Sunday, May 22, 2011

Building Ecotopia: Living without Electricity, Part 3

by Chuck Hall
If you’re planning to live without electricity from the grid, then what about home heating? Is it possible to forego electricity without freezing in the winter? If you’re building your own home, you can use passive solar to help to some extent. ‘Passive solar’ means aligning your home so that you have a lot of glass facing to the south during the winter months (assuming you live in the northern hemisphere) to maximize heat from the winter sun. Planting deciduous trees on the south side of the house will help in this regard. When the leaves are on the trees in the summer, they provide shade. In the winter, when more sunlight is needed for warmth, the trees have shed their leaves, allowing for more sunlight. Overhangs can also be strategically placed to block the summer sun while maximizing the winter sun.
Passive solar design can go a long way towards meeting your heating needs, but what do you do when it isn’t enough? One option is a wood-fired heating stove or fireplace. You can’t beat a warm hearth fire for coziness and romantic atmosphere! Today’s wood-fired heating stoves and fireboxes are much more energy efficient and less polluting than your grandparents’ wood stoves. Since they are designed to burn hotter than their counterparts of yesteryear, more of the wood burns, so less carbon and other pollutants are released into the atmosphere. Of course, you’d have to have a ready wood supply and now mind chopping wood on occasion. If that’s not a problem for you, visit the Wood Heat Organization at: www.woodheat.org.
A newer home heating alternative is the biodiesel stove. These stoves can burn either biodiesel or regular diesel fuel if biodiesel isn’t available in your area. And as with the biodiesel cooking stove, you can always make your own fuel. For more information on biodiesel heating stoves, visit Kuma Stoves at: www.kumastoves.com/bio_diesel.
If you have a biodiesel heater, you may also want to consider attaching a water line to it to heat water for showers and baths during the winter months. In many cases, such a system will supply all of your hot water needs when it’s cold outside. During the summer months you can place a solar collector on a south-facing roof. Such collectors can be made inexpensively yourself using PVC pipe painted black. You can find detailed instructions on how to build a collector at Build it Solar: www.builditsolar.com/Projects/WaterHeating/water_heating.htm. The water can be heated the roof solar collector during the summer and by the home heating system during the winter, eliminating the need for an electric water heater altogether.
If such a system seems too elaborate for you, you might also consider tankless water heating systems. Such systems attach to the water line and heat the water as it flows, eliminating the need for a tank. While some of these run on electricity, most run on propane or natural gas. If you’re interested, House Needs offers a wide variety at: www.houseneeds.com. So far I haven’t been able to find a manufacturer that offers a biodiesel tankless water heater, but as demand for green products continues to increase, rest assured that there’s probably one on the horizon.

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