If you want the ultimate in a water-conserving toilet, consider a composting toilet, which not only uses no water whatsoever, but also creates compost for your yard.

8.7% Clothes Washer

Washing machine water can be recycled and sent outside to irrigate your landscaping. If you are in the market for a new washer, seek out one that qualified for an Energy Star. To qualify for the Energy Star label, a washer has to use 18 -25 gallons of water per load, as opposed to the 40 gallons used by a standard machine.

6.8% Shower

Beyond the obvious, such as switching out old showerheads for low-flow heads, consider running the shower waste line outside to your garden. Or build an outdoor shower near plants that need irrigation. See pages 246 and 267.

6.3% Faucet

Make sure your faucets aren’t leaking. Just 60 drops per minute will equal 192 gallons per month. Another simple step is to turn off the water while brushing teeth, washing dishes or shaving.

5.5% Hidden Leaks

You can track down hidden leaks in your house by using your water meter. Your water meter will be found where your utility company’s water pipes meet your house’s pipes. It’s the thing the meter reader guy (or gal) comes to look at once in a while. Many water meters have a triangular red flow indicator. To check for a hidden leak, turn off all taps in your house. If the red flow indicator shows that water is still moving, you’ve got a leak somewhere. If your meter does not have a flow indicator, simply turn off all water taps in your house for a period of three hours and note the reading at the beginning and ending of this period. If your meter reads higher after the three-hour period, you’ve got a leak.

Water Meter

If your meter has a flow indicator, you can use it to troubleshoot your plumbing system. Go around your house progressively shutting off plumbing fixtures and sprinkler systems, assuming they have separate shutoff valves, until you isolate the part of your system that is leaking. Shutoff valves can be found under your sink and toilet. Likely leak candidates include toilets, sprinklers, as well as badly-executed pipe-fitting jobs.

0.6% Dishwasher

The “greenness” of dishwashers is a controversial topic — a study conducted by the University of Bonn in Germany concluded that dishwashers use half the energy, one-sixth the water, and less soap than handwashing. On the other hand, the resources used to manufacture these complex machines might, according to some environmentalists, eclipse their benefits. We’re not purists — we’ve got one, and it has probably saved our marriage. Green or not, you’d have to pry it out of our cold, dead fingers.

Harvesting Rainwater

After conservation, the second step toward water independence is harvesting rainwater. The number of ways you can go about this might surprise you.

Six Ways To Harvest Rainwater

Rainwater harvesting is an easy and positive course of action for people in nearly every climate in the world. Living in a dry place such as the desert southwest may make it seem more urgent, but no matter where we live, rainwater harvesting is a positive step toward changing our attitude toward the water that falls for free from the sky. Rainwater can be sent to where nature intended it to go — to the soil.

The most important step in formulating a rainwater harvesting strategy is careful observation of present conditions. Where does water flow when it rains? Rainwater harvesting expert Brad Lancaster suggests working from the highest point in your yard to the lowest point. For most of us the highest point will be the roof of the house, but other high points could include sidewalks, decks, outbuildings, or your neighbor’s driveway. Observe where water goes in a rainstorm or when the neighbors overwater their lawn and ask yourself if there is a way to direct this runoff to where it will percolate into the soil and water your plants.

Rainwater Harvesting Technique 1

Become A Radical Depaver

Our first concern is to minimize the impermeable surfaces that prevent rain and earth from meeting. Your initial step in harvesting rainwater has nothing to do with barrels or pipes. Instead, you’re going to pick up a sledgehammer. In so doing you will eliminate, as much as you can, every impermeable surface that prevents rainwater from getting into your soil where it belongs.

Paving is convenient, but not healthy for the earth. Consider alternatives for any concrete or asphalt that is on your property: wood chips, un-motored brick, decomposed granite, anything that lets water seep through. These surfaces are more pleasant to walk on and look at than concrete, and they free up soil for planting. For instance, a driveway needs only twin tracks of stone, brick or concrete for the car wheels. The rest of it can be gravel or low-growing plants, and the edges of the drive can be lined with garden beds or trees. Less hardscaping in your yard means more water will percolate into the soil, and down into the water table.

Most concrete work will yield to a few swings of a sledgehammer. For densely-poured concrete you may need to rent an electric-powered jackhammer from a tool yard. A jackhammer is an easy tool to use despite its intimidating looks. Cradle it lightly in your hands (keeping it in a death grip will vibrate the hell out of your joints) and direct the chisel end at a slight angle so as to dislodge the outermost portions of the concrete that you are trying to remove. Using either a sledgehammer or a jackhammer, work from the outside of the concrete inwards towards the middle. Loosen broken concrete with a crowbar and pull it aside. If you have asphalt paving to remove, follow the same technique. It is softer, and so easier to pull out.

If you’ve got concrete poured next to your foundation you will want to leave some of it in place to prevent water from getting under your foundation or into your basement and causing expensive damage. To make a clean break between the concrete you are removing and a portion you may want to keep, you’ll need to cut a line in it. To cut concrete you have to rent a gas-powered concrete saw fitted with a diamond-edged blade. Your local rental yard should have one of these in either a hand-held or walk-behind version. You have to be careful to make sure that the blade does not go all the way through the concrete and into dirt. Dirt will strip off the diamonds and the rental yard may end up billing you for the replacement of the blade that can run into the hundreds of dollars. A concrete saw is a noisy and aggressive tool that needs to be hooked up to a hose to keep the blade cool. It makes a big mess and you’ll need to make sure to wear plenty of protective clothing — including eye and ear protection. There’s no shame in hiring someone if you don’t feel comfortable cutting concrete.

Chunks of broken concrete, sometimes called “urbanite,” can be used to make excellent raised beds and retaining walls. When breaking up your concrete, think about what projects you would like to use the urbanite for, and size it accordingly as you break it out.

One reason you should consider recycling your concrete is that it is expensive to get rid of it. You’ll have to pay to have it taken away in a special dumpster called a “lowboy.” The other reason is that the company that carts off the lowboy will do one of two things with your broken concrete: either stick it in a landfill or recycle it into yet more pourable concrete, exactly what our cities don’t need.

Any depaving at all is a step in the right direction. Nothing is more depressing than the millions of acres of concrete and asphalt that cover our urban environments, but at least we can deal with the little bits of concrete that we are responsible for.

Rainwater Harvesting Technique 2

Smart Gutters And Downspouts

Our roofs are another impermeable surface. We can minimize the surface area by living in as small a house as possible and trying to maximize open ground. At our own compound we’ve even gone so far as to remove an ugly addition, increasing the backyard space of our home. So-called green roofs, which have soil and plants growing on them, are an option for the wealthy, but at present are still rare in the U.S. Most of us will be dealing with conventional roofs.

Hopefully your roof has gutters. If yours doesn’t, it’s time to put some on. Gutters on the urban homestead channel water away from your foundation, and toward your crops. This is a job to hire out, as putting up a gutter can be challenging, especially when your roof is high up and professionals can fabricate seamless gutters, which are less prone to leaking.

Downspouts are the up-and-down pipes usually attached to the corners of a house that bring water from the gutters on the roof down to the ground. Having more than one downspout around your house will lessen the chance that any of them will get overloaded and will increase the possibilities for evenly distributing rainwater to your landscaping.

The bottom end of a downspout can be hooked up to a drainage pipe which carries the water away from the foundation and out to the yard. You can run these pipes above ground or below ground to anywhere you want water — to a mulch basin with plantings, for instance, which is described below. Drainage pipe is a white plastic pipe that comes in multiple sizes, with the most commonly used being 4”. There are a variety of fitting options for connecting them to your downspouts. You can find drainage pipe at home centers and lumber yards. See ndspro.com for examples of drainage pipe fittings.

Building codes requires that downspouts take water a minimum of ten feet away from a structure and this is a good rule of thumb to ensure that water doesn’t undermine your foundation.

Keeping It Clean

While we’re big believers in sloth and idleness, one task that absolutely must be performed at least once a year is to get up on a ladder and clean out the gutters. Otherwise, you will be attempting this task, as we know from experience, during a downpour at midnight, after the downspouts have clogged up sending a cascade of water over the damned-up gutters.

Two simple bits of technology can make gutter cleaning easier. We have inexpensive strainer baskets made out of ½” hardware cloth in each of the downspouts to keep them from clogging up. You may wish to consider leaf guards which run along the top of the gutter to keep out leaves and other debris. The problem with leaf guards is that in order to clean out your gutters you must tediously remove the guards along the whole length of the gutter while balanced precariously on a ladder. While leaf guards catch large leaves, smaller stuff can still get through, so unless your leaf drop is monumental, you might as well just stick with the strainer baskets.

Rainwater Harvesting Technique 3

Earthworks

Earthworks are a simple, elegant way to ensure that rainwater gets to your plants rather than flowing out into the street. With an earthwork you shape the soil to catch and direct the rainfall into the ground. To build an earthwork all you need is a shovel and a sense of purpose. Basically what you are trying to do is to channel the water from roofs, sidewalks, driveways, steep hillsides, and other impermeable or semi-permeable surfaces to where that rainwater will nourish the roots of your plants. You do this by digging trenches and building up low earth walls to direct the flow of water.

The best way to design your earthworks is by careful observation of existing conditions. Even the most neglected of places will have plants growing where water naturally flows and collects. For instance, the drip lines of build-ings, or low points near streets and sidewalks will often support a lush weedy landscape. Use these areas as your starting point. As a clever rainwater harvester your role will be to “hijack” rainwater and direct it to your plants.

Illustration of water flow from roof through a series of earthworks

Rainwater Harvesting Technique 4

Mulch Basins

One of the best ways of dealing with the sudden flood of water that a storm sends off a roof or that a washing machine ejects in a rinse cycle is with a mulch basin. Mulch basins are simply shallow trenches with raised walls that are filled with wood chips. You can direct rainwater or greywater in their direction via pipes, hoses or earthworks. They hold the water in one place until it can sink into the ground. The wood chips (the “mulch”) are there to help keep runoff from getting stinky, prevent evaporation and keep mosquitoes from breeding. Anything planted in a mulch basin will receive a good deep watering every time it floods, whether by act of man or nature. Mulch basins are particularly good places to plant trees.

If you’re clever and have slightly sloped land you can channel the overflow from one basin into the next so that when the first basin begins to overflow the water will spill into the next and so on. In other words, you will have a chain of basins.

An exception to mulch basin building is for people who live in excessively moist places. In these climates you will sometimes need to do the opposite — plant in mounds to keep roots from getting waterlogged.

PROJECT

HOW TO SIZE AND PLANT YOUR GREYWATER MULCH BASIN

Size the mulch basin to accommodate the amount of water that the greywater source that feeds it usually generates (i.e., how many gallons you use per shower, how many gallons your washing machine holds, etc.).

Some trial and error may be necessary to get the correct size of the mulch basin. One thing to take into consideration is your soil type, i.e. sandy vs. clay. Water percolates into clay soil more slowly than sand, so to prevent overflows, it might be necessary to dig a clay soil basin with wider and more shallow dimensions to encourage absorption. All that is important is that it is sized correctly to hold the periodic floods you will generate — too big is better than too small.

The addition of an outlet chamber made out of an upside down bucket with holes in it, and placed within the mulch basin, will enhance water infiltration, particularly in heavy clay soils.

Greywater Mulch Basin

What to plant in your greywater mulch basins: greywater tends to be alkaline in nature, due to the salt contained in soaps. Thankfully, there are a number of plants that tolerate alkaline conditions including bananas, citrus, blackberries, elderberries, currants, loquat, pineapple, guava, and many other fruit and nut trees. Plants to avoid are acid lovers such as blueberries, ferns, and shady forest dwellers. Another thing to take into consideration is the water needs of your plant, and how much greywater you are going to be able to offer it. Bushes and trees are the best candidates for a greywater mulch basin, simply because they are big enough to not be bothered by the periodic flooding. In addition, their edible parts are well above ground, keeping them safe from any greywater splash-up.

Rainwater Harvesting Technique 5

Terracing

If you have a hill on your property, water will cascade straight off it, and find its way to the street before it has time to sink into the soil. Slow the flow by cutting stair-stepped terraces into the hill. Support each “step” with a retaining wall made of stone, broken concrete or wood beams.

Slopes with terraces and retaining walls act as a water storage system. Rain penetrating the soil at the top of the slope forms a lens of water which over time migrates down through the hill. Plants with deep roots can reach into this lens and support themselves though extended dry periods. Plant drought-tolerant plants toward the top of the slope, and more water-needy plants toward the bottom, where the water tends to accumulate for longer periods.

