Stephanie commented on my recent blog about how you go about planning to build your Under $20,000 home that when you put all your storage in separate rooms you don’t have to heat and cool those rooms the way they would be if they were inside a traditional home. This is such a good point, and as usual, once someone comments, I remember stuff for a whole new blog. I love it…
For the storage rooms, if you want light, you can put up those Tap-It things that run on batteries. I’ve found it isn’t that often I want to get something out in the dark, but if I do, it’s annoying not to be able to, or to have to take a flashlight, so I love those Tap-Its. The batteries last for years if you don’t use the light much, which it turns out you don’t. And of course you use rechargeable batteries hooked up to a solar panel. Someone gave me four Tap-Its for Christmas once, or I don’t think I ever would have thought to try them and find out they are as useful as they are. They attach with velcro anywhere, or you can use screws. Peter also found some battery-powered lights you put on your head, attached with elastic, so your hands are free. They’re called work lights. Useful for going to get something out of storage. That reminds me also, you can attach a motion detector to a regular light, but then you have to jump up every once in awhile to get the light to go on again. Oh well, good exercise. Maybe makes God laugh, too.
For the rooms you use actively often, separate little solar and wind systems are made for RVs (and purchased easiest at RV suppliers) for as little as $25 up to a few hundred dollars. When you separate each room’s power needs, you see you don’t need much for some of them–e.g., lamps take very little power. If all you’re going to do in a room is read–why not have a separate library? With this way of building, you can build like a rich person!–the little $25 solar panel from the RV place is enough, and you can put in skylights with retractable covers that let in only light, not heat, or the amount of heat you want, and solatubes that bring light from one place on the roof to another inside and magnify it. Of course you can live like a chicken–go to bed at dusk and get up at dawn–and need less energy, but there is no reason you can’t live like a modern person too.
Another very interesting thing I found when I started figuring out how much power each item in a house needs is it is so much cheaper and easier to use propane gas for cooking that I don’t want to use a lot of the electric appliances I was used to having in my kitchen. We also live in the desert, and outdoor cooking is so fun and possible 360 days of the year and every night if the space is covered, that we don’t need much of an indoor kitchen. Most of the cooking is outdoors, so all we need are shade and a breeze—the first easy to provide, the second often too available here—to make our cooking heavenly, not just pleasant, with no air-conditioning needed. (There was a California cheese producers billboard I saw once that said, “California Cheese—It’s why the people in Palm Springs put up with 5 days of rain a year!” I love it—not the cheese, the 360 days of sunshine.)
However, if I am producing my own electricity in a green way I don’t have to feel guilty, no matter how much electricity I use. We use solar and wind power in the desert, where one works when the other doesn’t—the wind comes up at dusk, when the sun goes down. So I don’t even have to have batteries unless my energy needs are really immediate, such as in the computer room, where I want it to work 24/7 and where the emergency webphone is. And if I’m worried about the mercury in CFLs (compact fluorescent lights) I can use regular bulbs, which are so much cheaper. The result of all this for me is I make conscious choices all along the way.
The principle here in how to decide on what kind of and how much energy to use for the various parts of the house is to separate and combine uses in logical ways, the same principle I was discussing in how to plan the building itself. Interestingly enough, I found when I was checking on getting solar power for a whole house that the costs of the system increase because first of all you have to have the highest amount produced that you might need for the highest use area, to cover 90% of your energy uses. Actually, you don’t need all of those at once, of course, so if you produce them when and where you need them, you need less overall. Also, you can save on the costs of transmission. Traditionally, you put enough photovoltaic panels and/or windmills in one or two places to cover the whole house, and then you have to transmit that to locations all over the house. On a small scale the problem of transmission for such a traditional house is the same as the one faced by huge solar power factories out in the desert having to go across miles and miles of neighborhoods with high-voltage lines: the high costs of transmission to get the power from where it is generated to where it is used. When you are putting up small systems to produce only what is needed in one small room, you are down to about as local as you can get, with virtually no transportation or transmission costs.
In planning the building, you can plan those rooms that need lots of electricity—the computer room, the indoor kitchen—to be where there is the most solar energy and wind power, which in our area would be facing north and northwest. In those places you won’t have big trees planted that will grow to shade the roofs. You need the coolest rooms and the places where you are going to grow food to be sited facing south and southwest here. (Opposite in Australia and New Zealand.) So planning makes it easier and cheaper, too, to accomplish what you really want to do, which is live well and lightly on the Earth. Once again, also, as with any other decision you make about this kind of building, if you make a mistake it is a small one. When you find out what you have built doesn’t work for what you thought it would, it is easy enough to change the uses around, or even move the room. What a good life!
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