Replacing all the windows in a home is extremely expensive. And, according to an article in National Geographic, the energy savings created by switching from single- to double-pane windows is about 10 percent. Do the math: Look at your heating bills, the price of windows, and calculate. Would your savings be worth it?
White reflects the sun’s light and keeps a home cooler. Dark colors absorb the sun’s heat and make a home warmer. In warm climates, paint your roof white to decrease summer cooling needs. To warm water using solar energy, paint water tanks black and place them outside.
If you live in the northern hemisphere, the rooms on the north side of a home are cooler than those on the south side. Use them accordingly, and at the right time of year. Try to let fresh air in from your east windows. They are closest to neutral.
Adding thermostats to heating and cooling devices reduces heating and cooling costs. Programmable thermostats allow you to reduce energy use at specific times of day, such as when you are asleep or not home. Thermostats also turn things on and off at the right time whether or not you remember.
In dry climates, swamp coolers cool interiors with four times less energy than air conditioners. Swamp coolers are basically fans that move over water to add humidity to an indoor space. We cool 1,200 square feet of space with a single 300-watt swamp cooler rather than using power-hungry air conditioners.
Layered Window Coverings
Layering a window with the right materials provides year-round options for heating and cooling. In summer months close up the window coverings before reaching the heat of the day; in winter trap heat by closing them at dusk.
Instructions
1. Silver Mylar bubble wrap makes an excellent reflective covering for your windows: The sun bounces off it in summer months and in the winter it seals out leaks. Cut a roll of Mylar bubble wrap to match the window’s size.
2. With a couple of screws, attach the top end to the window frame.
3. Loop a piece of metal wire through the Mylar halfway down and in the center.
4. Hang a small picture hook in the center top of the window frame. When the Mylar is rolled up, the picture hanger will catch the loop and hold up the Mylar roll.
5. A thin, semitransparent fabric that acts as a light diffuser comes next. Diffusers let the sun shine into a room while softening the quality of its light and intensity of its heat.
6. For the final layer, use a heavy drape made of a material such as cotton velvet. This layer is best lined with a light color and reflective material. The heavy layer helps close up the house to hold in the heat gained from the sun each day. The semireflective liner helps keep the heat of the sun away from the house in summer months.
Holy Scrap
This is not a moral issue, it’s not a spiritual issue, it’s not a political issue, it is a logical issue.
— Michael Reynolds
Here are a few projects that exemplify what Mikey and I love to do on our homestead: Rescue what others might throw out, and turn waste into useful and even beautiful things.
Toughie Skateboard
A toughie skateboard can be used to push oversized, heavy, and awkward objects like water totes, water heaters, furniture, and refrigerators.
Materials
3-foot by 2-foot scrap of plywood
jigsaw
crayon
a pair of wide, knobby skateboard wheel sets
screws
Instructions
1. Draw the shape of an extra-wide skateboard body onto your plywood scrap.
2. Cut the shape out using a jigsaw.
3. Attach the wheels to the bottom 6 inches from each end.
Fire Barrel
Fire connects us to nature, to light and heat. Mobile homes are flammable and fireplaces are not recommended in them, so our outdoor fire pit is where we gather with friends in winter months. We also make decorative fire barrels out of found 50-gallon metal drums (see page 45). We find them more beautiful and interesting than the outdoor fire pits sold in stores. Plus, they’re made from free and easily obtained waste material. They’re easy to make if you have basic welding skills.
Materials
50-gallon metal drum. (Never use a drum that stored combustible chemicals. Play it safe.)
oxyacetylene torch setup or plasma cutter
safety gloves
protective eyewear (specifically for welding)
metal tire rim
Instructions
1. Draw out the barrel’s design in advance, considering the effect of what gets cut away. Negative spaces will become holes in the barrel. Too many cuts, or ones too large or too close together, will compromise the barrel’s integrity. It will be necessary at times to leave parts of your image connected to the rest of the body; plan for these in advance.
2. Using your torch, remove the top of the barrel so that one end is open. Leave the cylinder and its base.
3. Cut a series of decorative holes, as you like. Make sure your design includes a few holes near the bottom 10 inches of the barrel, because these low cuts will let in the air needed to fuel the fire inside the barrel.
4. After the design has been cut, weld a metal tire rim to the bottom of the barrel in the center. This will be the barrel’s base, keeping it off the ground and allowing for good airflow.