My wife and I live in a drought-prone climate that occasionally gets torrential rainfalls. During those downpours a great deal of our neighbor’s runoff used to race across our backyard, down our driveway, into the street and right down the sewer — completely wasted because it didn’t have time to be absorbed by the earth. To make better use of that rain-water in our garden and to reduce moisture-related foundation problems, we recently built a simple rainwater collection system and also sculpted the land with berms and swales.

In the yard, we created berms and swales to redirect rainwater away from the house and capture it in pools around the garden beds where it has time to soak into the ground. For those who don’t know, a berm is a mound of dirt and a swale is a depression in the ground. My wife designed the berms in attractive shapes and locations for growing plants.

The swales surround the berms. After a rainstorm, the swales hold water that slowly soaks into the berms over several days — long after the rest of the yard has dried out. We also bermed dirt close to the house so water would stay away from the foundation to reduce those problems. All the dirt we needed to build the berms we got from digging out the swales, so we didn’t need to import any dirt. Incidentally, we learned about the usefulness of berms and swales at a free “Intro to Permaculture” lecture which you may find in your city, too.

Our roof collection system is as basic as it gets: a 20-foot section of gutter, a flexible plastic downspout, a big plastic barrel, a brass spigot, and standard garden hose. I got the gutter parts at Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore, a non-profit that sells donated building materials at bargain prices. I got the used barrel at an ecological retailer in my town, although some cities provide free rain barrels. The spigot and hose I bought at a hardware store.

To install the spigot I drilled a hole in the side of the barrel near the bottom and screwed the male thread of the spigot into the hole. The other end of the spigot is the correct size to accept the upstream end of a garden hose. I raised the barrel on a platform of cinder blocks to increase the water pressure at the end of the hose, then attached the downspout to the gutter and directed it to an opening on the top of the barrel. Now, when we want to water the garden, we turn on the spigot and get a gentle flow of water from the barrel. In the future we’re going to direct the outflow from our nearby clothes washer into the barrel for additional water savings.

Ken and Lorie Marsh, Austin, Texas

Rainwater Harvesting Technique 6

Rain Barrels And Cisterns

If you’ve got more rainwater than your earthworks can handle or if you want to bridge gaps between rainfalls, one strategy to consider is using rain barrels to store water. A rain barrel doesn’t just collect water like a big bucket, it has fittings which allow you to hook up a garden hose to the barrel, so you can use your rainwater on whatever you wish, whenever you wish. You can purchase commercial rainwater barrels, or make your own.

How To Make Your Own Rain Barrel

The ubiquitous 55-gallon plastic drum makes an excellent rain barrel. The trick is figuring out a way to hook a hose up to the barrel. Often this is done with what is called a bulkhead connection, made by cutting a hole through the barrel and fitting a threaded pipe through it. The thing is, improvised bulkhead fittings have a tendency to leak. To make our rain barrel, we used instructions from a company called Aquabarrel which showed us how to use common PVC fittings available in any hardware store to hook a garden hose securely to the barrel. Aquabarrel also sells kits for a little more which come with all the fittings and a DIY video at aquabarrel.com.

Rain Barrel

The garden hose coming off the bottom allows you to use collected rain to water your garden at will. The big, flexible pipe coming off the top is the overflow pipe. The pipe coming into the barrel from above is connected to a downspout from the roof.

With the Aquabarrel system you use the preexisting threaded bunghole fittings on the top of the barrel to hook up your garden hose, so be sure to get a “two bunghole” model when you’re buying your barrel. Once you’ve got the fittings installed, all you do is turn the barrel upside down on top of a couple of cinder blocks or similar for clearance, hook up a garden hose, and you’re ready to rock.

Another thing we like about the Aquabarrel design is the large overflow pipe and how easy it was to put together. You can even string several barrels together to increase storage capacity.

TIP: If it’s time to replace your roof, and you are thinking about rainwater collection, consider roofing with metal, which, unlike asphalt shingle, doesn’t shed undesirable stuff into your water. Metal roofs will last a lifetime and also reflect the heat of the sun, thereby keeping your house cooler in the summer.

PROJECT

HOW MUCH WATER CAN I HARVEST FROM MY ROOF?

To figure out how much water could be harvested from the roof, first you have to know how well the kind of roofing material you have sheds water — we’ll call this the “collection efficiency factor.”

Efficiency Factor by Roof Type

Next, measure the outside perimeter of your roof — you need not take into account the pitch or slant of the roof, since this does not affect the amount of water collected. Multiply the width by the length of your roof to figure out its square footage. If your roof is irregularly shaped, just break it down into pieces, figure out the square footage for each, then add it all up.

Finally, go to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration website: ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/online/ccd/nrmpcp.txt to find out the annual rainfall in your city.

Plug the figures you collected above into this formula:

For our house in Los Angeles, we have a collection area of 992 square feet, an asphalt shingle roof and an average of 15.06 inches of rain a year. So the average amount of rain we could collect in a year would be: 992 x 0.6 × 0.9 × 15.06 = 8,067.34 gallons.

If we transported our house to Atlanta, where the average annual precipitation is 48.6 inches per year (except in recent drought years!) we could theoretically collect 26,034 gallons of water a year.

Of course, in most places, rain falls bit by bit throughout the year, and you’re always using it anyway, so you don’t need to size your barrel or cistern to hold an entire year’s worth of water at once (26,034 gallons would be a huge tank!), all you need to do is bridge the dry gaps between rainstorms. To do this, figure out monthly rainfall statistics, also available on the NOAA website, using the same formula above. That way you can anticipate how much rain you get each month rather than in a whole year.

With these numbers in mind, you can begin to answer if rainwater collection makes sense for your climate and water needs and you’ll know how many rain barrels to string together or how big a cistern you’ll need.

Intermediate Bulk Containers

For greater rainwater storage capacity in a more space-efficient square form, permaculturist David Khan suggests what is called an Intermediate Bulk Container or IBC for short. IBCs come in 275-gallon and 330-gallon sizes and are made out of plastic with a metal reinforcing cage. Dimensions vary, but most IBCs will fit within the same footprint as a shipping pallet, roughly 40 by 48 inches in North America. Some are stackable. IBCs run around $140 to $250 depending on size and whether you want a new or reconditioned one. The nice thing about IBCs is that they already have a drain at the bottom so there is no need to do any cutting and fitting, making them a good option for folks who don’t want to tinker.

Intermediate Bulk Container

A Really, Really Big Water Barrel: Rainwater Cisterns

A potable rainwater harvesting system suitable for storing drinking water is a big step, and due to the space necessary is one rarely made by urbanites. But if it works in your situation, we’d really encourage you to think about it. Building a household cistern for potable water ain’t rocket science but it’s a topic worthy of a book in itself such as Suzy Banks’ Rainwater Collection for the Mechanically Challenged. A more likely option is a big cistern for outdoor irrigation. If you won’t be drinking it, you can skip the filters, pumps and complexities. Inexpensive polypropylene tanks are probably the easiest and cheapest option for a large cistern and can be purchased from tank, farm and ranch suppliers. They come in sizes ranging from 300 to 10,000 gallons. Just remember that all that water is heavy, 8.34 pounds per gallon to be exact, so you need to make sure that your tank is placed on stable ground and well away from your house’s foundation.

Greywater

So you’ve enacted a few conservation measures around the house and taken steps toward directing and harvesting rainwater. Now it’s time to see if you can harness even more water by reusing your greywater.

Let’s be clear about what we mean by “greywater.” Greywater is the fluid that goes down the drain of your shower, bathroom sink, and washing machine. “Blackwater” is the stuff that comes out of your toilet and kitchen sink. You might think kitchen sink water is not nearly as foul as toilet water, but the tiny bits of food waste it contains make it go septic very quickly, and so it should not be harvested.

There are two basic ways to deal with greywater. One is to use it to water plants, and the other is to simply dispose of it by sending it into the ground, instead of into the sewer. To send greywater into the ground, all you need to do is dig a big hole far enough away from your house’s foundation so as not to cause damage, and back fill it with enough gravel so that water never pools or runs off. To use greywater on plants, you’ll need to follow a few precautions that we’ll describe in detail.

Our philosophy for dealing with greywater is to keep your interventions simple and economical. Complex filtering systems, pumps, and underground irrigation drip tubing simply aren’t cost-effective or even ecologically sound since these kinds of setups mean a lot of plastic and maintenance. Unfortunately, many municipalities require filtering and put up other expensive impediments to greywater use. We suggest you become a water pirate, keep those inspectors at bay by being discreet and nobody will ever know.

In order to create a simple greywater system, your plumbing must be easily accessible, that is, not embedded in a concrete slab. Also, in an ideal world the destination being watered (e.g. your garden) should be lower than the source of the greywater (e.g. your shower drain) so that you can let gravity do the work of carrying the water out to your garden to avoid having to rely on a pump. For these reasons, greywater is highly context-specific and so may not work out for everyone.

Greywater collection also does not make a lot of sense in very wet climates or for those who only have a small patch of land to irrigate. That said, if the pipes are easily reached, go for it. And if you happen to be doing a bathroom or laundry room remodel and the plumbing is exposed, that is the perfect time to route those pipes out to somewhere useful.

By far the most informative source on greywater that we have found is Art Ludwig, author of Create an Oasis with Greywater, a must-read for the greywater revolutionary. He also maintains an extensive website at oasisdesign. net. Ludwig takes a balanced stance on the topic and has a range of advice from the simple to the complex that can be used by everyone from renters to homeowners to folks living in undeveloped countries.

Greywater Precautions

The dangers of greywater have been greatly exaggerated by public health and building inspector types. Ludwig says that nobody in the U.S. has ever gotten sick from exposure to greywater. The plumbing codes in this country are overly cautious in their restrictions on greywater use, as the Man, quite simply, wants you to throw perfectly good water down the sewer. But the existence of E. coli reminds us we that we do need to be careful. So here are some general safety rules to follow when using greywater:

1. . Definitely do not apply greywater to crops that you will eat raw, such as strawberries, carrots or lettuce. Greywater is fine for edible plants such as fruit trees where the crop is far from the ground and the risk of direct contamination by contact with contaminated water is low.

2. Do not apply greywater to lawns or directly onto the foliage of any plant as this can cause a microorganism growth party. Remember that greywater is purified by moving through soil.

3. Do not distribute greywater with a sprinkler as you don’t want any potential bad stuff to become airborne — or to coat plant leaves. Greywater is for the ground only.

4. Do not use the water from your washing machine if you are washing diapers (gross!).

5. Do not allow greywater to stand around as it will quickly become the perfect habitat for anaerobic bacteria which will quickly turn your wash water into a stinky, mosquito-infested pool of sewage. Plan a system that will use your greywater immediately.

6. Do not use the sort of detergents and soaps that are not plant-compatible.

Detergents And Soaps For Greywater

If you start to harvest your greywater, you might have to make some changes to the kinds of soaps and detergents you use around the house. With a greywater system, those substances go straight to your plants, so they have to be plant-compatible. This is different from “bio-degradable.” The natural, phosphate-free soaps and detergents you might already be using are great for the environment as a whole, but may not be appropriate for greywater use. Just because it is an eco-friendly product does not mean it’s good to water your garden with.

Most shampoos are compatible with greywater irrigation schemes, but you should switch from bar soap to liquid soap in the shower.

Most laundry detergent, however, is not good for greywater use. Even common non-toxic laundry additives like baking soda and borax will kill your plants. Baking soda, washing soda, borax, and the various mineral salts used in eco-friendly laundry detergents all cause salt to build up in your soil and they will damage plants. The big brand detergents contain many additives and chemicals that you don’t want in your soil, particularly chlorine bleach. The phosphates in those products, which are so damaging to our oceans and rivers, might actually be beneficial to your soil. So it is not the “no-phosphate” label that you are looking for when choosing a detergent to use in conjunction with greywater. Phosphates aren’t your problem.

The State of California Department of Water Resource’s Greywater Guide: Using Greywater in Your Landscape lists the following ingredients as unsafe for greywater:

• chlorine or chlorine bleach

• peroxygen

• sodium perborate

• sodium trypochlorite

• boron

• borax

• petroleum distillate

• alkylbenzene

• “whiteners”

• “softeners”

• “enzymatic” components

In addition, we suggest avoiding powdered soaps and bar soaps. In the end it comes down to this: The laundry detergent you use must be specifically labeled as being greywater-compatible. If it is not labeled so, you can assume it is not. We use Oasis Biocompatible detergent available at bio-pac.com.

