This winter is supposed to be a cold one, and the recent blizzard in Buffalo has shown us how severe a little snow can be. Are you prepared?
trapped in a snow storm
Many things can trap you in your house for extended periods of time, and you need to be able to take care of yourself until things get straightened out. If you are fortunate enough to be simply trapped in your house but still have power, all you need to worry about is making sure you have something to keep morale up and a sufficient food supply to wait it out. Many people amazingly don’t even have three day’s worth of food; there were reports of good “upstanding citizens” dumpster diving only days after hurricane Sandy because they had run out of food. Remember you need to have three days of **non-perishable** food, your fully stocked fridge and freezer is no good after a day without power, unless you have a backup method of generating electricity like a battery backup, or a generator. Please keep in mind that while it’s tempting to go buy a generator to make you feel safe, it’s easier and cheaper to make sure you already have a reliable source of food. A generator is no good anyway if you don’t already have a stockpile of gas, which you wont be able to go get, just like you cant go get that food. Be sure to have plenty of long-term storable foods. The caveat is that they must be foods that you already eat; if you hate beans, but know they last a long time, you wont eat them and they will eventually go bad. You just threw away 20 dollars on rotten food.
a well stocked pantry is essential for independence
The simplest and cheapest way to build up a stockpile of food is called “copy canning”. Any time you go to the store to replace something you ate that came from a can, buy two instead of one. After you do this 6 times, you will have an extra 6 cans of chili or beans or spaghetti Os in reserve that you didn’t even feel in your wallet. Just make sure to rotate your food, and always use the oldest can first so nothing goes bad. Once you feel like you have 30 days worth of food in reserve, you can probably move onto another project towards self-sustainability, like 1 gallon of water per person per day minimum. If you lose power from a storm in the winter, it can become dangerous very fast, as it will be easy to catch pneumonia or die. If you have natural gas or propane hookups, they should still work, so cook away. This will give you fresh warm food, which is a good morale booster, as well as heat up your home. Wear lots of layers, wrap yourselves in plenty of blankets, and stay in and insulate one room of the house. One room takes less energy to heat than an entire house, and it may be possible to stay comfortable with just your own body heat and a few candles for light. If you care to make the investment, you can get a propane heater like this one which will run off your standard barbecue tank and is rated to be safe for use indoors even when the power goes out.
You can get stuck anywhere, will you be prepared?
As long as you have enough food and water to last without freezing, you should be OK for a few days until life can return to normal. If you want to be more than OK, you will need to implement more advanced procedures of course.
Winter is around the corner, and its time to prepare for the cold weather! There are lots of ways to stay warm and reduce your heating costs at the same time using several basic principles applied in ways that have been forgotten by most people. Before the age of modern technology and electricity, people had to stay warm for thousands of years, and they took advantage of the largest source of free power and energy in the universe, the Sun. Understanding basic principles of heat transfer (convection, radiation, and conduction) can help us to more efficiently stay warm and comfortable indoors while a blizzard is raging outside.
passive solar heating diagram
Utilizing the sun is one of the oldest, and more reliable methods of regulating temperature. If harnessed properly, it can both keep you warm in the winter and cool in the summer. There are different ways to take advantage of the sun, one of which would be passive solar heating/cooling. It is a design principle that keeps the house cool in the summer and hot in the winter based on the azimuth and altitude (position) of the sun throughout the year, and other design principles which you can learn about here if you wanted to get some more technical details. This is generally only applicable to people building a new house, or who have a large budget for a substantial remodel, as most modern houses are not designed or built with these concepts in mind. There are other easier and cheaper ways to get more immediate returns.
Super efficient hippy home, aka earthship
The first step is to SEAL THE CRACKS. You can heat your house all you want, but if your roof, walls and floors are like swiss cheese, the warm air will slip right out. You may as well pay to heat up your back yard. To find the cracks you should perform a home energy audit, or you can pay to have a professional do it for you. That link is the best one i have found so far, it covers how to find leaks and also how to fix them. The one thing I will say is they don’t seem to mention that you should also pull off the moulding to confirm that between the window/door and the frames are insulated. You should pack it with insulation (fiberglass or spray foam are most common). Even if there are no leaks, heat can radiate out through a gap in the wall much easier than a well insulated wall. Only after you check that all your windows and doors are properly insulated should you seal all the cracks so you don’t have to take it apart later to insulate these pockets in the wall.
