This picture shows an improvement I made to our place last year. The shed was built out of entirely recycled building materials from a 100 year old demolished house, and I integrated a tankstand into the design. It’s made of new galvanised steel 100mm square posts which go through the steel roof on top of which is the platform the 2000L tank sits on (~550 galls).  Between the for posts I built a “strongroom” where I can lock up all my valuables, such as they are….

Water is collected in the 22,500L (6000 gallon) tank at L of the pic, and pumped up to the header tank with a barely visible demand pump I picked up new for $90! It’s tucked away out of the weather under the shed.

The water is exclusively used for the garden, and is another example of energy efficiency at work. The pump uses ~500W and only needs to run for 30 minutes to fill the tank (at a cost of 0.5 kWh). I can then water our 200m² garden for a week without using any power by gravity… Unless it’s very dry (and hot like now) in which case I might have to do this twice a week. The entire project cost me under $3000 including the brand new header tank.

Since we moved into this house, our consumption was consistently around the 4kWh/day mark.  In the Nov 2009 quarter, a noticeable increase to almost 5 kWh/day can be seen, and then another rise to maybe 5.5 is evident in the following quarter.  At that stage, I smelled a rat, and immediately tested our ageing fridge to discover it was basically stuffed, running for much longer than it used to.  I remember owning an even older fridge once that ran non stop, burning 2kWh/day all on its own!

So it was during the following quarter that we took the step of replacing it with our “cool idea”.  Because the bars in the chart cover a period of three months, there’s no knowing when the reduced consumption occured, but it’s very obvious.  Down to perhaps 3.5 kWh/day.  Then over the next period, we also got rid of the PC and the old TV, reducing those appliances’ consumption from ~280W to 70W, and this is where we lowered our daily useage to the 2kWh/day mark.

There’s a slight uptick in the Aug 2011 quarter, and that was caused by starting the second freezer after we killed our pigs.  The next downturn in the current “bill” can only be caused by the three LED lights in the kitchen….. which surprised me because I would not have thought the difference would have been that noticeable.   But then again, when you do the maths, 3 x 6W  (saving) x 6hrs = 108Wh/day, and that drop could well amount to 0.1kWh/day

The last bill came in at $642.98 in credit…… and I will add it to this post when I get around to scanning it.

The disappointing bit of news about all this energy stuff was that our Sunteams inverter died, again.  This is the third time in just over twelve months, but at least this time I only had to wait ten days for a replacement instead of the 6 weeks earlier.  I’m starting to wonder how many we will go through before the five year warranty runs out!

I recently bought one of these from Aldi (can’t recommend it enough) and I’ve just put our washing machine on it for the first time, and the most power it uses while spinning at full noise is 375W.  While washing, it only uses 100W.  Of course we only wash in cold water.

Enjoy…..

Bruce and his wife Erika plus three children live on six acres, high in the hinterland of Brisbane.  He planted a forest of sort on this land, just for energy need.  He is adamant that done properly, wood burning is efficient, and sustainable.  It is because of Bruce we have a combustion stove.

Wood burning has received a sometimes well earned bad reputation for pollution, not because of the practice, but due to the uncaring or perhaps ignorant attitude of many people who practice wood burning.  There is no doubt that poor combustion leads to high emissions of smoke and inappropriate firewood harvesting is contributing to ecological damage.

The combustion processes taking place when burning wood are quite different to other solid, liquid or gaseous fuels.  An external heat source is required to start the process of drying and thermal decomposition of wood.  If you attempt to burn green wood, most of the energy you seek from your heater will be wasted to just boil off any moisture in the wood.  The fire will be too cold, and it will smoke.  At temperatures above about 250°C, exothermic reactions (i.e. giving off heat) commence and the decomposition process can become  self-sustaining.  I have seen the top plate on our firebox glowing dull red, which, according to research I have done on cast iron, means this top plate had reached ~550°C, and obviously at such temperatures, complete combustion occurs. This is where the AGA’s insulated design really shines, keeping the heat inside the stove where it is needed.  It also means less firewood needs to be burned to achieve the desired result.

