offgrid and fuel savings

[near horse]

Make do, do without

Carl, you left out the first part of this saying …. “Eat it up, wear it out, make it do or do without”.

[near horse]

because of the actions of terrorists or a bumbling government (ours or others), maybe both or even due to other reasons

How about energy speculators like those guys that worked the Enron scam and then were hired by firms like Morgan Stanley to do the same with oil last summer? Glad we helped bale out old MS ’cause I’m sure they didn’t make near enough off $4.50 gas.

[OldKat]

@near horse 9329 wrote:

How about energy speculators like those guys that worked the Enron scam and then were hired by firms like Morgan Stanley to do the same with oil last summer? Glad we helped bale out old MS ’cause I’m sure they didn’t make near enough off $4.50 gas.

Oh, I agree. Also, how about the price fixing in electricity contracts in California? Representatives from the El Paso Corporation and Cal Pine got caught red handed fixing prices. Huge fines followed and I think some spent some well deserved time in the slammer because of it. That put Cal Pine out of business and has placed such a burden on El Paso (due to ongoing repayments to the state of California) that I don’t think they will ever fully recover. That is one reason why I left there after a combined 22 years of service; 10 years the first time I worked for them and 12 the second.

I started to mention price fixing / unmanaged speculation as a factor in making supplies of whatever commodity scarce, but my post was reaching novella length anyway so I passed on it. I will say I never saw any indication of stuff like that when I was on the trading floor at Chevron. That was a department that was built on a solid foundation of integrity. It actually starts at the top and filters its way down. That said I felt at the time that this was not true of many of the organizations that we dealt with. There were two firms that I said that I would never work for; Enron was one, Natural Gas Clearinghouse (later named Dynegy) was the other. It was interesting to see that those were among the first to bite the dust when their corruption was uncovered. I can’t honestly say that I saw it coming, but I can say is it did not surprise me one bit.

Don’t get me wrong, oil is a finite resource. So is natural gas, coal, trees, even sand for that matter. What I am saying is that we will never “use the last drop” of oil. Instead it will eventually become so hard to extract that it won’t be feasible to use anymore, or it will be taxed so high that it won’t be cost effective anymore, terrorist will make it impossible to transport, or irrefutable proof (absolutely irrefutable proof ) that it is destroying the environment may surface, etc, etc. There may be a thousand or more good reasons to move away from fossil fuels; the “fact” that we are in eminent danger of entirely depleting them just doesn’t happen to be one of them.

[firebrick43]

BachelorFarmer, The main point that I am trying to communicate is that sustainability of any thing, whether it be farming, energy consumption /usage, natural resource usage is that it needs to be achievable in a realistic manner over a large percentage of the population. Technology in many ways makes that possible in time. Someday maybe solar cells will come down in price enough do to technological advances that drastically reduce the manufacture cost (energy cost) or raise the efficiency notably of each cell.

But in the here and now, we can’t focus on technical solutions that don’t realistically work when low tech ones do.

It has been said the many times that “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”

We can not delude ourselves that something that uses smaller amounts of energy or produces its own energy at the source, is better when the reality is that the manufacture of those products makes the “lifetime” energy and pollution output greater.

In reply to your previous quote of “My theory is that if we all stop burning oil we bankrupt the NWO oil barons and they have to get a real job….
“

This forum is for sustainable energy, if you are just interested in fighting the machine, then I suggest you post somewhere else. The way you are going about it you will not win as there are 6 billion others on this earth that will compete for their share of oil. The 330 million in the US are a pittance compared to the burgeoning population in Indian and China that are know just able to afford private automobiles and appliances in their home. It’s a pretty self-centered view to believe that if even a sizable population of this country would have an impact in the price of oil. There is much proof as well that the recent manipulation of oil prices was do to the speculation of worker owned mutual funds, not big petroleum companies.

