Home of the future?

I've recently been setting up my first smart home purchase- blinds that will close and open when programmed to keep heat out and let sunlight in for plants. This is so futuristic to me that I have been reminded of this fallow blog. 

These are the ikea Fyrtur. The inches of space left on the sides which seemed okay in the product photos, seemed different with light streaming in and when viewing at an oblique angle- I was able to see outside. I sent them back even though the marled gray is so beautiful. I swapped them for the Tredansen. The Tredansen blinds are nearly the width of the housing so they fill the window frame much better. At first I didn't like them but now they have faded into the background. 

Now my dreams have come true- sunlight wakes me in the morning, then a shade shields me from the hot morning sun, then the shades roll up all day for some nice fresh ambient light. I frequently think I have to change the configuration, only to see it is a slightly different weather or time of day than I thought and the blinds are still right on schedule. 

I enjoy tempering my experience with reading about when a technology was new. I recently saw a smart home on the show Columbo, which was set and filmed in the 70s- we have been hungry for this for a long time. But, the products are such a fact of life that I can't find breathless articles written with stars in the journalist's eyes. Well, that's not entirely true. I did find one that charmingly describes the smart home early adopters running empty pipes through all their walls so they would be ready for whatever new electronics got developed. Who would have thought it would come through the air?? 

Also though why does it take so much work on my part for it to come through the air. I realize I will need the router. I realize the blinds will need some receiver. And the remote, sure. But why also did I have to plug a disc into the router and a small guy (it is called a repeater, and it is like the plug part of a plug) into any outlet? I realize having me, the user, install the smart home app, Home Smart, on my phone, and teach it what all equipment I have, the names, the location in my home, and what I would like it to do is probably the best available solution for the most people. Maybe instead I could open and lower the blinds with the remote and after a few days it could start anticipating these times. Then as the seasons change I could use the remote again for a few days, training it anew. 

Tiny Solar Solutions

By Hannah West

As we are better learning to harness the vast supply of energy that beams down on us every day, a wider range of solar powered products are becoming available. This is exciting news both for those who can’t afford a full solar power system in their home and those who already have one but are looking for additional solar solutions—basically for anyone passionate about conserving energy. As an added bonus, solar powered products are great for when you’re out and about, roadtripping, camping, or for when someone’s already claimed the last plug outlet at your favorite coffee shop. Here are a few that we at Modernize are particularly excited about:

Device Charger

Via Ubergizmo

A dead phone battery is merely inconvenient in some situations, but it can be dangerous in others. Whether you’re running errands or exploring wilderness, a solar charger is an amazing solution that almost feels too easy. That’s the beauty of solar power! There are plenty of solar chargers out there—like the Gomadic SunVolt above—that can power up a number of electronic devices, so do your research before settling on one that just charges your phone or laptop.

Oven

Via SolarTown

Solar ovens could not be more perfect for camping. Instead of hovering over food while it’s cooking on the fire, you can set it in the oven and let it sit for hours while you’re busy doing other fun activities. Solar ovens are portable and so simple that you can easily make your own.

Outdoor Lights

Via My Fancy House

Because solar lights don’t need electrical wiring, you can put them anywhere you want on your property. Just make sure they’re in an optimum spot to soak up the sunlight so they can illuminate your yard at night.

Backpack

Via Birksun

A backpack with a built-in lightweight solar panel and USB connections will prevent you from ever fearing that red battery signal again. Whether you’re a student or a world traveler, a solar powered backpack will take away the stumbling block of running out of juice in a fast-paced world.

Tent

Via Bang Bang Tents

Yet another solution to the pervasive problem of getting power into our portable devices, the solar tent will allow campers to use camping gear and devices without worrying about proximity to electrical hookups. While solar tents are not yet widely available, there’s no doubt they’ll be popular with the festival-going crowds as soon as they hit the markets!

I have heard one hundred times that I must not run the water while I brush my teeth. But my tooth brushing technique involves constant rinsing so that I always have a cold, fresh toothbrush to work with. And the cold tap is on my right, and I brush right handed, so there is really no way my left hand can help at all. I have sincerely tried to brush my teeth with the water off and I hate it. I try to pretend I am camping, but I am not camping. I have tried using a cup of water, but they don't get clean so I just have to brush them over using running water.

Garden Oysters

Do you remember the buzz these two Berkeley kids created by selling a box of coffee grounds that will grow tasty mushrooms? When our box gave up its last oysters, I took the mycelium and inoculated our garden with it. This year, I'm being rewarded with some new oyster mushrooms!