TIP: Every now and then irrigate your plants with fresh water to prevent the inevitable buildup of salts from soaps, shampoos and detergents.

Non-Invasive Greywater Methodologies

Bucket Flushin’, Tub Siphoning And What To Do With Your Bathroom Sink

Bucket flushing is for those who don’t want to start cutting pipe. It’s a cheap and easy greywater recycling idea that even those living in apartments can do. Simply keep a bucket next to the shower and collect the water that you run before the shower gets hot. Since you haven’t even stepped into the shower this water is fresh and clean, and not even technically greywater. You can use this water on house plants, outdoor plants, or to flush the toilet manually by pouring it directly into the bowl.

Another simple greywater strategy is to siphon bathtub water out the window with a siphon obtained at an auto parts store. A third idea is to disconnect your bathroom sink from the sewer and let the wastewater drain into a five-gallon bucket that you keep under the sink. You can use this water for plants or to bucket flush your toilet. Around 25 kids drown in buckets every year in the U.S., so don’t leave buckets unattended if you have little ones.

Highly Invasive Greywater Strategies

Greywater Plumbing 101

The Hack: For those without the means or courage to start cutting into drain pipes, don’t despair, just stick with the aforementioned bucket flushing and bathtub siphoning. But if you want to be a greywater hacker, you’ll be working with your home’s drain pipes which are also called the DWV or drain-waste-vent system.

For those not familiar with basic plumbing, the drain pipes (the ones that take water out) are the big pipes which are made out of either plastic, or in older homes, cast iron. The supply pipes (the ones that bring water in) are much smaller and are made out of either copper, galvanized steel, or in some new houses out of flexible or rigid plastic.

The drain pipes slope horizontally out to the sewer and are also connected to vent pipes that run vertically and admit air into the system to allow the waste water to flow downwards. Your plumbing system also uses u-shaped pipes called “p-traps” that hold a small amount of water to prevent sewer gases from venting into your living spaces. Look under any sink, and chances are you’ll see a p-trap.

Tapping into conventional plumbing, with its vent stacks and p-traps requires plumbing knowledge, especially in a large house with a complex tangle of pipes. If you screw it up, you could send blackwater (sewage) into your greywater, or worse, into the house, and then it would be time to make an embarrassing call to the plumber. So to keep things simple we make our greywater connections downstream of the vents and traps. We like what Ludwig calls “radical plumbing,” which is simply bypassing your conventional plumbing altogether and running drain lines directly from the drain of your shower, bathroom sink and/or laundry machine and out to the garden.

Working with ABS and PVC plastic pipe: Post-1950s houses usually have waste lines made out of either white plastic PVC or black plastic ABS pipe. Older homes that have been remodeled may have plastic pipe as well. To keep things simple, and to avoid having to use different cements (ABS and PVC aren’t glued together with the same cement), we suggest not mixing ABS and PVC pipes together. So when you make additions, match the new pipe to the existing pipe.

Both ABS and PBC pipe are easy to use. This is how you join together plastic pipe:

1. Cut plastic pipe with a hacksaw and clean out the burrs with a file or knife so the cut is smooth. Assemble the pipes the way you want them but don’t glue them just yet — this is called “dry fitting.” Dry fit only three or four connections at once, since the dimensions may change as you work.

2. Make sure that you slope all pipe downwards ¼” for every foot of length. Less and you’ll risk a backup.

3. Once you’re ready to start gluing, clean the connections off with a towel and rub the appropriate cement (your hardware store will carry both ABS and PVC cement — they are not interchangeable) on the inside of the fitting and the outside of the pipe end. If you are working with PVC pipe, you will also need to use a special primer before you apply the glue. Once the glue is applied, hold the pipes together for around 20 seconds and you’re all done.

Cast Iron Pipe — Not For Wimps

All of these projects work the same whether you have plastic or cast iron waste lines. Altering plastic drain lines is well within the abilities of everyone with the will, but cast iron waste pipes are more tricky. Those with cast iron pipes may wish to hire a plumber to cut it and help you make connections to plastic ABS or PVC pipe. Extra-intrepid urban homesteaders who want to cut cast iron pipes themselves need to take precautions. Cast iron pipe is very heavy, so make sure that waste lines and vent stacks are supported before you start cutting. You don’t want it falling on your head, or your foot.

We recommend that you read Michael Litchfield’s book Renovation: A Complete Guide before you begin more complicated projects. It has a lengthy section covering plumbing basics among many other topics on home repair useful to all urban homesteaders.

How the Greywater Guerrillas Learned to Plumb from Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground

I wanted hands-on skills. Since I knew literally nothing about plumbing, I decided to sign up for a residential plumbing class offered by the local community college. After two plumbing classes and a Sunday afternoon greywater conversation, I was ready with my partner-in-crime, Cleo, to make the first cut. So we did. This rental house was blessed with a genuine slumlord. Every winter we made a phone call to tell him it was raining inside our bathroom and kitchen. Every winter he put up a small blue tarp, which immediately blew away. We had no qualms about cutting pipes in this house. Giggling down to the basement with a saw and flashlight in hand, we found the shower drainpipe and promptly severed it. That jagged slice through two-inch ABS pipe cut the mental umbilical cord of fear, uncertainty, and apathy that had tied me to modern sewer infrastructure.

Greywater Guerrillas, Oakland, CA

PROJECT

SHOWERS TO FLOWERS

Along with your bathroom sink, your shower has the least dirty water and makes an excellent source for irrigation. One of the best greywater strategies is hooking up a pipe that runs directly from the bath or shower drain out into the garden. That way you’ll avoid all the complex plumbing issues that come when you tap into that tangle of waste pipes under your house. Your shower is a great candidate for running straight out. If your shower drain is higher than what needs to be watered, give this a try.

How To Run Your Shower, or Any Greywater Source, Directly Outside:

1. Go under your house and locate the waste line from your shower. Measure the distance to the garden so you can get all the pipe, fittings and cement you’ll need to make the run to the garden.

2. Using that measurement, confirm that your shower waste line is higher than the point you are watering. The minimum fall for waste pipes is ¼” per foot — any less and you’ll risk a backup. That means that you have to measure how many feet it is between shower and garden, and multiply that number by .25. If it is 12 feet to the garden from your shower drain, the garden must be at least 3” lower than the shower drain (12’ × .25 = 3”) to drain properly.

3. Choose plants whose watering requirements match the amount of water coming out of your shower by estimating how many showers and how much water you use per week. Odds are that the best candidates for Showers to Flowers will be water-hungry and alkaline tolerant plants such as blackberries or banana trees.

4. If you just want to do a good deed and recharge the water table with your showers, all you have to do is dig a ditch big enough to absorb the longest shower you and your housemates might take and backfill it with gravel. Drain all the water there.

5. Assuming your drain lines are plastic, cut your shower line using a hacksaw. Dry fit your run of pipe with the appropriate fittings out to the garden, remembering to maintain at least a ¼” per foot drop. Glue up the pipe with cement when you are sure all is well.

6. Put a screen over the outdoors end of the pipe to prevent rats and other critters from climbing up the pipe and surprising you in the shower. Keep the destination of the pipe at least ten feet away from your house’s foundation.

7. Use only liquid soap, not bar soap for showers. Most shampoos should be fine.

Or what about just showering outside? If you don’t want to reroute your shower water, you can take the entire shower outside and create an outdoor bathing paradise. To do this, run your plumbing outside or construct an independent solar-heated shower like the one in our solar heating section on page 267. Landscape around the shower to take advantage of the water and to create a living privacy screen.

PROJECT

RECYCLING YOUR SUDS

One of the simplest greywater projects is routing your washing machine water out to the garden. Because of the easy accessibility of your washing machine’s waste line and the fact that washing machines have a built-in pump that pumps the water out from the machine, it’s even a strategy that renters can take on. After the shower and bathroom sink, the next cleanest source for greywater is the washing machine. Here’s three ways to do it:

PVC Pipe

The easiest way to get water from your washing machine to your yard is simply to hook the drain hose of your washing machine up to a length of flexible 1” PVC pipe. Flexible PVC pipe is something that you’ll find at pool and spa supply stores, on the Internet and at large home centers. With flexible pipe you can run the greywater out to different areas of your yard just like you would with a garden hose. But you must use flexible pipe that is at least 1” in diameter — garden hose is not big enough and will burn out your pump, especially if it gets a kink.

The built-in pump contained in your washing machine makes it possible to send water both uphill and a reasonable distance horizontally. Unfortunately, washing machine pumps are not designed with this in mind, so you run a slight risk of burning out or decreasing the life of your washing machine’s pump should you attempt to pump the waste water uphill. There are, however, ways to minimize the risk of pump burnout. Whether you use flexible 1” pipe or glue up a permanent run of ABS or PVC remember the following things to preserve your pump:

1. The pipe you use, flexible or not, must be at least 1” in diameter. Smaller pipes risk burning out the pump.

2. Most washing machines empty into a vertical pipe behind the machine called a stand pipe. Use this height at which the washing machine hose pipe meets as a reference point. You don’t want to pump your water up any higher than this point or you will risk pump burnout.

3. You also need to take into account the length of the run. The longer the run, the more stress it will put on the pump. According to Ludwig, each 50’ is the equivalent of about 10” of vertical rise. Add up the length and height of the run and compare it to the height the washing machine hose used to meet the stand pipe.

4. For a more permanent installation, consider installing a three-way valve at the standpipe to send the water to the sewer when you need to. This is necessary if you wash diapers, because the water shouldn’t be sent to the garden.

5. It’s best to get the pipe up to its highest point early and then run down from there even though it is possible to run pipe up, down and up again (since the water is under pressure). Having sections of pipe where water will stagnate, however, run a slight chance of causing the water to get smelly, and risk burst pipe if it freezes.

Installing a swing check valve (a device that prevents water from flowing backwards in the line) close to the washing machine will prevent water from flowing back into the machine should you happen to move the flexible hose above the level of the machine.

Remember to use only detergent specifically made for greywater use such as Oasis Biocompatible detergent.

6. In freezing weather you’ll need to revert to sending washing machine water back to the sewer to prevent a burnout of your washing machine pump caused by frozen water in the pipes running out to your garden.

Tricking Out Your Washing Machine With Multiple Stand Pipes

With plastic pipe so easy to work with, you can also make several permanent runs out to the garden each with their own labeled stand pipe next to the washing machine. To do this you rig up multiple stand pipes each with their own separate run out to different places in the garden. Each time you do your wash you could choose the “citrus tree” pipe or the “banana tree” pipe, switching your machine’s outlet between them and allowing you to become a greywater disc jockey.

Make A Surge Tank For Your Washing Machine

Another way to use your washing machine’s greywater is to construct what is called a surge tank with a 50-gallon plastic drum. A greywater surge tank is pretty much the same as a rainwater collection barrel — you could even combine the two. All you need is a 55-gallon drum with a garden hose connected to the bottom. As discussed previously, our favorite method of hooking up a hose to a 55-gallon barrel can be found at aquabarrel.com.

Draining your washing machine into a 55-gallon drum rather than sending it out directly into the garden has multiple advantages: it allows hot water to cool, prevents siphoning mishaps and washing machine pump burnouts. Hooking up the surge tank to a garden hose allows you to use the hose around to water different plants. Here’s how to adapt your rainwater harvesting barrel to become a washing machine surge tank:

1. Direct your washing machine’s drain hose into the barrel. The hose must first go above the top of the machine before going down into the tank in order to prevent the machine from draining accidentally. Also, don’t make this connection airtight — the washing machine needs an air gap, normally provided by the loose connection to the standpipe to prevent wastewater from siphoning back into the machine.

2. You must use the water in the tank within 24 hours to prevent the water from going septic. Standing greywater goes bad quickly.

3. Use a nylon sock as a filter to catch lint and other debris coming out of the washing machine. Stretch it over the pipe coming out of the washing machine at the point where the pipe enters the top of the barrel.

4. Remember to only use greywater-compatible detergent such as Oasis Biocompatible.

PROJECT

ARRANGING A TWOSOME OR THREESOME — USING DIVERTERS

In some situations, rather than sending a pipe straight out to the garden it might be more convenient to shift your greywater back to the sewer system such as during an extended rainy spell or during the winter. If you want to use your washing machine, but have to run loads of diapers, you must have one of these to send the diaper water to the sewer where it belongs.