Do to my religion, I don’t feel that we should practice euthanasia on 5.5 billion people on earth like the Georgia Guidestone suggest. I am more about saving money, which means I don’t have to earn as much, and therefore saving resources comes as a result, and educating people to see things in a wholistic view about energy usage instead of a “blinders on” view that politicians and some business that sell products of this type would like you to have.

As to your firewood cutting.

The buzz saw is not a bad idea to cut firewood, if you had a tractor with a pto/flat belt, it allows quick processing of small wood (under 8 inch) My father uses one to zip through slab wood waste from a saw mill.

The issues with a horse powered buzz saw is that circular saw blades take high rpms. For a gas/diesel engine that operates at a high rpm there is not much power lost, some tractors such as the old 2 cylinder john deeres had the belt pulley directly on the crankshaft so there was no loss of efficiency what so ever through changing the ratio.

With horses pulling a sweep, you have to have maybe a 250 to 1 speed increase to get the proper rpms for a buzz saw. That much gearing will loose more than likely over half of your horses output before it ever reaches the saw blade. While horses will make more than 1hp for short burst, they need a consistent load at low rates and a buzz saw is the opposite, high loads for quick burst.

You are trying to make a technological solution for a simple engineering problem and I think using the KISS principal and thinking about it in a different light will save you money in the long term without a large increase in manual labor.

First is always reduce.
Why are you using 8 to 10 cords of wood a year? Wood heat is a good renewable and sustainable resource if maintained properly, and using that much for just one house is not sustainable. Here in northern Indiana, on the plains that wind blows 20 to 30 mph all winter, I burn 2-2.5 cords. How do I do that? 1 is a high efficiency epa stove. The newer epa stoves can get nearly 70 percent efficiency out of them. The new EPA stoves don’t smoke if they have a chimney installed correctly and are run correctly. Old stoves get less than 40% and forced air wood furnaces and wood boilers get very dismal efficiency around the 20s and when they choke off the air smoke very badly, causing the risk of a chimney fire and causing politicians to pass laws banning wood burning in some areas of the country. Second, keep the heat in. That means fix drafts and insulate the hell out of it. Even if you have an old farm house, storm windows installed out side the window and plastic shrink wrap inside is a good investment, even better is double pane or triple pane windows. You don’t have to do all at once, buy one or two at a time and install yourself.

The other big saving improvement is insulation. This is your best bang for the buck. If you have under R60 in the ceiling, you need more, and cellulous which is recycled newspaper is better at blocking drafts and convection heat loss compared to the more expensive fiberglass. My mother has a newer house of 1300sqft with R28 in the ceiling and heats with Natural Gas. She resisted for years to me adding extra insulation because her builder told her that was good enough and she would not see any gains. It took 4 hours for me and my wife to blow in 600 dollars of cellulous insulation and it cut her gas bill in half usage wise and about a 1/3 monetary wise because of the high price of fuel the last two years. Much more pleasant house to be in as well, warmer in the bathroom and a corner bedroom. In 1 winter she saved paid for the insulation in energy cost.

Second
While I feel for you about being over 6’ tall, as I am 6’2”, and have bad knees from being in the Marine Corps, this problem is the easiest to fix. Hand bucking wood was rarely done on the ground. It was almost always raised onto saw bucks. Chainsawing could be done on the same. If you use a buzz saw you will have to raise the wood to the saw anyway so why do it on ground.

There is also a neat tool that I use called a timber Jack. It is a Cant with a 6 to 10 inch square steel bar welded on 90 degrees to the head. Hook the log with the cant hook and rotate 90 degrees and it lifts the log up 6 to 10 inches. Then if you have a 20 or 24 inch bar on your chainsaw you don’t have to bend over. This is my method

Third,

if you still want to use a horse sweep to power a saw, use a drag saw or sometimes called a power buck saw. A large pitman wheel made lightly out of steel or wood pulls a pitman stick attached to a large bow saw. These saws are suitable to horse power as they operate at 20 to 30 rpm instead of 500 to 600 rpm so you won’t loose half your power in gearing. They can also handle larger wood if supplied with a larger bow/buck saw and you can make it so the wood has to be lifted onto a platform just a few inches high instead of 20 to 30 inches necessary with a buzz saw(buzz saws are normally only able to handle wood smaller than 8 inches) Also the drag saw because of low rpm and the cutting teeth are pointing down instead of radially are much more safe to operate. Hitting a nail or other piece of iron unseen and imbedded in a tree will not have the catastrophic results that a buzz saw blade exploding would have, I have seen a few fellows maimed by buzz saws as a result of striking something and have heard many oldtimers talk of the one that died as a result.

