Raising Steam / Higher Ground

Terry Pratchett left one heck of a legacy.



One of Terry Pratchett's last books: Raising Steam won't make you any better at building a rocket hot-water heater, but it will probably keep you entertained for a few memorable hours.  And it may leave you marked with a priceless, life-saving, wriggly-little-feeling down the back of your neck, whenever the idea comes up, "Wouldn't it be fun to invent a crazy new technology that eats fire and breathes deadly steam!"
I can't remember if I read the whole book, or just a chapter preview in one of his other books.  I definitely want my own copy for our bookshelf, in either case.


With help from my friend Leaha, we finally got some video in the can to finish the Kickstarter project.
While waiting for it to upload, I went looking for our friend Suzanna's band, The Moonshine Band, whose music we were hoping to use for the video.  Found this amazing new video of a treehouse performance of "Flood," filmed by our video friend Bryce.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/jr1oE8SVbEQ

A good omen for the project moving forward, I think.
And a pretty darn awesome way to end the day.

Yours,
Erica

What's causing the warming?

This is a companion to the "How Big Is It?" post.
It concerns global warming.  It's a thing.

The Bloomberg.com website has a nice, simple, graphic article showing the factors contributing to the gradual warming of our climate over the past 125 years, including human-produced effects and volcanoes.  It's titled, "What's Warming the World?"
http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-world/

Is it natural causes, like volcanoes, the earth's tilt wobbling, or solar energy?
Not really.

Crappy print-screen version of the animated graph,
with apologies to the authors.

Mostly, it's greenhouse gases.  Other environmental effects of human behavior (like deforestation and factory aerosols) are actually holding back the warming somewhat, and ground-level ozone is a slight contributor on the warming side.

print-screen version of the animated graph

(The article is simply and beautifully formatted for smartphones and devices, with active graphics.  Please look at the original; my "print screen" graphic doesn't do it justice.)

I showed this to my friend Barbara today.  She liked it - it's very clear.  But she also said she'd recently found a quote from the now-80-something author of the Gaia Theory, who figures we're already past the point of no return.  He considers it unlikely that plants will adapt fast enough to survive in the new climate, which means most of our food supply will not adapt (not to mention problems with pest-predator balance).  Which means human life as we know it today is a fleeting thing.  He says we might as well party; he's giving it 20 years max.

Depressing thought.  Both Barbara and I are not ready to accept the idea that it's all over, or that because one is late taking action, it's better to embrace counter-productive vices in some kind of nihilistic end-game.  This is not a game.  Nobody really knows what's going to happen (all the witnesses to previous sudden climate change events are long-dead, after all; and the sharks ain't talking).  So we might as well keep doing the things that we figure might make a difference - reducing impact, moving resilient plant species into higher and cooler niches, breeding and sharing heirloom seeds that have good genetics for drought-tolerance, extreme temperature tolerance, and so on.

Because there are always doom-sayers, and they're usually wrong.
Life as we know it has ended numerous times already - "we" would not recognize the social mores, language, or geography that was familiar to our great-grandparents.
My Depression-era grandmother kept calling our cell phones "wrist phones" like from Dick Tracy.  Her father wrote poetry about his friends among the loggers who cleared southern Wisconsin - today's dairy country was deep pine woods in their day.
Her grandmother rendered her own boot black from skunks.  I cannot imagine my housemates' reaction if I were to suggest popping a skunk in the oven for a few hours so we could take better care of our shoes.  (Though my wonderful husband probably does know enough about mustelid anatomy to butcher a road-killed skunk without puncturing the musk glands, making the idea more practical for us than for most of our contemporaries.)

Life as we know it changes continuously, sometimes suddenly, sometimes irrevocably.

As I've described before:
I told my grandmother about Peak Oil in 2007: "They say there's only so much oil in the ground; it's getting more expensive to get it out, and that means a lot of the way we do things is going to have to change."
She laughed, "They've been saying that for years."
"And did it change?"
"I guess...."
Depression, WWII, early graduation and traveling 1000 miles from home to take a 3-week welding course and spend 3 years building Victory Ships... marrying a haunted veteran half-again your age, and raising 4 children in 27 different houses while he helped build the hydropower dams that transformed the Western states (with impacts on electricity, irrigation, fisheries, and massive cultural displacement for both the work crews and their families, but more importantly, for the former inhabitants of the flooded valleys and the new communities growing alongside the altered landscapes).

How much of that change was due to oil prices?

At the individual level, the biggest impact on our personal lives can be attributed to a novice driver losing track of which pedal did what.  This changed our paths more than the insights and career changes of overseas travel, more than the 2008 recession, arguably even more than meeting each other (without that terrifying trial by fire, we probably would not be fused together in quite the same way).

Was that driver caused by oil prices?  Not any more than Ernie's reaction was caused by his military service.





The recession affected my ability to find work after Grandma passed away.  But Ernie's injury affected that even more - because it was difficult to work enough hours to make ends meet and still be home enough for caregiving and chores, unless I could work from home.

What we forget when assessing our collective responsibility in these big-picture scenarios is that we never had the option of a life "without change."  History is one long series of scene-changes, with empires rising and falling and writhing, dramatic weather changes (though perhaps none so big as the ones we can expect in the near future), and of course our own individual choices and circumstances that alter our lives even if we escape being a direct part of the big-picture statistics (being born above or below stairs; how to respond to that intolerable co-worker; whether to let that no-good charmer lure you off into a dark corner).

There was never the option to "freeze frame."  Our weather records only go back to the 1880s, the heyday of the steam era.  How long had we been burning coal and forests before that?  How many of the Ice Age animals were already gone for good?
The gardens of Babylon were already salt-encrusted wastes; Ozymandias already long forgotten and re-remembered.

