Thursday, December 31, 2015


It’s New Year’s eve, one last opportunity for a post during 2015. I may as well take advantage of it.

From December 26 through 28, we had one of the heaviest rainstorms in St. Louis’ history. As much as 9 to 10 inches of rain fell across portions of the metropolitan area, oriented in a band running roughly northeast to southwest. We were within that band, as was the official weather station. As a result three new rainfall records were set, one for the most rain on any day in December (4.87 inches on the 26th, which is the third highest daily rainfall total measured for St. Louis), one for the most rainfall in the month of December (11.74 inches), and one for the highest yearly rainfall (61.24 inches in 2015). With the soil wet to start, almost all the rain ran off into the rivers, creating major to record flooding. The Meramec River, which defines the southern border of St. Louis County, was especially hard hit, with several locations on the river in St. Louis County breaking their old crest records, set back in December 1982. Interestingly, it was the 1982 crest which inundated Times Beach, one of the towns along the Meramec, spreading dioxin-contaminated road dirt all over the town and prompting its eventual demise. Back to this year ... three separate interstate highways had closures this morning due to floodwaters on the roads. One of the local meteorologists says that’s a first. Luckily we live on high ground, far from all those issues.

But in other ways we are as affected by the weird El Nino winter weather as everyone else. The photo at the top shows that our earliest daffodil leaves are already growing. I would not be surprised if this happened in January. In fact it is typical for some daffodil leaves to show up above ground sometime during January when the soil has a chance to thaw. But I cannot remember seeing daffodil leaves in December before. The soil hasn’t frozen yet and it shouldn’t for at least another week given the forecast and how wet it is (as water freezes it gives off heat). I still have mustard greens and arugula in the garden, which we’ll be eating now that we’ve eaten all of the stored bok choy.

Speaking of the garden, the next post will begin my recap of our garden year. For now, suffice it to say that overall it was the best ever. Give me a couple more weeks and you can read all about it. And a few more weeks after that, I’ll let you know what the garden and I will be discussing in 2016.

A very happy New Year to all of you!

Thursday, December 3, 2015

Other options to reduce fossil fuel use in heating season


In my previous post, I discussed how heat leaves your residence and some low-tech, low-cost ways to persuade it to hang around with you for awhile longer than it would have otherwise. In this post, the last of my series on keeping warm with minimal fossil fuel use, I’ll discuss some more costly modifications you could make to your residence to hold heat inside longer or to generate non-fossil-fueled heat.

Since all of these involve extensive and expensive modifications to your residence, I doubt that they will be within the means of a renter to undertake without cooperation from the landlord. If you rent and find any of them intriguing, you can try to persuade your landlord to adopt one or more of them. In some cases, if the work has to be done on your rental anyway, you may be able to influence a decision toward adding a more energy-efficient version than the landlord had in mind.

For those of you who have come to expect me to promote low-cost ways of doing things, it might seem odd that I am devoting a post to discussing ways that are outside of many peoples’ means. However, I have reason to do so. Besides being able to help those of you who may be contemplating any of these projects to have a better chance of getting what you want out of it, some of you might suddenly find yourselves with the means to do them. Perhaps you receive a bonus from your employer. Or you might receive an inheritance; we received two inheritances within a five year period and chose to devote most of each to doing several of the modifications I’ll discuss. Or you might receive unexpected income from another source.

Few people who come into a sizable sum of money seem to entertain the idea of spending it on something so prosaic and, dare I say, dull as improving the energy efficiency of their residence. They might choose instead to buy a new car or house, or travel someplace they’ve never been. Or they might decide to put it toward education, their own or a relative’s. Or they might invest it into something that is supposed to make them more money over time. Or they might choose to pay off debts. In fact, if it were me and I had debts, I’d pay off the debts first and only then consider other possibilities with any money that remains. But I will advance an argument for why you might consider putting energy efficiency work onto your list of what to do with unexpected income.

If you have a savings account or any small investment such as a certificate of deposit and if you are old enough to have had these for more than 10 years, you have no doubt noticed that the interest rate these earn is much less than it used to be. As John Michael Greer wrote, there aren’t many bankable projects left out there, not much left to invest in that can grow enough to offer the interest rates folks enjoyed in the 1980s and 1990s. Once you fully grasp this change, you will realize that it can make more sense to spend excess cash on ways to reduce your expenses over the long term than it does to invest it at the pitifully low interest rates being offered by the safer investments. And that’s exactly what the projects that I’ll be discussing can do for you. Furthermore, even though the payback time on some of these projects may be many years, as soon as they are completed you will reap the benefits: a less drafty, more comfortable place to live and lower heating (and in some cases, cooling) costs to boot.

Let’s look at each project individually, attempting to separate the help from the hype - for in some cases, there may be more of the latter than the former, sad to say.

New entry or storm doors

In the previous post we learned that doors can leak cold air into our residence and how to reduce that with weather-stripping and caulk. But that isn’t the only way they might be responsible for winter discomfort. Just like walls, doors can lose heat by conduction when cold outside air cools them down and they then cool the inside air, or from radiative heat loss to the outdoors. They may also be ill-fitting beyond the point where weather-stripping can help. Because of this, new entry or storm doors can make sense as an energy-saving home improvement.   

When we were researching this two years ago, we decided not to replace two of the three entry doors into our house despite their worse performance compared to a new Energy Star rated entry door. However, one of our entry doors was actually a flimsy interior door, which we chose to replace with a proper entry door for security reasons. Unless you plan to replace the entry door for other reasons I do not think replacing entry doors is the best use of your money. We didn’t spend the extra money for an Energy Star door on the one we did replace.

On the other hand, if your storm doors are old and not well fitted or weather-stripped, as was the case with ours, our experience is that replacing them does make sense, as long as the replacement doors are properly made, sized, and installed. If you don’t have storm doors on all your entry doors and you can afford to buy good-quality storm doors, I recommend them. We are well pleased with our new storm doors. They seal much more tightly against air leakage than the previous doors did, cutting down on draftiness and the resultant discomfort. The new doors are glass on both the top and bottom halves, with the top half sliding down when desired, allowing a screen to roll down in its place for ventilation. They allow more light into our house compared to the previous doors which were metal on the bottom half and as much ventilation as the previous doors when we want it.

New windows

Hardly a week goes by that we do not receive an ad urging us to replace our windows with “energy-saving” gas-filled double pane windows. Having had this done on both the houses we have lived in (once by us, once by the previous owner), I have learned about the big drawback of these windows that the ads don’t tell you about, except in the small print you probably won’t read: the seal that keeps the gas inside eventually breaks, allowing the gas to leak out. Once this happens, air will leak in to replace the gas. That air has moisture in it, which will then condense out onto one of the interior window surfaces whenever weather conditions allow that. In our experience, that is most of the time. Now you have a cloudy window you cannot fix, except by replacing it. Guess who benefits? Companies that sell you these windows don’t offer a lifetime guarantee on the seal, because it doesn’t last long enough. The seal on most of our windows has broken by now. We haven’t replaced these windows and don’t expect to, although if we ever change our minds, we’ll replace them with high quality single-pane windows.

Years ago I was on an e-list of old-house restorers and residents. A popular topic was what to do about the wooden windows that come with many old houses. After years of little or no maintenance, they often fit poorly, or may not open, or the glass may be broken. The consensus of the experienced home restorers was that it is better to repair these windows than to replace them. I suggest that you consider spending your money on a properly done repair job if you have old wood-framed windows. Either you or your contractor should replace any broken glass and re-putty all the way around each piece of glass. The sash cords and locks should be repaired and the wood refinished or repainted if needed. Then do the simpler fixes suggested in the previous post to cut down further on air infiltration. You could also install storm windows during heating season if they still exist (many older houses included storm windows that were put up for the heating system and stored during the rest of the year) or make them yourself if you are handy, or see if you can purchase them if you can afford to do so. But if you really want to replace your windows, look on the Energy Star web site to learn about the best products for your region.

New central heating plant

Another well-advertised high dollar fix is replacement of your current central heating plant with a highly energy-efficient version. We have replaced old, inefficient (50% or less efficiency) natural gas furnaces in both this house and our previous house with 90+% efficient units. Both of the furnaces were over 20 years old and near the end of their useful lives.

Whether or not replacing the central heating unit in your residence makes sense depends on several factors. If the unit is at or near the end of its useful life, then replace it with the most energy-efficient unit you can afford. Check for Energy Star listed units; they are more efficient than other units in their class. If you have sealed and insulated your residence, you may be able to use a smaller unit than before, saving you money. If, however, your unit still has a lot of life left in it, spend your money instead on whatever maintenance schedule is recommended for it. Doing so will ensure that it runs at its peak efficiency, and keeping it in place as long as possible reduces the energy use and pollution associated with making a new unit. Our furnace contractor says that because he has properly maintained our 13 year old furnace, it is in better shape than many units half its age.

Home performance audit

I mentioned in the previous post that while you can hunt for all the different places where air leaks into your residence yourself, there are specially trained and equipped folks who can do this for you. The specialty is called home performance. These folks will do a home performance audit, using procedures such as a blower door test to find all the places where air leaks in and IR cameras to look for places where heat escapes out due to inadequate insulation. They may or may not do the work to fix problems that are found. If they do not, they may offer recommendations on contractors to do the work, or you may have to find them yourself.

We had a home performance audit done on our house in 2005. Our auditor also did the sealing and insulation work that the audit suggested should be done. It was very effective; our house is no longer drafty and it requires only about half as much natural gas to heat the house to the same temperature as it did before the work was done. It was also very expensive, requiring most of one of the inheritances to be completed. I think the most cost-effective approach is to hire the auditor to do the audit and then do the recommended sealing and insulation work yourself, and you may have to do it this way if you cannot find a contractor to do it for you.

Adding wall insulation

As Greer points out in his book Green Wizardry, wall insulation is more difficult and expensive to add after the fact than is attic insulation, although if you are replacing the drywall or other inner surface of the wall anyway, it makes sense to add insulation before re-surfacing. Similarly, if you are replacing the exterior siding of your house, you can add insulation before the new siding is attached.

The only kind of insulation you can add to wall cavities without removing the interior surface is a blown-in product. You’ll need to make holes large enough for a blower hose to penetrate through the wall into each wall cavity along the exterior walls, so you will have extensive patchwork and repainting to do after the insulation is added. We had this work done on the recommendation made by our home performance auditor. Since we’d not painted the walls and they needed it, the patchwork and repainting was not a barrier for us. Although you may be able to rent the equipment to blow in recycled newsprint or denim insulation and you can buy the insulation in the usual big-box stores, I am not sure that this sort of thing can be well done without proper training. Our contractor had difficulty getting the machine that blew in the insulation to work properly. Greer says he has heard mixed reports about the effectiveness of blown-in insulation. In our case the results seem to have been positive. I am not sure the insulation has remained dry since the only way to apply a vapor barrier would be to paint the now-insulated wall with a vapor barrier paint. We did not paint the walls until 8 years after they were insulated. Our contractor did not mention this issue, which I think he should have. But on the other hand we have not noticed any problems that might be attributed to wet insulation in the 10 years since the work was done (which is not the same as saying there are no problems, please note).

Supplemental heat sources

In the previous post I mentioned space heaters as a relatively cheap source of supplemental heat. Other supplemental heat sources which may already be present in your residence or that you may consider adding are a fireplace, a wood stove, or passive solar heat sources.

If you have an existing fireplace, it may be wood-burning or use natural gas as the heat source (in the latter case, the natural gas burner is located among structures looking somewhat like logs, called gas logs). However, while a fire in a fireplace adds atmosphere, it is not an efficient source of heat, as most of the heat goes up the chimney. Worse, if you leave the damper open (and in the county we live in, if you have gas logs in your fireplace, the damper must be welded in the open position for safety reasons, as friends of ours recently learned), heat continues to escape through the chimney when the fireplace isn’t being used. If you have a wood-burning fireplace, you can cut down on heat lost up the chimney by using tight-fitting glass doors, and you can use cast-iron firebacks to radiate some heat back into the room.

The way to turn a fireplace into a serious source of heat is to put a fireplace stove into it. If you don’t have a fireplace but you do have a large enough open space for a wood stove, you can have one put in. But it is not cheap to add a good wood stove, whether a fireplace stove or a stand-alone stove. Besides the expense of the stove itself, there is the cost of the chimney and of installation of the stove and chimney, plus you will need to add a fireproof surface under the wood stove if your floor is not fireproof. Please have these done by someone who knows what they are doing and will do them properly! If you cannot afford a safe installation, whether it’s you who does it or someone else, you cannot afford a wood stove. Then you’ll need to obtain the wood, either by paying a high price for wood that is already cut to size and split or by getting the tools you’ll need to do some of this work yourself. The more you can do yourself, the less the wood costs, but the more time you have to put into it. You’ll also need to store the wood properly, preferably in a wood shed that will allow it to dry before you burn it or covered by a tarp. And you’d better know how to burn the wood safely as well. The book The Woodburner’s Companion tells you what you’ll need to know if you are considering adding a wood-burning stove to your residence.

After many years of mulling over the possibility of adding a wood stove, we finally had it done a year ago. The photo at the top of the post shows our stove in its place of honor. We got the stove from Arnold Stove and Fireplace and they installed it as well. I am happy to recommend them to anyone in the St. Louis area who is looking for a good wood-burning stove. We are very pleased with the stove, the installation, and the service we received.

The past two weekends we have burned wood for heat rather than using the natural gas furnace, getting a feel for how much wood it burns to keep the temperature in the living area in the upper 60sF to lower 70sF (around 20C or so) when the outside temperature is in the 20sF to the low 40sF. Because of the high efficiency of the stove, the amount of wood we burned was rather small. The radiant as well as convective heat from the stove felt better to us than the convective-only heat from the furnace. We also found that the stove warmed the whole house, though less so as distance increased from the stove as we expected. While we don’t expect to heat with wood every day, we both enjoy the extra warmth on the weekends and knowing that if the electricity goes out during the winter, we still have a source of heat.

As noted in this post, Mike recently completed a wood shed to store wood above ground and under a roof, to enable us to burn the wood as cleanly as possible, for safety and environmental reasons. The wood has come from either trees on our land or has been scavenged. Mike uses all hand tools to process the wood, including a human-powered hydraulic wood splitter from Harbor Freight that he’s been pleased with so far. The nearby big-box home improvement store has a powered wood splitter for rent, a good choice for someone who purchases a load of wood and wants to split it all at once.

A number of supplemental heat sources based on collecting and redirecting heat from solar radiation might be available to you, if your dwelling is suitably oriented. Greer mentions three of these in Lesson 26 of his book Green Wizardry, with emphasis on cheap, do-it-yourself versions. In this post I wrote about the sun room we had built into the existing front porch on the south-facing wall of our house. Please go to that post for more details on how it works.

Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Keeping warm with minimal heating: small-scale solutions

This is the third post of a four-post series on how to keep reasonably comfortable in a minimally-heated residence. It’s based on my and my husband Mike’s personal experience with a residence heated to 60-63F (16-17C) when we are awake, 50F (10C) when we are sleeping, in a place where winter lows can get as cold as 0F (-18C) and where the heating season lasts for close to 6 months. Some of you have colder winters, some warmer, thus some of what I say may not apply to your situation. But I think most of you who aren’t already successfully living in a minimally-heated residence will find something useful in at least one of these posts.

The first two posts considered ways to keep our body’s internal heat in and near our body for as long as possible. In this post we’ll widen our gaze out to our residence. I’ll discuss relatively low-cost, small-scale solutions (some very cheap, others less so).

Now that we are looking more at your residence, a divide opens up between what a renter can do and what an owner can do. While renters will find some of these solutions cheap and easy enough and with a short enough payback time that it makes sense to implement them, others may be out of reach. However, what you can do may be more than you think depending on the details of your relationship with your landlord. If you do not expect to be where you are for long, only the cheapest, fastest-payback options make sense. I’ll note those as we go along. On the other hand, if you rent half of a duplex, are on good terms with the property owner who lives in the other half, and you both expect to be there for several years, consider the possibility of asking the landlord to implement certain solutions that interest you but are beyond your ability as a renter to do. You might point out that, for instance, sealing air leaks will reduce utility bills, making the property more valuable over time.

Before I start, let me note that in a blog post, all I can do is touch on the various possibilities. You’ll need to do research to learn how to make them happen in your residence. Two books that go into much more depth than I can are Homemade Money by Richard Heede and Green Wizardry by John Michael Greer. You’ll also find how-to books at your nearby hardware store.

The three ways that heat leaves us

To explain how the solutions work to reduce your discomfort level in a cold dwelling, we need to look at the three ways that heat leaves you and yours. They are called conduction, convection, and radiation, for those of you who like to name your problems.

To understand conduction, grab a piece of cold metal. If your hand is like mine, it will immediately feel cold. The way that heat is leaving in this case is called conduction. In conduction, two materials at different temperatures touch each other; when they do, heat flows out of the warmer material into the colder one. In this case, it was out of our warm hand into the cold metal. To stop this form of heat loss, separate the two materials (drop the metal, but make sure your toes are out of the way first!).

If you notice that a cold draft is flowing around your feet, you are feeling the effects of convection. Convection is when one part of a fluid (a liquid or gas) at a certain temperature encounters another portion of the fluid at a different temperature and starts heat moving from the warmer to the cooler portion. The cold air that is leaking in around your doors or windows causes the warmer air around your body to cool down when the two encounter each other. The reason it’s your feet that feel coldest is because cooler air is more dense (heavier, in ordinary language) than warmer air, so the cold air tends to hang around near the floor, where your feet are.

Convective heat loss happens by another means as well. When the warm air inside your dwelling hits cold outer walls or windows, it loses heat to them by conduction. Once it does, the now colder air starts to sink down to the floor, pushing warmer air up towards the ceiling and cooling it down as they flow past each other and the warmer air flows past the cooler wall. If the warmer air is up close to the ceiling because of convection while you are sitting in your recliner closer to the floor, you’ll feel colder than you would if convection were not occurring.

To understand radiation, imagine facing a hot outdoor fire on a cold night. The front of you feels warm and toasty, but the back of you feels rather chilly. That’s because one of the ways that the fire warms you is by radiation: heat traveling directly from a hotter body (the fire) to a colder body (yours) without anything needed in the middle to carry it. In order for heat to transfer by radiation, the hotter body must be facing the colder body. Your back end isn’t facing the fire. Instead, it’s facing the night sky, dribbling its heat out to the cold night sky by radiation. Eventually you turn your back end to the fire to warm it up, till your front end feels cold. You can spend a long time doing this.

Inside a dwelling, you are most likely to notice radiative heat loss when you are in front of a window, because the outside is much colder than the inside. Few of us enjoy standing in front of a window on a cold night for this reason. But you are also radiating out heat to any surface in your residence that is colder than you are and in your line of sight, like the walls, ceiling, and floor.

Now that we know all this, let’s imagine how we can reduce heat loss by all of these means as much as possible. First, we’ll want to seal off all the ways that cold air can leak directly into wherever we happen to be. Since we’ll need at least one door to get into our residence and probably want at least one window, we’ll want to seat the door(s) and windows(s) as tightly against their frames as we can and seal the window and door frames to their surroundings. We’ll also want as few holes through the walls, floor, and ceiling as possible, and those we must have to be sealed to what surrounds them. Next, we’ll want to keep the walls, floor, and ceiling as warm as we can, to reduce heat radiating off our body to them and to reduce the temperature difference between them and the air in the room that starts the rising of hot air and sinking of cold air. We’ll want to make any windows as small as is compatible with a good view and as warm as possible, or have a means to cover the window when we don’t need it. We’ll want to keep the ceiling as low as possible so we can keep more of the heat where we are instead of where we aren’t. And, finally, making this space as small as possible will make achieving all these goals easier and cheaper. All we have to do now is look at the particulars of how to accomplish these objectives.

The energy woes of big rooms, high ceilings, and lots of windows

You may be wincing now if you live in a place with a large open living area with high ceilings and lots of windows (or you wince whenever you pay your heating bill). This is exactly the wrong way to set up a living space that you want to be comfortable under minimal-heating conditions. The high ceiling means the air you’ve paid to heat winds up there instead of near the floor where you are. The many windows leak more cold air than a small window or two would, plus they allow much more conductive and radiative heat loss than a well-insulated wall does. And the large size means that much more air you have to pay to heat.

Before fossil fuels hit the heating scene, large rooms with high ceilings were a rarity, reserved to only the richest folks. If you have been in a residence built in the 1800s or earlier in a temperate climate, you may have noticed that they usually consist of small rooms with low ceilings. People with more money had larger residences with more rooms, but for the most part those rooms remained small and often had a door that could be closed off to the rest of the house. Before central heating plants became common, some or all of those small rooms had their own fireplace. During heating season, the residents would gather in one room, start a fire, and close off that room to the rest of the house. This was a sensible adaptation to the lower heat energy available from wood than from fossil fuels. It was only when fossil fuels and the central heating plants that they supply became cheap and widely available that energy-wasteful designs like open floor plans, vaulted ceilings, and banks of windows could be incorporated into residences for the less-than-rich. It’s no coincidence that the vacation from energy reality of the last 30 years or so featured the widespread adoption of these energy inefficient features into new construction. While that may not have mattered when high-grade fossil fuels were cheap and plentiful, residences with these features are not well adapted to the poorer, lower-energy world that is taking over.

If you live in a residence like this, you have a few options. You could move to a place without these features, for instance. If you don’t want to or cannot do that, consider the possibility of not using that part of the house during all or part of heating season. Do you have a more sensibly designed room that is large enough to hold you and yours during heating season, such as a spare bedroom, den or office, or media room? Remember that houses not all that long ago, in the 1950s, made do with living or family rooms of under 200 square feet for larger families than most today. I have been in many newer houses that have bedrooms larger than this. If your family can gather in that room for the winter, you can drop the thermostat down to minimal-heating levels and then apply other strategies from this series of posts as well as good furniture choice and placement to make this room a comfortable living space. If you can’t do that either, applying the other strategies in this series of posts should help at least a little to make your large open space feel a little warmer than it otherwise would.

Locking out cold air

Cold air is constantly trying to force its way into your residence without so much as asking permission. Your job is to lock up as best you can against its efforts. Lesson 20 in Greer’s book offers a clear discussion on why to begin with sealing air leaks and where to look for them. Heede’s book has some drawings to help you find them as well. No doubt you can find videos covering this topic someplace on the Internet.

The best place to begin this work is at the door(s) leading into your residence from outside. Check to see if weather-stripping (the material that should be attached to the side, top, and bottom edges of the door) is present, and if it is, if it is in good shape. If not, it makes sense for everyone, even short-term renters, to install it. Payback time is probably a few months on this item, so if you do it at the start of heating season, you should have saved more on your heating bill than it cost you by the end. You’ll likely find a range of materials for the purpose at the nearby hardware store, along with books to explain how to install them.

Now that you’ve weather-stripped the door, take a look at your windows. Check for weather-stripping along the edges of the moving parts; if it’s not there or not in good shape, install some. Like weather-stripping on doors, this makes sense even for a short-term renters.

Now search for other places where cold air might be leaking directly into your residence, such as around the door or window frames, around the pipes and wires that pass through the various surfaces, through cracks and crevices, or between the ceiling and what is above it or the floor and what is below it. Caulk, along with pieces of foam for wider openings, will fix these leaks.

The effort level and cost for caulking will likely be larger than for weather-stripping. You can reduce the cost, as always, by doing the work yourself. I would use a lit stick of incense rather than a candle to find air leaks. Or you can hire a home energy auditor to do this work for you. This is a more expensive option that I’ll discuss more fully in the last post of the series.

Covering your windows

You’ll recall that windows don’t just leak cold air into your house; they also cause conductive heat loss (cold air outside cools the glass, which then cools off the inside air next to it) and radiative heat loss. The way to stop both of these is by covering the glass and sealing the cover.

One way to cover the glass is with shrinkable plastic films that you can apply to your window frame. Generally a heat gun, or perhaps a blow dryer, aimed onto the film will shrink it over the entire window frame. If you already have the blow dryer or heat gun and you don’t want to open the window during heating season, this is a quick way to reduce conductive heat loss, since the air between the glass and plastic doesn’t conduct heat well.

A better way to accomplish the purpose is with an insulated window covering of some sort. I direct you to Lesson 22 of Greer’s book for a fine discussion of various ways to cover windows. A handy resident can make either the hardboard version, for windows not to be used during heating season, or the fabric version for windows meant to be used during the day but covered at night. If you aren’t inclined to do it yourself and you have some money, you can check into commercially available window coverings that fit the criteria in Greer’s book, if you can find them. I haven’t yet added window coverings to any of our windows in our house but it is on my to-do list.

Failing that, if you already have drapes on your windows you could seal off the top, side, and bottom of the drapes to reduce heat loss by conduction and radiation; see Greer’s discussion for more details. If you have blinds but are neglecting to use them, closing the blinds at night should cut down on radiative heat loss through the windows.

Hats for your ceiling

Back in the first post in this series I pointed out that putting a hat on your head will make your feet warmer. The same principle applies to your living space: the equivalent of a hat on your ceiling will help to slow down the tendency of heat to rise up and out through the ceiling, making you, down there near the floor, feel warmer than you would otherwise. If you live on one of the lower floors of a multistory building, the warmer dwelling above you is the equivalent of a hat. If, however, your ceiling has an attic above it, the hat is insulation on the floor of the attic. If you don’t have any, or you don’t have enough, adding enough attic insulation is cost-effective, although with a longer payback time than the other modifications I’ve discussed so far. In Lesson 21 Greer suggests R-60 is not too much insulation if your winters are cold or summers are hot. I’d guess very few of you have that much attic insulation, even if you’ve added it since you moved in. When we had attic insulation added in 2005, it was the equivalent of R-44. I’d recommend at least that much for people in the St. Louis region and other places with similar climates. You can do the work yourself with minimal tools if you don’t have much money to spend, or hire it out if you have more money than time.

Renters might find it difficult to add attic insulation unless they are on good terms with real-person landlords. If you are, and you plan to stay in your rental for a few years or more, consider offering to do the work yourself. Perhaps the landlord could buy the material if you provide the labor. You could, of course, first ask the landlord to do the work, pointing out that it will increase the value of the space, but it might well be worth doing even if you have to do it yourself at your own cost.

Socks for your floor

Just as putting a hat on your head keeps your feet warmer, thick warm socks also help to keep your feet warmer. The residence equivalent of socks is insulation on the underside of your floor. Because gravity wants to pull it down off the underside of the floor, it isn’t as easy to install and keep in place as attic insulation. If you have a crawl space under your floor rather than a basement, you’ll have to endure doing the work in other than a standing position. And if your residence sits directly on a slab foundation or you live in a multistory building with a dwelling directly underneath, it won’t be possible to install floor insulation. However, if you can add it, it is also cost-effective. Greer suggests R-19 as a good level of insulation under the floor. A nearby hardware store should carry how-to books on adding insulation, or you can see what the Internet has to offer. See the discussion of ceiling insulation if you rent but would like to do this.

Clothes for your walls

Walls also benefit from added insulation, though because this is not a low-cost, fast-payback option, I’ll defer further discussion to the final post in this series. However, Greer suggests a different, low-cost means to cut down on heat loss through walls: fabric hangings. We can do better than the tapestries on the walls of medieval castles: we can make a larger version of an insulated window covering, including the vapor barrier, and hang it it from floor to ceiling, a few inches away from the walls. Lesson 22 in Greer’s book should give you an idea of what to do.

Long underwear for your pipes and ducts

If your hot water pipes or forced air furnace ducts run through an unheated space, such as a basement or crawl space, you can wrap them with insulation to keep the heat put into the water or air from leaking out into a place where it does no good. For more information, see Lesson 23 in Greer’s book and the how-to books in your local hardware store.

Space heating

Lots of different kinds of space heaters for supplemental heating are available, some of which are heavily advertised as allowing you to keep most of your house cool except for the room you are currently using. Whether it makes financial or environmental sense to use a space heater depends on the particulars of your situation. If your central heating plant is a forced air electric furnace and you do reduce the thermostat setting when you use an efficient electric space heater in a small space, you should save some money and cause a little less coal or oil to be burned. If, on the other hand, you have a natural gas forced air furnace and your electricity comes primarily from coal-fired plants, as is the case for us, you may not save much money by using a space heater and you may cause more pollution than you would have by keeping the whole house a bit warmer. This is a complex subject, not something I can do justice to in a blog post. But I suspect that space heaters are not the universal boon that their promoters suggest they are. If you use a space heater, be sure to follow all safety precautions appropriate to your heater!

In the final post of this series, we’ll look at a few worthwhile options for those of you who can afford to sink some money into work that will take several years or longer to pay back in the form of lower heating bills. It will, however, pay off in increased comfort at the same thermostat setting as soon as it’s completed.


Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Fermentation and transformation



At the beginning of November many people in the northern hemisphere observed a holiday marking a transitional point in the year, a time when those who have died are remembered and honored in various ways. Those of us who live in temperate parts of the hemisphere have death all around us at this time in the form of falling and fallen leaves, frosted-out gardens, and lawns going dormant. With these natural reminders of seasonal death around us, it makes sense that a Day of the Dead is celebrated at this time.

While I too remember those people I knew who have died, I also perform two other rituals to honor the plants that have died to feed me and the rest of nature. One ritual is to gather some of the newly fallen leaves to begin a new compost pile. To make good compost, one layers dry, high-carbon plant matter such as fallen leaves with wet, green plant matter such as garden weeds or kitchen wastes. If the proportion of the two is correct, when they are layered a fermentation process mediated by soil bacteria will eventually convert them into a mix of humus, a stable form of organic matter, and less stable forms of organic matter. Humus, and to a lesser extent the less-stable forms as well, attracts and loosely holds on to anionic (negatively charged) minerals such as the nitrates, sulfates, phosphates, and borates that plants need to grow. Plant roots are able to mine the humus for those minerals as they need them. By making compost and applying it in the right amount to my vegetable garden, I help the plants grow to their full potential while keeping the soil in good condition so that it may continue to support plant growth after I die.

By this time of year I have long since used all of the leaves I stockpiled from last year to make compost. If I were to use fossil-fueled means to gather and shred leaves I could stockpile enough leaves to last all year long, but because I use a human-powered leaf rake and have a limited number of hours to devote to raking leaves, sometime in summer I run out of stockpiled dry leaves. Thus, when enough leaves have fallen to make leaf-raking possible, it’s time to begin a new compost pile the proper way, with both high carbon and green materials. Since the garden isn’t making much in the way of weeds this late in fall, I mix the leaves with kitchen wastes that I’ve kept in two five gallon buckets. About a week ago I dumped the kitchen wastes onto a pile of mixed dry and green weeds and spent plants, dumped a layer of leaves on top, and then blessed the pile, honoring the ingredients and the microbes that will do the fermentation. I then put the remainder of the leaves I raked into one of the bins I use to stockpile them. By no means is this small start a full compost pile. The best compost piles I make are in spring, when I have lots of leaves from fall and green weeds from the gardens to layer together properly. But even so, this beginning of a new pile holds symbolic meaning for me. We all die in our time. I honor those who have died, acknowledge the fact that I will join them in my time, and know that out of that death the ferment of new life takes place.

Another way that I use fermentation to change past plants into future food is through collecting and analyzing data from my vegetable garden. Because our growing season ends at about this time, this yearly ritual also honors the dead plants that have fed me and transforms them into information that I can use to become a better gardener. I’m in that process now, having created a spreadsheet to compare the best results from previous years to this year’s results. As I type, I’m thinking about weather, pests, the differences in the way I planted in different years, and so on, looking for patterns that will help me to better understand the particularities of my situation and work with it in the best way. When nearly all of the data-gathering is completed (I’m still harvesting hardier crops like greens and root vegetables), I’ll post it and my analysis of the results. I wish more people would do something like this in different climates. It’s the kind of data I would have liked to have as a beginning gardener. But at least it might help those of you who live in climates similar to mine to become better gardeners quicker than I have, another form of transformation appropriate to the times.

Mike finished the wood shed today and began to load it with wood that came from the silver maple tree that was removed to make room for our garden shed. The photo shows the new wood shed with the wood he loaded into it. Because we’d kept a tarp over most of the piled logs for the last year or so, much of the wood is still suitable for burning despite its being three years since it was cut and piled.

Each of the two bays of the shed will hold a cord of wood. Since we haven’t used the wood stove much we don’t know if two cords would get us through a winter if we were heating only with wood. But we might start burning wood more often now that the shed is built, to begin to get a feel for how long a shed-full of wood, burned conservatively, would last.

The next post should be the next installment in my series on managing well in a minimally-heated house.

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Keeping heat in and near your body in a cool residence

In the first post in this series, I focused on clothing that will help to keep you warm in a minimally-heated residence like ours. We typically heat our home to 60F / 16C from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m., 63F / 17C from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m., and 50F / 10C overnight. The method of clothing I discussed was based on keeping myself acceptably warm under those conditions. Dressing properly has the advantage that it is equally accessible to renters and owners, and it is one of the cheapest solutions to staying warm if you can find well-constructed clothing in your price range.

Clothing isn’t the only way to keep warmth close to your body, however. In this post I’ll discuss some other ways to keep heat inside and near you that don’t involve any structural changes to the building you live in. All of these means with a minor exception will apply to both renters and owners. Some of them are free or nearly so; others can be cheap or expensive.

A much-overlooked way to stay warm is exercise. OK, stop groaning already; I heard you. You’re thinking, not another guilt trip for not exercising. No, not at all. I’m merely pointing out that moving your body around generates heat. Dressing properly or using some of the other strategies I’ll discuss below will help you keep some of that heat close to you after you finish exercising, allowing you to keep your residence cooler for the same comfort level.

When I say exercise, I don’t mean you have to use machines or buy any special clothing to do it. How about doing some housework? Yes, I see you glaring at me. You don’t like housework any better than I do. Nevertheless, sweeping the floors, vacuuming the carpet, dusting the furniture, or picking up the various loose items scattered around your residence and putting them where they belong gets you moving, and that effort warms you up. You might be surprised by how warm you can become with this modest amount of activity. I find myself peeling off a layer or two of clothing even in midwinter when I get into the housekeeping groove. Put on some music and move a little more while you work and you might find yourself sweating! For that matter, take this as an excuse to dance without the housework component whenever you need to warm up. Just put on your favorite music and shake your booty!

Taking a walk, if you can do so safely, is one of the best ways I’ve found to warm up icy-cold feet. It’s best to dress a little cooler than is comfortable when you first step outside, because the effort of walking generates heat. You’ll want to wear a hat, either gloves or mittens, and sturdy, warm shoes or boots along with whatever layers of sweaters, coats, pants, and so forth are needed for the conditions. If you become too warm while walking, removing a layer should help you adjust to conditions. Depending on how cold your feet are, it may take only a few minutes to warm them up through brisk walking, or it may take a half hour or more (sometimes more, for me). For those of you who own property, raking leaves or shoveling snow also get you moving and warmed up if you use human-powered leaf rakes and snow shovels for the task.

A good way to keep your body heat where you need it most, inside your body, is to choose the right kinds of food and drink for a cold residence. Ice-cold drinks and a cold house do not mix well. It so happens that water must suck up a lot of heat energy in order to raise its temperature, a property that scientists call a high heat capacity. This is good when your favorite lake is absorbing the heat of sunlight during the summer to make it warm enough to swim in, or the water in those 55 gallon drums on your glassed-in porch is absorbing the heat from sunlight and then releasing that stored heat at night in winter. It’s not good when the cold water is in your stomach, sucking up the heat from your core, which causes the arteries in your hands and feet to constrict, making them feel cold. I suggest making all the liquids you drink in the winter no colder than room temperature, and warmer than that whenever possible. Forget that your ice trays or icemaker exist when your residence is cold. A nice warm mug of your favorite drink will warm your hands as you hold the mug and keep the heat inside you from being diverted to warm up a cold stomach.

As for food, I realize you may have a medical need or other reasons that determine your choice of foods, and I honor those. In our case, neither of us have any food allergies and we do not follow any special diet. Around here we like to eat substantial foods during the winter such as chilis, stews, casseroles, and carbohydrate-rich roasted vegetables like carrots, parsnips, turnips, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and winter squash, all served hot and sometimes containing some meat or served alongside a meat course. These foods are warm when they hit my stomach and my body can convert them into the energy needed to help keep me warm after the meal. Further, the vegetables are the same ones that store well for weeks in our root cellar or in the basement or living space. We don’t eat many salads or other raw foods in winter, except for the fruits or vegetables we have in storage that we typically eat raw, like radishes or apples, or a piece of fruit at breakfast that we’ve purchased because we have eaten all of what I grew. In winter my body wants heavy, spicy foods. If you have no medical or personal reason not to eat this way, try it and see if it helps keep you a little warmer than you would have been otherwise.

As I noted in the previous post in this series, adding layers of clothing will help to keep heat closer to you for longer periods. You can also do the same thing by covering up with a blanket or throw whenever you are sitting down. These have advantages and disadvantages relative to clothing. If you have some blankets or throws in storage, for instance, it costs you nothing to haul them out and begin to use them if you aren’t already. However, blankets will not keep your arms warm if you are, for instance, typing away at your computer. For this purpose a plush, thick, long bath robe large enough to fit over your usual layers of clothes would work better. A blanket or throw might not do as good a job at keeping your legs warm as fleecy jeans or other warm leggings if you are sitting in a chair, because the blanket doesn’t surround your legs. But they are a good way to add an extra layer of warmth to your core, where you need it most.

I prefer blankets to throws because throws aren’t large enough to keep me as warm as a blanket does. But you could sew a couple of throws together to make a larger covering.

I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again: wool blankets and throws are warmer than the more common cotton or acrylic versions. Of course the wool versions are also more expensive if you buy them new. But you may be able to find used wool blankets at thrift stores or yard sales, or you may know someone who has a wool blanket they aren’t using who would be happy to pass it on to you. We have wool blankets that belonged to Mike’s dad when he was in the military.

If you have a cedar chest or closet, that’s where to store your wool blankets when you are not using them. I keep ours in my cedar chest, washing them before I store them over the warm months. I keep wool clothing in between slabs of cedar that hang from the pole in my clothes closet. These are cheap and readily available, and so far they have prevented the insect attacks on my wool clothing that I had noticed occurring before I had the cedar slabs. They would probably also work to keep wool blankets folded to drape on hangers from insect damage in a clothes closet.

Mike bought a wool blanket that fits a single bed at a yard sale, which he modified to form a wrap for use when he is sitting in his recliner. The inspiration for this was an old comforter I had when we met, which had snaps along the edges to allow it to be snapped together into a large robe-like wrap when desired or unsnapped and used as a comforter. It was a clever design. However, after time the thin cotton cover separated from the snaps, allowing the batting to ooze out. Rather than use sewn-on snaps for his wool blanket, Mike used grommets and washers to create rows of holes along certain edges of the blanket. Then, by threading a long shoelace through the grommet holes, he created an opening through which he places his head at the top end of the blanket, and an opening for his feet at the bottom. I’ll show photos of the modified blanket first, then describe how he put in the grommets and washers.

This photo shows the modification at the top end of the blanket. Notice that the blanket is folded in half along its length. There are two rows of grommet holes which extend a short distance along the width of the blanket close to the edge.
This photo is a close-up of the grommet holes with a foot-long ruler laid alongside for the dimensions. The grommet holes begin about 1 inch / 2.5 cm from the long edge and are about the same distance from the short edge. The holes extend about 6 inches along the width on both sides and are laced together with a long shoelace, leaving an opening for Mike’s head to fit through.
This photo shows the modifications at the bottom of the blanket. It remains folded along its length. One row of grommets extends along the entire width, about 1 inch from the edge. The other rows of grommets extend up the length of the blanket on both sides.
This photo shows the rows of grommets along the length of the blanket and the shoelace that ties them together. These rows of grommets are about 10 inches / 25 cm long. In this configuration, Mike puts his feet through the bottom opening. The blanket forms a tube around his lower legs. He can change the configuration of the lacing to close off the bottom edge to form a pocket for his feet if he so desires.

Mike says that he could have bought a grommet setting kit to set the grommets in place, but he chose to use tools he already had instead. He used a sharp, sturdy metal point, such as on a metal skewer or a very heavy sewing needle, to open up a hole in the felted wool. He then inserted an aluminum grommet through the hole and placed a matching aluminum washer on the appropriate end. (It’s necessary to use the same metal for the grommet and washer to avoid corrosion.) Once the washer was in place, he put a center punch on it and tapped the punch with a hammer to set the washer against the grommet. I hope I’ve done justice to his description. He’ll read the post eventually and let me know if I need to change something.

This size of blanket works well because Mike is about 5 feet 6 inches tall. I suspect a taller person would prefer a double or queen size blanket for a similar wrap.

Finally, I’ll discuss bedding as a means of being as warm as you like for several hours each day. I find that after hours of being colder than I prefer, I especially appreciate the chance to be toasty warm while I’m sleeping and to begin and end my day in warmth. Having the right bedding makes that possible.

These days it’s easy to find electric blankets and mattress pads to keep you warm while sleeping. I have used both in the past but no longer use either. Besides the fact that they only work when electricity is available, they have other disadvantages. I found that the heat from electric blankets dried my skin to the point of redness. This wasn’t a problem with the electric mattress pad, but after several years of use the plastic-wrapped cords separated from the pad, breaking the wires and rendering the pad useless. Rather than replace the pad right away I tried not using it and found that it was no longer necessary. I think that’s because we no longer use a cotton comforter during the winter, so I no longer need any source of warmth beyond my own body heat to stay warm. Cotton does not hold in warmth in winter; you need wool or down for that.

If you can obtain a down comforter and have no allergy issues to prevent you from using it, it is the best choice for winter sleeping comfort. It’s because we now use a down comforter in winter that we no longer need the electric mattress pad. I find that one thin blanket under the down comforter keeps me as warm as I like even though the bedroom drops below 55 F/ 13 C during the winter. If you can only obtain a cotton comforter, then I suggest putting wool blankets under or over it, as many as necessary to keep you warm enough. Failing that, use multiple acrylic blankets in the same way. Again, check thrift stores if you are looking for bedding at a price you can afford, as well as yard and estate sales if you have time for them. If cold feet keep you from falling asleep, hot water bottles are available from specialty retailers.

The next post in the series will widen our viewpoint to keeping heat longer in a room-sized space.

Thursday, October 22, 2015

Of voles and sweet potatoes


When we arrive at this, the most colorful time of autumn, I enjoy one last glorious show of reds, yellows, greens, and purples before the gray-and-brown monotony of late fall and winter. Above you can see two dogwoods (the red leaves) flanking a spicebush (yellow-orange). In back the fading green of silver maples and in front, the still-green grass sets off the flaming colors.

A few days ago, I awoke to a light frost covering the ground around the vegetable gardens. As the season’s first frost, it toasted the sweet potato leaves, signaling time to harvest. This year I planted three different varieties. So far I have harvested all of two of them and a few of the third. Of the two I have harvested completely, ‘O’Henry’ suffered from extensive predation by a ground-dwelling creature whose identity remains unknown (though I suspect voles because they are said to eat succulent root systems such as sweet potato tubers). For some of the plants, all of the tubers except for the skins were eaten. Other tubers have large craters eaten into them or show signs that what I was left with was less than half of what had been there. The few that were undamaged or only lightly damaged are quite large, evidence that had I been left most of the tubers, this variety would have outyielded ‘Ginseng’. ‘Ginseng’s’ tubers are smaller but they suffered much less predation. Both of these varieties made most of their tubers under the central portion of the plant, while ‘Hernandez’, the variety which remains to be harvested, has already yielded a number of small tubers that formed on parts of the vines that intruded into ‘O’Henry’s’ part of the bed. We haven’t yet done a taste test of the varieties; it’ll be interesting to see how they compare.

I was quite disappointed and humbled by the evidence of extensive predation of what would have been the high-yielding variety. Those of you who have been reading along with me know that I have been trying to grow crops that can provide lots of calories for the space they take up, to understand if it’s possible to grow something close to a complete diet in a backyard-sized garden. Sweet potatoes should fill an important niche in this regard: they grow well in our long, hot summers and they store longer and in warmer, lighter conditions than regular potatoes. Part of growing a complete diet is eating the right foods at the right time, and that means having at least one high-calorie staple crop to eat at all times of the year. The potato varieties I grow aren’t ready till August and they begin to sprout and rot as the basement warms up in spring. Grains can be used year-round, but it takes much more space to grow a grain crop than a tuber crop. Ideally sweet potatoes could be stored through winter and then eaten in spring through early summer, when the regular potatoes are no longer available. Grains could fill the calorie niche from then till regular potatoes are harvested. But if the sweet potatoes can’t stand up to predation, that strategy won’t work. Hence my disappointment and humility. Beaten by small mammals ... I’ll have more to say about this when I write up the results of this year’s garden and what I’ve learned from it.

Meanwhile, Mike continues working on the woodshed. The photo below shows the framing almost complete.

Next he’ll add some more bracing and the roof purlins (the pieces that lie on top of and at right angles to the roof rafters), followed by the roof deck and top. It’ll have a metal roof because he says that’s the easiest kind of roof for him to install. Then he’ll need to add some kind of floor framing to hold shorter pieces than the four foot width. We have made one fire in the wood stove so far, the evening of the 18th (it frosted that morning). That one fire, made with dry wood, heated up the house several degrees so we did not need to run the gas furnace. With this week’s warm weather, the house is warm enough to not need any added heat beyond what we let in through open windows during the day. Take that, electric and natural gas providers!

Most of the vegetable garden is no longer producing food. I’ve picked the popcorn, most of the blackeyed peas, and all the squash. The frost was not heavy enough to kill the tomatoes, peppers, or pole snap beans. They continue to make some food, though as the soil and weather cool and hours of sunlight diminish, less is available at each picking. I may get another two or three weeks of slight production from them before frost kills them. However, the two beds of fall greens and roots are full of beautiful food, as you can see below.
The purple is ‘Purple Rapa Mix’ mustard greens. I’ll have to figure out how to preserve some of them; even then I expect there will be enough to give some away. The other greens are turnips, radishes, and arugula. Outside of the picture we have large bok choy and smaller kale for stir-fries as well as lettuce for salads.

Another autumn project, now mostly complete, has been to dig a new rain garden to accept overflow from the 500 gallon water tank that collects rain from the garden shed roof. Around here it’s suggested to make a rain garden about 1/3 of the area of the roof if it were flat. Our shed is 120 square feet, so the rain garden is about 40 square feet. I dug it by hand, with the tools in the photo below. It took a couple of hours because I wasn’t working that hard.
Unlike summer, autumn has been very dry. I measured about 1.1 inches of rain in September. So far October hasn’t brought enough rain to measure. In order to give the rain garden plants a good start, I first ran over 100 gallons of stored rain water into the depression to moisten the soil before adding the plants. I chose a mix of appropriate native plants suggested by a publication titled Native Plant Rain Gardens co-produced by the Missouri Departments of Conservation and Agriculture in 2004. After planting them, I ran another 100 gallons or so of stored rain water into the depression, to settle the plants into their new home. The last step will be to mulch them; when that is complete, I’ll post a photo. I’m hoping that the claimed weather pattern change, to a more normal mix of occasional rainy days, will materialize to help the trees and shrubs I planted in spring settle into late fall and winter.

The tea camellias I talked about in this post died, alas. So this past spring I bought and planted new ones from Camellia Forest Nursery. They’ve done very well and are supposed to be at least marginally hardy here. But I want to improve their chances to survive winter cold. So I did what I should have done years ago after I first read it: I bought Palms Won’t Grow Here by David Francko. (I suggest searching for a used hardback edition so you can see the beautiful color plates rather than the print-on-demand paperback version with its blurry black-and-white photocopies of said plates). Anyone who is trying to push their hardiness limits to grow plants that aren’t supposed to grow in their location needs this book. Not only does it tell me how to protect my tea camellias (mulch them in early winter with a foot or so of oak leaves and consider surrounding them with a wind barrier and coating the leaves with an antidessicant), and how to keep the flowerbuds on my hydrangeas alive (cover the plants with oak leaves to overwinter the budded branches) but it tells me how to grow palms, bananas, and other plants in the ground here in the St. Louis region. Sure, people grow bananas here; I’ve done it myself. But we dig them up after the first autumn frost, keeping them in the basement for the winter, and plant them back out in May, after the last spring frost. This book tells us which kinds of bananas we can wrap up for winter, sheltering them in place in the ground. And while no one here bats an eye at the sight of a crape myrtle (they seem to be everywhere) or a southern magnolia (less common but still many examples around town), I haven’t seen anyone growing a camellia of any sort outside, much less a palm. Maybe a few palms in the front yard, out where passersby can see them, would be fun to grow. And now that we had the dying blue spruce removed, I finally have space for a southern magnolia!

Next post I will continue the series on keeping warm in a minimally-heated house.

Sunday, September 27, 2015

Dressing for Comfort in a Minimally-Heated Residence

This is the first post in a short series on ways to stay as comfortable as possible in a minimally-heated residence. For the last several years Mike and I have heated our residence to 60F / 16C during the day (63F /17C for 5 hours in the evening) and 50F / 10C at night for economic and environmental reasons. We even set it as low as 55F / 13C one winter and managed, though I prefer to keep our house a little warmer than that to keep my spirits and activity level a little higher during cold weather.

My toes and fingers turn white and become numb if they get too cold. This can happen in an excessively air conditioned environment in the summer but it happens much more frequently during the winter if I do not take care to prevent it. While I haven’t been formally diagnosed, my symptoms are consistent with Raynaud’s disease, and it isn’t pleasant when it occurs. So the fact that I can manage in a house whose warmest portion is 60F most of the winter means that most all of you can put my tips to good use.

Who am I aiming this information toward? Everyone who lives in a place where it gets cold enough to add heat indoors at some point during the year and who have some control over how much heat is added. I will provide some tips appropriate for both renters and owners and some that are only possible for owners. We have done almost everything I mention, so as always what I share reflects personal experience. If I have only read about it but not tried it myself, I will say so.

Why should I care about this, some of you might be thinking; I can afford to heat my place as much as I want to! Natural gas prices are lower now than they were 10 or 15 years ago, before the fracking process became widespread. But one of the dirty little secrets of fracking is that fracked wells deplete very rapidly, so frackers must find new fields faster than the current ones deplete. So far they have been able to do that, but the folks with the best data and most realistic thinking on the issue suggest that within a decade the pace of new wells being brought online won’t be able to offset the depletion of old wells. We’ll likely see a period of volatile pricing around that time, maybe earlier. In addition, oil has its own depletion issues and may not be keeping pace with demand within a decade or so as well, which may affect those of you who heat with electricity if your utility burns oil to produce electricity and those of you who burn oil directly for heat. Since it takes fossil fuels to grow the economy, once fossil fuel supplies can no longer keep up with demand, economic growth must stop too. When that happens, more people will find themselves without jobs, perhaps with reduced pensions or other aid. They will have to choose what they spend money on, and that may mean they choose to heat less, or not at all, during winter. I’d like for everyone to know how to keep themselves as close to comfortable as they can in such a world. Folks have done this during lean times in the past and some are doing it now; most of what I write here is what I’ve learned from them, and I’ll include a list of references at the end of the final post. I think more of us will be facing lean times in the next five or ten years. So even if you can afford to heat your residence as much as you want, you might want to bookmark this post, or print it out and put it someplace you can find it later if you should need it. And for those of you who are already enduring being colder in the winter than you’d like to be, I hope that you’ll find a tip you can make use of in one or more of the upcoming posts.

Layers are not just for cakes

Whether you rent or own, the easiest way to improve your comfort is to keep your body’s internal heat in and around your body as long as possible. Clothing yourself in several well-chosen layers will go a long way toward accomplishing this purpose. I’ll describe the layering system I’ve worked out over the years that enables me to stay comfortable in our minimally heated house. Even if you don’t need as many layers as I do to be comfortable, you might find that adding another layer or two of the right sort increases your comfort level enough to lower the heating temperature, saving you more money than you spent on the clothing if you pay for your heat. And you can take the clothing with you should you move.

The innermost layer: long underwear

If you aren’t already wearing long underwear, I suggest getting a pair and trying it under what you usually wear. Some of you may find that it is the only extra layer you need. For me, it is the first layer of defense against cold air.

The cotton thermal weave type is readily available and is the cheapest, but it is not the best choice if you can afford something warmer. While the thermal weave helps to trap and hold warm air around you as long as it is dry, wet cotton clothing will make you feel colder rather than warmer. (That’s why cotton clothing is popular in summer in temperate climates and all year long where it is hot all year.) You might think you won’t sweat in the house, but then you might start doing some housework or you might have a hot flash, and all of a sudden you are sweating. You could change to a dry pair of long underwear when needed, but as many layers as I’m wearing, I’d much rather not have to do that. Thus I suggest choosing a fabric that keeps you warm even if it gets damp from sweating. A number of retailers sell this kind of long underwear, marketed to people who engage in outdoor activities during the winter. The most affordable versions are made of a single layer of synthetic fabrics such as polyester. I find Polartec versions to feel a bit itchy so I choose smooth fabrics instead. Long underwear that clings to me feels colder than looser-fitting styles, so I choose the latter. Some more-expensive fabric choices exist among this kind of long underwear, including silk and wool; I have not tried either so far. The single-layer synthetic long underwear I have is several years old and still in good condition. If you can’t or don’t want to spend that much money, go with old-fashioned cotton thermal underwear. I’d suggest buying multiple pairs so you can change out of them if they begin to feel cold and clammy.

The second layer above the waist: turtleneck or mock turtleneck shirt or sweater

Unless you have an unconventional fashion sense, you’ll want to cover up the long underwear with something more conventional-looking. A turtleneck or mock turtleneck shirt or sweater does a good job of this. They are easy to find at stores and online. If you need to look professional, you’ll probably choose a button-down shirt for this layer.

For several years I wore cotton mock turtleneck shirts, until I learned about the superior warmth of wool. It happened that cashmere turtleneck sweaters made their way to upscale used clothing stores like ScholarShop here in St. Louis by that time. I now own three of them, none of which cost me more than $20, all bought since 2009 but not in the past couple of years, so I am not sure if you can still find them or not. At a different upscale used clothing store I found a white crewneck cashmere sweater for $35. These have become my second layer of choice. They are warm, lightweight, and good-looking. They do need to be hand-washed and line-dried, however. That’s why I own multiple such sweaters. I minimize how often I need to wash them by allowing the one I had previously worn to air out for a day to a few days before I put it back in the closet. Doing that, I can get several wearings out of it before it needs to be washed. To cut down on insect problems, I use cedar blocks that hang on either side of my collection of cashmere sweaters. I have mended holes in some of the sweaters, using cotton thread that is a close match in color. The cashmere layer made enough of a difference for me to recommend it if you can afford it. If you’d like to try it, check out upscale used clothing stores to see if you can find them there. I’ve yet to see one in the more common thrift stores, although they are good places to find other good used clothing, and you might get lucky. However, you can get by with a cotton shirt for this layer as long as you wear warmer, looser layers on top of it and change it if it gets damp from sweat.

The third layer: a heavy sweater or sweatshirt

For this layer I choose a wool or acrylic sweater. I used to use a cotton sweater for this layer, but once I tried a wool sweater instead, I found it kept me warmer than a cotton sweater did. I found the three wool sweaters I have at ScholarShop, but because this layer is of a more readily available wool than cashmere, you may have more luck finding them at thrift stores. You can find these easily new (some of them claim to be machine-washable) but those you find in thrift stores will be much more affordable. If you’re layering it over long underwear and a shirt like I am, you’ll want to buy a size larger than you would if you were wearing it over just one layer. The larger size will slip over the rest of the layers and trap some more warm air closer to your body. If you don’t like wool, I have found that acrylic sweaters are almost as warm. If the second layer you chose is cotton, it’s best to choose acrylic or wool for this layer, in my experience. Most of the time I choose for this and the layer beneath it to be wool for maximum warmth. But if all you have or can get for this layer is a fleecy sweatshirt, hooded or not, it will serve.

The fourth layer: a fleece-lined vest

Once the inside temperature drops under 65F, I’m ready to add another layer to the three layers above. Several years ago my mother-in-law gave me a fleece-lined quilted cotton vest, and it has become the fourth layer of my five-layer system. It’s large enough to go over the three layers below it, and it keeps more warmth in my trunk, which helps warm up the blood as it returns from my extremities. It’s still in very good shape and I should get many more years of use out of it. I found different versions of fleece and down lined vests at L. L. Bean’s website, which I mention only because it suggests that different styles of vests should be widely available. If I find a wool vest in a thrift store I might buy it, but the fleece-lined cotton vest I have seems to be good enough at this point.

The fifth layer: a large hooded sweatshirt or fleecy hooded shirt

Major requirements for this layer are that it be large enough to fit over all the other layers and that it have a hood to keep my head warm. The other thing I hope to find in this layer is that it’s free or very cheap, to offset the cost of the other layers. My mom gave me two sweatshirts she didn’t want, and I found a fleecy zippered jacket with a hood at ScholarShop that I use for this layer. I’ve seen plenty of sweatshirts at thrift stores that should work fine. A fleece-lined flannel shirt or heavy wool shirt would also work for this layer.

Below the waist: long underwear and fleece-lined jeans

Jeans that aren’t lined just don’t cut it for me in a 60F house, even with long underwear worn underneath them. Thick, warm sweatpants worn over the long underwear are warm enough but don’t fit my sense of style if someone other than Mike will see them. I’ve found that lined jeans worn over long underwear keep my legs acceptably warm, and jeans wear well in most places I go. I find fleece-lined jeans to be warmer than flannel-lined jeans. I always buy them from L. L. Bean, which gives you an idea of my fashion sense, but experience shows that they fit me well and last for several years, so they are in my opinion worth the price. I use older pairs for gardening and other grubby work so the younger pairs stay good-looking longer. Wool pants might also work for this layer, but I haven't seen them in thrift stores and they cost more than I want to spend to buy new.

On my head: one or more hats

The people who told you that a hat will keep your feet warm weren’t kidding, even though you may have thought they lacked fashion sense (who likes hat hair? Not me). However, even though hat hair offends my fashion sense, the rest of me wants that hat on when it’s cold in the house! Brains suck up a lot of blood for their volume. While hair has some insulating value, it isn’t insulating enough for me when it’s cold, and some of you may not have any hair to help insulate your brain against heat loss. Heat lost out of your head translates to cold hands and feet. The solution: a hat, or more than one. That’s why the fifth layer in my winter clothing system is hooded and I wear that hood in the house. When the house is only 60F, I like to have another hat underneath the hood for extra warmth. The one I use is an alpaca wool cap, but a cotton or wool watch-style cap is readily available and cheaper. Mike usually wears a watch cap, often one he’s found while walking, under the hood of his sweatshirt in the winter. (We often wonder how the clothing we find in the streets got there. But maybe it’s better not to ask.)

On my hands: fingerless gloves and/or mittens

Wool mittens would be the best choice to keep my hands warm in a cold house, but they cut down on dexterity too much, as do full-fingered gloves (ever try to turn the pages of a book while you are wearing mittens or gloves?). So I wear fingerless cotton knit gloves that a friend of mine found at a dollar store and gave me as a gift. My hands still get cold, but not as cold as they would without the gloves. When I saw a pair of wool fingerless mittens in a catalog I bought them, hoping that by layering them over the fingerless gloves I could keep my hands warmer. But it turned out that cold air could still flow through the opening for my fingers. Of all the aspects of my winter dressing system, this layer is the least satisfactory. I’ll keep searching for a better solution as I do the best I can with the fingerless gloves and mittens.

On my feet: wool socks and over-the-ankle slippers

Since my feet are farther from my heart than any other part of my body, they are the coldest part of my body in the winter. Keeping a hat on keeps my feet a little less cold, but they still need extra help.  Luckily they are easier to find proper clothing for and still keep their essential functions than are my hands.

Wool socks are my friends in the winter. But not just any old wool sock. I have two pairs of single-layer wool socks that I wear in spring and fall for a little extra warmth. However, in the winter I need the equivalent of a layer of insulation inside my socks. The socks I now have and like very much are the Killington Hiker socks from Maggie’s Organics. You may be able to find similar socks at sporting-goods retailers. On top of these I wear bootie-style insulated fleece slippers so I can pull my jeans down over the booties, keeping cold air from falling down into the slippers. This combination is better than anything I’ve yet found for keeping my feet reasonably warm in a cold house at a price I am willing to pay.

In the next post, we’ll start moving away from our clothing to consider other ways to keep ourselves tolerably warm in a minimally-heated residence.

Sunday, September 20, 2015

Autumn work

With the autumnal equinox less than a week away, the wildflowers of autumn are in full bloom. I took these photos in various parts of our yard so that I can share their beauty with you.
The yellow flower in the middle is showy goldenrod, and it lives up to its name!
These are woodland asters. The delicate, small blue flowers are among my favorites.
This is yet another member of the aster family, as are the two previous flowers.

Planting is done now except for cover crops, due to be sown as I clear off beds over the next few weeks, and garlic and potato onions, which will be planted around the end of October or early November. I enjoy the slower pace of garden work in early autumn. This week I harvested nine good-sized butternut squash, the first-planted of the four beds of popcorn, and, for the second time, the dry pods of blackeyed peas. I also harvested about two pounds of arugula, with a good deal more remaining to be harvested. At least I can grow one good salad crop during autumn! Even better, arugula will remain usable into December, possibly January if winter is warmer than usual.

Speaking of winter, it isn’t all that far off, only about two months away. With that in mind, I began making the glassed-in front porch ready to receive the container plants that spend the warm months on our patio. I have already moved a few plants to it and have seedlings of calendula in process for flowers during the winter. I expect to move most of the rest of the patio plants to the front porch over the next week or so. Although our first frost is probably still a few weeks off, I’d rather not have to move all the plants in a hurry, perhaps during bad weather.




Meanwhile, Mike has begun to frame-in the woodshed that will provide wood for the wood stove we bought and had installed late last autumn. Rather than chuck any old piece of wood into the stove, we intend to burn dry, properly seasoned wood. By doing so, we minimize the risk of creosote formation in the chimney as well as minimize the pollutants produced when wood is burned in a careless way. Thus, the woodshed will be roofed over to keep the rain off and have open walls to allow air to pass through to dry the wood. We have some wood stacked up elsewhere in the yard under a tarp, waiting for the woodshed to be finished. Most of it is from the silver maple tree that we had removed in 2012, where the garden shed now stands. The rest of it is from large shrubs and small trees I’ve removed and limbs that have fallen on our yard or on the lot to our west, where no one currently lives. As my shrubs and trees grow larger, some of the prunings are large enough to burn, as kindling if nothing else. Later on, I intend to try coppicing some of the larger trees in our back yard. Our goal is to minimize the use of purchased firewood. Mike will process all the wood with human-powered tools, including a hydraulic human-powered wood splitter that works well! I’ll talk more about the wood stove later on, after we have more experience with it.

In the meantime, I am writing the first of a short series of posts on keeping warm in a minimally-heated residence. I don’t know yet if these will be the weekly post for the next few weeks or if I will put them up in between these a-week-in-the-life-of posts. While I work on that series, I wish all of you in the northern hemisphere an enjoyable autumn equinox, and an enjoyable spring equinox to those of you in the southern hemisphere!




Monday, September 14, 2015

Homegrown meals

Blogger seems to be behaving better today, allowing me to import images again. Above is Autumn Joy sedum. Although my point-and-shoot digital camera doesn’t have the resolution to show them, bees are busy working the flowers.

As we leave summer behind, the planting decisions I made last winter and the combination of my actions to prepare, plant, and weed beds along with Nature’s provision of air, sunshine, water, and soil have produced enough food so that some of our meals are now almost entirely homegrown. This week I’ll share with you what we’ve been eating and how that will change over the next few days and weeks.

For the salad course, Mike, our primary household cook, has been preparing a mix of homegrown ripe sweet peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, carrots, and onions for about the last month. Not all of these have been featured in every salad but the base has been peppers, cucumbers, and onions along with whatever of the others we’ve had on hand when the salad was prepared. It’s been a good year for each of these three crops; even though the red and yellow onion crop suffered from the excessive June and early July rains, we have some remaining and I have more than enough potato onions (a multiplying, perennial onion that tastes the same as yellow onions) to provide all the onions we’ll need into winter and perhaps next spring.

Now, however, the squash bugs and the hot, dry weather of late August and early September have put an end to the cucumbers and nearly so to the zucchini, and the small carrot harvest has been eaten. To compensate, however, the arugula has grown enough to be included in our salads. The only issue with it is thinning and eating it fast enough to allow the remaining arugula to grow on and to avoid having any harvested arugula go bad before we can eat it. By necessity, those who have a big garden have to plan the kinds and amounts of crops grown to provide an ongoing harvest and also must put in the time in the kitchen to convert the harvest into food on the plate.

For the main dish on our homegrown meal days, we are eating snap beans and potatoes in some form. It has been several years since I grew a successful snap bean crop, so I had almost forgotten how much a good stand of pole snap beans can produce. About 3 1/2 pounds of the long, flat Roma-type beans, about 2 pounds of a shorter heirloom snap green bean, and about 2 1/2 pounds of a Red Noodle type bean (really a cowpea but eaten whole, similarly to a snap bean) await use in our refrigerator. Meanwhile we have 80 or 90 pounds of potatoes holding in the darkest part of the basement. Mike and I have differences in how we prefer to use these foods to make up the main portion of lunches and dinners. He likes to boil the potatoes and then add slightly cooked beans to the pot with the potatoes so the beans cook the rest of the way in the pot, eating the mixture as a stew. I like this well enough but have a slight preference to eating the potatoes and beans separately. The beans can be boiled or stir-fried; the Red Noodle beans seem to be especially good when stir-fried, in my opinion. Potatoes can be mashed, boiled, roasted, fried, or made into a casserole. A week or two ago, I made scalloped potatoes in a slow cooker rather than in the oven, following the recipe in The Gourmet Vegetarian Slow Cooker. They tasted nearly the same as when the dish is made in the oven, with less heating up of the kitchen and, I suspect, less energy usage as benefits of choosing the slow cooker to make the dish. As I type, potatoes are roasting in our sun oven, to eat for lunch along with leftover snap beans (and there should be plenty of leftover roasted potatoes for future meals). Together, potatoes and beans provide a complete protein profile as well as calories and various nutrients: along with the salad, this is the sort of meal that a backyard garden can readily provide in this climate. We’ll have fresh beans until frost, stored potatoes longer than that. Later on popcorn and dried beans will take over for the green beans, and winter squash and sweet potatoes will join the potatoes. Along with greens and root crops to come later for use in salads and stir-fries, these will form the foundation of homegrown meals through fall, winter, and perhaps early spring of next year. My goal is to learn how long we can stretch out the food supply and, knowing that, modify the garden plan and how we store food to stretch out the availability of homegrown food into spring and even early summer, before summer’s main crop harvest begins.

On September 6, the high was 96F / 36C. On September 10 the high was 88F / 31C. By September 12 the high was only 70F / 21C. At our house on September 13, the morning low was 46F / 8C, a few degrees cooler than the official low of 51F. This is autumn in the Midwest: warm or even hot spells followed by ever stronger cold fronts sweeping through, then followed by more warm weather until the next cold frontal passage. Over the three months of autumn the bottom of the cold spell will become colder and the rebound become less warm, till by late November we should transition into mostly cold winter weather punctuated with brief spring-like warm-ups. We received some rain from the weekend cold front, but once again much less than the official St. Louis weather station about 10 miles away. It’s not the fact that the rainfall varies so much over short distances that puzzles me; that happens often. It’s the fact that starting in June, the pattern has so consistently favored the official station getting more rain than we do. I don’t think anyone can explain it. It will just be one of Nature’s mysteries, even quirks.