[Carl Russell]

near horse;9328 wrote:

Carl, you left out the first part of this saying …. “Eat it up, wear it out, make it do or do without”.

Yeah that part is such second nature that I always forget it.

As far as sustainability, I don’t think it wrong to see sustainabilty only in terms of earth-based energy transfer processes. That way we can be honest to ourselves about the limitations of our choices. Compromising so that a large number of people can absorb the change is not “sustainable” it is just workable. I am a victim of these days and times, as all of us are, and although I strive toward sustainabilty, I am still a long way off, but I do put a lot of thought into which systems have the greatest long-term practicality on this farm, and finding areas to isolate our unsustainable needs to ways that can be dropped IF/WHEN they need to be.

The biggest problem with petroleum is the dependence on it as a power source to fuel the expansion of a culture. When I say “oil is over”, I don’t mean there isn’t a drop left, I mean that from now on, all that is left is enough to keep running the machine that is already in place, and there is not enough, or at least enough that is cheap enough, to fuel the development of another world order. For future economic and social vitality we will have to seriously consider, and adopt, sources of energy that are easily available to the common person, both in terms of cost, and in terms of physical accessibility, and by definition, those will be more sustainable ONLY IF we learn to use them sustainably.

Carl

[near horse]

Regardless of how many neat low E, low input gizmos we can fabricate – the bottom line is that there are too many humans on the planet and they all need resources – even if it’s only food and water – so until we can make food and water out of nothing, we’re not sustainable unless we’re talking very short term. BTW – I think of something being called sustainable as being able to be continued indefinitely.

It might be another 100 to 500 years but eventually we’ll hit the bottom of the slide. It is really ironic (maybe not the right word but…) that we can see what overstocking a pasture does to the environment but don’t recognize that the earth is our big pasture and we don’t do anything to reduce or limit the “stocking rate” – instead we spend massive amounts of money to “unnaturally” increase life spans and reproduction/fertility rates with rampant disregard for the longterm consequences.

Sorry firebrick but it doesn’t matter which god, if any, you believe in – people ARE the problem – because of our stupid brain. We have figured out how to tweak the laws of nature so as to allow us to occupy all sorts of places and ecosystems that we shouldn’t be able to inhabit AND wreck the place for other life on the planet as well as for ourselves. We sure are smart ain’t we?

Compromising so that a large number of people can absorb the change is not “sustainable” it is just workable. I am a victim of these days and times, as all of us are, and although I strive toward sustainabilty, I am still a long way off, but I do put a lot of thought into which systems have the greatest long-term practicality on this farm, and finding areas to isolate our unsustainable needs to ways that can be dropped IF/WHEN they need to be.

Carl – You may have it “righter” than you think. We are dropped into this world at a certain place and time and must work within those limits – like it or not. I’d love to never buy petroleum fuel again but I was born here and now in the society that developed here over the last 200+ yrs with no input from me. So the best I can do is compromise, trying to limit my usage of petroleum as well as my longterm impact on the planet.

[firebrick43]

Sorry firebrick but it doesn’t matter which god, if any, you believe in – people ARE the problem – because of our stupid brain.

Geoff, My religion doesn’t allow me to slaughter people just to reduce the population to 500 million like the Georgia guidestone suggest. I am confused, you seemed to be upset in previous threads when individuals were killing and composting unwanted bull dairy calfs? Do you think we should kill the “unwanted” population of humans?