There are two ways to do this. The “Cadillac” option is a piece of plumbing known as a three-way diverter valve which will allow you to switch back and forth between sending your water out to the garden and sending it down the sewer with the simple turn of a handle. Three-way diverter valves are a bit exotic and probably won’t be found at your local hardware store. Instead, you’ll have to seek out a pool and spa supply shop. Art Ludwig sells one through his website (oasisdesign.net/greywater/divertervalves.htm) in the $50 range. If you think you’ll need to constantly switch back and forth, this valve should be placed in an easily accessible place. There are electronic remote controls for such valves but they cost around $250, which violates our “keep it simple and cheap” rule.

The cheap alternative to a three-way diverter valve: two ball valves used to switch between sending your water out to the garden or to the sewer.

For a cheaper way to divert water back to the sewer, water activists the Greywater Guerillas suggest rigging up a set of two ball valves that every hardware store should have. These are the plumbing equivalent of an on-off switch: turn the two-way valve and the line will close. Position them as shown in the illustration to divert water either to your garden or to the sewer. Just remember not to shut off both valves or your waste line will back up.

Two-Way Diverter

PROJECT

MAKE A GREYWATER WETLAND

As we’ve already stated, our approach to greywater must be kept simple and away from the prying eyes of building inspectors. One way to improve the quality of the greywater, while avoiding complicated and expensive filters, is through the construction of a greywater wetland. Wetlands are nature’s way of purifying water, and the water treated by a wetland can be used on plants that don’t tolerate untreated greywater. Aquatic plants take oxygen from the air and release it through their roots, helping to break down and treat both greywater and even blackwater. A greywater wetland will give you both a water garden and a way to further improve the water quality of your greywater. If properly constructed, a greywater wetland can even purify blackwater from your toilet, though amateurs should probably stick to greywater.

Excellent instructions for constructing a simple greywater wetland can be found on the website of the San Francisco Bay Area Greywater Guerillas at greywaterguerrillas.com. Their method involves routing greywater to a pair of 30- to 50-gallon containers. The first tank serves as a surge tank and the second, containing sand, filters out the soap scum. After passing through these tanks the greywater is sent to a set of salvaged bathtubs. Depending on how much greywater you produce and how much you want to purify it, you can use anywhere from one to three bathtubs that drain into each other. The system the Greywater Guerrillas use consists of two bathtubs containing ¼” to ¾” pea gravel planted with aquatic plants such as cattails. On top of the gravel, there’s a layer of wood chip mulch to decrease evaporation and smells. The third tub contains water hyacinths that finish off the purification process.

Greywater wetlands will work best in mild, moist places. In desert areas your wetlands may evaporate faster than you can use the water. In these cases, simply routing your greywater directly to the garden and choosing greywater-tolerant plants may the best option. Additional resources for greywater wetlands: frogs.org.au/frogwatch/greywater.php

So what can you do with all that blackwater from the toilet that we’ve so far told you to send down the sewer? The answer is the most extreme of our water projects:

PROJECT

THE COMPOSTING TOILET AND HOW TO POOP IN A BUCKET

Radical urban homesteaders can do away with the flush toilet altogether and opt for a composting toilet. With a composting toilet, not only will you eliminate the water that you waste on flushing, but you’ll also be saving all that useful organic matter that can help build your soil.

Composting toilets come in commercial and DIY versions. The best-known commercial system is the Clivus Multrum (clivusmultrum. com) which sends your waste into a large basement composting chamber. Smaller, self-contained systems such as those manufactured by Sun-Mar rotate and dry waste in place. With both Clivus Multrum and Sun-Mar toilets you need to periodically empty and distribute the finished compost.

Composting toilet revolutionaries can save a lot of money by following the DIY advice of Joseph Jenkins, author of The Humanure Handbook which is available both in book form and as a free download at jenkinspublishing.com. Jenkins’ “humanure” method amounts to using a five-gallon bucket with an attached toilet seat as your new throne — infinitely cheaper than the aforementioned commercial systems. After you leave a deposit in your bucket you cover it with a layer of carbonaceous material such as sawdust or peat moss to prevent odor. When the bucket is full you take it outside and put it in a compost bin (separate from your regular compost) and, just as you do with the bucket in your bathroom, you make sure that each new layer added to the pile is thoroughly covered with carbonaceous material. Jenkins adamantly suggests that you never turn the pile. When your humanure bin is full you start another pile and let the first one sit for at least a year to thoroughly decompose. When the pile has decomposed you can use the compost on trees and non-food plants.

In most urban places, dealing with your own sewage will make you an outlaw in the eyes of building inspectors and your local health department, so if you try humanure be discreet and responsible — read Jenkins’ book for the details of the process.

You Will Always Have a Pot To Piss In

Even if the thought of becoming a humanure revolutionary is a little much for you at the moment, it’s good to know that you can use five-gallon buckets as toilets in the event the sewage system fails. You don’t need to dig a latrine, use scary blue chemicals, or wait in line for the Port-A-Potties, just set up a bucket in your bathroom. When you fill up the bucket, put a lid on it, set it aside and start a new one. Those buckets will act like mini-composters and in a year or so they will no longer be yucky inside.

Luggable Loo Composting Toilet

If you have the space, stash away an old five-gallon bucket with a lid, filled with sawdust or peat moss, just for this sort of event. It might be difficult to find a sawdust source while simultaneously fighting off zombie hordes.

Pooping in the Bedroom and Proud of It!

Well, I finally just realized that nothing was stopping me from composting my humanure, except my own fear and inhibitions. There’s a certain awkwardness to get past with this system. It’s not conventional, and many people don’t know what to make of it at first. My husband was one of those people. Well, talking about it warmed him up, but the only way to get him used to it, was to do it!

So I’ve done it! Not surprisingly, my husband has come around. He assisted me in building the toilet (which was a great sign), and has been using it more and more. It’s only been four days! He’s commented several times that he’s impressed and proud of me for going through with it. This from a man who was adamantly against it originally! I now have my husband’s full support. In fact the tension about the decision dropped away the minute he realized he couldn’t talk me out of it. He’s been positive about it ever since!

I’ve wanted to do this for years, but have let other people’s negativity hold me back. The recent catalyst for me was about three weeks ago, when a new friend of mine said she was planning on building one, even though her partner “thinks it’s disgusting.” I thought, wow, she’s going to do it anyway…Why not?

Now I’ve done it, and it’s already inspiring another friend of mine to build one. Good ideas catch on! By the way, I live in a rental apartment, and we had to put the thing in a corner of the bedroom! I think pooping in the bedroom took more getting used to than pooping in the bucket!

Walking lightly on the Earth and proud of it,
Amy, Massachusetts

Power To The People

It seems, there is almost no activity or product that, in the course of our daily lives, does not owe its existence to fossil fuels, oil, natural gas or coal. All of our energy needs, our transportation, heating, and lighting, as well as the myriad petrochemical-derived products such as plastics and the chemical fertilizers that grow our supermarket foods, owe their origin to fossil fuels whose extraction in our lifetimes is becoming increasingly expensive. As the balance between supply and demand tightens with the expanding industrialization of countries such as China and India, concerns about energy security and future supply make clear the necessity of seeking energy efficiency and self-sufficiency on our urban homesteads. In addition, the climatic implications of our dependence on fossil fuels leaves many folks who stumble out of a screening of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth wondering what exactly they can do in an increasingly desperate situation.

Optimists, such as Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, predict a new economy based on the production of innovative forms of alternative energy. Peak oil pessimists believe the world’s petroleum reserves are rapidly approaching a point where extraction will soon take more energy than it is worth, the result being economic disaster and the collapse of modern society.

Between these two extremes, waiting for some technological miracle or collapsing in despair, we propose a pragmatic third position: Keep your living space small, and tweak what you’ve got through low-tech, simple and small solutions aimed at maximizing the energy you use. Some high-tech miracle may come along, but in the meantime we’ll be doing what we can and having fun while we do it. Together, the simple projects we propose in this chapter will add up to a dramatic reduction in your environmental footprint and a big step toward energy independence. Energy independence is an accumulation of small opportunities — not grand strategies.

Principles

Our “keep it simple” energy plan takes a cue from the laws of thermodynamics that are inescapable in our universe. To oversimplify, the laws of thermodynamics basically state that you can’t get something out of nothing and secondly, that entropy or decay will guarantee that all energy in all its various forms ultimately decays. Or as author and scientist C.P. Snow put it, “you cannot win” and “you cannot break even.” So what we’ve got, we’ve got to use wisely and efficiently, leading us to our energy principles:

1. Energy systems we use should produce or conserve more energy than they took to make. In technical terms this principle is called “energy return on energy investment” or EROEI for short. A proven technology such as photovoltaic cells, which generate electricity from the sun, when properly made and installed will over time generate more power than it took to create them, giving us a positive EROEI. Though there is considerable controversy on this topic, some consider Ethanol that is produced from corn or soybeans to be an example of a fuel that takes more energy, in the form of fertilizers and transportation costs, than it produces.

2. Energy generation and conservation technologies on the urban homestead should be simple, long-lasting, and low-maintenance. Photovoltaic panels fit this description, as do bicycles and solar ovens. We like technologies whose parts and functions are readily understandable, standardized, and interchangeable. We don’t like complex contraptions with no proven history, with parts that can’t be replaced, and with promises too good to be true.

3. Energy systems should benefit the people they serve. Just as we do in our gardens, in energy production we seek out mutually beneficial arrangements, We search for techniques and technologies that enhance rather than drain our lives. If we can generate our own power, what do we use it for? We use it to create positive and enriching experiences.

4. Neither Luddite nor geek. Our tinkering ethos is pragmatic and extends to the way we generate and use energy. We do what we need to do to get by, as long as it is ethical and produces a net energy gain. Urban homesteaders are not Luddites. Any technology that has a proven EROEI and greatly reduces our emissions we’ll happily use. At the same time we must be skeptical of new alternative energy schemes. Recent history is replete with examples of ridiculous gadgets, fads, and frauds that simply don’t work other than to enrich hucksters looking for a quick buck.

Household Energy Use

Before we can get to tinkering with things like solar panels, we’ve got to increase the efficiency of the systems we currently have. And by starting with efficiency, renters and apartment dwellers who might not be able to take on the more radical projects will still have a way to save on those utility bills and make a contribution to keeping the globe cooler.

Source: Residential Energy Consumption Survey, 2001

This chart gives us a visual understanding of where we should direct our priorities in both conservation and innovation. What follows is a series of projects and suggestions to help you both increase the energy efficiency in your home and explore alternative technologies, arranged in order of energy costs.

Heating 49%

According to the last U.S. census, most homes are heated with gas, with smaller percentages heated with electricity, fuel oil or kerosene. Alarmingly, natural gas, which was once abundant and cheap, now faces an uncertain future as domestic supplies dwindle and demand increases. The same supply-and-demand problems also face the small percentage of homes that use fuel oil and kerosene. Right now, heating with gas is still cheaper than heating with electricity, but both will definitely rise in cost in coming years.

Strategy 1: Insulation

As with all projects relating to energy we first suggest increasing efficiency, which in the case of heating and cooling means making sure that your urban homestead is well insulated. Insulation is a complex (not to mention dull) subject and frankly, we have yet to follow our own advice, and live in a hastily built 1920s bungalow that’s basically a wood and plaster pup tent that offers merely symbolic resistance to wind and rain. When we get around to the task of sealing all those drafty cracks we’ll first consult Insulate and Weatherize by Bruce Harley, an excellent resource for information on insulation matters. It’s one of many books published by the Taunton Press, our go-to source for all home repair and construction questions. Taunton also puts out the informative Fine Homebuilding Magazine. There is a Taunton book on almost any construction or remodeling topic and all are thorough and well researched. Even if you’re hiring out the job, Taunton publications are a great way to educate yourself on getting the details right, and in the case of insulation, the devil is definitely in the details.

The Energy and Environmental Building Association also has an online checklist that you can go through to make sure your house is well sealed and insulated: eeba.org/resources/publications/hec.

Bubble-Wrap Your Windows

Windows are a huge source for heat loss. Admittedly this is not the most elegant solution, but it works, and it’s a cheap and easy way for anyone to cut heating bills in the coldest months.

Simply cut sheets of bubble wrap so they are sized to fit your windows, apply some water to the window with a spray bottle and before it dries, stick the bubble wrap on the glass. It will stay put. While you can buy special bubble wrap designed for greenhouses, regular bubble wrap will probably work just as well. If you number the pieces you use and keep a key on what piece goes where, you can stick the same wrap up again next year with less work.