Burning unseasoned wood is a really wasteful thing to do.  You cannot reach the full potential of the device you’re burning it in, and it causes unnecessary pollution.  Patience is of the essence, because Bruce tells me it takes two years out of the weather for wood to dry sufficiently to become firewood.  When I first fired up the AGA, I was going to excitedly post a photo of the smoke coming out the flu (it does smoke for the first five minutes or so on firing up), but by the time I had found the camera and run outside to do so, the smoke had already disappeared.  There was no point even taking a photo, the smoke was almost invisible, and the flu looked like the stove was not even on!

The process of thermal decomposition causes chemical changes in the complex organic molecules that constitute lignin, cellulose and hemicellulose. Organic gases (a fuel in their own right at the right temperature) are released, leaving a carbon-rich solid residue. Under controlled conditions it is possible to produce a solid residue of relatively pure carbon. The carbon (charcoal) burns as a result of surface reactions (with little gas release) leaving a residue of ash. All this ash ends up on our food garden to enrich the soil.

The energy content of wood does not vary much from one species to another; hardwoods typically release 19 MJ/kg (oven dry wood basis) and softwoods 20 MJ/kg, provided combustion is complete.  Pine works just fine, but because it is far less dense than hardwood, you need to burn more of it, in volume at least.  When in continuous mode, the AGA burns 12 kg of wood a day, for an estimated 240MJ/day, or roughly 10MJ/hour or 2.8kW continuous power.  I can actually foresee that our stove could become a community energy source, with neighbours bringing food to cook as the firewood is shared out….

This energy heats our water, half the house, and accounts for all our cooking.  All on an armful of firewood.  The AGA is also unlikely to be used much in Summer, unless it rains for several days in a row.

The big difference between doing this with wood over fossil fuels is that you can grow wood, but you can’t grow fossil fuels, and furthermore, as you grow the wood, all the CO2 emitted is 100% absorbed by the new growth in the trees that will be future fuel.  This is the Carbon Cycle.  Wood is a truly renewable resource.

The biggest problem I see with a solution such as this, is that it is only achievable for a few people.  The Earth does not have the resources for everybody to start burning firewood, there are simply way too many people to accommodate now, we as a species are well and truly already in overshoot.  I’ve even been accused of being elitist for doing these things that only a few others will be able to duplicate.  I don’t know how to answer to this.  I think I’ve been lucky to have met Bruce who opened my mind to new and different ways of seeing things, I’ve been smart enough to work out the future wasn’t going to be as rosy as the media makes out, and I worked on a plan to survive the looming collapse.  This blog is here to assist people who think like Bruce and I do, and are prepared to take the plunge to change the way they live.

Take it or leave it…….

Every System Has a Driver

And it isn’t ideology.

The system in question is the global economic system that has been increasingly based on consumption of goods and services and a capitalistic method for aggregating investments. The former represents a shift from a societal sense of scarcity, husbanding resources, and thrift to one of abundance and growth. The latter started out as a means of funding the development of productive businesses that could sustain the prior societal understanding. Businesses that served the needs of building productive tools (like plows and harnesses) or serving productive needs (like horse shoeing) could only be started by aggregating enough capital (money) to purchase the necessary components and pay the workers. Borrowing from banks and selling stocks started out as ways to do this aggregation. Those who loaned the capital expected to earn some profit from their taking a risk and when the businesses did well enough investors/lenders did profit from the use of their capital. As long as everyone was satisfied with profit margins that could be applied to savings (and future investment) at a reasonable rate, this system worked very well. But, perhaps too well.

Somewhere around the end of WWII we started to see a shift in perceptions. We started to see the growth of a belief that capitalism was the engine that produced increasingly abundant wealth, especially niceties like fancier cars and bigger houses. For a while middle class workers were garnering wages that grew. Companies were making more profits and growing. And investors were making huge profits without doing much in the way of working. President John F. Kennedy famously said that “a rising tide lifts all boats.”, expressing the optimism that the American economic system was producing wealth for all. The sentiment became that as the wealthy investors got even wealthier that was good for everyone. A smaller slice of a growing pie is still more pie. Then came the high technology boom and the rise of the get-rich-quick entrepreneur. This was the changing American dream. It was no longer enough that every hardworking citizen would have a chance to establish a modest, but livable home and have a few simple appliances. People saw other people get more. And they wanted more for themselves. The economic system evolved such that we are no longer citizens, we are consumers. And that means of everything; food, stylish clothing and cars, bigger houses, even education and information (so-called, but what is sold on Fox News and most mainstream media can hardly be called information!). We are even consumers of political posturing.