If we wanted to go back to a real "before," before we started on this path that has resulted in the changes perceptible to the current generations, we'd have to go back a long way.  Before oil was discovered in Oklahoma and Pennsylvania?  Before coal mining?  Before the massive deforestations of the Age of Sail and the exploration (1400s, both in China and in Europe).

Have you ever read any original literature from the 1400s?  Most of us would be trying to talk to ancestors who spoke a different language - who had no word for "extinction," let alone "cell phone." Mine in England would have used the word "nice" to mean "precise and fussy," and "pet" to mean "ill-tempered tantrum;" in Ireland, would have a Gaelic oral tradition due to centuries of being forbidden schooling under Norman and English rule; others would have been hearing Cinderella in the original French, or reading the Gutenberg Bible in German.

They could not predict our future from 125 years ago, let alone the 500+ years you'd have to go back before the expansionist Western industrial era.

We can speculate about rising sea levels (the coast lines will not stabilize again within our lifetimes), but we don't really know what will happen.  Each region will have specific events that punctuate that change; we don't yet know the names of the unprecedented storms, ruined power plants, mountain eruptions, and landslides that will become the historic markers of that change, or the massive public works projects that may stave it off.  Will San Francisco become the gatekeeper of dikes protecting the Central Valley?  Or will the Sierra foothills become coastal farms?  Or will The Big One render previous measurements irrelevant, moving the coastline somewhere else entirely?

We can speculate that life will be harder in the future - but all we know for sure is that it will be different.  If it's harder to travel, it may also be easier to stay close to family.  If it's harder to keep the lights on, it may be easier to get a good night's sleep.
Human beings, and life on earth, are remarkably adaptable.  I've heard some remarkable interviews with people who say "it's probably for the best" after the most appalling misfortunes (the original drummer for the Beatles, who left the band before they became famous, comes to mind).

And while many people will die, in various ways (most of them unpleasant), when all's said and done, the history books will be written by the survivors.

We don't even know if they will be "human."

But there's no call to deliberately make things worse; all you can do is the best you can do, one day at a time.

Equinox: Sun and Cellulitis

Equinox is here, and things hang in the balance.
This week is a great time to re-orient yourself to the cardinal directions and priorities.

Amazing print done with a pinhole camera in Tijeras,
showing sun angles from summer solstice (high arc)
to winter solstice (bottom arc). From NOAA, 3/22/2015:
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/abq/?n=clifeatures_summersolstice

For us, most projects are on hold due to Ernie being laid up with a cellulitis infection in his bum leg. Instead of chopping firewood, he gets twice-daily IV antibiotics. We hope for improvement in the next few days, but nothing's certain.

This sort of setback always makes me reflective. Am I staying tuned to what's important, or just reacting to what feels most urgent? (More on that below).

I wanted to put out this update today, somewhat urgently, because I think passive solar is very cool, and it's important, and it's easy to neglect planning for it until it's too late.  This (the week of spring equinox) is is a good week to take some relevant observations.

You can do a lot of fancy math to figure out the optimal sun angles and thermal mass to match your heat loads.  This site has a pretty great library of resources: http://www.builditsolar.com.

However, nothing beats direct observation, and now is one of the key times to observe.

A solid equinox sun-path, and a second one (sun and moon) from close to the solstice, can let you skip a lot of the maths and work directly from your site data.

 You don't want to stare at the sun directly, but watch how the shadows or sunny patch moves along the ground and floor and other objects.  A vertical stick, or an angle wedge like the dial on a sundial, will make a shadow you can trace.  If you already have a building, just watch the sunny patch from a window as it moves across the walls and floor.

I made this papercut to watch its shadow trace the sun's path.

If you are modifying a building, adding a sunroom or whatever, you might rough in a frame and hang up some cardboard to represent the future walls and roof, so you can trace the patch from the future windows.

(The full moon is roughly opposite the sun, so a summer-solstice full moon traces a similar path through the sky as the winter sun. 
You can double-check it six months later if time allows.  Since most people only get a few solstices to observe while planning a building, and some of them might be cloudy, it pays to double up at each opportunity.  The Stonehenge builders sank dozens of log post markers before placing the permanent stones. )

At equinox, March 21/Sept. 21, the sun rises due east and sets due west.  If you are not 100% sure of the N/S axis of your property, this is one way to find it (not counting nearby hills).

Equinox also marks the average day length and sun angles for every place on the planet.  Winter days will be shorter, summer days longer.

http://www.homeenergy.org/show/article/nav/remodeling/id/1298

Summer sun rises higher in the sky and traces a longer path.  The winter sun takes a shortcut, low across the sky. Shadows are longer in winter, and sunbeams slant almost horizontally.

In the northern hemisphere, the summer sun rises north of true East, circles clockwise across the southern sky, and sets north of true west. The winter sun makes a shorter arc, from southeast to southwest, staying lower in the sky.  

(In the Southern hemisphere, it's almost the same but swap the north and south directions: the sun still moves east to west, but counter-clockwise.  Australian winter days are all north-oriented, summer days have a long SE to SW arc with a northern noon.)

In the equatorial regions, "summer" and "winter" may not mean much. Your temperatures stay closer to optimal year-round; tropical conditions warrant a separate discussion.

So in the temperate climates, where most people need heat:

We can orient windows and sunrooms to admit more light in winter, less in summer, which is exactly what we want in a temperate climate to offset our seasonal extremes. 

Sunroom: vertical windows let in more winter sun, less in summer

Skylight: lets in the most light, but more in summer and less in winter.

If you are setting up a greenhouse or attached sunroom, it really pays to think about your goals.
Good insulation, thermal mass, and passive-solar sun angles can help you create a more moderate environment (protected from overheating and from frost). 
Too much glass (not enough walls) can cause overheating in summer and heat loss in winter, but it does let in more light for plants.
Different plant species have different light requirements and tolerances for extreme temperatures, as do fish, poultry, and other common indoor-outdoor livestock.

