Nick Perla photo courtesy Flickr Attention is in shorter supply than time or money, and it is a matter of habit to use automated systems, like a washing machine or thermostat, to handle routine domestic chores. Furnaces and appliances evolved from the twentieth century’s mass analysis of mass problems.
Today, communications and design let one sidestep the one-size-fits-all approach of conventional solutions to life support. A few second’s attention to thoughtful, hands-on ways of washing, heating, or cooking can yield meaningful savings that lighten the menace of global warming.
Depending less on utilities and more on muscle-power yields more than an easier conscience: small changes foster better health and more disposable income. A series of minor, elegant changes can make stress a memory, at least familiar stress. There’s always room for new, improved stress.
One simple example: coffee. Ready-ground beans and an automatic drip coffee maker keep brew running like tap water, good neither for nerves nor bones. Shifting to whole beans and a hand-grinder, kinder to the ears than an electric one, reduces coffee-making to a low-tech process more like the Japanese tea ceremony than fast-food.
A heating system responds to minor, hands-on changes in control that revise the whole process of staying comfortable. The base line for heating is to have no heat at all. Staying warm used to mean gathering, storing, and stoking solid fuel in a fire pit or chimneyed hearth. Turning the furnace on and off by hand or plugging in a heater is trivial work compared to lugging and tending a scuttle of coal. Every domicile is a unique situation, and personal attention to heat brings all one’s perception and intelligence to the process of staying warm. Since most existing houses have automated systems built in, one can shift back and forth from driving a stick, so to speak, to driving the automatic depending on circumstances.
Turning the furnace off altogether makes it easy to perceive subtle advantages of warmth. If left on, the ceiling lights in my kitchen warm the floor of the bathroom overhead. The bathroom light warms the ceiling enough to keep steam from condensing and lingering in the room. A free standing heated towel rack keeps linens fresh and will pay for itself in a month.
Good lighting and clean windows are vital to living well without central heat. Artificial and natural light keep air circulating in an unheated room. So far this winter, I find that a UL listed electric floor-heating mat stowed under a thin, wool rug keeps our little sitting room comfortable, usable, and far less parched than the portable oil-filled radiator I used last year. Heating from the floor up is far more rational than heating from the ceiling down.
The floor mat draws around 1350 watts, and I anticipate a higher electricity bill. On the other hand, though, the greenhouse max/min thermometer says the refrigerator has little to do in the kitchen, since the room is usually close to forty-five degrees. The featherweight portable twin-tub washing machine UPS delivered last year halved the electricity bill, since I can use rinse water to wash the next load. The machine has a centrifuge that spins clothes dry enough to wear, in a pinch, so even line drying in an unheated space is efficient, especially if I keep one small incandescent bulb lit or use a 6w muffin fan to circulate the air. Line-dried clothing lasts around five times as long as that tumbled in a machine.
All these little refinements support daily life. As an assistant traffic engineer in 1966, I learned to design for the ordinary daily load, not for the worst-case scenario. When visitors arrive or work brings a crunch, I revert to the stupid, expensive robots that were running the house to begin with.
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More after the jump.
