Add and Subtract

The homesteader's dilemma

One of the basic tenants of homesteading is to turn one's home from a zone of consumption into a zone of production.  But it also means that if you use x amount of energy, you try to either reduce or at least maintain that amount as you go along in life.  Meaning you don't add appliances without thinking about their impact on your household bills and the environment.

Sometimes this is a challenge.  Right now, for instance, I have realized I am accumulating a pretty nice collection of wines, some of which are new and could do with a nice laying down for several years.

A laying down, you ask?  Yes.  If you know wines, you already know that this means.  Get a bottle of, say, 2010 Cabernet, and while its drinkable now, it will be even better in a few more years.  Laying it down means just that:  Setting it aside and, just as important, storing it properly, so you can hang onto it until it comes to the peak of its deliciousness, when it's truly ready to be opened and enjoyed.

Laying down on the job

The other day at the winery, for example, the staff sampled a 2009 Cabernet, which everyone thought was delicious, until the manager opened a bottle of the 2005 Cabernet, which had been stored in the temperature controlled wine library to age for four years longer than the 2009.  The change was remarkable; the "laying down" truly took a good wine and made it great.

Wine is an investment.  I have a coworker who collects new wines, allows them to age, then checks on a wine brokers website to see when it's selling for the most money. That's when the wine is at its peak, so that's when he opens his bottle.  He said usually a good wine will double in price by the time it reaches its peak, and some become more expensive even after that.  

So as I'm working for wine now and amassing a pretty nice collection of wines, I need something to store them properly in, i.e., a decent wine refrigerator (rather than the 8 bottle one we currently have), so I can do the same thing as my coworker and open no wine before its time.

Investment receptacle

But we're homesteaders, and so begins the homesteading thing of adding and subtracting  as far as our power usage goes.  When we get rid of the inefficient 8-bottle cooler we have now, that will save some wattage.  Moving the chest freezer indoors has saved us a lot of wattage also.  So now I can justify buying the wine fridge as we've created energy savings elsewhere.

These are not hard and fast rules; we're not energy-use zealots, but we do believe in not wasting finite resources, like those that bring us our power.  So we check and we balance, and we find a way to preserve our new and delicious investments.

Well Pump, Part Two

So the boys from the well drilling company came out to look over our well set-up, make sure everything was in good working order, and let us know any ways they could think of to reduce the amount of time the booster pump on the well ran, and hence our electric bill.  The running joke in our household is that you can flush the toilet and the booster pump on the well will come on...which is not what you want, from an energy-efficiency standpoint.  

We learned several things today:

1.  Buying a secondary pressure tank would not save us any electricity, as any savings we gained by not running the booster pump as much would be offset by running a secondary pressure tank instead.  Six of one versus a half-dozen of the other. Hrumph.

2.  In the event of a power outage, we WILL have water in the house...but with no power to the booster pump, there will not be enough pressure to get water into the hot water tank inside the house (meaning no hot showers during the zombie apocalypse).  There will also be extremely low water pressure for our inside faucets. BUT -- with 4,000 gallons available in the holding tank, we can access that from a faucet next to the big tank itself.  So we and our animals won't be dying of thirst. We'll just either be taking cold sponge baths or smelling kinda funky until the problem is remedied.  I can live with either of those options as long as we have drinking water for, potentially, at least a few weeks in the event of a disaster.

Old booster pump with new microswitch (at upper right)

3.  One thing that's been happening that has probably driven our electric bill up is that a micro-switch on the booster pump was starting to fail, leaving the pump running longer than it needed and causing back pressure.  They fixed this today with a new micro-switch.   The booster pump is also starting to fail, but we are going to let it die completely before replacing it.  The new micro-switch will work on any booster pump we buy, so we figured that was a good investment.

4.  And a few stats:  We have standing water at 403 feet and the well itself is about 600 feet deep, so we're in good shape there...if we start to run dry at any point, we can lower the pump without major expense.  With wells in this area, it's not lowering the pumps that kills homesteads and country properties, it's having to drill a new well when the old one reaches bottom and goes dry.  But I think we'll be OK for the next decade or so.  And we have started a well fund in case we ever do need to drill a new one.  

I realize for people who live in greener areas, the idea of a well pump sitting at 600 feet deep probably seems crazy, but that's how we roll in the mediterranean climate of Central Coast Wine Country and elsewhere in the western U.S.  

We've also decided we're going to look into the idea of some solar panels which would generate at least enough power to run the well pumps, in the event of a power outage and even on regular days.  That would lower our electric bill as well as protect  our comfort (and our crops) in the event of a disaster.  It would be expensive and we'll probably have to save for it, but it might be worth it, long-term.  Kind of a duh there...with so many sunny days, it seems criminal not to take advantage of them to create energy.

Houses

Have you ever noticed how interior styles of homes have changed over the decades?  I've been thinking about it ever since we started looking at real estate.  Get a 1910 farmhouse, for instance, and you'll find a lovely, expansive porch to sit on (for when the house was too hot; some porches were even used as summer sleeping quarters), an extremely large kitchen (for all that canning, preserving and cooking Mom would have been doing all day long), and good sized bedrooms for everyone.  But Mom and Dad's bedroom wouldn't necessarily have been much bigger than the kid's rooms, and everyone probably shared just one bathroom.  There were even attics and cellars for storage.  Lovely.

That went along until we hit the late 1940's and 1950's.  That's when people began to move into areas called suburbs, where their houses would have been closer, and therefore smaller, and where those smaller houses were surrounded with good-sized yards.  Windows got smaller to provide more privacy, and porches were smaller (you couldn't really sleep on them anymore on a hot summer night, since your neighbors were so close by) and the houses had a definite community feel. But kitchens were still large, yet seemed smaller because of all the new appliances -- dishwashers, big refrigerators, and all things "modern."

The 60's and 70's hit and women began working in droves, no longer minding the home all day long. The thing about houses built in the 60's and 70's is that the kitchens are really small.   Galley kitchens were not unusual, but if you buy an un-renovated house from this era and you happen to enjoy cooking,  you will find those kitchens hard to move around and work in.  That's because they were designed so that you could come home from work, pop a Stouffer's entree into the microwave, and, voila -- dinner.

Then in the 1990's and aughts, we discovered the "great room," where kitchen, dining and living areas were all opened up and placed together.  Owner's master suites began being built, and were often as large as the Great Room.  Our current home, for instance, has more carpeting in our master suite than our living room, and all that bedroom space for just one bedroom seems somehow wasteful.  Children's bedrooms in these new houses are usually miniscule, sometimes less than 10 ft. by 10 ft.  Kitchen size can vary, with the only downside being that whatever you are cooking, your entire Great Room will smell of it because, well, the kitchen is part of the Great Room.  Great except the days you're serving fish.

Then the Crash of 2008 happened, and now, the latest trend is to build new homes with energy efficient solar panels, solar hot water heaters, enhanced insulation and the like.  They still look like houses from 10 years ago -- big and open -- but they use energy more like the houses from the 1950's. And you can plug your car into the power station in your garage if need be.


I'm thinking a renovated 1910 farmhouse with solar panels would be perfect.  Probably not affordable, but perfect.  I'm ready to ditch our master suite and Great Room for something more traditional, but want a big kitchen as well as 2nd and 3rd bedrooms of a decent size.  That's not asking too much, is it?  Just take me back a century, architecturally speaking, but with all the technological trappings and advantages of 2012.