The Bucket Test:

This week is a great time to get out in your sunroom with a bucket or chalk and see where the sun actually hits throughout the day. I like using a 5-gallon bucket because it's about the right height for a seating bench.  You want the winter sun to hit that vertical face for best heat collection. So you want to get the sides as well as the top of the bench into the sunny spot.

If you place thermal mass along the shady side of the sun/shade line, it will get some sun in winter, but none in spring or summer.

If you place it a few degrees to the sunny side of that line, it will get sun through about 3 seasons but not too much in summer.

You can also do this test with a camera – set up a tripod or put the camera on a ledge, and take a picture every 2 hours or so from sunrise to sunset. Makes a good record that won't get messed up as you build things.

Our clients in Chehalis are doing this in preparation for adding a rocket bench to an indoor/outdoor patio space.

Speaking of Chehalis, please check our schedule for upcoming workshops. We have two in Canada and three in the USA between now and June.  As a change of pace, we're throwing in some natural building and plasters as well as rocketry at the Ecological Living Summit in Montana.

http://www.ecolivingsummit.com

Please keep your fingers crossed that Ernie's infection will resolve quickly and he'll be released to fully enjoy these workshops.  Since his 2008 injury, we pretty much consider Ernie as a special volunteer, and any work he is able to do as a bonus.

We have delayed the Kickstarter launch for the Rocket Mass Heater Builder's Guide because of this situation and other reasons. Hoping the fallow time will turn out to serve its purpose, and there will be some benefits from it.  For example more and better connections to help us, and I can keep working on more rewards to offer as incentives once we do go live.

So if you'd like to help, and have good resources to spread the word, please remind me that you're interested. questions@ErnieAndErica.info

Yours,
Erica and Ernie

Home again, home again, jiggity jig

We are home.

Ernie walked down to his dad's house this morning.  Arrived with a shirt full of ground-fallen apples he collected on the way.  Like me, they marvel at seeing him strolling along, hands full of autumn bounty instead of crutches.  We had coffee and tea together, and gave them some pecans from Texas.

Still feeling grateful for all the people who've helped, shared the struggle, and otherwise been part of these amazing months full of hope, sweat, and grace.

Among the stories from our recent southern adventures that I haven't posted yet, Ernie competed in the Southwest Valor Games, and had the best time of the day in the 200-meter kayak race. 

The medalists in Ernie's class

Ernie circling back to cheer for his 2nd place competitor

They took lots of measurements of him walking in his old and new braces on Thursday.  Painful, but productive.  We're sort of hoping that the studies they're doing require calling him back for a follow-up, because it would be wonderful to see these folks again, and to cheer on the latest crop of intrepid participants on their road to recovery.

Pressure readings, timed measurements,
and some photo and video of the devices and his gait.

On Friday, coincidentally as a sort of graduation for us, they had a big patriotic event in San Marcos, with schoolkids, police and sherriffs' departments along with three biker clubs of veterans, and a big community-sponsored barbecue at a local airfield, following which they sent any willing wounded warriors up to skydive out of a small airplane.  Ernie liked it so much he sent me up for the final run of the day, too.

Ernie and Kimberly, and their tandem jumpers, going out to the plane.

The plane (flyby on its way to landing after a drop)

People landing who may even be Ernie and Jo

Erica, whole and grinning, back on the ground

Person landing who is very likely Erica

I don't know if you'll be able to view the video above, but it shows Ernie paddling like mad in one of the kayaks.  He's hoping to keep competing, and I am looking forward to being out on the water more as he practices.

For my next trick, though, it's past time to get our Builder's Guide out on the market.  I'm uploading the draft files to Scubbly.com, and recruiting people to help spread the word as soon as I get our Kickstarter approved for launch.  Apparently these things go better if you pre-sell a bunch before the Kickstarter... and I'm not sure if I can promote or organize that heavily without delaying the Kickstarter itself. 

First step is to vacuum the sand out of our good camera, and/or find a local videographer, and get the campaign application finalized and submitted.  While it's processing sounds like the best time to add frosting, pre-sell, or other hoopla.

Anyone eager to fill the role of videographer, and maybe gets some gorgeous fall footage of the Okanogan in the process?

Much love, and many thanks,
Erica and Ernie

the smoke ascending, it seem to reach the sky

The clouds of smoke over the wildfires to the south of us are making their own weather.  Heat from the fire drives convection currents upwards, making the classic "caulflower" shapes in the smoke (same as cumulous clouds, except dirtier).

("I saw the smoke ascending, it seemed to reach the sky/
.. till all my strength had left me, and all my courage too" are lines from Texas Rangers, performed by Tex Ritter among others, lyrics have been attributed to Richard Shindell or .  Though in the case of wild fires, the conclusion "you'd better stay at home" will only help if your home is someplace green and humid, far away.  Wild fires and the extreme weather that's increased their ferocity in recent years are far more implacable than the fiercest warrior; wars are avoidable, but even if we gave up all our combustion-driven toys and spark-producing tools, we'd still be facing lightning-lit fires across these Western landscapes in dry summer weather.)

Smoke column with lenticular cloud

In this image you can see a "lenticular cloud," sometimes called a mountain cloud or lens cloud, the little bent wisp above the main cloud.  This type of cloud is formed when air is forced upward (usually as it passes over a mountain rainge), causing little droplets of water or crystals of ice to form in the bands of air.  I believe it's because the air gets chilled, and the pressure drops, as it's forced upward - if there was almost enough moisture to make a cloud, and you change the conditions to make it a little easier to form a cloud, then you get a little cloud where those conditions are different.  You will often see similar lens-clouds hovering over mountains like UFOs.
This is looking south from the parking lot at the grocery store.  I ran into our current fire chief, and he said he thought those kinds of clouds only formed way high up in the atmosphere - meaning this smoke column is getting really tall.