The belief that capitalism and free markets was the driving force that led to the abundance of wealth is stuck in our collective consciousness. We’ve even sold this belief to essentially every other nation, regardless of their professed political system. Most people sincerely believe that capitalism is responsible for what we have. The reason, I think, is simple. Most people never take enough physics to grasp the relationship between energy and work. But the truth is that capitalism just happened to be at the right place at the right time. I won’t deny that it facilitated what came next. But it was not the driver, not the final cause, as it were. There is, rather, a more subtle driving force that would have produced essentially the same effects under any political system. And that is the simple fact that humans are biologically programmed to consume as much energy as they can get their hands on. Or, more appropriately, get control of. Humans have a unique ability to find ways to harness power for their own uses. All that is necessary is that there exists a concentration of power (energy) that can be discovered and we will find ways to exploit it. Nature abhors a steep gradient it seems (Second Law of Thermodynamics – the entropy version).

The growth of economic activity and wealth has always tracked right behind the discovery of new forms of energy at higher concentrations of power. Fossil fuels, and especially petroleum, was just the latest naturally occurring concentration of energy (fossil sunlight), and very high powered energy at that. And the oil-based economy started to take off during the later part of the 19 century. With the advent of diesel engines (for trains and ships) and powerful aircraft jet engines, the fossil fuel age came into full swing. Electricity produced from coal-powered turbine/generators rounded out the power portfolio that produced the potential for growth. By the middle of the 20^th century the economic engine fueled by fossil fuels was in high gear. Every nation that had access to abundant fossil fuels, regardless of their economic model, became richer. It is still a puzzle why this didn’t occur in the middle east but all of those nations seemed content to sell their oil to the western world and use the money to buy luxuries. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that the west, particularly the US had already been investing in oil refineries and had gone through the learning curve before oil was discovered in places like Saudi Arabia. Even the former USSR was on a track to producing more wealth from their oil reserves, until the economic/military race with the west forced them to dismantle what they had and break up into independent (supposedly) countries. Their oil business suffered from the dismantling, not so much from being communistic. It has since started to make a resurgence, but it may be that their reserves are not as great as needed to make a great comeback.

The fundamental economic driver is the combination of biological mandate to consume energy and the availability of said energy. It matters much less what kind of economic theory or model you adopt or believe you have (like us believing we have free markets!). All that matters is humans have access to energy sources and they will then figure out how to exploit that energy to exploit other natural resources. It has always been thus since the first hominids evolved.

All of the rest of the economic system, regardless of what you call it, is the emergence of organization from the flow of energy and the cleverness of humans to exploit that flow. Our current system has gotten so complex and abstract that it is nearly impossible for anyone to actually understand what is going on. But the clue is that when there are problems arising in so many different facets of a system then you can guess the real causes lay deep at the heart of the system.

Energy Flow Decline and the Collapse of Complex Societies

Joseph Tainter has it right. In The Collapse of Complex Societies he developed the thesis that societies try to solve problems by increasing complexity. But complexity has costs associated with it that are sometimes hidden from the normal accounting. These hidden costs often show up as new problems and the societal response is to increase complexity yet more. And increasing complexity follows a law of diminishing returns^*. At some point the next unit of complexity has a much greater cost than what it was supposed to fix. That is when things start to break down.

Lately Tainter is speaking to the relationship between problems, complexity, development, and energy flow. He recognizes that it is energy flow that allows humans to attempt solutions to problems. And it is energy flow that is needed to maintain the structures developed. He speaks to the historical patterns of civilizations, fueled mostly from real-time solar flows (i.e., agriculture), growing to a point where the energetic cost of shipping food into the core became too high. The civilizations could not sustain themselves but also could not recognize what was really happening.

Tainter and several other social scientists, are using systems thinking and analysis to see this pattern in all of the collapses. There is invariably a proximal cause or two that everyone can see, such as the invasion by barbarians or climate change, and that everyone concludes is THE cause. But now we are seeing that the real underlying cause of collapse is the decline in energy flow that was needed to sustain the complex organization that had evolved over time and many generations.

