# WL7 housing/resilience v1.0
We want to go deep on our house and continue putting down roots and making connections in this community. The greatest improvements that can be made as far as environmental impact is related to our two shelter options: house and van. Some not fully formed ideas about various systems, energy, money, and information flows follow through sketch notes and writing. I think gradually visiting, revisiting and refining these over time will help to crystalize the mountainFrugal system more in my mind. There is an inherent tension in this project between anti-consumerism and some semblance of self-reliance due to some upfront capital costs. I think it can be done in a smart way overtime.
Any suggestions are welcome.
The local history of the land where our house was built was conifer forest, cabbage farm, and then 1950s "suburban" development even though we are 150+ miles from the nearest large city. Our house has had many retro-upgrades including extra insulation, new double paned windows, and a large wood burning stove with large brick thermal mass (fireplace before), sky light ports for kitchen and pantry (previous owners). The previous owners (family of 4) used ALOT of wood for heating and the wood took up most of the side yard on the West/Southwest side of the house (5-6 cord). Our heating needs are estimated to be 0.5 or less so the physical wood footprint is dramatically reduced.
The West side of the house is mostly devoid of plant life. We want to plant edible shrubs out to the property line to make use of this space and if they grow tall enough to also reduce the afternoon solar load on the West wall. We put up a sun shade on the window on the West side of the house and it immediately reduced the afternoon temps in the living room by a few degrees. The sun is much lower angle now as we head into winter so there is less solar heat gain. An interesting observation was that we had an early October cold spell that lasted a few days and the house was much colder then compared to now even though the average outside temps are colder now. The Southern aspect trees on our property and the neighbors' property had not lost their leaves yet. This blocked all of the nice morning and early afternoon fall sunshine our house would have gotten.
We plan to put a solar panel on the roof of the woodshed and set up a small charging station in the office room next to the shed. The manifold and electric switching system for the drip irrigation is located between the shed and the house. Power outages during the heat wave this past summer while we were away drained the small back up 9v battery to the manifold and the small pumps ultimately killing most of our early season garden plants. The manifold and pumps will be able to run regardless of the electric to the house with a backup system. I plan to make the system large enough to provide a small charging station for our phones, watches, headlamps, LED desk lamps, kindles and bike lights. I found some cool designs online using rolling tool boxes as the box so we could bring this with us in the van during winter trips when watering is not needed. This will provide a sun tracking (aka I move it) panel collecting lower angle sun.
We view the van as a small subunit of the home system where the inputs are fewer in number, but we will have to solve more problems in the market place (e.g. food, fuel, etc.).
I have a pretty good idea of the physical aspects of human physiology at my current age and health level due to constant feedback of low pain, high energy, etc. It is much harder to design a system that looks at what normal aging does to both males and females. This aspect is a moving target, but one that we have to engage with regardless if we have perfect information. What does life in either our house or our van look like at 80+ years old? Impossible to know, but a ripe area for personal research and probabilistic estimates.
It is also interesting to consider the information flows into and out of the house. Internet, culture, discussions with my partner, guests, neighbors, the mail. I suspect there is a deeper insight here as it is one of the major leverage points for systems change, but I will have to think more.
Taking a different paradigm, such as the one outlined in RetroSuburbia and overlaying on our current physical house, van, body and social systems is going to be a very fun challenge. As an example, there are human environment interactions that are occurring likely just how our house is laid out with respect to the rooms, the plot, the street, the neighbors, the municipality, the surrounding forest, the region, etc. Or alternatively, the connections between greater electricity use during summer nights that do not cool down AND there is polluted air from distant (or near) wildfire smoke.
Acorn update: So far we have collected ~12 lbs of acorns. If the hog farmer will in-fact trade for these (even just bones for broth...tonkotsu ramen... yum) it would be a good trade for something we cannot produce here. All of the leaves falling has made acorn collection more challenging because they are now mostly under the leaves. My original conception that the leaves and acorns would fall at the same time was correct. Abscission of the connective cell layers is apparently timed. This makes collection more difficult, even though the total number of acorns has increased dramatically. Will provide another update after the big fall rake into the compost pile. I plan on layering the leaves with the already "cooking" compost in my three bin system for the winter. Hopefully this will provide a nice base for the bottom of the planter bins.