Smoke column with drift smoke

Still seeing the smoke column growing this evening, over larger hills, on my way home.  There are also bands of 'drift smoke,' which has cooled enough to sink but is not ready to fall out of the sky yet, lower down.  Drifting smoke can stay in the air for days or weeks, making it hard to see what's going on with the fire (or anything else), and making a lot of people nervous so the fire department gets more false alerts.

(Of course, fire fighters would much rather get a false alert than sit on our hands while you wait for the fire to get big enough to be sure.... but it would be even better for everyone if we had some nice, gentle rain to wash the smoke out of the sky, leaving us a clear field of view and better chances of controlling any remaining fires.)

While all this is going on, our little rural fire department is sending a truck or two to help with the efforts on the big fires.  I'm babysitting Karen's goats, while she's off running with the fire crews.  Lots of goat milk!  Lots of curious noses! 

Backdated Beauty - just landscapes.

I sent some of these pictures to family last spring, but thought I'd share them with you now.

Just enjoying the thaw, and looking forward to the birds, bees, and wildflowers that I know are coming next.

Spring flowers

Spring growth around our "weather rock"

Late spring - balsam-root blooms moving uphill

Spring view across nearby valley - pine woods at elevation

Valley farm, late spring. Hills and buttes behind

Summer weather

Late summer thunderstorm

Fall - Sagebrush slopes near valley floor

Late fall snow (note yellow larch)

Winter view across valley

Sun on frost on snow on little trees

Fog: being the clouds in someone else's sunset.

That's it for now!

Summer Speeding On

Isn't time supposed to be God's way of keeping everything from happening at once?

Is there a tech support line for when that's not working?

My purpose in finally making it back to the blog is to share some of what's been keeping me away.

We were invited to contribute to the 'Ultimate Survival Bundle,' a special offer of wide-ranging resources that will sell for one week starting Sept. 16th.  This is a chance to get resources on homesteading, food preservation, wilderness skills, and of course our heating books and plans, for a ridiculous discount off the cover prices.  Something like $700 in value for $29.  The catch is that we only see any proceeds from it for the bundles we ourselves sell - or for the 'upsell' package, which includes two of our most popular plans.  So you can rest assured, I will be putting the appropriate link up here with our affiliate ID all over it, just as soon as I get it.

And of course, I did not want to give away our big-ticket stuff in case the whole thing gets pirated by some trust-fund Robin Hood (that's why the oven and Cabin 8" plans are in the spendier 'upsell,' not the basic bundle), yet I definitely wanted to be in there.  So I put in a couple of our smaller books and plans (including the Art of Fire, which I am happy to report is getting compliments from a number of people I admire).

Simple Shelter - Debris hut photo by TrackersEarth.com

The Ultimate Survival Bundle organizer didn't have a good resource on shelter, which seemed like a pretty important part of survival basics.  Way more useful than, say, guns, for the vast majority of situations.
     So in some weird universe in my head, it made sense to just write up something new that I could justify 'giving away' and then continue to sell after the bundle is done.  Our friend Tony gave me the cover picture for this little guide called 'Simple Shelter.'

I think it's a form of productive procrastination, the number of small books I've written this year.  The outline for "The Book," the Builder's Guide, is over two pages long, and completing it (while not repeating myself too often) has become a brain-boggling chore.  So whenever I sit down "to write," and something comes across my desk that justifies writing something easier, well, that's what happens.  At least when they turn into booklets, I can sell them later, which is more than can be said for uber-long blog posts and emails.

Speaking of selling things, both DVD projects are wrapping up.  Paul Wheaton's 4-DVD set from the 2012 Montana workshop is already being mailed out to contributors, and Calen Kennett just visited us for his final, final additional footage session on the Instructional DVD and has two assistants helping with the editing.  It includes hand-drawn animation fades, and while we have very little confidence in the delivery timeline at this point, we are looking forward to exquisite results.
   We have some neat shots from both of them, and we have copies of Paul's DVDs for sale if you want them. 

The Garden Assistant - and his handiwork.

Harvest season is accelerating in the garden.  Luckily, the grasshoppers and deer are picking up my slack on that one.
   Being 2000 feet above the valley in elevation, we are about a month behind their growing season, so I'm on about my third pick of ripe tomatoes while they've been in the farmer's market for a month or more.  I'm just about breaking even: collecting seed from the veggies we like, enough to plant a little more next year.  Every couple of weeks, I go down the hill and help out at a prolific organic farm, bringing home armfuls of 'seconds' and slowly replenishing the freezer.

Ernie's latest hobby. 
The day the 'split' woodpile
finally got taller than the other.

Ron and Ernie cleared some roads on the property this year, plus we got some seasoned firewood from a vacation-cabin neighbor who got tired of splitting more than he needs.  Fuel is piling up in the sun, waiting to go into the woodshed, which has been storing project parts for all the other items on the to-do list.

Ernie is working on a pole-building to house materials, tools, and his boat(s).  He picked a building method so elegant, Ron and I are teasing him he should just turn the whole thing upside down and call it the boat. It's based on the 'Stimson shed' idea, 1x4 bent trusses forming a cathedral-like Gothic arch shape that handles a lot of load for its weight. 

Think of Ernie as a 2-meter yardstick for scale. 

The boat shed is occupying a lot of Ernie's time, but help just arrived in the form of our former apprentice, Kyler.  Ron and Jeanine declared that since his apprenticeship is over, he officially graduates to being a WIT (Wisner In Training).  He's a tremendous help, very cheerful, two years more experienced at construction than when we last enjoyed his company.  He's also helped with the garden, the barn, and anything we can point him toward, and is a great excuse to make and eat some delicious meals together. 