We have figured out how to tweak the laws of nature so as to allow us to occupy all sorts of places and ecosystems that we shouldn’t be able to inhabit AND wreck the place for other life on the planet as well as for ourselves. We sure are smart ain’t we?

Don’t disagree with you there. Its evident in Africa more than anywhere. Do to drives to end hunger American and Europeans have been sending food for decades, causing a population explosion on the African continent. Now Malaria, AIDs, and many other diseases are epidemic and many are trying to send drugs find cures for these problems. I personally believe that its Gods way of dealing with either overpopulation or sinful lifestyles. I could also see someone that wasn’t religious viewing it as “nature” keeping the balance.

In this country look at New Orleans. It has always be a place of vice and death. Until DDT and building of levies/draining swamps disease was rampant with extremely high death rates. After all man did to tame “nature” then the hurricanes come along and wipe it out, and we still try to rebuild there, were we should have never in the first place.

But in any case whether the two listed above, or many other of hundreds more, my personal religion would not allow me to kill them or send/support someone else doing it on my or “natures” behalf, no matter the benefit that it may provide.

[near horse]

Look – I don’t want to get into religion bashing but the idea that god is punishing a city, continent or people for their sinful ways is ludicrous and arcane.

Christians have slaughtered plenty of people throughout history and I hope that your religion isn’t the only thing that keeps you from slaughtering millions or billions of folks already living here. My point was/is – stop over populating the planet because once we have people, feet on the ground, we’re stuck with or responsible for with taking care of them (like bull calves).

Anyway, I have digressed from sustainable energy. There is a point to be made though, we are part of a system with finite resources – some renewable and some not. When we deplete the non-renewable ones we better have a plan for utilizing renewables to take their place or we’re in serious trouble. Hence, using nonrenewable resources can not be sustainable by definition. But how do we address the use of renewables that we can use faster than they can be replenished? A good example would be trees – we can grow ’em and harvest ’em but we can harvest ’em way faster than they can regrow if we choose to (if the market says to). I know Jason is working on educating folks on sustainable timber management but when the dollar signs show up you’d be surprised how fast many will sell out to clearcutting.

[Carl Russell]

I know that these beliefs about living sustainably require substantial effort, because on the face of it, one little home is such a small drop in a huge ocean, and it is very easy to see that the “real” problem is that there are all these other people who are making “bad” choices, or at the very least the same old choices.

However, first of all, I think our future sustainability really depends on individual energy independence, and we have been living for centuries in a global human environmental occupation, whereby through social networks we have propped up so many lifestyles that have become habitual that as a whole we have created a juggernaut, and the solution will have to be a reversing of the mass consciousness through billions of alternative examples.

Second it does nothing, in my experience, to blame the shortsighted decisions of others, or to target overpopulation, these people are all part of our human experience, here and now, and although we can definitely learn from what see around us, and around the world, sustainability has a huge amount to do with personal responsibility.

As a community member, and a parent, the choices I make about lifestyle have their roots in how I interpret my responsibility, to set an example, and to pull together, skills, resources and infrastructure, to go beyond my own personal feel good solutions, but to help the people who come along after me by breaking some of the cultural conventions that have landed us as a group where we are.

I don’t care how long oil/petroleum can last, 80-150 years is peanuts, and if anyone disputes the environmental destruction they should lay down behind a car and breath the exhaust for a while, but I can see the ill-effects of the choices we have made with oil in mind, and as a parent I cannot, with good conscience, lead my children head long into that future.

One of the points we should acknowledge is that natural organisms are all motivated by an innate drive to live, to succeed, and in that they can continue to develop even as the resources that the depend on dwindle around them. Watch a plant in a drought, it can’t tell that there is no water until it has begun to die from drought. Humans, on a basic level are very similar, but we do have a little bit better cognitive skills, so those of us who can see the impending drought can be the mutation that allows the organism to develop drought resistance, one little gene at a time.