Adding mushrooms to a raised bed garden is simple. do a little research and learn what sort of stuff your desired mushroom grows upon (oysters: oak, maple) and stuff some of the host material into the moist corners of your garden. Prep it well (make it good and wet, in most cases). Buy plugs, or look for living mycelia. Inoculate the host matter... and then wait. In a year or less you might have a new, renewable source of mushrooms!

BTW, did you notice how low effort this is?

What Makes Small and Tiny Homes Sustainable

Not all Small and Tiny homes are sustainable; they actually range in a broad spectrum from achieving high sustainability to not being sustainable at all… Many are sustainable because they use recycled, upcycled and minimal amounts of building material; with small space comes a smaller internal envelope, making heating and cooling less energy intensive; and by living the Small-Space lifestyle occupants generally consume and waste less store-bought products, further helping to reduce the planet’s overall carbon footprint. Sustainability in Small and Tiny home culture is a spectrum of principles and ethics based on the idea being mindful in how we interact with our personal and global environments’, which hopefully carries forward to our interactions with others.

The issues that work against Small and Tiny home design is that the Small-Space lifestyle does not suit people who have a lot of stuff, or are not in a financial position to make life changes, it is not reasonable to ask or expect people get rid of stuff or change their psyche to live in a small space. Additionally the cost of permits to legalize Trailer (Tiny) homes and Shipping container homes by California building codes is so expensive that the investment building these places is usually not worth the return. Other states are different and have more permissive building codes. For people who want to live mindfully of environmental issues not everyone needs to live in a small space. There are numerous options in larger types of architecture that allow an occupant to live by sustainability principles.

However, building-out small and tiny livable space can be a labor of love! To work with steel and convert an old shipping container into an appealing, attractive industrial looking guest room; to craft wood and colorfully paint a delightful Tiny home on a trailer frame; or construct an endearing artsy cottage from cob, cord wood, glass, or earth bags, these buildings have a charm and value separate than improving property values and wholly separate than living by ethics of environmental mindfulness, rather they can evoke a sense of artistic pleasure and are a form of interactive art that inspires awareness of how we relate to our surroundings.

Sustainable Spectrum - Design Ideals for Small or Tiny homes

1) Uses an Independent energy source, solar, wind, geothermal, etc. (off the grid)
2) Has a high insulative total R- value, design has a low energy intensive foot print.
3) Lots of recycled and upcycled materials used. Minimal new building material used in construction and maintenance.
4) Any building materials used are non-toxic (or minimally toxic) to environment as they break down over time.
5) All materials used are locally built, manufactured and acquired. Materials used are manufactured with sustainable philosophies as much as possible. (No stuff manufactured in China)
6) Reduced square footage, which creates a low potential for occupants to consume large amounts of household products.
7) Waste water recapturing systems (grey water) and organic methods of processing black water.
8) Food garden, either indoor or outdoor integrated into the home’s design.
9) Positive feel and character, pleasing aesthetics, which creates a wholesome ambiance for the occupant when interacting with the living space.

Learning the Gentler Lifestyle ~ Dave

Learning the Gentler Lifestyle ~ Dave

           For over a year I have lived in a small 7’-6” x 20’, 150 sqft. shipping container on an acre of land. Prior to moving to my container I had a spacious 3 bedroom condo, a 10,000 sqft. warehouse and 1 acre of land. Two years ago, on this day Jan. 10, I lost it all in a sheriff’s raid (except my one acre) and although this painful catastrophe was difficult to work through, today I am grateful for my loss as it reset my lifestyle and rebooted my psyche on a path of gentler healthier living.

           Rewiring my brain from a lifestyle of financial spoil (having whatever I wanted) in my larger comfortable home, to a lifestyle of constant organization and minimalist living in my small steel box, has been a struggle and a joy as I agonized (and still do) over letting go of emotional attachments and a large volume of physical stuff that overwhelmed my environment. Suddenly I didn't need so much furniture, suddenly I didn't need so many cloths, 4 bicycles, a computer in every room and a 52” plasma TV; rather I needed the right furniture and the right clothing that fit in with my smaller living arrangement.

           The psychology of living in a large space is different than the psychology of living in a “Tiny Home”. Small home psychology has forced me to be poignantly aware of how one relates to the square footage one resides in and has helped me to contemplate sustainable architecture and how we interact with our surroundings; versus when living in a larger home with enough space to just throw stuff around the house, my environment didn't matter because there was always enough space to live large, stock pile stuff, and have junk everywhere! Living in a small space with less possessions has been difficult, but it has also caused me to practice better personal habits and live more gently.