Strategy 2: Gathering Solar Heat

Passive Solar Heating

Passive solar heating refers to heating that comes about through the design of the building itself, where both the materials and the configuration of the home are designed with the intention of catching and keeping the heat of the sun in the home, and so lessen the need for fuel-based heating. It is an ancient technology. Greek and Roman homes were set up to take advantage of the heating power of the sun’s rays. In ancient Greece, entire communities were laid using sophisticated passive solar design principles.

Few of us are able to design our homes from scratch, but when it comes time to rent or buy a house or apartment we can seek out inadvertent passive solar assets, such as south-facing windows, or make little changes around our present homes to enhance solar heat.

Some passive solar tips: If you’re searching for an urban homestead in a cold climate, try to find one with south-facing windows and a long wall on the south side that will collect heat. Clear obstructions that shade your south-facing windows. You want that sun to come on in. The south side of the house is a good place for deciduous trees (trees that lose their leaves in the winter). These provide shade in the summer and let in sunlight in the winter after the leaves have fallen off in the fall.

When it’s time to replace the roof, choose dark-colored roofing materials, which will absorb the heat of the sun. Tile and masonry floors in sunny rooms absorb sunlight, and hold that heat into the night.

Solar Air Heating

The principle of solar air heating is identical to the solar dehydrator that we describe on page 174. We’re not talking about photovoltaic panels here — no electricity is being generated or used. A solar hot air collector is an insulated box topped with glass or plastic, inside of which you put dark metallic material such as metal screen to absorb the light of the sun. It sits outside of your house, but is connected to the interior of your house via a vent. The sun heats the black metal and the resulting hot air rises up the length of the collection box and is vented into your living spaces. In most places a solar air heater won’t completely replace your conventional heating, but it can help augment it, and greatly reduce your power bills. Solar hot air will work best in cold places that get a lot of sun in the winter, like Colorado.

DIY solar hot air collectors come in different forms. The simplest version involves constructing a collector box, and feeding it into a window of your house, the same way you would stick a cheap air conditioner in a window. Detailed instructions for building window-mounted solar air heater like this can be found in the archives of Mother Earth News at motherearthnews.com/Green-HomeBuilding/1977-09-01/Mothers-Heat-Grabber.aspx.

Solar Hot Air Collector

Between The Studs

Another approach is to integrate a solar air heater into the wall between the studs of your house. Retired aircraft engineer Gary Reysa has an impressive design that he says will pay for itself in heating costs in just a year’s time. Rather than taking in cool air from the outside like the design above, Reysa’s solar heater passively recycles inside air, resulting in greater efficiency.

Other than the fact that the intake vents are inside rather than outside, the basic design is essentially the same principle as the food dehydrator described on page 174. Detailed instructions for how to build Reysa’s solar heater can be found at in the October/ November issue of Home Power Magazine and on the Build it Solar website at builditsolar.com/Projects/SpaceHeating/SolarBarn.pdf.

Commercial Versions

You can also purchase commercially-made solar hot air heaters that work just like the DIY versions. Commercial solar hot air systems often have an electric fan to help circulate hot air and may also have a thermostat. They come in both roof- and wall-mounted versions. The solar cost calculator at findsolar.com can help you figure out if buying a solar hot air system makes economic sense where you live.

Strategy 3: The High Mass Rocket Heater

The Limited Fuel Use Option

In many places in the world, heating is provided by wood, but unfortunately this practice can lead to massive deforestation. Rocket stoves (which we’ll describe in detail in our stove section) allow for high-efficiency burning of small materials such as twigs and wood scraps and are therefore much more energy-efficient than regular wood-burning stoves. A high mass rocket heater uses the same principle as the rocket stove to heat your house. Ecologist and author Ianto Evans has written a DIY book entitled Rocket Mass Heaters: Super Efficient Woodstoves You Can Build that details how to construct your own rocket heater.

Cooling 49%

Chill: Easy Passive Cooling Strategies

Just as with heating, it’s entirely possible to cool your house with simple and inexpensive passive measures. Remember that air conditioning did not come into widespread use until the 1950s and somehow we all managed to survive.

• Plant the things you water most (veggies, flowers, fruit trees, etc.) close to the house, that way they’ll help cool your living spaces through the water evaporating from both soil and leaves (as well as making it easier to grab food when you want it).

• Plant deciduous trees on the south side of the house to provide shade in the summer and sunlight in during the winter.

• Create inviting outdoor living spaces, preferably on the north side of the house, and spend your time outside on hot evenings.

• In hot climates, it’s a good idea to paint the exterior of your house with light-colored paint to significantly reduce heat absorption from the sun. For the same reason, choose light-colored roofing material if you don’t need winter heat.

• Observe where prevailing winds come from and do everything possible to enhance cross ventilation in your house.

PROJECT

HOW TO MAKE A LIVING AWNING OR SHADE

For south-facing windows, an awning or horizontal window trellis will shade your living space in the summer months and let the sun shine in during the winter. If you grow edible vines over your window trellis, not only will they give shade, but they will also give you food and the moisture evaporating from their leaves will cool the house more than an awning.

We really like the idea of being able to reach out the window to retrieve dinner.

Window trellises can be ordered, scavenged or, for those with carpentry skills, improvised. All they consist of are two supports, like shelf brackets, on either side of the window. Across those you lay something for the vines to cling to. That might be a piece of lattice, or several narrow pieces of cedar, or bamboo poles, or copper pipe.

Choose a deciduous, perennial vine (like a squash, maybe?) and you’ll have shade in the summer and sun in the winter. Just remember to keep vines neatly trimmed to prevent them from working their way into the walls, where they might do damage.

How do you know how deep the trellis should be? You could wing it — it’s fair enough to say that any sort of awning helps. But the best way to tell would be to take a ladder and a long stick, a yardstick would be nice, but any stick will do, to your window on a sunny day at noon around the summer solstice: June 21. Climb up the ladder and position the stick so that it is poking out perpendicularly from the wall of your house, just over your window (i.e. the spot where you’d install the trellis). You’ll see the shadow of the stick fall across the window. Run a finger along the stick until you can see the shadow of your finger at the lower edge of the window. That point, the place your finger is on the stick, indicates the ideal depth of your trellis. See, this is where having a yardstick comes in handy! But if you have a plain old stick, just mark that magic point and go measure the length of your stick to that point.

Living Curtains

A less formal approach than a trellis is to rig up a living curtain right in front of your window by providing vertical supports for climbing vines. Some thin wire or concrete reinforcing wire (find it at home centers in 3 ½’ by 7’ sections), the same stuff we use for tomato cages, can provide a temporary support for annual vines. Tomatoes, pole beans and cucumbers are the types of plants that are good candidates for a living curtain. The greenery will cool your house and provide a privacy screen.

If you don’t have any soil beneath your window, plant your vines in big self-watering containers.

Living Awning

We’re Fans Of Fans

Whole House Fans

Imagine your bathroom fan on steroids and you’ll have some idea what a whole house fan looks like. Whole house fans are usually placed somewhere in the center of the house in the joists between the ceiling and the attic. The fan points up into the attic. Fire it up, and the air flow it generates will suck cool air from the outside of the house, move it though the living areas and push hot air out of the attic.

A whole house fan is good for exactly one thing: cooling the interior of your house to the temperature outside. It won’t work in places where the nights are sweltering, but very useful for cooling down your house in the evening if the days are hot but the nights are reasonable.

In order for a whole house fan to work the attic itself must be adequately vented to exchange air with the outside. Screen material over your attic vents decreases air flow, so if your vents are screened, replace it with ½” hardware cloth to both keep critters out of the attic but allow the air to move.

Whole house fans come in different sizes depending on the square footage of your house with the smallest ones priced around $200. Installation will probably involve cutting ceiling joists so hire a carpenter if you feel uncomfortable sawing a giant hole in your ceiling. You can also make a low-rent whole house fan by jamming a large floor fan in your attic access door.

NOTE: If you have AC, do not use the whole house fan at the same time the AC is on or you’ll be sucking the expensive refrigerated air you are paying for straight out of the house.

Whole House Fans

Solar Attic Fan

Though not as effective as a whole house fan, attic fans, which are mounted on top of the roof, can help evacuate hot air out of your attic and that in itself will keep your house cooler. To be clear, the difference between these and whole house fans is that attic fans have nothing to do with sucking hot air out of your living space — only your attic. But a hot attic makes for a hot house, so they are worthwhile.

There are a few solar models available and installation is as simple as cutting a hole in your roof and installing the unit. In order for an attic fan to work properly the attic should have some intake vents, often placed under the eaves of the house, so that the attic fan can pull cool air from the outside up and then out of the attic.

One possible strategy is to run an attic fan during the hot parts of the day to keep the attic from heating up, and the whole house fan during the cool hours of the evening.

Ceiling Fans

Ceiling fans are an excellent alternative to conventional air-conditioning — they keep the airflow in a room moving, they are inexpensive and easy to install and don’t use a lot of energy. The only drawback to them, in fact, is an aesthetic one. For some reason, ceiling fan manufacturers adhere to a saloon-whore-house-meets-cheap-Chinese-slave-labor look. While very expensive designer models exist, the urban homesteader can pimp out most ceiling fans with some paint and creativity to cover up the factories’ unfortunate attempts at ornamentation. You can also switch out the ugly lampshades that seem to always come with these things.

Water Heater 13%

Pimp My Hot Water Heater

Treat your water heater like teens treat their Hondas — as a source for self-expression and optimized performance. If you’re going to attempt solar water heating it’s especially important to boost your conventional water heater’s efficiency.

• First, make sure that your water heater’s thermostat is set at the lowest agreeable setting. While thermostat settings of any kind are a potential source of spousal/roommate conflict, there is no sense heating water to dangerous temperatures.

• The next step is wrapping your water heater in a insulating blanket. Insulating kits can be purchased at your hardware store for around $20 and they will pay for themselves in a few months. Follow the kit instructions precisely.

• Finally comes the less than scintillating annual task of water heater draining. That gurgling sound you might hear after taking a shower is the result of sediment from your municipal water supply that builds up in the bottom of the tank. As this sediment builds up, it prevents the water in the tank from being heated efficiently. We recommend draining your water heater once a year, but some plumbing experts suggest doing it more often. To remind yourself to do this task, pick a significant date like the summer solstice or your birthday and throw a water heater draining party.

How To Drain The Tank

1. Turn off the cold supply to the tank. If it’s an electric water heater shut the power off to the heater — if you don’t you’ll burn out the heating element. If you have a gas heater shut off the gas at the heater.

2. Hook up a garden hose to the drain pipe that you will find at the bottom of the tank.

3. Open up the hot water side of any faucet in your house.

4. Open the drain valve on the water heater and kick back — it will take a while to drain the tank. Send it to a kiddie pool for a low-end hot tub party — after all, it is your birthday, remember? Make it a nude hot tub party.

5. After the water has drained, shut off the drain valve and turn on the cold water supply to the tank to loosen more of the sediment. Let the tank fill partially and then drain it again. If you’ve got a lot of crap in the tank you may need to do this several times.

6. To finish up, shut off the drain valve and let the tank fill up completely. You’ll know the tank is full when water starts coming out of the hot water faucet you left open in your house. When the tank is full turn the power on again or, if it’s gas, turn it on and light the pilot light.

If all of this seems a little wearisome, it might be time to consider a tankless water heater. Popular in Europe for a long time, tankless heaters heat on demand, and might use less energy depending on where you live and how many folks live on your homestead. The big drawback right now with tankless systems is the expense, but you’ll never have to drain one.

Alternatives To The Gas-Heated Shower

The Sunshine Shower

We’re not suggesting you take all of your showers outdoors. But outdoor shower/tub situations have been all the thing in fancy home mags of late, and though we lack the budget, we don’t see why we can’t have the pleasure of showering with the birds on a warm summer day. It’s cheap and easy to install a solar shower. You’ll have fun with it, and whenever you use it, you’ll be saving energy, and watering your yard.

Plant things around your shower that can take advantage of the water-rich environment. Line the floor of your shower with gravel to keep your feet out of the mud. The shampoo and soap you use will be of small enough quantities that they should not harm the plants, but it couldn’t hurt to use very mild, natural products in your outdoor shower.

The principle behind the solar-heated shower is simple — fill a black container with water, let it heat up in the sun, and take your shower in the afternoon. Here are three ways to construct one:

Camping Shower

First off is the camping shower in a bag concept. The principle is simple — you fill a black bag with water, leave it out in the sun, and hang it somewhere for your very brief shower. You can buy one of these things for around $20 or, better yet, you can improvise one with a truck tire inner tube.