Carl

[Fermentation]

So happy to see so many thoughtful responses. Even happier to see Peak oil discussed. you guys are ahead of 99.9 of the western population. I personally think the West has it worst off. We have further to fall, as we’re more dependent on oil and fossil fuels. A great, great irony. i’ve seen it from Africa to pakistan. For example, in Ivory Coast, i lived in a small village no running water, or electricity, no indoor plumbing. Everyone made their own homes from local mud bricks, which they made onsite in the village. They also made the rooves out of thatch straw, from the village. A four man team could do it in a day or less. If you had a toilet, you dug it yourself. Water was provided via deep wells, operated by foot pumping action, not mechanized via oil in anyway. Everyday, women would collect fire wood, men would go and plant cassava, women would pound it with BIG mortars, almost no meat consumption, if you did it was locally dried fish, yard chicken, or big occasions goats, lambs or a cow, for ten of more families to share. I had no tv, there was one in the whole village, black and white, operated off a car A CAR BATTERY. Everyone was happy, until they saw a copy of Vogue/Cosmopolitan. Community was rich, and contrary to what many say, I didn’t see any sick folk, almost without exception everyone was very health six packs and all. In honesty, i was probably the most overweigh when I arrived from the US in the whole damn village, After two years, i was trim.

In Afghanistan, the local people rode donkeys, farmed with scythes, and had mud houses.

My point is that they are living in harmony with their environment. Not because they shun Western lifestyles, far from it,many really want it. However due to conquest and Via history, colonialization, globalism and corrupt leadership, they have had their natural resources diverted to the west. The irony is that they haven’t lost many of their survival skills, in fact they use them everyday. how many Westerners can do all the things i laid out above? This brings me great sadness in my heart. I’m certain that if Peak oil is true and there isn’t zero point or some other fantasy technology,we’re in big trouble. personally i don’t know what to do. i want these skills, and have sent out many emails, resumes and etc. but I can’t get an opportunity. Why? because there are so few opportunities and so few people doing what you guys are doing. i salute you. I want to come back home to the US, to teach and learn, but i fear i may have to stay here to learn these valuable skills from third world countries, and then come home in God knows when. maybe the meek will inherit the earth and maybe people will reap what they sow literally. the whole thing brings me great pain. Keep farming with Draft guys, keep teaching, and by all means don’t give up, you may just be our saviors. Be well.

[Carl Russell]

This type of comparison is exactly what I have found to be a waste of time and intellect. The point is that the lifestyle options available to our children are shortsighted and destructive, and the only solution is not to point my fingers at others, but to point them at the earth in front of me, and put them to use building the most sensible possibilities that I can come up with.

Carl

[near horse]

Carl – in your last post you identify one of the key problems – options.

the lifestyle options available to our children are shortsighted and destructive

I believe that many more people would “choose different options” if those options were 1) readily available and 2) could smoothly transition into their lives. That is also where some of the hope lies – that all the “small sensible possibilities” that individuals employ become inspirations for others, increasing overall awareness. Once in a while, some one might expand on a process or idea to make it more available to the masses.

Everyone was happy, until they saw a copy of Vogue/Cosmopolitan.

or are even exposed to some method or technology that initially seems to help but alters the balance of their community forever. It is a dilemma – make life easier but alter the community’s balance with its environment.

Second it does nothing, in my experience, to blame the shortsighted decisions of others, or to target overpopulation, these people are all part of our human experience, here and now, and although we can definitely learn from what see around us, and around the world, sustainability has a huge amount to do with personal responsibility.

I think that you and others may have misinterpreted my comments about overpopulation – the control of overpopulation does have to do with personal responsibility and it starts with not having tons of kids – a shortsighted decision of others that does affect us all. Whether we as individuals can do anything about it is the problem.

One of the points we should acknowledge is that natural organisms are all motivated by an innate drive to live, to succeed, and in that they can continue to develop even as the resources that the depend on dwindle around them.

That is competition. There aren’t too many options – compete for the limited resources or perish.

Watch a plant in a drought, it can’t tell that there is no water until it has begun to die from drought.