Diagram of most common sources of heat loss from Airtight Energy Audits
After sealing the more obvious items like windows and doors, you need to get a little more creative. You can get insulating gaskets for wall outlets and vents that aren’t used, check up around recessed lights on your top floor for proper insulation, make sure you have thick, insulated attic doors without any air leaks(see above), try to get creative to think of all the little spaces. Go up into your attic and make sure every inch of your ceiling is covered with insulation, no gaps around ductwork, vents, chimneys, etc. A little work and some cheap insulation can make a big difference in your electric bill, both in the summer and the winter, for decades to come. The same goes for your basement/crawl space, insulate your floor between the floor joists very well and get some caulk to seal any cracks in the foundation or between the foundation and the floor.
It is worth mentioning that the more insulation you have, the better, so you can always add more even if your house is already properly sealed. Insulation is rated by an R value, the higher the number, the better it is insulated. Homes typically have R values between 19-30, but you should strive for 30-60. The higher numbers really require thicker walls though, so you may be limited by space in pre-existing walls.
After you get your house as tight as a drum, then you can go back to making the sun work for you. You can be as hippie green as you want to get with it. More modern, subtle improvements would be to get heavy, blackout curtains, or “energy efficient” curtains. They block out all light and keep in the heat at night when closed. You leave your curtains open during the day to gain as much natural light and heat from the sun, and close them at night after the sun goes down to keep the heat inside. You can further magnify the benefits of this by putting a clear plastic film over your windows (like this one), it will act as an extra barrier to letting heat out, and increasing radiation from the sun into your house. Put some rugs down if you don’t already have carpet, it will help your feet feel warmer and better insulate your floors. Winter is a good time to bake lots of cookies, the oven throws off a lot of heat, just sayin’.
Depending on how determined, or creative you are, you can also make solar heaters to put into windows, or angle reflective surfaces to bounce more sunlight into your house to gain more heat. A solar heater is something very simple to make and implement, if you live on the first floor, and don’t have a neighbor that will complain about how ugly it looks. With a little carpentry skills, for ~$100 or even less if you can recycle materials, you will have something that requires no electricity, no maintenance, has no moving parts, can’t break, and that can provide up to or in excess of 100F air flow as long as the sun is out. An even simpler solution is to just hang a black plastic bag, or a thick dark colored cloth a few inches away from the window inside, and it will absorb heat and radiate it into the room. There are plenty of other creative solutions if you care to look on google.
Just think of Pauly D’s face as your window.
Once you have maximized the efficiency of your house, and absorbed as much heat out of the sun as possible, now we look at heating efficiently. If you go back to heat transfer, there is convection, radiation, and conduction. Convection is where you heat the air and blow the air throughout the house(central heat). This is the least efficient, as you need to expend energy to heat the air in the furnace, then expend energy to blow the air through the house, losing heat as it moves, then blow across the room, and eventually blow onto you, where you don’t even absorb all of the heat. In addition to being one of the least efficient methods of heat transfer, you waste energy heating parts of the house that you aren’t even in. THE FIRST TIP to saving money is only heat the room you are in; heat the room that you will spend the most time in, probably the livingroom or bedroom. The next most efficient method is radiant heat, where heat radiates from the source to you. Think sitting next to a fire, or standing in a parking lot on a hot summer day; it’s so hot you can see the heat coming off the asphalt, that’s radiation. A wood stove in a house is a good source of radiant heat.