Plumb the truck tire with a ½” plastic pipe coupler, a male hose connector, a small clamp, and a nozzle. See our bibliography for a pointer to instructions at motherearthnews.com. Create a stall for your shower out of scrap wood and put the tire on top.

Camping Shower

Garden Hose Shower

Another option that makes for a longer shower is simply to coil up 200’ of black garden hose and put it somewhere sunny, like the top of a shower enclosure, or the roof of your house. For temperature control, add a “Y” connector to blend in cold water from a second hose. These connectors are found next to the hose section at the hardware store.

ABS Shower

Inexpensive black ABS (plumbing) pipe can also be used to make a solar shower. You get this stuff at any home center. All you have to do is glue it into a squarish configuration using the cement that is sold for this purpose, connect a shower head to the lowest part of it. Fill it with a hose, leave it out in the sun to heat. Your shower lasts as long as the amount of water contained in the ABS pipe, meaning use more pipe for longer showers. You could also construct a sort of trellis-roof out of ABS for the top of your improvised shower stall. This will provide greater privacy if your city has as many police helicopters as birds.

Solar Water Heaters For General Household Hot Water

Heating water for general household use is one of the most promising applications for the light of the sun. And the good news is that creating your own solar water heating system is within the means of the ambitious do-it-yourself urban homesteader. Note that with solar water heating we won’t be using photovoltaic panels — those are for generating electricity. Instead we’ll be using sunlight to heat water directly.

Solar water heating is an old and proven technology with the first patent for a solar water heater, which consisted of a black water tank on the roof, dating to 1891. Solar water heaters fall into several different categories. The type you choose will depend on your climate and whether you want to do the work yourself. With most urban installations you’ll probably keep your conventional gas or electric water heater as a backup.

The simplest solar water heaters that you can build yourself closely resemble the 19th-century versions (yes, there was a solar craze in the 19th century!), and consist of a black tank, often a scavenged old water heater, contained in a insulated, glass-topped box. These simple systems are known as batch heaters or “integral passive solar water heaters” (IPSWH for short) since the collection and storage of your hot water takes place in the collector itself. The Build it Solar website has a detailed 100-page book on how to design and build batch heaters by David Bainbridge called The Integral Passive Solar Water Heater Book that you can download for free: builditsolar.com/Projects/WaterHeating/ISPWH/ispwh.htm

Another slightly more complicated solar water heating method is called thermosyphoning. Thermosyphoning is the most common solar water heating method in the world. Just as with air, hot water rises and thermosyphoning takes advantage of this principle with a separate solar collector through which water is circulated. As the water heats, it rises up to a separate hot water storage tank. The advantage of this system over the batch heater is that the hot water ends up in a separate tank which can be insulated and housed indoors to make hot water available for a longer period of time after the sun goes down.

Thermosyphoning Diagram

Closed Loop Systems For Freezing Conditions

To operate a solar hot water heater year-round in a cold climate there are additional considerations to take into account. The solar hot water heaters we just described are called “open-loop” systems — the water in the tank or collector is the same water that you’ll use in your house. In cold climates, where water could freeze and burst the pipes, you have two choices: either drain the system for the winter and rely on gas, or upgrade to a “closed loop” system which circulates an antifreeze solution such as propylene glycol though the collector instead of water. The antifreeze solution heats your water through a heat exchanger, which usually consists of a pipe with the antifreeze surrounded by another pipe containing your household potable water. For most, this kind of system is going to be store-bought and professionally installed.

Other Options

Besides open-loop and closed-loop there are additional kinds of solar collectors for heating water such as flat plate collectors, which are a network of pipes in a glass covered insulated box, and efficient evacuated tube collectors which have pipes surrounded by vacuum-sealed glass tubes. With evacuated tube collectors the vacuum creates a highly efficient insulation around the collector pipes making these expensive collectors a good option for cold places. Even on a cloudy day, an evacuated tube collector can heat your water.

For more information on commercial solar hot water systems and to determine if they are economical for you check out findsolar.com. For DIY solar hot water projects go to the Build it Solar website: builditsolar.com.

Lighting 10%

Light Bulbs

It should be old news by now that compact fluorescent bulbs are where it’s at — we’ll assume you’ve already gotten rid of the energy-wasting conventional light bulbs in your house. One thing to note is that the quality of compact fluorescents varies widely. It’s best to stick to the big brand names, as off-brand or generic bulbs may not last as long and may have unappealing hues.

While there will no doubt be a bright future for LED bulbs, right now, compact fluorescents are still more cost-effective if you consider the ratio between cost and the amount of light they put out. It’s not entirely fair to compare compact fluorescents to LED lights, since LED bulbs have a more directed light, making them better for certain applications such as bedside reading lights, where you don’t want to bother a dozing partner. LEDs also have an exceptionally long life — upwards of 60,000 hours. LEDs just don’t, at this point, work so well in situations where you need general dispersed lighting, such as in a floor or ceiling lamp. This will change soon as the lighting industry continues to develop new kinds of LED bulbs.

Tubular Skylight

Tubular Skylights

Tubular skylights are an easy and simple alternative to lightbulbs that will bring sunlight into your home during the day without installing an expensive and potentially leaky skylight. Tubular skylights consist of a collector that you mount on the roof and a tube that snakes down through the attic and through the ceiling, allowing filtered sunlight to pass from the sky into your house. These “light tubes” are a godsend for dark bathrooms, hallways, and kitchens. The light they create is pleasant and diffuse. Best of all, a light tube means you can keep the light switches in your home in the “off” position until the sun goes down. Installing a tubular skylight is well within the means of a DIY urban homesteader. The most well-known brand name in this field is Solatube (solatube.com).

Stoves and Microwaves And Small Appliances (8%)

The uncertain future of natural gas makes finding alternatives for conventional stoves essential. And a word on anything that uses electricity to heat — don’t use it if you can help it. You are better off cooking and heating with gas or with the alternative means described below. Electric heating elements, which can be found in things like coffee makers and toasters, are an inefficient and expensive way to cook.

An Overview Of Solar Cookers

One of the most promising alternatives to cooking with gas or electricity is solar cooking. While solar cooking can take more time than a conventional oven, one nice side benefit is that with the lower temperatures it is impossible to burn anything. Put your food in the solar oven in the morning and in a few hours you’ll have a hot lunch or early dinner. Food can be removed any time after it is done.

There’s definitely a solar cooking season with most solar cookers, since sunlight is diminished when the winter sun hangs low on the horizon. In most places solar cooking season is the time of year when your shadow is shorter than you are.

There are three basic types of solar cookers, and all can be improvised with scavenged materials.

• Panel cookers are the simplest and can be made with a cardboard box, aluminum foil, and a black pot.

• Box cookers are more efficient and consist of an insulated box, some glass, and reflectors to increase the amount of sun going into the box.

• Parabolic solar cookers are the fanciest of all. They consist of mirrors focused on a tight spot — they are the most difficult to build but will produce temperatures so high that you can deep-fry with them.

Panel Solar Cookers

The simplest kinds of solar cookers consist of nothing but a black pot and a piece of cardboard covered with aluminum foil. The extraordinarily useful Solar Cooking archive (solarcooking.org/plans/default.htm) has a large number of designs that you can download and build for next to nothing. To make a panel cooker all you have to do is take a piece of cardboard, spray-glue some aluminum foil on it, and bend it into the shape you see in the illustration and point it at the sun. Your pot should be black to absorb the heat better, and efficiency can be further increased by putting the pot in a clear plastic bag (oven cooking bags are great for this purpose since they won’t melt in high heat).

Panel Solar Cooker

Box Solar Cookers

Box cookers are our favorite type of solar cooker for day-to-day use, and the best do-it-yourself design we’ve seen is the Heaven’s Flame. Search this name for free construction plans from a number of sources. It consists of a smaller cardboard box placed within a larger cardboard box, with the space between the two stuffed with rags as insulation. You cover the opening with a piece of glass and affix a set of panels around the top to bounce more light into the box.

The Heaven’s Flame Cooker

The Global Sun Oven

The readymade alternative: If you think you’ll be doing a lot of solar cooking, and want something sturdy, or just don’t want to make one yourself, you can buy a solar box cooker called the Global Sun Oven for around $200. The Global Sun Oven has a convenient tilting tray to put your pots on, a temperature gauge, thick insulation, and is sturdier than a cardboard box.

Parabolic Cookers

A Hybrid Parabolic-Panel Cooker

Arranging your cardboard panels into a parabolic shape (that means shaped like a satellite dish for those of us who have forgotten our geometry) will increase efficiency and generate more heat. The Parvati Solar Cooker, developed for use in India where shortages of cooking fuels are a serious problem, is one example of an easy-to-build parabolic panel cooker. Search Parvati Solar Cooker for free plans. Plans also exist on the Solar Cooking Archive website.

Purely Parabolic

Genuine parabolic cookers are more difficult to make because of the complex shape, but they generate heat well. We’ve heard of people roasting coffee beans in them. There are a number of clever designs out there, including one by Marc Ayats called the Paracuina solar cooker, which is made from an umbrella. Plans for the Paracuina cooker can be downloaded at solarcooking.org/plans/paracuina.pdf. Some folks have built parabolic cookers from repurposed satellite dishes.

The Built-In Solution: A Wall Cooker

One drawback to solar cookers is that you have to take them and your food outside. For greater convenience in cooking you can build a solar box cooker into a wall or window of your house so that you have indoor access to your solar oven. All you do is make an insulated plywood box with a slanted top to catch the sun, on which you put a piece of glass. Caulk everything carefully with silicon to seal in the heat and create an access door in the wall or window of the house. Affix the box to that opening.

The downside to wall cookers is that the oven cannot be aimed at the sun, so it must be installed on a sunny wall, and you must time your cooking to coincide with the hours the sun is on that wall. Barbara Kerr has a nice design that can be accessed at solarcooking.org/bkerr/DoItYouself.htm

Wall Cooker

PROJECT

BUILD A ROCKET STOVE

The rocket stove was designed by Dr. Larry Winiarski of the Aprovecho Research Center, a non-profit organization that develops “appropriate technology” (which they define as “technology that can be made at an affordable price by ordinary people using local materials to do useful work”). Rocket stoves are an efficient way to cook using only twigs and small wood scraps, not logs. They are twice as efficient as conventional wood-burning methods. There are a number of different designs, but most consist of a heavily-insulated L-shaped metal pipe, at the bottom of which you burn a small, hot fire. The super-efficient transfer of heat from the wood to the pot is facilitated by the chimney effect.

To make a rocket stove you’ll need:

• Square five-gallon metal cooking oil container (ask a restaurant for one of these),

• Stove pipe

• Stove pipe elbow

• 15 oz. can

• Small metal grill to rest your pot on

Wear gloves while you’re making this so that you don’t cut yourself on the sharp pieces of metal.

1. Fit the stove pipe into the elbow snugly so that no heat leaks out.

2. Cut a circular hole low down on one of the sides of your five-gallon metal container for the elbow to stick out of. This is where you feed the fire.

3. Take both ends off your 15 oz. can. Cut it lengthwise and flatten it out so that it becomes a rectangle. Cut the metal into a T shape so that the tail of the T will fit into the elbow sticking out the side of the can to form a shelf for the firewood.

4. Cut out a circular hole for the top of the stove pipe in the lid of your oil can. Then cut off the edges of the lid so that it will fit down a few inches into the five-gallon container.

5. Assemble the elbow, stove pipe and shelf. Pour ashes into the five-gallon container so that they surround the stove pipe, filling the container entirely to provide insulation for the stove pipe. Tuck the lid of the can a few inches down into the container, so that it rests on the bed of ashes.

6. Put the grill on top of the container and you’re ready to cook.

7. To use the stove, select small pieces of kindling and start a fire with some newspaper. Feed the kindling slowly into the stove across the feeding tray, pushing it bit by bit as it burns.

The Aprovecho Research Center has developed a number of other rocket stoves that you can build for your urban homestead. You can download plans and watch instructional videos on the Aprovecho Research Center’s website at aprovecho.org. Particularly useful is their publication “Capturing Heat”: weblife.org/capturing_heat/pdf/capturing_heat.pdf

PROJECT

TOMATO CAN STOVE

This is a little outdoor hobo stove that works on the same principle as a charcoal chimney starter and the rocket stove described above. It burns twigs, so it’s easy to fuel. Best of all, it’s extremely simple to build.