The only drawback to spreading the load is that I am in the office more and out of the loop.  These pictures were taken almost a month ago, and I haven't been over to see the progress on the shed in at least a week and a half.

I've been busy working on "The Book," the Rocket Mass Heater Builder's Guide.  Here's a dummy cover - what do you think?

Version 3 - Cabin 8" layout.

Version 1- More Bricks 6"

I'm trying to convey that this is the step-by-step, professional-friendly version.  The existing book has great explanations and a definite eco slant (or more to the point, rant).  Ours will fill out some technical and mechanical information for people who are more interested in dealing with the building code, using actual math, and/or doing things once.  It's a gamble - we hope there will be more people in this 'mainstream' audience, and that they still will have enough do-it-yourself sensibility to read their local building codes instead of suing us for not knowing.  Can't be all things to all people.

For the cover itself, can you spot the differences?  I'm torn between using the actual 8" system that we diagram in the book (versions 2 and 3), versus using the 6" layout (version 1) because I just think it looks cool.  I like having more brick, and the squarer channels; it looks more like the masonry heater diagrams that inspired the layout.  I guess I could just count the cover as a 'bonus' design in addition to the ones in the book.

Version 2 - vertical 8" layout

Any comments on the cover design are very welcome.  I can change anything at this point, though of course I hope to be done soon.
I used the marked brick for the title texture because I want to convey how specific we are about how to do it: get this standard firebrick, cut it here.
  I still need to find a printer, but I want a rough page count before I have those discussions.
  I am leaning toward using Kickstarter to fund the initial print run - it beats putting up all the money it out of pocket, but it will also set things back at least a month over the timeline we would otherwise prefer.  (If I'd started two months ago, we'd be in great shape ... but there is one more photo sequence I want, and I want it in a particular setting, which is still under construction....)

And I want to wait until our friend Paul is done with his Permaculture Playing Cards Kickstarter, since he's a huge promoter of our work when he has time.  If you would like a deck of these cards for your Christmas present, speak up soon, as I'm debating getting a brick before the Kickstarter ends in 3 days.  Also, I kind of like the stretch goal of doing a few new face cards.

And I want to get the book out in time for the heating-season rush of interest.

This is about the time of year that we start fielding a higher volume of enquiries from people who, like me, have discovered that Summer is Almost Over.  In their cases, this means it might be time to get that heater done before winter.   We get a lot of last-minute invitations to run workshops and work-parties, and there's almost never enough time to take them up on it even if they are interested in paying all the expenses.
I am almost ready to follow Art Ludwig's approach, and respond only to checks received rather than 'quick questions' that aren't.
(One of those miracles of the English language, that the fastest words to say are the ones with the most complicated meanings.  Love.  Bread.  Fire.  Trust.  You think you know what it means, but try explaining it to someone who's never encountered it.  A six-word bread recipe can produce anything from pancakes to baguette to chicken-feed.)

For free heater advice, I heartily recommend searching the online forums at www.permies.com, specifically the rocket stove forum.  We spend a lot of our free time there giving advice, and the reason we give free advice in public is so it's still available to everyone when we aren't.
If, however, you want to send me a check for a private consultation, I will bump you right up my list of people to talk to today....

I suppose I could do the Kickstarter, have the PDF ready by the time it's fully funded, and send all the donors the electronic version while the print run is still in progress.

It's thundering again.  Now that we've had a couple good rainstorms, we're not so terrified about wildfire, but it's still a constant awareness in the region.  We had over 10,000 lightning strikes from one storm system a while back, and they spent several days putting out a fire near the Oroville Airport across the valley.  We are under a burn ban across the region, and have been super-careful to avoid the least mischief during fire season.

The electricity in the air may be part of the reason I get so anxious about unfinished projects this time of year.  But it used to happen in Portland too, and there I blamed the heat.  (It's already starting to cool down at our elevation, a mixed blessing given how much snow we have to look forward to.)
Lightning just flashed within line of sight of my desk, but receding ... four or five miles away.  The thunder rolls on and on in these mountains, echoes I suppose.  

   And I am reminded of the lateness of the hour, and the importance of sleep before another long drive tomorrow.  This one, finally, is not a workshop - Ernie and I are going to celebrate the 5th anniversary of our belated honeymoon with a couple of days' escape from all our projects to go camping.

If you want to catch us on one of our next tours, we are looking forward to being in Ontario later this month, and ...
now it's directly overhead ...
Montana in October.

This is Hobo, wandering grandaddy
of most of the cats on our mountain.

I think I'll wander a little further from these enticing conglomerations of copper wires for a while.

and remain warmly yours,
Erica (and Ernie)

p.s. Even the cats are tired.  Of keeping me up all night in thunderstorms.
Good night!

Wood Burning for Ethical Rich People

Warning: I am now going to pontificate about religion, and personal finances, and possibly about race, sex, and your mother. Also about playing with fire.
My mother warned me these were topics to avoid if I did not want to offend people. If you are a person who pays no heed to such warnings, and you are offended by anything you read here, perhaps you are not the person you thought you were.

A client pointed me toward an anti-religion blog where burning wood was cited as an example of unethical things people do in defiance of scientific reason.

Surprisingly, I agree with the author's general point that wealthy Westerners who burn a smoky, recreational fire in a poorly-designed fireplace built of expensive materials, are poisoning their neighbors to no good purpose.
Responsible rich people heat with smokeless methods, burn smokeless beeswax or bayberry candles for nostalgia value, and indulge in other pleasures that do not poison their fellow citizens.

