Hands on Practical Experience

Want to read something frustrating about living more sustainably? Want to read why, when people ask the hardest part about what I do, I say it's the friction from people? I'm not saying I'm anything special, just that I've done things as experiments that work out. People say living more sustainably is impossible. When I tell them I'm already doing it, like that I dropped my impact ninety percent, they say what they just was impossible is easy, devaluing any struggle I put into it. I generally find the activity intrinsically rewarding, so I value the struggle, but I don't like being patronized. When I suggest if it's easy, they can do it, they say it's easy for me but hard for them. I don't…

After three or four days at least overcast, often raining, I got to charge outside today. Since I've also been charging through my window, today was my first time outside in longer than just since those rainy days. Unfortunately for me, it was 40F when I went out (4.5C), rising to 43F (6C) when I went home, but more challenging for charging was the wind. Panels are like sails in the wind, expensive sails that can break. But those challenges paled compared to the advantages of spring. The sun is close enough to overhead that I could lay the panels flat on the ground and the angle is close enough to right that the charging rate is fairly close to maximum without the wind blowing…

Until I learned that "the electric refrigerator was made and marketed as means of supporting the physical properties of fossil fueled power plants," I thought electric appliances were designed to save us time and effort. Some may, but our lives have less leisure time than our ancestors before agriculture, as well as many indigenous people today. No wonder, I realized, when it hit me that the industry didn't begin to help us but to sell products to sell more electricity. Oh yeah, generating all that power pollutes and depletes, which power companies don't make a point of publicizing. We've bought into what they told us to sell us that we don't realize we're not benefiting. I never would have noticed this pattern except for hands-on…

I was reading The Grid: The Fraying Wires between Americans and Our Energy Future, by Gretchen Bakke, "One of Bill Gates's Favorite Books of 2016," where I learned that refrigerators didn't follow the grid. I had it backward. Fridges didn't come about for health or to improve food quality. Fridges became popular to drive more energy consumption, and therefore pollution and depletion. It turns out Bakke gave a talk on the subject, Refrigerator as Linchpin: A Brief History of the Fossil Fueled Electricity System. Quoting that page: The relationship between the refrigerator and the electric grid is much the opposite of what we assume. Rather than the grid being there for the fridge, the fridge is there for the grid. In this talk Gretchen Bakke…

I live in a big apartment building. The building has central air and heating. I stopped using either. Five of the six sides of my apartment face the rest of the building, so my apartment mostly doesn't face the elements. Some people say that configuration means I'm "stealing" heat from my neighbors in the winter and coolness in the summer. They have it backward. Since I keep my windows closed, most heat loss or coolness loss is through conduction, which depends on the temperature difference between my windows and the outside. Since my windows are closer in temperature to the ambient temperature outside, my apartment loses less heat or coolness, therefore requiring less of the heating/cooling system. Since all residents pay for heat and cool…

People ask me if I can put my solar panels in the window. Generally I've said doing so doesn't get nearly the power I'd need since for most of my time off grid the pressure cooker was my main use for electric power. I'd also think something like, "no shit, Sherlock. In what world would I not have thought of using the panels in my own apartment." In fairness to myself, most of the year, the angle of the sun doesn't provide direct sunlight at an angle the panels can charge from. It happens that for a month or two before and after the winter solstice, the sun is low enough on the horizon to provide some sunlight, albeit for only a couple hours, through…