The MOST EFFICIENT method of heating is conduction, or heating by direct contact. This would be like sitting on a heating pad, holding a cup of coffee or hot cocoa in your hands, etc. The one I am most interested in are rocket mass heaters, which can be as hippie or as modern as you want. It can heat a house more efficiently than a standard fireplace, and more consistently than a wood stove with as little as 1/10 the wood because it burns so hot, but the heat is absorbed by the mass, and very little heat winds up leaving the house. Since there is a mass that absorbs and slowly releases the heat, it isn’t as hot as a wood stove, and it can be molded into a bench to sit on (conductive and radiant heat). Even though these are relatively cheap and easy to build, since they are so massive they really only apply to homeowners. For everyone else think hot water bottles, plenty of layers of clothes, and blanket heaters. If you use a traditional heater, keep it to the one room you spend your evenings in. When you go to bed, it would be most efficient for you to use a heat blanket with one or two quilts on top (to keep all the heat on you instead of in the room) instead of heating the entire room.
There you have it, with a little bit of work and not a lot of expense, you can save a lot of money this winter staying warm. Even if the power goes out, a little generator or battery bank can keep you more than comfortable since you have reduced the energy needs of your house.
Let me be honest up front when I say that I am an amateur home brewer. I consider myself strictly a home brewer, and not someone looking to open a business. I don’t really care about highly technical procedures, or using lots of chemicals, I care that it tastes good without spending a lot of money at the store. I should also clarify that I only brew wine (cider is my favorite), and not beer, because wines are so much easier than dealing with the wort and extra processing and stuff for beer. I don’t really like beer anyway, so that’s kinda convenient.
At the most basic level, making alcohol requires only sugar, yeast, and water. The yeast eats the sugar, giving off carbon dioxide and alcohol, you could say farting and peeing. This is fermentation. The fermentation continues until the yeast runs out of sugar (which would be a dry wine), or the yeast dies, which could either be done intentionally with chemicals, or the alcohol content is high enough to kill the yeast. Fruit juices are commonly used for flavor, but don’t contain enough sugar on their own to create any worth while amount of alcohol, so sugars are added to the mix.
This time I decided to make some cider, and wanted to do a little experiment to see the different results I would get between fermenting with white sugar, brown sugar, and honey.
Ingredients to make hard cider
It is important your cider/juice doesn’t have any preservatives like ascorbic acid(vitamin C – no orange wine), which will kill your yeast, or at the very least prevent it from growing. Always prefer fresh juice from orchards if you can, or at least check the ingredients if you get it from a store, Whole Foods has a good option.
sanitizing equipment
It is even more important to clean and sanitize everything you use when fermenting. You need to control the environment inside your fermenting container; you need to be certain your yeast is the only thing living inside, or you may likely wind up with VINEGAR instead of alcohol. I learned this one the hard way with some peach wine I had tried to make this summer. It can be hard to sanitize the inside of a large container, so I recommend a commercial cleaner like this one. You will also need vapor locks and rubber stoppers(depending on your bottle size) to keep bacteria and other contaminants from getting in, while letting the carbon dioxide out.
weighing my sugar to add to the cider
How I PERSONALLY brew (not the textbook preferred method), is to fill my container roughly half full with whatever base liquid I am working with, then add in your sugar and swirl/mix it around until it is mostly dissolved. This is a lot easier and simpler than heating your liquid and dissolving the sweetener into it, that takes a lot longer and requires more cleanup. For this round I am using 1.5 lbs of white sugar, 1.5 lbs of brown sugar, and 2 lbs of honey for each batch of cider. Honey has solids and minerals in it, so it does not have the same sugar content per weight than pure sugar. I came upon these numbers based on research I had performed online to try and get the same sugar content in each batch.
white sugar, brown sugar, honey
After the sugar was dissolved into each container, I had to add my yeast. Again, in an attempt to make sure everything was identical except for the type of sugar, I made my yeast starter as one batch and divided it equally amongst the three containers. Prepare your yeast starter based on the instructions for the starter you use. So far I prefer Lallemand Nottingham Ale yeast. Most instructions talk about measuring your yeast in grams, or otherwise typically a whole packet for a five gallon batch, which I have not done yet. Since my scale doesn’t weigh grams, I found this handy converter that allowed me to measure my yeast in tsp.
If you want to know what the alcohol content of your brew is after it is finished, you have one of two methods, either a refractometer, or a hydrometer. I use a hydrometer because it is much cheaper, but it’s a little less accurate, and if you don’t get specific gravity readings before AND after, it is nearly useless. That is exactly what happened this time, I forgot to measure the specific gravity before setting my containers to ferment, so I’ll never know the alcohol content besides relative strength by taste.