Solar Water Heater or Doormat
If you see a refrigerator in the trash, use a bolt cutter to chop off the compressor coil, an approximately 2-foot by 4-foot metal grate on the back with tubing running through it. The refrigerant moves through this coil when the refrigerator is working. Once the coil is free from the refrigerator, it can be made into a solar water heater by plumbing it, running water through it, and placing it in the sun. Or a portion the size of a welcome mat can be cut from it and placed in front of the door of your home for removing rocks and dirt from the bottom of shoes before entering.
Our neighbor Donna turned us onto the idea of using old refrigerator coils as doormats. On our way home from the dog park this morning, she dug one out of a pile by a dumpster. We took three more home with us. I immediately grabbed the bolt cutters and trimmed it down to size.
Rust Recovery
Rusty tools need not become trash. A simple process of electrolysis can remove rust.
Materials
rusty object in need of salvation
two alligator clips
scrap of steel
5-gallon plastic bucket
water
about 1 cup baking soda
battery charger from any DC home device (such as a plug-in charger for an appliance)
enough white vinegar to cover object
Instructions
1. Connect one end of an alligator clip to the item you wish to recover (de-rust). Connect the end of the other alligator clip to a piece of scrap steel that you are willing to throw away (it won’t be usable after this application). The positive alligator clip goes to the scrap metal, and the negative goes to the item being recovered.
2. Place the recovery item and the scrap steel into a bucket of water and baking soda, with the alligator clips coming out the top.
3. Connect the other ends of the alligator clips to the charging device, the positive end on the positive lead and the negative end on the negative lead. If you are uncertain about which end is positive and which is negative, use a multimeter.
4. Plug the charger in. The water will fizz. Leave this setup running for 8 to 20 hours. To check the progress, unplug the charging device from the wall socket and look at your rusted item.
5. When the item is rust-free, take it out and submerge it in a tub of white vinegar for about an hour.
Garden Colander
If you see an old washing machine in the trash, grab the basin, the part that the clothes go in. This may require disassembling the unit a bit. Enamel basins in old washing machines are preferable to plastic basins in new machines. Enamel is durable and lasting. Use the basin for an outdoor garden colander for washing large harve
sts of fruits and vegetables.
Plastic Welding
Broken plastic goods need not go into the trash. Plastic welding is simple — and you only need nail polish remover and some cotton swabs. Seriously.
Materials
acetone, a.k.a. nail polish remover (check the bottle for high acetone ratio)
cotton swabs
Instructions
1. Dip a cotton swab in the acetone and rub both ends of the break in a plastic item with it. Rub back and forth until you feel the plastic soften.
2. Reunite the two ends and hold them together until they bond.
3. When this bond dries, mend the seam by applying more acetone over the seam until you can no longer detect the break.
Epilogue: Make Mistakes
Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
— Samuel Beckett
Mistakes are unavoidable and should therefore be expected when acquiring mad skills. And here’s the thing: shared mistakes are valuable.
In that spirit, I’m leaving you with a list of lessons Mikey and I learned the hard way.
Build a workshop first, then build everything else. We were so anxious to remodel our home and property that we began working in spite of not having a workshop. Each day we hauled tools out of our shipping container shed, dragged them to the spot where we were working, unpacked them, set them up, and then each day packed them back up and put them away.
Consider your environment when you make priorities. Mikey and I live in a hot desert with scorching UV rays. Thinking only about house and food, we did not build shade until after remodeling our home and building our gardens. This meant working in the sun, with unnecessary suffering and energy drain.
Allow cement to completely dry before sealing. Wishing to avoid a toxic store-bought product, I stained a cement slab in our yard with natural umber powder that I hydrated. Then I sealed it with a cement sealer. A year later, the slab chipped and I learned what spalling is: it happens when water is sealed into the cement.
Build a humanure system as soon as possible. During the remodeling of our mobile home, we were so committed to using waste and preserving existing materials that we kept the two 40-year-old toilets in the home. I figured that with a bit of elbow grease I could get them clean, but I was wrong. I don’t wish that we’d bought new toilets, but I do wish we’d set up a humanure system outdoors and stopped using indoor toilets altogether. Home plumbing can be tricky and expensive to repair. Humanure is a composting toilet that is simple to manage and requires no plumber. Its impact on the environment is much less than flush toilets that waste water.
Watch out for mold spores! While making blue cheese, we learned that mold spores roam free inside buildings. After throwing away a failed batch of blue cheese that smelled like stinky feet, we made a batch of cheddar and noticed that the blue cheese’s mold spores had moved over to the cheddar. This time, after throwing away the contaminated cheddar cheese, we scrubbed our cheese fridge and fermentation tank and opened all the windows for a while to clear out the unwanted spores before starting another batch of cheese.