A cheap little stove is a good thing to have on hand for emergencies. Sometimes it’s just nice to be able to have a hot drink or heat up some soup while you wait for the power/ gas to come back on. In more extreme situations, it could be used to boil water for drinking.

You need:

• A 28-ounce can, or similar.

• Heavy wire. Coat-hanger wire is a little flimsy for this project. About 3 feet of it.

• A drill with a 1/4 inch bit and a 1/8” inch bit. (You could do this with a hammer and awl, too.)

1. Turn the can upside down and drill a bunch of 1/8” holes in the bottom. No particular pattern or number, but don’t be shy. Make it into Swiss cheese. These holes will allow air to draw through the fire. The more holes the better.

2. Measure down about ¾” from the upper rim of the can. Using a pen, mark eight evenly spaced holes around the perimeter of the can. Drill at these points using the ¼” bit.

3. Do exactly the same thing at the bottom of the can. Mark ¾” up from the bottom rim and make eight ¼” holes. Make sure these holes align with the ones above.

4. Cut three equal pieces of wire to serve both as legs and to elevate the cooking surface. This sounds strange at first, but it’s actually simple. You’re going to thread three longish pieces of wire through the top and bottom holes of your can at equal intervals, forming tripod legs for the can. However, those same pieces of wire are going to extend over the top edge of the can as well, forming three prongs that you can balance a pot or kettle on.

So cut the wire with a mind to how far you want the can off the ground, and how far you want the cooking surface elevated. You should have an extension of at least two inches off the top and bottom to allow for good air flow. The total length of your wire = the height of your can + (at least) four inches.

On our tomato can, which measures 4½”, the total length of each piece of wire is 8½”, allowing two-inch extensions top and bottom.

5 Thread your first piece of wire into the can by pushing it through one of the bottom holes from the outside. Run it up the inside of the can and back out of the matching ¼” hole at the top. Do the same with the other two pieces of wire, spacing them at even intervals to form a tripod base.

Yes, there are eight holes top and bottom and you’re only using three. The others are for air.

6 Bend the wire and fiddle with the legs until it stands sturdy. Do the same with top, shaping the prongs until they’ll balance an empty pot.

7 To use the stove, gather a bit of newspaper and a bunch of pencil-sized and smaller twigs. Wad a little newspaper on the bottom, and then pack the can tightly with twigs that you’ve broken up into one- to two- inch pieces.

The idea is to create a slow, controlled burn with a minimum of soot and smoke. The looser you pack the wood the faster it will burn, which is not as good. Light the newspaper through one of the bottom holes. The twigs should catch fire easily. You can add a squirt of starter fluid if you’re having trouble.

You’ll get the feel of it. Play with your stove prior to an emergency, just for fun. That way when you really need it, you’ll be comfortable with it.

PROJECT

HEAT ON THE CHEAP: BUDDY BURNERS

A buddy burner is an easy craft project for the family survivalist, which we learned from the brilliant ’70s Mormon classic, Roughing it Easy by Dian Thomas.

Think of it as a homemade Sterno can for camping or emergencies, made entirely of recycled materials you’re likely to have around the house.

Completed, a buddy burner is simply a tuna can packed with cardboard rolled in a sweet-roll configuration. The cardboard is saturated with wax, making the whole can flammable. It can be used as cooking fuel, light, or a heat source. It will burn for 1 ½-2 hours, and can be recharged and reused.

What you need:

• A clean tuna can

• A piece of cardboard

• A bunch of candle stubs (You knew you were keeping them for a reason!)

• Some kind of double boiler setup, e.g. a soup can and a small sauce pan

Part 1: Cut your board and pack your can

Begin by cutting the cardboard into strips as wide as the can is deep. It doesn’t matter how long they are, but longer strips are easier to work with.

Cut across the corrugation — across the ridges — so that when you look at the edge of the strip you see the open channels. You are going to coil the cardboard in the can, so you will need maybe three or four feet of cardboard total. Roll your strips of cardboard up like a sweet roll, starting with your longest strip. Tuck it in the center of the can, and coil the rest of the cardboard strips around it until the can is filled with cardboard. It doesn’t have to be tight, but it should be pretty full.

Part 2: Melt your wax and pour it in

Pile your candle stubs next to the tuna can to get a sense of how many you’ll need to melt. The wax soaks into the cardboard, so you always seem to need more than you expect. Don’t worry about the wicks, dust, soot, or those little metal tab things. The purity of your wax doesn’t matter.

Melting wax directly over a flame is dangerous, because if it reaches high temps it could catch fire. Therefore it is safest and best to use a double boiler. All this means is that you’re going to put your candle stubs in a clean soup can. Then you’re going to put the soup can in the center of a pot of gently simmering water.

Keep your eye on it, and give it an occasional stir. The wax will melt eventually. As it melts it will liberate bits of old wick. Fish these out first and tuck two or three in a standing position between the cardboard coils to act as starter wicks for the burner. Then pour the hot wax slowly into the tuna can. It will fill up fast at first, then the wax level will sink as the cardboard soaks it up. Keep adding wax a little at a time — you want to be sure the can is absolutely full of wax and the cardboard completely saturated.

Cooking with your buddy

To cook with your buddy burner, all you have to do is figure out how to elevate a cooking pot above it. You could use a fondue setup, or stack up some bricks on either side of the can, or fashion a base out of wire.

To start the burner, light the wicks that you tucked into the cardboard and turn the can up on its side so that the cardboard catches fire, too. The cardboard is a huge wick. That inferno effect is what you want.

Control the size of the flame by making a damper out of a piece of aluminum. Fold the foil into a rectangle as wide as the can, but much longer so that you can use the excess as a handle. Slide the foil back and forth to expose or repress the flame as needed.

To recharge the burner, place chunks of wax on top of it while it’s burning. The wax will melt down and refuel it. The wax will always burn at a lower temperature than the cardboard, so the cardboard should last a long time.

Safety note:

Unfortunately, these days, most “tin” cans are coated on the inside with plastic. The plastic leaks estrogen-mimicking compounds into our food. It also makes heating up food directly in cans problematic, ruining a whole school of outdoor cooking. You’re not eating out of the buddy burner, but it might release some plastic fumes during use. We’ve never smelled anything, but they’re probably there. To prevent this, you might want to toss your empty tuna cans on an outdoor fire and burn off the plastic coating before you begin the project. The cans will blacken, but may easily be scrubbed clean.

Electronics 7%

We do not have any DIY substitutes for the electronic toys that fill our homes short of learning to play a musical instrument and putting on your own plays, but we can use our electronic gadgets as efficiently as possible.

Hunting The Phantom

Electronics are the most insidious source of so-called phantom loads, a colorful way of describing how certain appliances drain electricity even when they are not in use. Anything with a transformer, those plugs with big annoying plastic cubes at the end, are the first place to hunt phantoms.

Transformers — we prefer calling them “wall warts” — take household current and step it down to the level that your answering machine, laptop or cell phone charger uses. Unfortunately transformers consume power even when you’ve turned the appliance off. Plug all such electronic gadgets into a power strip, that way when you’re done using them you can cut off the power at the strip and stop those phantom loads.

Also look out for any appliance that has a clock, because a clock is an energy drain. If you don’t need the clock, like the one on your microwave, for instance, put the appliance on a powerstrip and turn it off when not in use. Phantom load meters with punning names such as the Kill-A-Watt and Watts Up, can help you figure out if an appliance is draining power while “off,” but these things cost between $40 and $100, meaning you’d probably be better off just assuming they do, and investing in a few power strips.

Computers

Some computer folks will tell you that computers will last longer if you keep them on all the time. True, the power supply may last longer, but it doesn’t justify the electricity costs; and people tend to replace computers long before the power supply will die. For reducing power loads, consider a laptop computer that uses a lot less power than a desktop model.

The Boombox: Your New Home Stereo

Big stereo systems draw a fair amount of power. An energy-saving tip that many off-grid rural households take advantage of is to replace the home stereo with a much smaller “boombox” or a small dockable desktop iPod speaker system. Plug it into a power strip and you’ll also be able to kill any phantom loads when not in use.

Plasma TVs Are The New Hummers

Bad news for those with a jones for gargantuan TVs — some new plasma screen TVs consume more power per year than your refrigerator even if you only have them on for a few hours a day. According to the Wall Street Journal, a 60-inch plasma screen will cost you around $120 worth of electricity to run for a year compared with $60 for your refrigerator. Add on the fancy surround sound, game consoles, DVD players, set-top boxes and digital recorders and you’re looking at a veritable fiesta of energy-sucking plugs.

Washer & Dryer 6%

The Solar Clothes Dryer

The solar clothes dryer, otherwise known as a clothesline, is probably the simplest solar power application that virtually anyone can use. Why air-dry your clothes? In terms of energy savings the economic benefit doesn’t seem all that impressive at first. In our urban homestead at our current natural gas prices we figure we’re saving about 17 cents per load. If we had an electric dryer the cost would be considerably higher — 44 cents per load. But if you live in an apartment and use a coin-operated dryer you’ll have an even bigger savings since you won’t be pumping quarters into the machine.

Of course if we figure in the cost of the dryer itself, those loads would cost quite a bit more. But the greatest savings over time may be that air-drying is simply better for your clothes. They’ll last longer and smell fresher than machine-dried clothes.

Simple retractable clotheslines as well as clothespins are available at your local hardware store. Those with limited space may want to consider a rotating collapsible design especially made for small spaces. There are also drying racks made for use both indoors and outdoors. The smaller racks can be moved around to take full advantage of the sun.

KELLY SAYS: Homesteader is not a synonym for martyr. I have to be honest here and say that we have a dryer as well as a laundry line. Erik is advocating that we do not replace the dryer when it finally shakes and sputters its way off to dryer heaven, but you can bet there will be some bickering here when that day comes. Laundry lines are great, but they do require that you plan your laundry days. Time spent hanging laundry can be calming, meditative, wonderful, but sometimes you want to — have to! — do laundry at night, or when it is raining. So I’ll retain the option to machine-dry, and save the suffering for when the zombies come, thank you very much. Then I will out to hang laundry with an Uzi strapped to my shoulder.

ERIK SAYS: Planning when to hang laundry is one of those activities, like growing food, that connects you with nature. You’ve got to watch the weather! That’s what the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration website and the Weather Channel are for — I’m not a Luddite after all! That being said, we live in Los Angeles where the weather is almost always sunny and warm, so if we lived in Seattle and I had to deal with an armful of soggy laundry during a rainy spell, I might feel differently.

Refrigerator 5%

Refrigerators are the single biggest power-sapping appliance in your household, and they have a depressing history of bad design. Back in the days of cheap electricity, manufactures increased the interior capacity of refrigerators by reducing the amount of insulation and then adding heaters to deal with the moisture that developed on the outside of the fridge because of the lack of insulation. This resulted in refrigerators so inefficient (1950s refrigerators were four times more efficient than 1970s models) that California stepped in with regulations in 1976, with the federal government following in 1993. There is still room for improvement and the most innovative and energy efficient refrigerators made today are to be found in the world of off-grid solar living.

We are particularly fond of our ConServ Refrigerator made by the Vestfrost company. While more expensive than a comparable-sized refrigerator it will, over time, make up the difference in lower electricity bills, and its high efficiency is especially important if you want to power your kitchen with solar. Another added benefit of this refrigerator is its very small footprint — just two by two feet making it an ideal appliance for old kitchens that have no room for modern refrigerators.

The easiest way to take energy consumption down is to use as small a refrigerator as possible. Some folks may be able to get away with a bar-style fridge. As Shay Soloman, author of Little House On A Small Planet, told us, big refrigerators are usually filled with nothing but the two C’s: condiments and compost.

Dishwashers 2%

The good news about dishwashers is that a study conducted by the University of Bonn in Germany concluded that dishwashers use half the energy, one-sixth the water, and less soap than hand-washing.

Photovoltaic Panel

Generating Your Own Power

Since all power on earth ultimately originates with the sun, it makes sense to go straight to the source. Generating electricity from sunlight is the most promising way for urban homesteads to achieve energy independence. Systems can range from the simple, such as a photovoltaic solar panel hooked up to a laptop for emergencies, a tiny trailer wired for a solar-pimped version of Thoreau’s cabin, to a full-blown system for all of your household needs installed by a licensed electrician. Lets first look at some of the components involved in generating electricity with sunlight and then take a look at some examples of how these individual components might be put together.