After you have your sugar and yeast in the container, top off the container with juice, making sure to leave some room for bubbles inside the container without mucking up your airlock. Then MAKE sure the lip of your container is clean, and attach your sanitized stopper and vapor lock, filling it with clean water to the fill level so pressurized carbon dioxide can get out, but nothing nasty can get in. Then you put it somewhere dark where you wont disturb it until the bubbles stop.
I’ll update with a review when it is ready to taste.
Comment if you have tried brewing before, let me know any of your successes or failures. Go get brewing!!
When I eventually own my own house, I want to develop and have a food forest, which is a type of low maintenance, self sustaining (little-no work) garden that produces hundreds of pounds of food in the first few years, and thousands of pounds of food year after year after the system matures. The primary principle of a food forest, is to find a way for every organism to serve at least one purpose, preferably two or three; it could be a food crop, or provide habitat for predators like birds(pesticides without chemicals that you don’t have to pay for), attract pollinators, etc. It has a high initial cost, since shrubs and trees typically cost more than little tomato and pepper plants, but after two to three years, they more than pay for themselves, and even become profitable! You could consider it an investment, both financially, and for your own independence/health. One to three years of hard work and investment can lead to 20-80+ years of food that you don’t have to pay for and is healthier than anything you could ever find in the grocery store.
Schematic of the layers of a food forest from Wikipedia
Since I live in an apartment, space is at a premium, and my plan was to get a head start, (since younger plants cost less than older plants) and start growing and propagating certain plants that grow easily from cuttings. Propagating from cuttings is basically when you cut off the green, new growth from a plant and stick it in the dirt, and it grows roots and becomes its own plant, without having to buy another one. What most people don’t realize when they start a food forest is that the shrubs and herbaceous plants wind up costing a lot more than the trees, since they are smaller and you need a lot more to fill in the same amount of area. So, in the spirit of getting started now and not making excuses for not having my own place yet, I went ahead and ordered some berry plants that i plan to propagate heavily this next year, and turn 8 fruit bearing plants into 20+ that i can plant when i have my own place that will provide more fruit than I could ever want. I got two blackberry, raspberry, and elderberry saplings , plus a goji berry and autumn olive. All of these are easy to reproduce from cuttings, which is a quick/easy way to turn one plant into many plants within a year.
So where I work, we typically get half a dozen pallets a week from shipments, which inevitably get thrown out. I decided this would be a good opportunity for me to try my hand at carpentry and reduce waste at the same time.
Since I live in an apartment, I am limited by space, so it had to be something relatively small. Since winter is around the corner, and I will need a place to protect my little plants as they grow into big and strong plants, i decided a few small tables for infront of the windows would be perfect.
I picked three nice pallets from work and cut two of them into thirds, so each shelf was a full pallet long, and three boards deep (roughly 12″). I then stripped down the third pallet for legs and braces. I took the outside two-thirds of each pallet so I would have a flat ‘front’, and drilled a board onto the front of each, which made it look a little nicer, and added more support to prevent the shelves from sagging.
Then I drilled two legs to one side of the ‘top’ shelf at 12″ apart (assembling the table on its side since it only had two legs at this point). I then attached the bottom shelf at an arbitrary 20″ beneath the top shelf, keeping the leg spacing at 12″ to help keep it square, thinking this would give enough space for a larger plant on the bottom but still keep it well off the ground. I then attached the third leg, and moved it onto a flat surface before attaching the fourth leg (I was working outside). My thought was, if I attached the fourth leg on a flat surface, I could make sure the table wouldn’t rock.
I was able to successfully make two tables with some scrap lumber, and I think it adds a nice rustic touch to the apartment . I’m thinking maybe to save it for a small stool on the balcony when I am working with my plants outside. One of the tables infront of the balcony door will work perfectly, but since the one in the den doesn’t allow any sunlight on the bottom shelf, I’ll probably just use that for storage.
Have you ever considered recycling pallets? They are basically free wood! What have you tried to make recycling pallets?
The Verdant Tinkerer 