STUFF ~ Dave Harris

STUFF ~ Dave Harris

When you're home tonight take a moment to look around and check out your stuff… What do you see? If you’re like me maybe you see milk crates filled with 968.5 books, which only 101 or so of them you've actually read, but wouldn't dare get rid of any of them, because well you know, you want them around just in case you find some time to read 30 or 40 of’em some weekend off work with nothing else to do. Even though honestly, when you actually want to know about the information in them you will probably just Google it anyway (like the article below), but you keep these books, regardless of the clutter they create, to remind yourself the information is at your disposal, and yes they are neat to have around too because they make you look smart when friends come over…

This is the bane of having stuff. We love our stuff, we are inspired by our stuff, we are genetically wired to bring stuff back to our lair, store it and make it available when we need it, but there is a cost to all this stuff, it’s called environmental taxation. The hidden costs of objects we place around us in our personal and public lives that yield for us relatively little economic or emotional return for the expense they create. Expense that originates in mining raw material, processing materials into stuff to manufacture stuff with, marketing stuff to masses of people, delivering stuff to our homes and business, using stuff (often only once or twice), then paying storage fees to keep stuff around, and eventually if we’re psychologically able, like leaving a religion, we agonize over getting rid of the stuff we believe in...

            As we people of planet Earth increasingly become conscious of how we interact with our immediate and global environments, understanding the emotional connections we have to our stuff is paramount to sustaining wholesome living conditions. The following article is psychology research about people and their stuff. If you can identify yourself in this research how do you relate to your own stuff? What do you call clutter and what would you get rid of?

 Article: http://www.thepsychologist.org.uk/archive/archive_home.cfm?volumeID=26&editionID=228&ArticleID=2313

Human Powered Fun

I've become involved in the human powered kinetic sculpture world. Many of the billions of people on Earth use their muscles to meet their everyday needs for water, food, and shelter. I get to use my muscles to make strange vehicles move upon the face of the Earth. Above, the Whittaker, a pedal powered paddlewheel water taxi, seen here at Rivertown Revival in Petaluma. Below, the SemiSide, the world's first side-by-side semi recumbent sociable tandem bicycle, as Dave Harris and I learn how to ride it.

I'm capturing some of this work over at Three Feet of Air.

Introducing Dave Harris!

Welcome, Dave!

Dave Harris is a Contractor, Builder, Maker, Solutionist, and Sustainability enthusiast. Together, we just might rock the local Green Scene.

Why does Sonoma County need yet more info and exposure to how to live more gently on the planet? Don't you already follow Transition Town Sebastopol? Perhaps our perspective from keeping one foot in the coming age and one foot in the passing age will be entertaining.

Building a Floating Island

I've begun getting video.
http://vimeo.com/user7636532/building-a-floating-island

My New Nomadic Life

I share my days among the towns of Citrus Heights, Santa Rosa and Oakland as well as visiting a working vineyard near Clearlake. I'm connecting with old friends and making new friends.

It's a time of renewal for me.

At the global level, I believe this is the calm before the storm: in the next few months we will begin to feel the effects of Japan's calamity all over the world. Everywhere I go I am making mental catalogs of available resources, noting how resilient the locals are, and participating in conversations around helping those in need while also caring for ourselves.

I wasn't sure about whether any of this belonged on "The Home of the Future" but as I move into this new incarnation of the work I can see that it does.

Right now, today, I am eating these berries as I look at this broken swimming pool and imagine how to convert it to aquaculture using onsite materials.

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Waste

Cleaning out the refrigerator, I end up with a collection of bottles and containers formerly holding the last bits of condiments and food. Food stuffs I had already decided I would never finish eating.
A big part of sustainability is being careful what I buy at the store so that I have less stuff to throw away.
Tonight I removed about 20 pounds of compostible (food) waste from the kitchen and another 10 or so recyclable packaging.
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Updated Template

There was nothing wrong with the old template. However, the comment system had been taken over and was going to cost me money. I successfully archived all the comments before changing over to Blogger's comment system.

Backyard Foraging

My neighbor Jess writes a nice article that includes how to make pesto from nasturtiums. She's pretty keen on something she's calling "weed gardening." It's a technique of noticing what is growing really well in the margins of your yard, and using that as food. She made a successful quiche from sow thistle, for example.

I've been eating wild radish for as long as I can recall. I discovered it when I was perhaps 8, exploring the wilds of Orange County. I'd pull up the ubiquitous plant and chew on the thin bit of root meat surrounding the woody core, enjoying its horseradish like quality.

My yard right now has several hybrids of wild radish and other brassicas. The particular plant in the picture above is making giant, juicy, crisp, flavorful seeds pods. I'm munching on them nearly daily. Soon they'll start to set seed and they won't be so pleasant.

Have a look around your yard! See if there are any edible feral flora growing near you. Start simply, adding petals to salads and that sort of thing. Educate yourself so you don't accidentally eat something harmful, but by all means experiment and find what's yummy in your unexpected places!