for itself in electric bills, no doubt.

These fridges are known to be reliable over many years, and are not complicated to repair. We know a family in our community who has an older model Vestfrost that they've been running for more than a decade, and there are lots of reviews online from satisfied long-term Vestfrost owners.

Typical American super-sized fridge full

of crapola.

Downsize Your Fridge

One way that the Vestfrost saves energy is by being smaller than the typical super-sized American fridge. The average capacity of a standard fridge in the US is 18-26 cubic feet. The Vestfrost has about half that: 7.1 cubic feet of refrigerator space and 3.4 cubic feet of freezer space. In terms of energy efficiency in refrigeration and freezing, it is better to have less space and have it packed more tightly than to have lots of empty cooled space.

"But what if we don't have enough space for all of our food?!?" Despite our decidedly counterculture leanings, CF and I obviously had some level of buy-in to the "BIGGER! BETTER! MORE!" mentality that pervades American culture. We found ourselves asking this question with an edge of panic in our voices as we discussed refrigeration options.

If a Big Mac is better than a regular cheeseburger, then a Big Fridge must be better than a small one, right? In addition to the status-symbol factor of fancy appliances (see Dwell, Natural Home, or any number of fancy home magazines), I think that our culture places a high value on having a large fridge full of lots of perishables at all time--it's a kind of false security. It's as if we believe that a big, packed fridge will make us safe in an unsafe world. So CF and I decided to let go of the false sense of food security that is engrained into us by mainstream American culture and--gasp--downsize our fridge.

In other parts of the world, people don't think that everything has to be kept at 38 degrees all the time. And they don't think that they need a large quantity of refrigerated stuff to be happy and secure. In my travels throughout Europe and Latin America I have observed that people tend not to refrigerate everything, and also not to stockpile food the way folks do in the US.

When I lived in Ireland, I noticed that no one refrigerated butter or eggs. In many countries, it is more typical to buy fresh produce at the market, bread at the breadshop, and a small bottle of milk daily or several times a week than to fill up your giant fridge with gallons of milk, dozens of eggs, and stacks and stacks of processed food products that need refrigeration. My guess would be that cultures that buy food more frequently and stockpile less are wasting less food, too.

A beautiful old root cellar

Root cellaring links here

Alternatives to Refrigeration

When storing quantities of food is necessary, there are lots of ways to do it that don't require ongoing use of electricity, and in some cases don't require any electricity at all. Many of these preservation methods are ancient culinary traditions that produce delicious foods.

Alternatives to refrigeration include:

• Brining. Examples: pickles, sour kraut, relishes.
  
• Salting (meats). Examples: Cured ham.
  
• Drying (meats, shell beans, herbs, vegetables, fruits). Examples: raisins, dried apples, sundried tomatoes, dried beans.
• Souring or culturing (dairy). Examples: cheese, sour cream, buttermilk, yogurt.
  
• Canning/heat processing. Examples: tomato sauce, canned fruits and vegetables.
  
• Cellaring/Cool storage. Examples: potatoes, cabbage, apples, and all manner of root crops. This can be as simple as storing potatoes in a cool, dark basement or as complicated as building a root cellar.
  
• Buying or harvesting food fresh more frequently and storing it for less time (see my comments above on what people in other parts of the world do).
• Eating in season fresh from the garden. The taste beats the hell out of refrigerated food, too.

On Upsides and Compromises

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a total refrigeration Luddite. I am grateful for the technology of mechanical refrigeration. It improves my quality of life, and I know it has many important functions (such as preserving medicines and medical supplies) that are invisible to most of us. If nothing else, I am grateful to have a constant supply of mayonaisse available to me without a lot of effort, thanks to my fridge.

So, I am not suggesting that we all revert to root cellars, kraut crocks, and spring houses alone, but I do think that it is worth thinking about refrigeration and how much energy we spend keeping things cold.

Lastly, there are ways to make regular old inefficient fridges MORE efficient. If buying an over-the-top fridge of the future like the Vestfrost is not in your budget anytime soon, here is some great advice from Chelsea Green on how to make the most of your current refrigeration technology:

5 Tips to Turn Your Icebox Into a Low-Carbon Superfridge.

So there you have it. A whole post on refrigeration. Who would have thunk?

