Going Off Grid: Part 1, Heating our City Home

some of yesterday's results

There is a serious cost to energy production, always a mix of environmental costs, financial costs and labor costs. I spent the day yesterday splitting wood with a rented log splitter in our alleyway. I guess I mixed all three of those costs because I didn't split by hand this time. I was joking with my friend Chris that "there's nothing like city living" as we loaded a few thousand pounds of firewood onto the pneumatic log splitter. It was 2009 when we decided to forgo having a furnace as a big first step in going off the fossil fuel grid. We moved into a house with electric baseboard heat, basically space heaters, in every room. They are inefficient, expensive to use, and dangerous. We've had several of the kids toys nearly burn or melt when someone accidentally turned on the heat in their rooms. And so, we don't use them. When we found this house, without a gas powered furnace, it seemed perfect for us to try heating with wood, something I was interested in. I can't imagine how much energy is used to heat the buildings and houses in the world, most of it is fossil fuel generated heat that was buried in the ground for the past 300 million years or so. The problem with fossil fuels? Buried carbon is released into an atmosphere it hasn't been in for millions of years.  Burning wood that is aged and dried in a high efficiency wood stove is a great way to get away from burning natural gas or fuel oil for your heat, and it's quite clean too. Both heating methods release carbon into the atmosphere, but burning firewood releases biogenic carbon that has been captured from the atmosphere for only the age of the tree. (Note: most of the wood we burn is either repurposed scraps from a lumber mill or invasive tree species that I replace with natives or fruit trees, these threes are only about 15 years old) Biogenic carbon is captured carbon from a biological system, a living system based on decades of carbon capture. Burning fossil fuels is based on geological time, not biological, making it disastrous for all biological systems on earth. Energy from biogenic systems is a sustainable source if we are planting new trees and harvesting from well managed sites.

Using a log splitter yesterday was a first. Usually I split by hand or I buy the scrap wood from a friend who runs a lumber mill an hour away. Over the past two years I had accumulated large rounds of oak, maple and the highly invasive Siberian Elm that were all knotted and mostly too hard to split by hand. Last spring I hurt my shoulder at the gym (i.e. backyard where I split the wood) and so learned that I shouldn't try it again this year. So... gas powered log splitter on a four hour rental sounded great.

Outside the Garfield Farm bioshelter at night

Wood heat is not the best way to heat a home but it's a step in the right direction. The best heat source is probably through passive solar design, once the design is implemented in the construction there's no cost or fuel besides the sun, not even solar panels are needed. At Garfield Community Farm we built a passive solar greenhouse that never goes below 32 degrees. Most greenhouses heat up quite efficiently when the sun is out, but quickly cool down at night. Our plastic tunnel greenhouse heats up nicely, but cools very quickly at night to nearly the same temperature as the outside air. Our bioshelter greenhouse captures that heat energy of the day and stores in a variety of ways that keep the building warm all night. The north side of the building is built into a hillside, where the ground insulates and transfer warmth from the outside soil. The north side is also not clear, it's insulated with spray foam insulation. The south side is double paned polycarbonate, a better insulator than single paned glass or plastic. Inside we have barrels of water, they warm up in the hot sun and then release the heat stored in the water as the temperature drops. Inside the building the thousands of pounds of raised bed soil also absorb heat from the sun and release it into the air of the building during the cold winter nights. Maybe my favorite aspect of the boishelter's heat system are the eleven chickens that, according to Bill Mollison, are each the equivalent of a ten watt space heater. By the way, the chickens in the bioshelter also release CO2 into the building through their breathing and help the plants grow, a common problem in winter greenhouses is actually a lack of CO2 as the plants absorb it all and release oxygen. Finally, to buffer the cold nights in cloudy old Pittsburgh, we installed a pellet stove to stabilize temperatures during the dead of winter when the sun rarey comes out. These pellets are compacted saw dust from the lumber industry, a waste material that when burned is a very clean biogenic form of energy. Pellet fuel costs more than free firewood, but burns more efficiently and is much less labor intensive.

The tropics in 800 square feet in our bioshelter

If we had a newer home with good insulation and tight windows and doors our wood stove would probably heat the home with much less fuel. We use about four to six cords of wood every year to heat our 1600 square foot 90 year old city house. The best part of our house is that most of the windows face south and we have no neighbors on the south. We are flooded with sunlight on sunny days, helping warm the house with passive solar heat. New homes could be heated almost exclusively with passive solar heat if we designed them with zero fossil ethics in mind. The technology is simple, basic design for heating from the sun using clear south sides of buildings. All new construction should take passive solar heating into consideration, it could account for anything from a 10% reduction of heating to 100%.

I can't believe it's been eight years of living without electric or natural gas heating. It is definitely a way of life starting with firewood acquisition twelve months ahead of burning the wood. It's usually February that I start searching for firewood for the next year. It really makes you realize how much energy is used to heat a home when you have to carry a few hundred pounds into your house every day and control it's combustion. It's not for everyone. I'd be great if we had double the number of solar panels so we could use the electric heat in the house to stabilize and supplement the wood stove, but we don't, and so wood it is, a biogenic and sustainable source of cozy heat.

There are many other ways to heat buildings sustainably, but all of them require a redesign of our lifestyle and/or a redesigning of our buildings. That's what gets permaculturists excited. In order to transition to a carbon neutral society we have to redesign civilization, and permaculture has all the design principles needed to embark on this massive endeavor. The question is, does our society have the fortitude to embark on this journey of imaginative redesign? At this point the answer is in question here in the United States, and yet, world wide we are moving in the right direction.

And so, our family, hauls wood into the house multiple times a day reminding us that heating our homes comes at a great cost. It comes with a cost to the environment, a cost to our pocketbooks, and a cost in terms of time and work. We choose to put more on the time and work side believing that's the right thing to do. And, we get a really cozy living room that's almost always warm and beautiful.