But by claiming that burning wood is unethical, and that a fossil fuel should be used instead, the author reveals a deeply troubling attitude toward the larger world. Making ethical arguments that poor people should live like rich people is morally indefensible.
(Making ethical arguments that people should stop ANY traditional behavior with proven ancestral survival value, when you are ignorant of its origins or current best practice, is a risky business. But taking risks is part of growing up.)

Responsible rich people also drive carefully, pay workers fairly, and are troubled at heart by the world's current dependence on finite supplies of fossil fuels... fuels produced from deadly mines where humans toil, and drilling rigs where 24-hour natural gas flares (which are far from smokeless) poison local air supplies; and whose processing and handling contaminates the water, air, soils, and people for miles around the refineries and power stations; giving the Gulf region a new industry to offset its devastated shrimp production: cancer research.
It's worst in the wild places where the oil companies are the biggest gorilla in town, and it is legal to ask the town drunk to sign away his tribe's rights to clean-anything-ever-again. But every community has its own toxic rainbow badge of service-station tank leaks and parking-lot oil slicks, working their way slowly into our groundwater and the circle of life on earth.

Roughly half the world's population would be considered poor by global standards - and more by US standards. Of those, most have a choice between local biofuels, or a local monopoly which supplies such things as Butagas cannisters, propane tanks, fuel oil, or utilities. Utilities only come in pipes to urban or wealthy populations. What does "smokeless" fossil fuel look like in under-developed areas?

Rural places are the 'undeveloped' US, and our latest euphemism for the rest of the world is 'underdeveloped.' If you have never been there, it's an abstraction. A lot of people who spend time reading random blogs have never been there. (Apologies if you live there already.)
Let's flesh it out. This is not a pity party, just some quaint details of life elsewhere.

In my rural US county (which is not entirely undeveloped), the local public utility District charges a minimum of $30 per month regardless of how much electricity is used - which means that my disabled father-in-law has a minimum $90 electric bill regardless of whether he is home, out fishing, or in the hospital. His 3 electric meters cover his well-pumps, his house, the barn with chickens and retired horses and the extension cord for warming up the snowplow, and the separate in-law unit where we now live. He could have the farthest wells' meter turned off, and save one power bill, but in case of water problems he would have to wait for the power company to re-start service before switching on his back-up well. The added fees for a shutoff and re-start would add up to around $90 additional. At home and using propane for hot water, the winter total comes to around $140/mo.
We pay our line's share, usually around $30. About half the time, we use enough electricity to make it past that minimum to $30.47, or $40.62. But we pay the base fee regardless of usage. Otherwise, I wouldn't be writing to you in this way.
This is very reasonable by American norms, the previous tenants paid similar amounts in our urban apartment, without the wells or barn. But it gets scary for disabled/retired folks when someone suddenly has to move out, the same year you have to get surgery, and you get stuck with all 3 lines and additional expenses on a fixed income. Now that we are weathered in and working together, we are doing fine: we pay a little rent, buy Ron a little diesel, Ron cuts a little firewood, Ernie can build backyard boats or come home with a second-hand table saw without incurring spousal wrath. (Pictured is not actually Ernie's big boat, it's Ron and John's 26-foot fishing sled, getting its first fairing of the frames.)

I bring this up not because I think you should track my personal finances, but because they are different now than they were in Portland or Aloha. It is cold here, and it is cold in mountains all over the world. We keep the outside freezer unplugged for weeks at a time, it stays colder that way. What is scary to a person on a fixed income in the USA, is simply unthinkable to someone living on $2 per day.

In Portland or Corvallis or Pittsburgh, utilities are largely already in place when you buy a house or improved suburban lot. Streets are hooked up to new municipal services in batches, so residents pay a small share of the total cost of the project (which admittedly can still be steep, and it's generally not optional: cities must charge everyone at the same time, to install services like sewer which are a public health concern).
Rural lot owners often must pay individually for a utility to run lines to their home from miles away. Think how many blocks are in a mile, and how much it costs to dig up sidewalks vs. roots and rocks, and guess what the price might be if you were in the other guy's shoes.
Residents here, and in Maine, and in rural Mexico, and all over Africa, and most of the tropics, will run an old truck down to the gas station to buy propane cannisters, or kerosene, or diesel for engines and generators, or have an on-site tank that they call a local micro-business owner to bring a few more gallons of heating oil. Here and in Maine it's a 5-gallon tank, and you feel poor if you only put in 4 gallons; in Africa, that would make you a dealer to people who buy from you in reused pop-bottles. What happens if you can't afford heat anymore, or your truck breaks down? Poor people don't eat out when the power fails. Poor people fix the power, or light a lantern they saved from their grandaddy.

Wood fuel is a lifesaver in places where fire means not cheerful entertainment, but protection from hypothermia, purification of water, cooked food; balanced against the energy and security that must be sacrificed to get fuel. I grant there are many areas where wood does not grow fast enough to meet the needs of everyone.
There are few wood shortages in the temperate US, and few people who bother to burn their firewood efficiently despite years of practice. This is partly because in the US, to legally burn firewood you must install an approved wood-burning device, and the most affordable of these is the (relatively inefficient, no matter how well designed) woodstove. Rural people in India can build a more efficient stove out of mud brick, but we don't live that way here. The closest we come is the dangerous, and inefficient, home-built woodstoves welded together by scrappers who emulate what they know.
The poor in cities may have it worse; and they burn things only as a last gesture of defiance. The poor who move to the country are often those who worked all their lives but never quite got their big break. Or got it, and lost it.
Unimproved lots cost roughly a third of what a house does; and the price drops with the difficulty of access. If you can't afford city prices, insurance, or a mortgage (which adds about half again to the price of the house, not counting the insurance premiums it requires you to pay), you buy rural. If you can't afford that, you buy deep rural. That is, if you have the skills to live on it with the limited income you can expect to earn in a place where an hour drive gets you to a public internet terminal, and the job postings on Craislist are mostly 3 hours away.
Yes, this means poor people are out there 'consuming' more land.
No, it's not an unethical choice, necessarily. Compare to working in an economy that daily destroys vast tracts of land elsewhere, but you need to earn that money to buy a living space whose formerly-fertile land is buried deep in concrete sidewalks and asphalt driveways, other hidden costs tastefully externalized through underground pipes and overhead wires.