Firing Up the Wood Cookstove

Over the weekend Christopher finished installing our wood cookstove. 

C. was in charge of all of the work of installing the stovepipe, cutting holes in the roof and ceiling, running pipe up through the attic and out the roof, and hooking up the stove. I catered, deejayed, and photographed the event and otherwise provided support.

Christopher on the roof as the chimney takes shape...

...and the hole in the kitchen ceiling.

It was about four years ago that we bought this stove, made by an Amish stovemaker in Canada (ordered via Lehman's).

It was our primary heat source back when we lived in the old, drafty 1600 square-foot house in town before we moved to the ruburbs.* We learned back then that this stove can really pump out the heat. In those days we were living with two friends, and many was the winter night when we all stripped down to tank tops and shorts for a night of hot, sweaty dominoes as the stove blasted away.

Our intention all along was for this stove to be the heat source for our house here on the farm, and also our stove for cooking.  We used it to cook occassionally back in town, but cooking by wood was mostly a novelty at that point.  Now its a way of life.  

The cookstove differs from a typical woodstove in that it has an oven (with temperature gauge) and a large cooking surface on the stovetop. It is also built to accommodate a waterjacket for heating household hot water.  

This summer, our plumber friend will hook the stove up to our hot water system so that when we're using wood heat and cooking on the stove it's also  filling the hot water heater.  Our solar hot water panel will heat household water in the warm months when we're not using the stove for heat, and our plan is to turn off the electric hot water heater all together, using it only as a thermos for water already heated by wood and sun. 

Heating water for household use with electricity is one of the biggest energy hogs in a typical household, and by eliminating this power drain, our electricity load will be reduced to the point that we will be ready to go to a relatively small on-site photovoltaic (PV) system for our main power source.

I love using a woodstove for heat and cooking and hot water. When I lived in Ireland, I cooked on a stove very similar to this one, and I remember loving the simple tactile pleasures of stoking the fire, feeling the air around me gradually grow warmer and drier, and holding my palms above the surface or in front of the open oven door.  

Getting up in the morning, stirring the coals, and putting the kettle on feels like a beautiful natural rhythm to me.  It's so much more grounded, sensual, and humanely-paced than rushing out the door and grabbing a coffee to go.

Another thing that is so satisfying about using the stove is the idea of "stacking functions," a permaculture principle.  The principle of stacking functions means that every component of a well-designed sytem should serve more than one purpose.  

Here's a great description of what it means to stack functions: 

"To stack functions, one designs strategies that meet the most needs with the least effort. Thinking this way helps one become a problem solver: creative, adaptable, effective and abundant. One’s entire life can be based on these principles; they can be implemented with every decision that you make."

- Jennifer Dauksha-English, Financial Permaculture.

The wood cookstove, which heats our home, cooks our food, heats water, and can even dry our clothes (hung on a rack) is a great example of stacking functions.  It feels easy.  I've already found myself thinking things like, "the stove going to be fired up all day today anyhow, I'll put a pot of beans on and they'll be cooked by dinnertime...and maybe I'll make a pot of ginger tea, too."

The final stacked function of the stove that we have discovered is cat happiness. Having a fire in the stove makes Frankie the 

cat very, very happy (here she is sprawled out in the heat about four feet away from the back of the stove).  One downside, however, is that the dry wood heat has apparently made her very thirsty, and driven her to uncharacteristic water theivery.

*ruburbs=rural areas around a city

Al Gore on Energy Options and "Clean Coal"

KT sent me this great snip of the recent Digg interview with Al Gore - in this segment, he's speaking about energy options, including the myth of "clean coal."

Gore says here that "the phrase clean coal is an oxymoron" and is in truth "a very, very cynical, massive advertising campaign by the coal companies to promote the meme 'clean coal, clean coal' and it really is deceptive." He also offers clear options for energy independence and a sustainable energy policy:

Worth a watch: