Yesterday, in my post on local food, MK and Patty pointed out that if local eating is really going to take off, people need to know how to cook, and realize cooking isn’t necessarily more time-consuming than cooking from a box.

This got me thinking…what are foods that people could easily make at home, but think they can’t? The idea would be to have a series of cooking classes with the theme “Yes, you can cook it at home.”These things would ideally take no special equipment or hours of prep, and would replicate things that people think they “have to” buy because it’s way too hard to make them at home.

Here are some of my initial ideas:

• Chinese restaurant-style sauces (white, brown, sweet-and-sour, and spicy orange glaze)
• Crackers
• Pizza
• Fajitas
• Fish sticks & chicken nuggets
• French fries (oven fries)
• Lasagne

What else can you think of?

Found a great new blog this week at http://growthechange.blogspot.com/ by Canadian authors “Freija and Beringian Fritillary.” Guessing those aren’t real names, but wouldn’t it be awesome if they were? A few highlights:

• A knitted scarf/facemask for biking, which Kate should knit for Ken
• Recipe for making soymilk, plus what to do with the okara (soy pulp) when you’re done
• A review of harvesting grains by hand – why didn’t I think of a bread knife??
• …plus lots of great pictures, thoughts on sustainability, and essays of garden lore based on extensive observation (life cycle of their 4 types of ladybugs, fungal infections in the garden, etc.)

Also, Kate at Living the Frugal Life has inspired me to build a rocket stove – an outdoor stove built with very simple technology (bricks and a metal pipe) that will run on twigs. Paella, anyone?

It’s been a tough day, oh people of the Internet. I was working from home today due to health issues that, try though I might, I cannot wish, medic, or magic away. I got a request to present information on a project I’ve been working on for over 2 years to a very high-up person at the university, and I couldn’t fill it because I couldn’t be certain I’d not puke on him if I went in. So my boss had to take herself away from another very important meeting to cover for me. This is incredibly hard for me to deal with. I feel like I have total job fail.

Then there’s the crummy energy news: the IEA has been covering up how dire the world oil situation is, largely due to pressure from Americans who don’t want people to panic. Remember how badly that blip of $4/gallon gas threw off the economy? That’s going to become the norm, folks. The only silver lining there is that maybe it’ll slow down global warming, which makes me think Michigan will look like the Dust Bowl in my lifetime. We sure won’t be flying in strawberries from California and chicken from China, and I don’t know if Michigan can feed itself. We’re in a better position than many states: far from an ocean coast, plenty of fresh water (though some places have lots of groundwater pollutants), a diverse and fairly healthy agricultural base, and lots of arable land…which is tilled solely by diesel-powered tractors, outside a few Amish farms and “wacko” organic veggie plots.

And speaking of Michigan, a report from the Pew Center on the States tells us that Michigan is likely going to have California-like money problems in the near future. And a dozen other states, too. How bad is it going to get here? We already have 15+% unemployment (over 20% in Detroit). I’m incredibly grateful to have a job (don’t think about today’s job fail, don’t think about today’s job fail) and there are only slight, very distant rumblings that either my or my husband’s jobs might be in jeopardy, but I’m worried about my family and people around me.

I feel really impotent today. I can’t even go out and garden, which is my usual answer for despair of any sort, what with the dark and the health today.

What do you do when it all just seems like too much bad news you can’t do anything about?

I realized the other day that the next realistic steps my household might take to reduce carbon emissions are to carpool more (we commute to work together but could add up to 2 more people in our car) and to move to geothermal heat.

Geothermal systems – even with the rebates – would probably cost $15,000. That’s a ton of money. Even supposing we had $15K to spend on a system (and that’s a big “if”), would it be the best way to spend it? What would truly be the most carbon-reduction-bang for fifteen thousand bucks?

Some initial ideas:

• Help 15 households insulate their attics to R-60
• Buy super-efficient furnaces for several households
• Help 3-5 farmers build hoophouses to produce local veggies through the winter
• Invest in a “neighborhood energy startup” with a gasifier (makes heat and electricity and biodiesel), possibly with a permaculture system of greenhouses, coppice groves, etc.
• Just buy land and start a coppice grove for sustainable heating fuel production, and possibly invest in a pelletizer
• Some kind of education program? I’m thinking the actual return is hard to measure, and it’s not education about global warming that folks around here lack.

Anyone have data on any of these? Or other ideas? bonus points for things that are done once and keep on saving energy and reducing emissions without any further attention or work.

A couple weeks ago, I finally bought a thermal cooking pot. It’s been on my radar for a long time, and I finally splurged. The basic idea is that it’s a pot-in-a-Thermos. You put your ingredients in the inner pot and bring it to a boil on the stove, then put that pot into the insulated outer pot, close the lid, and the food cooks using the retained heat. It’s sort of like a countertop version of haybox cooking, and the idea is to save energy and keep from heating up your kitchen when cooking.

I’ve learned that this gizmo has definite strong and weak points. I’m honestly not sure I’d recommend buying one; they are pretty pricey and it doesn’t do everything I’d hoped it would. Still, it works really well for some things, and I can’t stop experimenting! I thought I’d post the results of my experiments to date, so if you’re considering getting one, you can make a really informed decision. Details after the cut:

Excellent Results

• 

  Beef stew. I browned a slice of beef shank and some meaty bones in the pot with a little oil and onion, then added water up to about 2″ below the top of the pot. (This is considerd “full.”) After it had boiled for 15 minutes, I put it into the outer pot and let it sit for 2 hours. Then I brought it back to a boil (which took only a minute or two) and put it back in the cooker for another hour. At that, point I had a really nice pot of beef stock. It was still steaming hot when I put it in the fridge overnight. The next day, pulled the meat off the bones and added carrots, onions, kale, barley, salt, and seasonings. Brought it to a boil and dropped it into the cooker for 30 minutes, and it was probably the best beef barley soup I’ve ever made. The carrots retained a nice “bite” and the barley was fully cooked. Usually, the carrots are overdone by the time the barley is cooked.

• Yogurt. This was the exception to the rolling-boil rule. Heated the milk to 180, cooled to 110, added diluted starter, and popped it in the pot overnight. In the morning, it was yogurt, with no attention, energy, or re-warming needed. I definitely prefer this over our previous cooler-with-hot-pack method.
• Coconut vegetable curry. Can of coconut milk, can of tomatoes, and a lot of chopped vegetables (including white and sweet potatoes). Bring to a boil, pop in pot for 30 minutes. Quite tasty; all veggies done nicely.
• Taking hot food to a potluck. It’ll keep food hot for several hours without added heat or electricity, so this is perfect for taking a pot of curry or chili to a potluck.
• UPDATE 10-31-09: Beans. I filled the pot a little over halfway with water and threw in a cup and a half of dried black-eyed peas. Soak overnight, bring to a boil, and throw in thermal sleeve for…a while. I had to go out, so mine were in there around 4 hours, and they were *perfect* when I got home. Cooked through, but not at all mushy. As an added bonus, black eyed peas do not make my heart race the way other beans do!
• UPDATE 11-3-09: Potatoes. Dice and cover with cold water (pot half full); bring to a boil and let sit in thermal sleeve for about 20-30 minutes.

Middling Results

• Chicken stock. Eventually, I did get good stock and tender chicken out of the pot, but it took several re-warmings and 4-5 hours of “steeping” time. I was also making stock out of the same batch of chickens on the stove, and to be fair, it took about 4 hours on a constant simmer. These were some tough old hens, and while the stock was great, the chicken never really got meltingly tender (even after pressure canning). I will continue to make stock in this pot when I’m doing one chicken at a time.

Poor Results

• Split pea soup. The batch was so small (1c peas and 3c water) that not enough heat was retained to cook them.
• Brown rice. I’ve tried this four times and ruined a really depressing amount of rice, both because of my own failure to measure ingredients, and the pot’s failure to cook.
  • 2c rice, unknown water = fairly crunchy rice. Hmm, did I put in 2 or 4 cups of water? Well, I’ll just add some more hot water, like I do on the stove and I’ll end up with…wallpaper paste!
  • 2c rice, 3c water = slightly crunchy rice. Um, Em? Do you remember that rice is supposed to be made with TWO cups of water for every cup of rice? No? Well, don’t you think it would be a good idea to MEASURE YOUR INGREDIENTS PROPERLY before blaming equipment failure? That’s a good girl.
  • 2c rice, 4c water = fully cooked rice floating in a lot of hot water. You see, this pot doesn’t let steam out the way a pot on the stove does, which is why the 2c water/3c rice was only slightly crunchy. I just dumped this batch into a sieve and let it drain, and it actually was the best batch to date. Not perfect rice, but it was edible. Next time, I will try cooking 2c rice in 6 or 8c water and just plan to drain it like pasta.
  • 1c rice, 2c water with complicated “double boiler” arrangement inside the pot = total failure. My idea was to put the rice and water inside a stainless steel bowl, and surround that with boiling water. I think the idea bears repeating, but by a different method – perhaps using a Mason jar on a silicone hot pad (so the jar doesn’t crack) with a lot more water around it so the inner pot can actually boil.
  • 2 c rice, enough water to fill pot half full. Let it stand for one hour and it was completely overcooked.

Lessons Learned

• You must bring the contents of the inner pot to a full, rolling boil for a couple minutes before putting it into the thermal outer pot.
• The pot works best when it’s full (80% of 4.5 liters, in this case).
• It works poorly or not at all when it’s not full.

At one point, Thermos made a 6L version of this that came with two pots. You could either cook 2 different things at the same time, or fill one with water to help the other one cook. I can’t find it now, and I’m not sure if the difference between 3L and 4.5L would be enough to, say, get my rice to cook.

Next Steps

• See if I can find a way to do a pot-in-a-pot method that will let me cook smaller quantities of food.
  • UPDATE: This hasn’t worked terribly well, though I did get a passable split pea soup by putting the soup ingredients in a small stainless steel pot and filling the thermal pot *around* it with water.
• Compare to a standard pressure cooker, which also uses less fuel than regular stove-top cooking, but does so at much higher heats. Supposedly it’s faster, too, but I’m not sure that it will be once you take cool-down/depressurizing time into account. But it might do a better job with rice and other things made in 1L instead of 4L quantities.

I’m doing my first workshop on stocking a pantry to live out of! This workshop aims to appeal to a variety of folks: those who want to save money, those who want quick meal prep, and those who think the economy is going to collapse but aren’t quite ready to join a peak oil group or move to a commune. Here’s the announcement: [EDIT 8-13 4:30pm - revised location]

Oct 10: Stocking your Pantry

Join us at 10 AM on Saturday Oct 10 at St. Paul Church elementary school (495 Earhart Rd., Ann Arbor) when Emily Springfield, a member and organizer of Ann Arbor’s Preserving Traditions club (http://preservingtraditions.wordpress.com), will present a workshop on Pantry Staples. Having easily-stored staples on hand will make meal preps easy, and Emily will even share some simple recipes to which you need only add vegetables or meat. In addition, Emily will share tips on basics to have on hand in case of emergency (think blizzard or tight funds), items you could buy in bulk or on sale to stockpile.

Cost is only $5 and includes the workshop and munchies. We promise to let you go by noon. Please RSVP to Ruth Zielke 994 3718 (azielke914@comcast.net). Bring your friends. Ask that nice woman who sits in front of you every Sunday if she will join you. There will be time for sharing tips and stories, too. It will be great to be together. There is no home game, so you won’t even have to worry about traffic! Treat yourself to great fellowship!

Going into this weekend, I was pretty tired of the eternal To-Do list. Items might change, but I never really catch up. And some items never change: clean the kitchen, weed the garden, clear off the dining room table, do the bills. Gah.

I wanted out of my rut this weekend, so I decided to ditch the to-do list and instead focus on making something beautiful. I decided to start with the front flower bed. Flats at the market are $8 – don’t need to make that offer twice! And black-eyed susans were 4/$10. And supposedly perennial, too. Sold!And as luck would have it, my favorite garden store was demoing a meat smoker by offering surprisingly large samples of smoked pork butt, homemade salsa, potato salad, and curtido. Beautiful!

Got home and started puttering, and before I knew it, I’d planted the flat of flowers – mostly in the front bed (let me just pull this grass and clover and elm seedlings out to make room), and also in the shade planter on the back deck (hmm, none of the herbs overwintered…better yank those…), and because I had a few left, I scanned the garden and planted them smack in the middle of my line of sight. That happened to be the edge of the rutabaga bed (just let me toss those last scraggly turnips that didn’t get harvested last week and hey…are those volunteer potatoes? Looks like dinner to me…). And oh, heck, why don’t I plant up this empty pot of dirt on teh deck with the last couple things from that flat? And move the rest of the junk off to the end of the deck where I don’t have to see it? I’ll put it away…later. But at least now I don’t have to look at it.

Dinner’s in the sun oven (baby potatoes and rutabagas, a couple bulb onions, brussels sprouts, and asparagus with a little schmaltz and seasoned salt), so while I’m waiting, I’ll put away this stack of cookbooks (huh, if I wipe down the coffee table, the living room will look really nice…) and take a shower. And if I wash those last couple pans, hey, the kitchen is also beautiful!

I’m glad I decided to ignore my to-do list today. Making things beautiful was much more interesting.

Last summer, we were told that our well was getting up there in years and would soon need to be replaced. So we started a New Well Fund, and by this spring, we’d saved up enough to have the new well drilled.

Out here in the boonies (only 5 miles from “civilization” like cable, natural gas, city water, and Meijer’s), we are plagued by power outages. It’s better than it was a couple years ago, when every heavy rain would kill our power for hours at a time, but we still lose power for 8 – 72 hours about once or twice a year. And as you probably know, when you’re on a well, no power means no water. We keep jugs of water in the house, but we decided that an even better solution would be to have a hand pump on the well.

We opted for a Simple Pump. The beauties of this pump are many. It needs no priming. (Older-style pumps require you to pour water into the pump before it will start to draw water, so you’re out of luck if you’re completely out of water, or your priming water is frozen). The pump won’t freeze in the winter – you can use it all year with no modifications. It installs alongside your existing electric pump, so there’s no switchover between electric and manual. In fact, both can be running at the same time. And supposedly, you can run a hose from the Simple Pump to the pressure tank in your basement, charge the pressure tank, and continue to get water flowing out of your faucets. I need a male/male hose adapter, and then I’ll try this out and report on how it goes. [Update: here's the review. The verdict? Possible but maybe not preferable.]

For pumping into a bucket or hose, the Simple Pump is very easy to use. I can operate it with one hand, though I prefer the balance of using two hands. Our well is about 100’ deep, and it takes 5 strokes to get the water going, then an additional 10 strokes to pump a gallon of water. There are two handle settings; the other setting makes pumping easier, but you get less water per stroke. I actually found that setting too easy at our depth, like riding a bike in first gear downhill. A child could definitely pump water, and because of the hose attachment, you could use the pump action to move the water rather than relying on hauling buckets.

The cost of having the Simple Pump installed during new well installation was $1300 (parts and labor). That was a bit steep, especially on top of the $4300-5000 for a typical well installation, but we think it’s worth it. Cribley Well Drilling did the installation; they said this is the 6^th or 7^th they’ve done this year – so apparently, lots of folks are thinking this is a good idea. It might be something that a group of neighbors could pitch in for, or perhaps a church or Grange.

I also have to say, the quality of water from the new well just floors me. Our old well was at least 40 years old, we think, and the steel casing was starting to disintegrate. We used a whole-house sediment filter and a Britta pitcher filter, and the water tasted like iron and stained everything. Bathwater was gray from suspended manganese sediment. From time to time, I would switch to store-filtered water for drinking, and it tasted so…clean. (Although even the old well water tasted cleaner than chlorinated city water.)

The water from the new well tastes decent right out of the tap. I’ll be curious to see if that lasts; the well was just bleached, after all. And I know that the plastic (PVC?) lining is not the best thing to be in contact with drinking water, but well water is 55 degrees, and plastic leaches the least when it’s cold. And honestly, after drinking rust flakes and fine particle sediment, I think I’ll risk it. The well driller said we should be able to quit filtering the water completely, too.

So all in all, I’m really pleased. The service from Cribley was fantastic (they even ran a PVC conduit through the basement wall for the hose to charge the pressure tank), the water is great, and the hand pump is everything I’d hoped for. I’m also wondering if the country curse of “iron in the water” is a misnomer, if the iron is actually your disintegrating well casing.

I thought I’d list thethings we do as a matter of course to save energy. You can use this list as a resource, an inspiration, or ignore it completely; just please don’t use it as a springboard for guilt, unless guilt actually motivates you to change.And especially don’t guilt-trip if you’re un/underemployed and just trying to get food on the table.

But if you can put aside a few extra bucks, a lot of this stuff gets at 30% tax rebate until 2010, so now’s a great time to make some of these changes. I’d dearly love it if you would find one or more things on this list that make you think, “Hey, I could do that” and then take 3-6 months to work it into your daily life. If you really commit to doing just one or two at a time, five years from now, you’ll be doing all this and more and it won’t even seem like a drudge.

I do recommend writing out all you do to save energy, though. It sure surprised me to write all this out…it’s become so natural that I don’t even think about it any more.

And please, won’t someone write the “Energy Savings 102″ book? It seems like lots of people say “change your lightbulbs” or “throw away your fridge and furnace” but there’s not a lot out there describing realistic steps to take in between. Well, maybe this is the beginning of that list, and y’all can add your own comments of additional steps to take.

Details, details…

Household portrait

• Two adults, both employed outside the home.
• Work (and town in general, including groceries) is 11 miles away from home.
• Closest public transport is 8 miles away – by the time you get to the bus stop, you might as well keep walking to your destination.
• No kids, no pets.
• Husband attends capoeira class twice a week.
• 1800 sf ranch house w/partial unfinished basement, breezeway, and garage
• 1300 sf of garden, plus 8×12 greenhouse
• All electric appliances (hot water, dryer, range/oven)
• Propane and wood (fireplace insert) heat
• Car 1: 2003 Prius, 45mpg, ~25,000 miles/year
• Car 2: older Ford Explorer, 18mpg, ~1200 miles/year
• We live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, zone 5b. Winters are very cold compared to the rest of southern Michigan and moderately snowy – it can get down to -20 at night for several days straight, though more usual low nighttime temps are around 10 degrees.

Gasoline savings

• When my 18 year-old Honda Accord died, we replaced it with a used 2003 Prius.
• We drive to work together every day, with a few rare exceptions.
• We generally shop for groceries on the way home from work and “combine trips.”
• We loaned our 30mpg car to my brother indefinitely so he doesn’t have to drive the 18mpg SUV 40 miles to/from work each day.  That also makes us much more restrained about driving the second car anywhere at all.

Electricity savings

• Four of the 5 of our most commonly-used lightbulbs are CFLs. The fifth one is in an enclosed fixture, and the only bulbs we can find small enough buzz so much they drive me nuts.
• We swapped out every 100 watt bulb in the rest of the house for 1 or 2 40 watt bulbs. (When we moved in, the ceiling fixtures each had two or three 100-watt bulbs – yikes, you could *tan* in there…).
• We’ve scouted the house with a Kill-o-watt and eliminated virtually all “phantom power draw.” So, for example, we unplug the TV, DVD player, and converter box when we’re not actually watching.
• We now turn off the furnace in the basement during the summer – it appears to have a significant phantom draw.
• The TVs are on about 5 hours a week total; half of that is for playing exercise videos.
• We air-dry all shirts, pants, and skirts on plastic hangers on a clothes pole in the laundry room.
• The water heater is set at the temp where it is comfortable when the shower is on 100% hot.
• No one in the house uses hair dryers, curling irons, clothes irons, or other small energy-sucking devices.
• We try to “stack” baking tasks, so we only have to heat the oven once to make, say, pizza and granola.
• We avoid A/C as much as possible – thermostat is set around 78 during the summer. We open windows at night whenever it’s cool and not-humid (which was almost all of last summer).
• We installed a pergola over the front picture windows. The screen across the top blocks the sun and heat in the summer, but we put the screen away in the winter so we do get some solar gain when it’s cold.
• All appliances are Energy Star (slowly replaced over the years). Front-loading washer, normal-sized fridge, very small chest freezer.
• Water softener calculates the number of gallons used, rather than cycling every day. This saves water, too, and since we’re on a well, water usage = electric usage.
• We’re playing with solar cooking, fireplace cooking, and cooking with retained heat (“haybox cooking”), but those aren’t part of our daily life at this point.

Heat savings

• R-65 cellulose insulation in the attic
• Attic hatch sealed with Velcro (kit)
• Switches and outlets have those foam thermal seals.
• The drafts between/behind our kitchen cupboards have been sealed with spray foam. (No idea why that’s so drafty, but freezing cold air used to come out from between the bottom of the cupboards.)
• At first, we sealed our unusable fireplace with an inflatable draft stopper, but after 5 years we were able to fix the fireplace and really seal the air leaks by installing a fireplace insert. And, of course, now we can heat with wood. I have some qualms about pollution, but the insert is EPA rated, reburns essentially all particulate matter, and is fueled with locally-renewable resources. It also lets us truly heat only the living room.
• Seal the windows each winter with that plastic that tapes on and shrinks tight.
• Thermostat is 63 in the winter when we’re home and awake, 55 when we’re gone, and 57 overnight. We do not feel cold, and we do not wear hats in the house (though we do wear slippers and are generally under a blanket when sitting around reading or watching a movie in the evening). Fixing the fireplace let us drop the thermostat 5 full degrees, and we feel WARMER now than we did before. (Seriously – cap your fireplace or put in an insert. Fireplaces are evil.)
• Thermal curtain between the house and the breezeway. This keeps the breezeway around 45 all winter, which is actually a good “root cellar” temp.

Food miles

• The vast majority of the food we eat at home was grown within 100 miles of home. The major exceptions include rice, sandwich bread, raisins, raisin toast, carrots, avocadoes, and ice cream ~2pt/mo.
• I grow enough veggies to keep us in greens from June to October. Hopefully the greenhouse will extend that some, too. Contrary to popular belief, I do not grow the majority of our food, nor is that really a goal of mine.
• A recent change we’ve made that has had a really good impact on our food miles and waste production is making our own yogurt. Now, instead of shipping 6oz refrigerated cups of yogurt from California, we make yogurt twice a month from local cream-top milk bought in a glass bottle. We stir in homemade jam. The only plastic to throw away is the bottle cap, we’re almost never out of yogurt, and the furthest anything had to travel was the sugar (~ 100 miles).  And did I mention we’re saving nearly $20/month just in yogurt?
• We eat out too much to really be sustainable. :/

Ok, that’s all I can think of right now. Man, some of this stuff happened so long ago I forget we did it. Which means you can do it once and forget it, too, and it’ll keep saving you energy as long as you’re in that house.

Goal: 10.25 tonnes
Actual: 14 tonnes

Well, we missed our goal. By a *lot*. We used only about 1 tonne less carbon than last year, so far as I can tell from my less-than-perfect recordkeeping for 2007-08. I’m not happy about it, and I’m not making excuses. I am looking for reasons, though, and ways to cut. But I also feel like we’ve hit a plateau, and it’s going to take some oomph and hard decisions to further reduce our carbon output.

* per household, or for 2 people
**  Every place you look will tell you a different number for average US carbon emissions per household. To get the average figure of 22.7 tonnes, I used the same conversion factors I used for us and applied them to the US averages I found.

Agonizing detail, including several surprising ways we reduced our impact, after the cut…

Here are some factors to take into consideration

• Most of our family lives far away – 600-1000 miles away. Not visiting is not an option at this point in time.
• My husband was participating in some training that required 1300-mile round trips 3x/year. He carpooled with 2 other people and he always drove, because our Prius gets the best gas mileage of the available options. That training is done, and will eliminate nearly 400o miles of travel next year.
• Our stove, dryer, and hot water are electric. No other option where we live, except maybe solar water pre-heating.
• We had a leak in our propane tank for 6-9 months last year.
• We live in southern Michigan; temps got down to -20 at times this winter. Our thermostat is set at 55 when we’re out of the house; 63 when we’re home and awake; 57 overnight.
• We bought a full cord of wood but didn’t use it – next year, we’ll do more wood heat instead of heating the whole house.
• We bought wind offsets from our power company AND from Native Energy, to the tune of 125% of our electric usage. However, we’re counting offsets as a “gift” and recording our actual usage here.
• Our wood was harvested by a neighbor about 3 miles from the house and consisted mainly of ash trees killed by the emerald ash borer.

Things that really, really helped us save energy

We had already plucked a lot of low-hanging fruit like CFLs, carpooling to work, and putting plastic on the windows in the winter. Here are a few things that don’t show up on many how-to-save-energy lists that REALLY worked for us:

• Fixing the propane leak. The month we got it fixed, we saved 125 gallons of propane over the previous month. If we’d fixed the leak earlier, we might have made our propane goal.
• Putting in the fireplace insert . Inserts seal up tight, like a wood stove, and block the flow of warm air up the chimney. Keep in mind – we had an inflatable flue blocker installed, but you could tell air was always moving through there. So fixing (sealing) the fireplace let us turn the temp down, saved 175 gallons of propane (maybe twice that, if we’d fixed the propane leak sooner), and felt *warmer*. If you can’t spring for a fireplace insert (~$5000), seriously consider getting the chimney permanently capped (~$350). You are losing more heat up the chimney than you’re gaining by burning wood – not to mention that inserts trap/reburn much, much more of the pollution caused by burning wood.
• Heating only the main living space, when practical. The fireplace heats the living room but doesn’t do much for the rest of the house. We’d heat with wood one evening and one or two weekend days each week and let the furnace kick on overnight. We didn’t start a fire when we were only going to be home and awake for an hour or two. Next year, we’ll try to do more of our heating with wood, though that may mean we use a small electric heater in the bedroom to take the chill off. I’ve discovered it’s hard for me to sleep when my nose is cold and runny.
• I discovered I feel colder when the temp gets up to 68, vs. 63 degrees. We’re still learning how to regulate the heat from the fireplace, so there were times when the living room got up to 68 according to the room thermometer. I generally felt colder then than I did when the fireplace was still heating up and the room was 62-63 degrees. My only explanation for this is that maybe I was getting too warm and starting to sweat, which then made me feel cold.
• Our furnace has a large phantom power draw. In May, 2009, our electric usage was 130kwh (30%!) less than average. I can think of two things we did during that time: One, we turned off our radon fan for a week or so. (But I’ve done that before and not noticed a dip in kwh). Secondly, our furnace has an off switch right on the furnace. (It looks like a light switch.) I turned the furnace off at the switch off for about half of May, rather than just turning the thermostat off. I think our furnace was drawing a lot of “standby power” even when it was not in use. Hopefully, we can keep the central system off for the summer, except for the nights when it’s too hot and humid to sleep.

So ok. We were nearly 4t over our goal, and only about 1t less than my estimate of last year’s emissions. But we still managed to be under 50% of average US carbon emissions this year, which isn’t bad. It’s still too much, but it’s not horrible. I guess it takes more than a year to make changes of this scope.

What these results tell us

• We drive a lot. Even at an average 45 mpg, gasoline is our #1 carbon emission. We do carpool, combine trips, and all that good stuff, but we’re 11 miles from town, so round trips add up. Long car trips are our big downfall, though. And they’re tough to cut because our best friends, most of our family, and important parts of our spiritual life are 650 miles away.
• We need to find a more efficient way to heat our home in the winter. We insulated the attic to R65 a couple years ago, and we put the fireplace insert in, but heating 1800 square feet for 2 people is just silly.
• We use more electricity than we could possibly “make up for” with solar, wind, or human power. While our electric usage is less than half US average, and I don’t think we have that many appliances, lights, etc., we still use way more electricity than we should. We use about 13.5 kwh/day; suggested use for a solar array is 3 kwh/day. This is a tough one to cut, because out here in the boonies there’s no alternate fuel for hot water, stove, and dryer, and I’d thought we had already cut all phantom power and useless gadgets.

Changes we’re planning to make next year

• Keep the furnace turned off at the switch as much as possible without freezing people or pipes.
• Heat more with wood – any time we’re in the house and awake for more than 2-3 hours.
• Insulate the walls of the house and see if we can turn the thermostat down any more.
• Get a new, better-sealed and -insulated front door.
• I’m going to shower only every other day, and wash my hair on the off days. (I have a really hard time getting out of a hot shower! I tried timing myself this year, which helped, but I think just skipping showers will be easier with better results.)
• Washing clothes on true cold, rather than “auto temp cold” – which is actually using some hot water.
• Fewer long trips by car.
• Air travel is dicey; we have family with health issues and won’t have as much control over our need to fly as we’d like.
• Experiment more with environmental energy: solar cooking, haybox cooking, freezing jugs of water on the deck in the winter and putting them in the fridge, etc.
• Contemplate unplugging the fridge in the winter (use ice jugs and turn it into a cooler) and unplug the tiny chest freezer in the summer (eat all the food until harvest/hog season comes back).

So that’s where we are. Next year’s goal is 10.5 tonnes. We’ll see how that goes!