Small towns with buildings 3 or 4 stories high support optimal densities of humans, leaving wildlife corridors. (Another TED talk.) This is an ethical choice for people who can afford to build 4-story buildings. Project managers will tell you this height of building falls right into the weird little cost bracket where you need the expensive foundations but can't rent out enough floors to make back the extra costs. People build up to 2 stories, or skyscrapers, unless the law forces them to stay below a certain height and drives up rents. Poor people can't afford to live where regulation is driving up rents. Also, many of the poor (who often have military enlisted experience, and other experiences where there is a lot of shouting, shooting, or exploitative mind games) tend to need a little space. These poor can't afford condos, and they didn't do so well in the Chicago Projects either.

Oil prices continue to go up; natural gas too; and the oil industry is far from clean when it comes to particulate emissions. If you have a clean local source like geothermal or passive solar available, by all means use it. If you have to choose between paying the oil company a premium for kerosene, or buying local firewood, I would question Mr. Harris' ethical stance.

To add injury to insult: Even if fossil fuels were sustainable, they are being produced and refined at the expense of the people who can least afford it. Ecosystem Services are the externalized costs of most industrial development which, by and large, are directly paid by the losses to peoples who subsist directly on clean air, clean water, hunting and fishing, and local produce fed by forest-born rainfall. The loss of these things, uncompensated by cash, is what earns these peoples the label 'poor'.
The cost, to these 'poor,' of a few canisters of Butagas, is often a day's trip by donkey or (leaky?) diesel outboard, to a seller who travels in turn to a distant industrial hub, where government officials are salting away their retirement funds for 'administering' the community-resource funds that are supposed to compensate for the manner in which the oil companies' activities irrevocably pollute the fabric of local life. Even if they were directly applied to the welfare of the end-user in the canoe (which never happens), the small percentage oil companies grudgingly pay to silence national-level complaints would hardly compensate for the loss of perpetually sustainable lifestyles. It's not surprising that learning to use fire effectively remains preserved in many traditional religions; people gather in small spaces where dedicated fire-keepers tend and focus the fire to provoke attention at the right moments, while making no smoke. Religions, and traditional taboos, encapsulate and preserve the essential life lessons of a particular time, place, and culture. This shared learning and belief, and the ability to transfer it in effective ways, is such an important evolutionary asset that we seem to have a compulsion for it, like our compulsions toward the high-calorie foods, or to find babies cute. In a world where starvation or exposure are real hazards, it pays to use the heart and hands as well as the head.

It is poor people, or people living with limited cash, who are responsible for the most sophisticated and smokeless wood-burning devices I know.
Ianto Evans chooses to live in the woods and sell books and workshops, instead of using his architect's license to build rich people's homes, in part because he wants to show Americans (and the wealthy international students who routinely travel to attend his classes and apprenticeships) how beautifully it is possible to live using the technologies he learned from 'poor people' and traditional cultures all over the world. Mud huts, properly designed and oriented, are a vast improvement over the cinderblock-and-tin tropical ovens he was forced to 'design' in Guatemala. People still own and maintain these cement buildings with pride - but most have built themselves a separate, natural-material outdoor kitchen and sleeping-shed because the interior temperatures make the bunkers fit only for storing non-perishable goods.

The scouts traveling the American Plains had a cook-stove they could build in minutes, using a badger-hole or fox-hole, that would boil water quickly while showing no flame or smoke to betray their location to enemies. The Dakota firepit is a primitive version of this design; for a true fox-stove, add a chimney and make the air hole bigger, fire pit smaller. Similar structures were traditionally used for tipis and kivas, to bring outside air in and produce a clean, open fire whose minimal smoke would draft properly out the built-in roof hole.

The Masai, and other tribes in Africa, have a tea-stove we call the 'jug stove' in English. It is dug into a termite mound, again in minutes, to offer tea as a peacekeeping ritual when meeting a stranger in the open savannah. If tea is not offered, it's a bad sign, and the chance meeting is more likely to degrade into suspicions or accusations of trespassing and cattle-theft. The jug stove is simply a chamber, with a narrow chimney, on top of which you set the tea pot. It can be half-open, or mostly enclosed; and if you don't have a termite mound, it can be dug into any suitably stable (and non-flammable) hillside.

An American logger in the past century might cut a narrow notch in a convenient stump, in a very similar shape, making a chimney-stove on which to heat a pot of coffee over a contained, and nearly smokeless, fire. (I suppose that they may have had similar motivations to the Plains groups, considering the probable attitudes of lumbering companies to laborers starting fires in the woods on company time.)

There are Japanese and Chinese tea-stoves, camping stoves, and a myriad of other little devices that mimic these forms and use processed industrial fuels. Some of these are doubtless based on ancestral versions which used local bio-fuels instead.

The European masonry heaters are designed to provide maximal comfort and fuel efficiency, and as a secondary benefit, produce very little smoke. Modern masonry heaters take a master mason working with pre-manufactured parts maybe a few days to build; maybe a week or two for a less-experienced mason or one who must cut masonry shapes on site. They last for centuries, and require only a cubic foot or two of wood, in a single, clean, batch burn, for a 24-hour or longer heating cycle. They cost anywhere from $5000 for a kit, outer casing required and sold separately, to $100,000 or more for a master-mason installation with beautiful soapstone or molded ceramic tiles. They are sized to the house, and in traditional models the heater is built first and the house around it.