Electricity From Solar Power — The Components

Photovoltaic Panels

Photovoltaic Panels (PV for short) convert the light of the sun to electricity. PV panels come in a wide variety of sizes from small panels you can use to charge batteries or run a laptop, to multiple panels chained together to run your urban homestead. They are sized according to how much power they generate, a figure measured in “watts,” though in the real world they won’t quite generate their rated power. Photovoltaic panels are modular and can be hooked together to provide more watts of power.

Panels should ideally face south with an unobstructed view of the sun. Just a little bit of shade across the panels can dramatically reduce their electricity output. Panels also need mounting hardware so they don’t blow away in a storm, and so they can be tilted at the optimal angle.

Prices for PV panels are beginning to fall dramatically and whatever your feelings about our international economy, low-cost manufacturing of PV panels in China may spark a solar revolution. Recent manufacturing breakthroughs have included panels that can double as roofing or siding material allowing them to be easily integrated into most any building.

Inverters

PV panels output direct current (DC) electricity. Direct current is the kind of power that batteries put out and it’s the power that you’ll find in cars and boats, but not in a conventional house. So with a solar power system you have two options — use DC appliances, like the kind found in the world of recreational vehicles, or convert that DC to AC. There is a whole world of DC appliances, but they tend to be more expensive and limited, so most urban household PV systems make use of a device called an inverter which converts DC to regular household AC, meaning that you can use all your normal electronic devices. Inverters take away some of the power in converting DC to AC, but not as much as they used to.

Off-Grid vs. Grid-Tied, Or, When The Sun Don’t Shine

During the evening hours, or during an extended stormy spell, you’ll have to decide whether to go completely off-grid, by using a battery backup, or if you’ll stay tied to the utility grid (“grid-tied”) and use city power to keep the lights on at night.

In an off-grid system you store your electricity in batteries that the solar panels charge up during the day. The advantage of this system is that you are energy-independent — power outages will have no impact on your homestead. The disadvantage is the additional expense and maintenance of a whole bank of batteries and the added cost involved in having enough photovoltaic panels to completely cover all of your electricity needs. To go off-grid you will definitely need to trim down your energy usage by adopting many if not all of the conservation techniques we’ve already discussed.

The most common photovoltaic power installation in urban areas is a grid-tied system where you stay hooked up to your utility company. During the day, when your PV panels are collecting electricity, your power meter will run backwards if you are generating more power than you are using, and you’ll be selling electricity back to your utility company. Your power company will credit you for the power you have fed back into the grid. At night, since you are still hooked up to the grid, you’ll use your utility company’s power.

Batteries

Advanced DIY types who want to experiment with small-scale solar systems need to know a few basics about batteries. Car batteries, for instance, are designed for brief periods of discharging when starting the car followed by a long period of slow charging, when the car is running. If you try to run your light bulbs off of a car battery it will quickly become impossible to recharge, and you’ll end up with a toxic doorstop.

The cheapest battery option for solar systems is six-volt golf cart batteries — string them together in pairs and you’ll have the 12 volts you’ll need to power your typical small DC system. Lead-acid golf cart batteries need periodic maintenance, which consists of adding distilled water so that the internal lead plates stay immersed in a chemical stew. Fail to do so and the battery can smoke, catch fire and/or explode. These types of batteries can also produce hydrogen gas which is why they should be vented to the outside. Placing your batteries on a concrete floor, or concrete backer board, used for backing tile, is also a good idea in case of acid spills.

One way to avoid these maintenance hassles is to purchase the more expensive gel or absorbed glass matte batteries (AGM). These batteries are completely sealed and do not need to be topped off with water and you don’t need to construct a vented enclosure, though it’s always good to keep the terminals in an enclosed box or covered in some way to prevent accidental electrocution.

Charge Controller

If your system uses batteries you’ll need a charge controller. A charge controller’s electronics monitor your batteries charge level and prevent overcharging.

Safety Disconnect

As required by code, properly installed photovoltaic systems will have a disconnect switch to allow for safe troubleshooting of electronics. Just like the juice flowing from your power company’s wires, your solar system can fry you and light your casa on fire if you get careless.

Fuses

Fuses prevent electrocution, fires and damage to equipment in the event of a short circuit. All solar systems, even really small ones, need fuses.

Solar Systems: Small, Medium And Large

Most discussions of solar electricity use revolve around large systems installed by a professional that provide all or part of the energy needs of your household. We will briefly discuss what such a system would look like. But solar systems can also come in small and medium forms — you can use them to power a few outdoor lights, or to provide backup power to a tiny house or a home office.

Entry-Level Solar

Simple entry-level solar gadgets such as battery chargers, cell phone chargers, outdoor lights, while probably not economical, can provide a cheap solar thrill as well as give an introduction to basic solar electronics.

Tiny Kit For A Laptop

A kit is probably the best way to put together a small system. Kits such as this one, which includes a PV panel, battery and inverter, available from Sundance Solar, could be used to power a light or laptop,

Ted Kaczynski Solar: Systems For Small Homes, Apartments, And Emergency Backup

While even a small solar photovoltaic system is expensive, anyone can put together a simple panel and battery combo that could power a home office or an extremely frugal household. To see detailed examples of small systems that renters have put together see issues 93 and 96 of Home Power Magazine, available at your library or online for a small fee. Both of these examples consist of a couple of PV panels on the roof hooked up to an inverter and batteries all contained in a small plywood box. The cost for such a small setup will be in the low thousands — expensive, but keep in mind that when you move, you can take it with you.

It’s tempting in such small systems to skip the inverter and run everything off DC power; however, the cost of the larger wires, and more exotic appliances you need with DC make it impractical for all but the tiniest applications.

Going All The Way

For homesteaders who can afford it, a grid-tied system installed by a licensed contractor with an economic assist from government incentives and tax breaks will be the most sensible path.

If you own your own homestead, there are many federal, state and municipal incentives for installing solar photovoltaic systems. These incentives are constantly in flux so you’ll need to check findsolar.com and use their online calculator to help determine the cost of a full-scale installation and whether it makes economic sense. Findsolar’s calculator will also tell you if your local utility company has a net metering plan that will let you sell power back to the grid for a further reduction of your costs.

Some Precautions

While we’re bullish on solar power, beware of too-good-to-be-true claims which the alternative energy industry is full of. Get references from any contractor and watch their work carefully. One persistent problem with solar contractors is carelessness when mounting the panels on your roof which can lead to leaks and mold. You’ll also need to make nice with the neighbors to make sure they don’t plant trees that will eventually shade your panels.

Self-Contained Solar

It takes years for a solar system to pay for itself, and that fact keeps many people from investing in one. Why pay for an expensive installation when you’re likely to move before it pays off? One solution is to buy a self-contained solar system (both off-grid and grid-tied versions are available) in which the panels, inverter and other electronics are all mounted together in a big box. All you do is plop it down in the sun somewhere in your yard and hire a licensed electrician to hook it up to your home’s electrical panel. Because it is not affixed to the roof, when you move, you just take it with you.

In 2004, after doing some work on our home, we decided to purchase a small-scale solar unit to provide some of the power used within our home. Over the previous years we had reduced our lifestyle to demand just one car, and numerous bicycles, but the continued wringing of our hands over the world’s energy situation was getting old. We decided to make an investment. Our intent was multi-pronged: we wanted to support the solar energy industry, take advantage of plentiful sunlight that was falling on our property every day, contribute to the power grid, rather than just take from it, and be somewhat self-reliant in regards to the power we used in our daily lives. To us, a small investment in the future was the way to go. Someone needed to start building the alternative energy infrastructure of the 21st century so we volunteered.

We settled on the Bluelink 960 (960 Watts DC) after talking with company CEO, Naoto Inoue. Bluelink, a partnership of Talmage Solar, Solar

Market, and Two Seas Metalworks, makes affordable “plug-n-play” systems that are fully assembled and ready to go (think washing machine that sits in your backyard and generates electricity). We went small because we didn’t want half of our investment to go into the system’s installation. Bluelink’s system really fit our needs so it was an easy choice. Spending a little over $9,000 on the system, we received a rebate of $2,200 after completing a mound of paperwork for the California Energy Commission’s Renewable Energy Program.

A year and a half into the system’s use, we’ve been quite pleased with how our 960 functions. Bluelink claims that our system will work better during the winter months, but our problem is the surrounding trees in the neighbor’s yard that keep the sun’s rays from hitting our BP panels during a considerable portion of a day. Fortunately, that’s only during the colder months: November through March. In the warmer months, the system generates anywhere from three to five kilowatt-hours. On average, we use about seven kilowatt-hours per day and this is mainly due to the fact that we live in Southern California, spending virtually nothing to heat or cool our house. We’ve installed a very energy-efficient Lennox heating and air conditioning system that is probably in use for about one month of the year. The rest of the time we use either sweatshirts or fans, depending on the extreme. The other crucial component of our energy system is the array of trees, plants, and other biomass, that further reduce our need of energy to make our home comfortable.

In the coming years, we plan to expand our system onto our garage roof. We’ve started another “solar fund” for this effort. Another converter will be needed as will an installation team. California’s progressive energy policies will hopefully make it easier for us, and for others, to take energy production into their own hands. Growing your own power is a great thing. We walk out to take a look at the converter every day to see what we’ve generated and this has really impacted how we use energy. Frugality is the key to the future, and though the sun is an abundant energy source, we found that using solar energy has only pressured us to use less. Energy is not something to squander. It is something to be thankful for, and every day the sun comes out we are just that, thankful.

Deena Capparelli and Claude Willey, Altadena, California

Wind Power

For most urban dwellers the odds are that wind power won’t be a viable option, largely because buildings inhibit the flow of wind. Wind turbines need to be mounted as high as possible, at least 30 feet above the nearest building — any lower and it’s like putting a solar panel in the shade. Because of the tower requirements, wind power is generally a better option for folks in the suburbs and country.

Of course you also need wind, so to find out if wind power will work where you live, Southwest Windpower has links to wind maps across the U.S., showing the most promising areas.

Wind maps: skystreamenergy.com/skystream/will-skystream-work/local-resources.aspx

Microturbines

For folks living in a windy area in a tiny house, so-called microturbines, scaled-down version of the ones that power a big house are an option, especially when combined with photovoltaic panels.

Microturbine

Harvesting Water

Water Principles For The Urban Homesteader

1 Rain is a resource, not a problem

2 Water can be recycled

3 Water-saving strategies should be simple and cheap

Conserving Water

How To Play Water Detective

Where Does All That Water Go?

58.7% Landscaping Water

10.8% Toilet

8.7% Clothes Washer

6.8% Shower

6.3% Faucet

5.5% Hidden Leaks

0.6% Dishwasher

Harvesting Rainwater

Six Ways To Harvest Rainwater

Rainwater Harvesting Technique 1

Become A Radical Depaver

Rainwater Harvesting Technique 2

Smart Gutters And Downspouts

Keeping It Clean

Rainwater Harvesting Technique 3

Earthworks

Rainwater Harvesting Technique 4

Mulch Basins

Rainwater Harvesting Technique 5

Terracing

Rainwater Harvesting Technique 6

Rain Barrels And Cisterns

How To Make Your Own Rain Barrel

Intermediate Bulk Containers

A Really, Really Big Water Barrel: Rainwater Cisterns

Greywater

Greywater Precautions

Detergents And Soaps For Greywater

Non-Invasive Greywater Methodologies

Bucket Flushin’, Tub Siphoning And What To Do With Your Bathroom Sink

Highly Invasive Greywater Strategies

Greywater Plumbing 101

Cast Iron Pipe — Not For Wimps

Power To The People

Principles

Household Energy Use

Heating 49%

Strategy 1: Insulation

Bubble-Wrap Your Windows

Strategy 2: Gathering Solar Heat

Passive Solar Heating

Solar Air Heating

Between The Studs

Commercial Versions

Strategy 3: The High Mass Rocket Heater

The Limited Fuel Use Option

Cooling 49%

Chill: Easy Passive Cooling Strategies

We’re Fans Of Fans

Whole House Fans

Solar Attic Fan

Ceiling Fans

Water Heater 13%

Pimp My Hot Water Heater

How To Drain The Tank

Alternatives To The Gas-Heated Shower

The Sunshine Shower

Camping Shower

Garden Hose Shower

ABS Shower

Solar Water Heaters For General Household Hot Water

Closed Loop Systems For Freezing Conditions

Other Options

Lighting 10%

Light Bulbs

Tubular Skylights

Stoves and Microwaves And Small Appliances (8%)

An Overview Of Solar Cookers

Panel Solar Cookers

Box Solar Cookers

The Global Sun Oven

Parabolic Cookers