Today we are a global civilization even if we still recognize borders between nations. Our commerce is global in scope and is fueled by prodigious amounts of fossil fuel energy. Our agriculture is totally dependent on fossil fuels (the Green Revolution) for growing and delivering the food. Every home in the developed world depends on heating and cooking from advanced power sources like natural gas and electricity (only some of which is produced by nuclear or hydro power). We need powerful transportation vehicles to get us to and from work. Our system is completely and irreversibly dependent of fossil fuels. And guess what is diminishing^**?

Our global society is in the beginning stages of collapse. The wealthy sense this even if they can’t put their fingers on what is wrong. They are more motivated than ever to try to aggregate all of the paper wealth they can. I do think most of them believe that their efforts to create paper wealth are on a par with manufacturing, for example, in helping to lift all boats. I suspect some of them feel totally justified in taking home huge bonuses as they attempt to build a hedge for themselves against what seems to be a sinking boat. They are working on their life rafts after all. This is a normal human proclivity and you, dear readers, and I, and all of the occupiers would probably do something similar if we were in a position to do so. None of us has transcended our biology and all of us will do what we can to protect ourselves when we sense the impending loss of the system that gave us our sense of well being. Of course I support their demand that what wealth there is being created now should be more equitably distributed. But it has to be real wealth, not the phony money created by Wall Street gamblers and fractional reserve banking. I continue to urge that real jobs can be created for many of the unemployed in a modern version of the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corp) where the goal is to restore depleted soils for organic agriculture under the permaculture methodologies. So what if these are government jobs. And so what if the rich are taxed heavily to fund it. That would go a long way to doing something worthwhile, investing in real infrastructure. And it would provide incomes for many currently unemployed (it could also be a way to reabsorb the military personnel coming back, at long last, from our foreign adventures.) A program like this could help alleviate the inherent conflict that is boiling up and it would slow down the collapse somewhat.

The occupiers give us a more realistic measure of the nature of the problem we face. They see the many aspects of the situation and sense that those various aspects are all related to one another. They intuitively understand that all of the various problems are systemic in nature but they just don’t go deep enough into that system’s drive. What the bankers do, what the politicians do, and what the OWSers do, they are all reactions to the systemic collapse that we are experiencing. The problems we will all face soon will be from our ignorance of the root cause and a belief that we need to do something that will protect our positions. If we believe we could have things back the way we believe they were then we will take radical actions against whatever proximal cause we think we see. People will come to blows as they blame some other group for what is actually happening to everyone. Even the richest will find they can’t use their paper assets as food. They won’t even buy food. The tide is going out. All boats are lowering. And many of them have sprung leaks and are already sinking. Those in the sinking boats are going to soon try to commandeer the ones that still seem seaworthy. It is coming.

^* In my systems science book I describe this in greater detail. It turns out that increasing complexity can, and often does lead to collapse, but it can also lead to reorganization and increases in hierarchical control structures that actually simplify things at the operational level. Thus some societies evolve into seemingly more complex ones, but are organized differently (more hierarchically) to avoid the increasing costs and diminishing returns. Human societies have a harder time doing this because humans are more autonomous agents who invariably fail to do as they are expected. Contrast the organization of a state vs. that of an army. The latter kinds of organizations work because the humans are operating under much stricter discipline rules. The problem with humans in general is that they are not wise enough to grasp the benefit of disciplining themselves to cooperate. Hence, complexity tends to result in collapse vs. reorganization and success.

^** We have already reached the peak of oil extraction rates and this can be expected to have an impact on the extraction of coal and natural gas as well. It is already having negative impacts on agricultural photosynthesis and will soon cause the diminishment of food production. A related problem is that the energy costs of obtaining the next increment of energy from fossil fuels is rising. The energy return on energy investment (EROI) is declining faster than the decline in extraction rates. This is the principle driver in rising oil costs. Net energy per capita has likely been in decline since the late 1970s. Aggregate net energy may soon follow even while the population continues to expand, even if at a slower rate.