If traditional peoples can build a smokeless fire in minutes, why do rich, educated Westerners need to pay a master craftsman for weeks of work?

It's not because white people are naturally dumber than brown people, because a big red-faced logger can do it too. It's not because technology makes us stupid, because the Japanese can do it too.

Is this rich-people behavior pattern related to the reason that they enjoy burning wood in inefficient fireplaces, while heating with fossil fuels? Is it that they don't care to do manual things very often, but do enjoy some of the products of manual labor?
Or maybe it's that our Western education really does train us out of 'primitive' life skills. I've watched two college-educated young people sit in front of a fireplace for a full 45 minutes, telling each other how to properly start a fire, and taking turns failing to do so with a limitless supply of newspaper and matches. (As a college-educated slightly older person, I was enjoying the meta-perspective too much to actually do anything about the problem at hand.)
On this particular occasion Ernie (who was raised among loggers) came into the room, lit the fire, and walked out again. The kindling burned steadily in a small, concentrated flame path for about 3 minutes, then the larger logs leapt into cheerful and sustained life. There was a thoughtful silence, and then the conversation moved on to other topics.
For basic wood burning information, including cool tricks you can use to impress your friends, I recommend The Sweep's Library(humorous, graphic, and accurate wood-burning advice, or WoodHeat.org(a dignified East Coast professional's public service site). I am working on a Fire Science page at http://www.ErnieAndErica.info/FireScience, but at this point it's not quite doing it for me.

A wealthy person's status is reflected in how much money they are able to spend on the comforts of life, and whether they can do so in a manner that makes their friends feel exclusively indulged. High prices may even be an incentive for a rich person, who believes you get what you pay for. This is supposed to support the economy. But that economy continues to extract its wealth at the expense of the common goods that support life on earth.
A person living well in a non-cash economy gains status from being able to do the things that need to be done, better and quicker and smarter and sounder and safer and thriftier than others. Everyone's mutual survival depends on there being enough to go around, so everyone watches and learns. Failing this competence or its recognition, a person survives in a truly cash-starved economy by being dangerous, or stealthy, or both. Mastery of fire is a survival skill.

I re-learned one of the basic facts today from experience: burning punky, wet, snowy wood is inefficient, whether or not you can do it without making smoke. We had gathered a pile of dead and down logs, but only had time to cut and stack part of a cord before the snow hit. Though it's punky, it's dry punk, and burned OK in our excellent firebox. We would use 1 or 2 carriers of wood a day (about 1 cu foot per carrier) and we stayed cozy. Ron (above) cut some more off the frozen logpile for us when this ran out. Even frozen, it would burn OK in our mass heater. But Ernie wanted to get us one cord of seasoned, split, local tamarack (larch), for a price I could agree to. Lovely folks, Bonnie and Mike, who brought it over. From the single carrier-load we brought in yesterday, we had yesterday's fire, and today's, and there is still a big pile of warm, dry kindling and another big log indoors to start tomorrow's fire. I guess we are burning about 1/3 the volume of dry wood, compared to wet punky wood.

I know this about burning wood; I teach it. But when you arrive in September and the snow comes in October, there isn't time to season on-site wood. (Though we bought a harvesting permit, it too would have been green or down, wet wood).
And we could not have afforded that cord of firewood until we paid off the addition that gave us indoor plumbing. I know, suburban priorities.
At current rates, given that the punky almost-cord lasted 4 months, and the tamarack lasts twice as long, we will still have half of this cord in our woodshed for next winter. That's mid-winter rates ($170) for a full year's worth of heating.

What does it say about our culture that wealthy, informed people are willing to dedicate a few months or years of their income to an efficient biofueled heater that will last a lifetime .... and middle-income, less-informed people are willing to dedicate a similar chunk of their salary to refurbishing or installing a smoky fireplace or woodstove ... or in our case, insulated walls and electric-heated running water .... but are not willing to dedicate a few days or a few hours' earnings to getting dry firewood, or to attend a catered workshop on producing clean heat with simple tools and materials they may already own?

I suppose to earn all that money and spend it on those other things... They must really like their work.

I like my work too, and my work involves teaching people to use hands-on skills and observations to expand their options for enjoying a beautiful, comfortable, non-harmful life. It's a humbling sort of work, as these skills take years of practice.

In order to entice such work-enjoying people to consider our smokeless, low-cash option, we have prototyped this Rocket Mass Heater with an attractive fieldstone finish and copper-clad heating bell. (It's a work in progress; when finished, there will be a pine mantlepiece on top to match the bench under the cushions.)


It doesn't warm me quite as quickly as the poor-person's version with the oil drum exposed, and it costs $100 in scrap copper plus the original $10 for the stout steel barrel. But it does all the other things a rocket stove mass heater is supposed to do (burn without smoke, store heat for 24 hours in a warm bench that I can sit on, cost substantially less than a woodstove or all-masonry heater). And I like its looks.

Now if you are a rich person, who likes to throw money at people who do manual things, I don't want you to get the idea that this stove costs only $100. I put a good solid two weeks of work into this, while failing to procure firewood I couldn't at that time afford. You would need to pay a master mason for their expert time, and building officials for theirs, in order to meet the terms of your homeowner's insurance policy, in order to protect the mortgage that allows you to overpay for your home at almost-comfortable monthly rates.

But if you are reasonably well-off person who would rather spend time than money, and have a willingness to apply (or learn) some physical skills to complement your mental ones, you are quite likely to get some serious advantages from the rocket heater plans or workshops we offer.

We also have a contest open for other design suggestions, and fabricators willing to produce them if we refer business, on the wood burning stoves forums at www.Permies.com.

There's a lot of other good threads there too, currently moderated by yours truly,
Ernie and Erica.