Don’t get ahead of yourself and buy batteries before you need them. We were so excited to build our PV solar system that we purchased the batteries a year before installing the system. The batteries sat in our yard while we built a dome to house the inverters and gear. The dome took longer than expected, and the batteries lost resilience sitting in the yard unused. Our batteries’ capacity was permanently affected by this loss.
Put what you will need to access in easy-to-reach places. We chose a pole mount for our PV solar panels because the roof of a mobile home is not strong enough to hold a lot of weight. Our PV panels stand at 8 feet above the ground near the roofline of our home. They’re too high to access without struggle and are difficult to clean, and their tilt cannot be changed. We cannot maximize their exposure to the sun as it moves through the sky at different times of the year. If we could do it over again, we’d choose to mount them low and in reach, where they could be adjusted. We’d place them on an adjustable mount so that their angle could be changed at different times of the year.
Consider the limits of your chosen materials. We got a little caught up in achieving technical challenges. This was particularly true in our use of papercrete. Papercrete has its uses: it is excellent for insulation and works well in domes. But we should have avoided the backbreaking, time-consuming work of building a solid papercrete slab wall. There are better choices of materials for making a privacy wall. The papercrete slab wall we built also needed a stucco job to withstand time. On the other hand, the fence we made using hollow armature and sprayed papercrete is durable and lasting, especially because we mixed in some prickly pear cactus goo.
Follow nature’s rules. Dreaming of an edible landscape in our first two years, we planted many nonindigenous trees. We took risks and planted exotic varieties not from our region. Planting local native trees would have saved us time and energy, and we would have had shade and food faster.
Have fun and play nice. This is hardly a complete list of the mistakes we’ve made. We suggest you make your own. Making them is more fun than you’d think, and you always learn from them.
Resources
Do, or do not. There is no “try.”
— Yoda, in Star Wars
These resources are listed by broad topics covered in this book. Within each section you’ll find books, websites and blogs, and films (including both YouTube shorts and feature-length movies). Some people warn against using Wiki references, but I think that it’s important that we do. We’re building the commons. This means using it, relying on it, and contributing to it.
Holy Scrap
Holy Scrap
store.holyscraphotsprings.com
blog.holyscraphotsprings.com
Mikey Sklar
www.screwdecaf.cx
www.youtube.com/user/sklarm
www.flickr.com/photos/11461247@N02
Wendy Tremayne
www.gaiatreehouse.com
Building
Alexander, Christopher, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, and Shlomo Angel. A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. Oxford University Press, 1977.
Alexander, Christopher. The Timeless Way of Building. Oxford University Press, 1979.
Garbage Warrior. Directed by Oliver Hodge. DVD. Open Eye Media Ltd., 2008.
Guelberth, Cedar Rose, and Dan Chiras. The Natural Plaster Book: Earth, Lime and Gypsum Plasters for Natural Homes. New Society Publishers, 2003.
McDonough, William, and Michael Braungart. Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. North Point Press, 2002.
The Antti Lovag Project
www.anttilovag.org
Cal-Earth: The California Institute of Art and Architecture
www.calearth.org
Earthship Biotecture, LLC
earthship.com
Eve’s Garden Bed and Breakfast
www.evesgarden.org
Ferrocement Educational Network
ferrocement.net/flist
FlyingConcrete: Structural and Sculptural Forms in LightWeight Concrete
flyingconcrete.com
Mortarsprayer.com
www.mortarsprayer.com. Stucco and texture sprayers
“Nader Khalili”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nader_Khalili
papercretes: Papercrete Info
groups.yahoo.com/group/papercreters
Robert Bruno
robertbruno.com
Spaceman’s Papercrete Mixer
www.starship-enterprises.net/Papercrete/Mixer
Emergent Culture
The Beehive Design Collective
www.beehivecollective.org
Billionaires for Bush
www.billionairesforbush.com
Black Rock Arts Foundation
blackrockarts.org
“Boing Boing”
www.boingboing.net
Burning Man
&n
bsp; www.burningman.com
Cult of Less
cultofless.com
The Long Now Foundation
longnow.org
Madagascar Institute
www.madagascarinstitute.com
Maker Faire
makerfaire.com
“Pirate Party”
Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party
Radiolab
New York Public Radio
The Good Life Lab Page 21