We all use energy but we need to use it wisely and not be spendthrifts with it. I spoke with a woman touting her fabulous decrease in garbage by recycling and had only 1 small bag of garbage for the week. She later spoke about how she was using her neighbors plastic recycling, folded her boxes and brought them to the dump and that left her with only 1 small container. Still the same amount of garbage but it wasn’t in front of her house!

We have the desire to move further out but we plan on a generator, WI-FI and indoor plumbing. With today’s technology, you can do it. No one is planning on living on root berries in sack cloth but you can cut down on things or make choices that have a positive impact. That is what being a good steward is all about, use what you have wisely, don’t waste and offer positive solutions that are affordable and feasible.

Thank you for such a wonderful post. Have you considered using that wood to make charcoal? A by-product of the charcoal-making process is biofuel, which is something I thought you would be discussing in your article. In addition to the charcoal (the larger pieces capable of being burned separately) created by pyrolisis is biochar (the smaller pieces), which can be crushed and used in gardens and spread around trees and bushes to enhance the soil.

My husband and I look forward to retirement and leaving the city for the quiet country life. Unfortunately, he’s the one who is adamant about his creature comforts; fortunately, he’s very supportive of my desire for minimal grid needs — ie, solar power and solar hot water heating as well as rainwater cachment and greywater recycling. I also hope to set up a garden and greenhouse, and one of the things I plan to get is a home-size pyrolosis setup to make biochar to not only use in the garden but to cut down on the amount of unrecyclable household and yard waste that would otherwise end up in the local landfill.

By the way, I caught the “biochar bug” after reading a piece on terra pretta here at Off-Grid.net and have spent much time reading about and researching biochar ever since.

I have heated my homes with wood since 1979. Cut it all with a crosscut and carried it on my back until about four years ago. Could no longer afford the time..but I truly miss the exercise and silence.

Now I cut my firewood with a gas-powered chainsaw and haul it with 79-year-old gasoline (originally kerosene) powered tractor.

Went off the elec grid in 1989..but paraffin candles and later kerosene lamps still of course amounted to sucking from the Great Petroleum Tit.

Independence of course is always relative, and in the strictest sense an illusion. We all depend on the ecosphere….and on our not-always -conscious-or-voluntary choice of human constructs

The most important thing, IMHO, is for those choices to be conscious.

I am an engineer by profession when not fully occupied with subsistence chores, and have had a business for many years building and repairing machinery. In my shop, given energy (currently use combination of PV and gasoline generator), scrap metal, and man-hours I could theoretically maintain roughly a 1920 technological level without ever having to buy parts. But I would still be dependent on scrap, which derives from a vast infrastructure.

I had a good friend who was working on a road-worthy wood burning steam engined truck when he died. I imagine burning home-squeezed sunflower seed oil in a Diesel tractor, or building and running a steam tractor, and running a hydraulic chainsaw such as the utility companies use from the tractor hydraulic system…

But to live in a style anything beyond that of the pre-European- contact Amerindians requires inevitably a large economic and technological network. Even the Indians traded over long distances for desirable flint and other stones for toolmaking and ornaments.

Year and a half ago finished building solar power system, providing electricity for lights, computer, refrigerator

We are harvesting wood (and manufacturing toxic materials) to build ‘traditional’ type homes that have relatively low thermal mass/insulative qualities…so *of course* they require quite a lot of heating/cooling…which then leads to industrialized harvesting of the resources being used to heat & cool.

All of this sort of stuff is what led me to the Earthship concept years ago; imagine re-using waste products to build a self-sustaining home that (if designed and operated efficiently) could potentially use *no* external fuel for heating, potentially captures it’s own water, etc etc.

Great concept…unfortunately, the powers that be will do everything they can to outlaw these types of abodes…

Just food for thought.

Check out:

http://earthship.com/

Also, the movie: Garbage Warrior (documentary about Michael Reynolds, Earthship ‘inventor’)

Thanks and hope I haven’t offended anyone…

The concept was to use the surplus power from nuclear stations during slack periods of power demand to make hydrogen. This would keep the base load on a nuke very high on a constant basis. Hydrogen could then be stored and used as fuel. Ballard Power had done a field trial of public transit busses. These experimental hydrogen fuelled busses never became mainstream due to various maintenance and service issues. The transit company also tested methane as a fuel. Neither really got top marks as an alternative fuel. Back then we did not realize how severe hydrogen embrittlement was nor how damaging it would be for the piping used in nuclear stations. Replacement of embrittled piping has proven to be a major expense in maintaining nuclear reactors.
Because hydrogen molecules are so small they tend to insinuate themselves into and through the molecular structure of the metals used for piping inside the reactors. I worked for a company that built equipment for the nuclear fuelling machines and we had to pressure test the piping with helium because it was decided hydrogen was too dangerous to handle and helium was close enough in molecular size to be a close substitute for pressure testing. Therein lies the real problem with hydrogen. The molecules are so small they can leak through just about any kind of container. We do not have the technology to handle it the way we do propane or gasoline. Even Ballard has experienced their share of tank leaks. The trick is to formulate a coating with a molecular lattice so small a single hydrogen molecule cannot get through it. When we do, Canada will be in a position to produce major quantities of Hydrogen fuel. We already have huge hydro-electric generating capacity not to mention one of the largest private nuclear generating company in North America.
At present most of the commercial hydrogen fuel cells rely on petroleum feed stock to create the required hydrogen using a proton exchange membrane technology. Its going to be a while yet before it reaches economic viability.