Mon Abri is French for “My Shelter”.  How it got to be called this is interesting in itself, because a very long time ago, when all this sustainable stuff wasn’t even a glimmer in my young eyes, I lived in a house in Toowong which had a brass plaque screwed to the front with those very words on it.  I was the only frenchman living there who understood its meaning, and I became rather attached to it.  One day, we were told we had to leave because the house was going to be demolished for redevelopment……  so I nicked it!  That was near forty years ago…. and the house is still there, they lied to us to get us out, serves’em right!  In any case, this name is highly appropriate under the circumstances, you couldn’t get a better shelter.

This is an older photo, and I’m using it because a lot of things are planted around the house now, and this gives a clearer view of the building.  The only external difference is the new 2kW solar array on the right section of the roof which is featured in an older post, and of course the AGA flue.

Our block falls from E to W, which, when you want to build a long narrow house facing N makes life difficult.  The reason for the E-W axis is that it gives you 100% control over how the sun interacts with the building, such that in Summer (when temperatures can go higher than 40°C) the sun almost never shines inside the house, and in Winter (when we saw -6ºC three years ago!) it does so all day long…. which is why there are so many windows on the N face of the building, even in the roof.  The house is 25m long, and only 3.6m wide along 10 of those metres.  You can see one of those narrow sections at the R of the picture, which is our formal living room.  You can see right through it in the pic, at the back we have a deck with fabulous views of two of the volcanic plugs which surround the area.  The other narrow section is our master bedroom, which has 3.6m high cathedral ceilings; you can just see the windows at the L end of the pic.  Both these rooms have fabulous ventilation because of their narrowness and glazing on the N and S walls.

The rest of the house is 7.2m deep.  It basically started as a 20m x 7.2m rectangle, but because of the lay of the land, I decided at the design stage to split the house in half lengthwise under the clerestory windows (in the roof), and slide the two halves 5m.  To this day I consider it to be one of my very best ideas!

To simplify the foundations and slabs, it is split exactly down the middle, the lower floor being 1200mm lower than the upper.  At the split, a filled concrete block wall retains the earth which is under the upper floor, giving us even more thermal mass.

The beauty of having a narrow house is that it no longer becomes necessary to have any windows facing E or W to light the rooms in daylight hours.  It’s a little known fact that Summer heat is not just a problem in the afternoon when the sun shines from the W, but every bit as much heat is gained from the E.  The Sun’s strength is exactly the same from either direction.  Nearly all the windows are recycled timber casement windows which swing out (rather than slide like modern ones) and are able to catch breezes from the NE on the the N side, and the SE at the back.  This is where our regular cooling breezes from the sea come from.  The clerestory windows are louvres, as are a few more on the S side, where the deck and back veranda exist.

PASSIVE SOLAR GEOMETRY

The whole thing is well insulated, with R3.5 batts in the roof, and polystyrene slabs in the wall to an estimated R value of at least 1.5.  The long walls are clad in maintenance free colourbond corrugated iron.

To have a truly thermally stable house, you must have a lot of thermal mass, that is heavy material like concrete, inside the building. Thermal mass has the unique ability of soaking up heat, and storing it a long time. Just as black bitumen roads get very hot in the sun, and remain so long after sunset. Therefore I had no choice but to build on a slab, and do so across the natural slope…. not easy.

Foundations like these didn’t come cheaply, but then just look at that gorgeous view… and then consider that when we have a frost outside we remain nice and cosy with no heating at all.  Now the AGA is going, it will be toasty warm even if it’s cloudy all day.  And last summer when the temperature hit 43 deg C, it just hit 30 inside, and cooled down overnight with the clerestory windows open to vent the house.  And I hasten to add the house is not yet finished, we still need to hang curtains and install pelmets to achieve total control.

In winter the sun shines into the house all day long and warms up the thermal mass which acts as a heater overnight keeping the temperature around 20 degrees or more until the sun comes up the next morning.

In summer. the sun never enters the house, but any heat coming in through windows is soaked up by the concrete keeping the house cool.  At night the heat is vented out the clerestory windows.

Whilst it did cost a lot of energy to make all this concrete, unlike conventional houses this one will repay its debt for as long as it stands instead of adding to it.  I estimate that it will take just twenty years of habitation to do this, and we are already one third of the way into this period.

In 2007, Glenda and I won a Glossies Award for the house’s “Resource Saving” features.  It’s the very best house we’ve ever lived in bar none.