Actually, what we see as beginning to die is the plant’s response to reduced water availabilty. When corn leaves roll up or curl in response to reduced water, that is reducing the surface area of the leaf exposed to the air and thus limiting water loss. Also, as plants grow, upper leaves shade out the lower ones and the plant will begin to shunt the nutrients away from those lower leaves and let them perish – kind of competition on the plant.

[Rod]

Hmmm, intersting points worth thinking about. Likely not completely accurate but certainly contains some elements of truth.

[Carl Russell]

I just don’t see population as an issue that plays into my decisions about off-grid living and sustainability. First of all high populations by themselves are not the problem, but how the community uses whatever resources are available, (ie. US uses 35 X resources per capita than people in countries like India). Secondly, I cannot affect population by myself, unless I opt out, which kind of defeats the purpose. And thirdly I have more positive affect on population by trying to set an example of how a family can use their resources and skills in a sustainable manner to the benefit of not just themselves, but also a neighborhood and surrounding community.

The fact that organisms have responses to reduced resources does not mean that they can pre-determine the need to enact those responses. The shutting down of those portions that require the greatest expense of energy are reflexive, and often lead to necrosis, and/or sluffing off. It will be no different for humans, or the human community as an organism. We can intellectualize the human experience all we want but we cannot avoid the realities of the Earth.

BF points out what I consider the biggest part of sustainability, personal sovereignty. There are, as I pointed out in other posts, many artificial power structures that strive to control our individual and shared lives. Although I find it somewhat entertaining to explore how and where they exist, I do not think it is reasonable to try to use those arguments to support a personal lifestyle change. First of all the evidence changes based on perspective, and those types of arguments are often used to try to convince other people that they should, or need to, make the same choices that you are for the same reason, which limits success based on how many others you can get to share your experience. Second as soon as your conspiracy theory is undermined, or loses luster compared to the difficulty of breaking the trend around you, then sustainability goes out the window like a bad habit.

When you learn to see yourself as a sovereign individual, with unalienable rights, and personal responsibility and capability to provide for yourself, at the same time participating fully in your community without having to swallow all the pre-constructed opportunities then you are on the road to sustainable living,…..in my mind.

My decisions are based on things like what can I put together right here, from what I have right here, in such a way that my kids,or others, can easily and successfully continue, and improve upon, and what things are doomed to drag me down, or will limit future commitments and opportunities. Global populations, economies, religions, environmental degradation, and injustice, all are intellectually compelling issues, but they are not contingencies in the sustainability of my day to day life.

Carl

[near horse]

First of all high populations by themselves are not the problem, but how the community uses whatever resources are available, (ie. US uses 35 X resources per capita than people in countries like India).

I beg to differ on this account. High populations, let’s say 20 billion people, all using resources as conservatively as possible still can’t work – it’s just mathmatically impossible. On a different note – many of the billion or so folks in India would be willing and happy to take on a US lifestyle using 35x resources while most Americans wouldn’t think of living like most Indians. So we end up with increasing numbers of people trying to “make a better life” for themselves which requires higher resource use – can’t work.

I consider the biggest part of sustainability, personal sovereignty.

I don’t see the connection here at all. Historically, human communities have lived “sustainably” for centuries or more without each individual having personal sovereignty.

When you learn to see yourself as a sovereign individual, with unalienable rights, and personal responsibility and capability to provide for yourself, at the same time participating fully in your community without having to swallow all the pre-constructed opportunities then you are on the road to sustainable living

Are we saying sustainability = us living how we want for as long as we want to (not immortality but as long as we want to live that way) OR is it a concept that provides a place for future humans to continue living?

This seems to point towards the latter perspective.

that my kids,or others, can easily and successfully continue, and improve upon

BF –
As politely as I can put it, I agree that there are people/groups of people etc that are trying to manipulate public opinion for money and power BUT I don’t see any evidence that any group is smart or sophisticated enough to pull off the conspiracies that you cite from infowars. So that just puts infowars in the same group as those it claims to be fighting against. I guess that’s exercising my personal sovereignty.

[Author]

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