Personal Peak Prep - Heat & Energy
This guest post is about the personal activities and preparations of someone who’s name you might recognize, but who wishes to remain nameless here. I’ve separated it into multiple posts based on topic.
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Heat:
We bought a corn-burning furnace at an auction and got it working this year. We found a (fairly) local farmer who was willing to sell us his very, very dry untreated corn for $5 for 50 pounds, and we picked up all the bags we could carry in our car. This allowed us to open up a ‘great room’ in our house that was previously unheated, and to make room for more community ‘salons,’ which are sort of structured community talks about sustainability.
My husband also learned how to hand-chop wood from a local expert, and was shown its meditative qualities, as well as great technique. Wood heats three ways: When you chop it, when you lug it, and when you burn it. We’ve been told that our forest will sustainability allow us to continue to heat our home without depleting our source. This is very good news.
We have refused to turn the oil heat on in the house (end of Nov.) and continue to burn our wood. We are cleaning out a section of the basement to be able to stack it inside. We’ve been gathering up paper and cardboard all summer, but we’ve gone through most of that already. We have located a free source of kindling we’ll be investigating.
We moved our bedroom out of the coldest North & North-West facing side of the house and into the warmest central & smallest room over our hallway. It rests just over the basement and wood-burning furnace, so it will stay warm from down below. We put up insulating curtains there, and are putting up others throughout the house. I’m also learning to knit, so as my first ‘project,’ I’m making draft-stoppers for the doorways, and using some of the dried corn used for the stove. Our goal is to only heat the downstairs of our overly large home, and to sleep in the cold. We’ll need ‘night caps.’
Energy:
We’ve come to see cutting our energy costs as a process of peeling an onion. We begin a task, and pretty soon, we start seeing other things that might never have occurred to us. One thing I’d say is not to get too caught up in the “more sustainable than thou” mode. You know, when you say “I’ve just hung up a clothes line in my basement and am not using my dryer anymore” and someone response by saying “YOU still used a DRYER?” This sort of one-upmanship is human nature, but very discouraging to the person making the change. Yes, we used a dryer. Yes, we used to dry clean clothes. And no, we don’t anymore. As of yesterday.
We looked over at the electric coffee maker, constantly telling us the time, next to the stove, constantly telling us the time, and we pulled out the coffee maker (no, not the stove—yet.) We got a French Press, which, yes, took energy to make, but will continue to make coffee when the electricity is out, and doesn’t require any filters, therefore no ongoing disposables. I put away the electric clocks and bought wind-up ones. It reminds me of the time going by each day, when I have to wind them up.
I also walk around doing what my father used to do when I was small: shutting off the lights saying “We aren’t here to support Edison,” a quaint reference to the man of the same name who our electric companies used to be named after.
Our water heater, a huge monstrosity we put in when we were in the midst of the ‘Energy Fiesta,’ continues to consume oil, even when our thermostats don’t. We could have hooked it up to electricity at the time we put it in, but then, “Oil was so cheap.” That beast eats up 500 gallons of oil a year, and clearly something has to change there too. Maybe just taking less showers, until we can front the bucks for a solar water system, which it can be converted to. Turning down the warmth of the water would help too. We’ve stopped using the dishwasher.
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