Preface. To prepare for the day when there is no natural gas, oil, or coal to heat homes and buildings, the best possible way to prepare for the future and lessen suffering would be retrofitting homes to use less energy and insulate them from extreme heat or cold. As well as cooking boxes and other energy efficient appliances. And hot water bottles in cold weather.

Since both of my books and much of this website explain why the electric grid can’t stay up after fossils, some of the retrofits below don’t make sense for coping with energy decline, but are being done because they’re designed to reduce CO2 emissions. CO2 will be declining dramatically and with a vengeance as oil declines by 6% and more a year in the future (global peak oil happened in 2018). I don’t know how practical buildings over 6 stories high will be either, since elevators won’t be able to run at some point, but perhaps they’d be a good place for food and other storage.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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2022 Amid rising energy costs, Italian cooks go old-school to save gas. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2022/12/10/1140042621/italian-food-cooking-box-europe-energy-cost

Build yourself an insulating box. After bringing a pot of stew to boil on the stove for 10 to 20 minutes, put int into an insulated box to continue to cook slowly, a portable oven. This also frees you up from hovering over the stove, and food cooked at lower temperatures has better nutrition.

Sisson P (2020) New York’s Real Climate Challenge: Fixing Its Aging Buildings. New York Times.

More than 90 percent of the buildings in New York today will still be standing in 2050. Instead of demolishing older buildings, owners and developers are devising ways to retrofit them with the latest green technology.

Interior pipes, radiators and heating ducts will be removed or sealed, and a new facade on each building will cover a new all-electric heating and cooling system. When finished, the buildings will meet a strict passive house standard, a modern building convention that substantially reduces heating and cooling costs, thanks to their airtight exteriors. The fading brick and concrete walls will be buried under a white, sculptural surface that will help slash energy costs by 80%.

This project was inspired by  Energiesprong, a Dutch process that uses standardized, premade building panels with built-in heating and cooling systems to upgrade older buildings. In the United States, and New York in particular, the wide variety of housing types, as well as differing climates, makes the standardized Dutch approach unfeasible.

Each of the 146 apartments will have a wall-mounted electric heater and air-conditioner connected to a system of ducts and refrigerant lines that snake up the walls and eventually connect to an energy recovery ventilator, a rooftop machine that purifies and circulates air.

The new facade, layered up to eight inches thick atop the existing exterior, will consist of a barrier to prevent airflow; rigid insulation panels; stucco; and a self-cleaning finish, Lotusan, designed to whisk away water by mimicking lotus leaves.

Tenant benefits go beyond energy savings. The facade is thicker, airtight and watertight, which means improved air quality — it’s constantly recirculated because of the tight external envelope — less noise from the outside and fewer pest and mold issues. Electric induction stovetops will cut interior air pollution, and the apartments will gain extra space from the removal of radiators.

Home improvements

• Lots of insulation and sealing of cracks.
• Limit the windows on the cool and windy side of a house
• Passive solar, thermal mass, and LOTs of insulation properly installed
• Zoned heat; hydronic in the slab using hot water reclaimed from the wood stove.
• Heat only the spaces that need heat.
• Thermal curtains/shades on windows.
• South-facing Home.
• North part of house bermed into hillside.
• Roof overhang for seasonal insolation.
• R-60+ in ceilings.
• Get a small dog. Some breeds were, in part, actually bred to this purpose. They’ll burrow down to the foot of the bed and keep your feet warm.  A “Three Dog Night” meant it was below zero outside so you slept with 3 dogs to stay warm.
• Earth Sheltered Homes
• http://energy.gov/energysaver/articles/efficient-earth-sheltered-homes
• Green roof: watch out for fire ants.  I built our home to have a green roof; up to 18? of soil and plants. It’s bermed up to the roof level on the north, NE and NW sides. However, my research into underground homes revealed that fire ants love green roofs, and will drill tiny holes in virtually any roof membrane. Fire ants we’ve got, unfortunately.

Kaller B (2014) Simpler ways to stay warm.  grit.com

We use many times more energy keeping warm than our ancestors did. Our houses rarely use the natural energy around them, and they leak the energy many of us import from far away. Most modern homes are many times larger than traditional ones, giving us far more space to heat. And more and more of us are alone.

In 1900, only 1% of U.S. residents lived alone, and half lived in households of 6 or more people.

By 2012, 27% of Americans lived by themselves, and other Western nations saw similar trends. When extended families gathered under one (small) roof, the entire building could be heated or insulated more easily, and of course when people gathered in the same room, their body heat warmed the air. More people living alone, and fewer people per house in general, means more vast spaces to heat separately. (1a, 1b)

Most of us keep our homes very hot. One U.S. organization assumes a normal indoor winter temperature of anywhere from 67 to 82 F, but a few decades ago kept them at  53 F. Victorian Britons often slept with open windows – and they lived during the sub-zero nights of the “Little Ice Age,” an era when the climate was much colder than today. (2) (3)

Many old techniques allowed people to remain warm while sleeping, by transferring heat from the fire to some thermal mass and letting it radiate slowly. They put closed pans of hot coals or sand under the bed, or put their bedding atop “bed wagons” that left space underneath for heat sources. Some people in Central or Eastern Europe built masonry stoves, whose winding chimney heated a giant thermal mass of brick or stone – and some had a space for bedding attached to the stove itself, so that the fire would warm the brick underneath the bed. Hot-water bottles accomplished the same purpose with less of a fire hazard, and we still use them in our house through the winter.

If such temperatures sound intolerable, keep in mind that most of us dress poorly for the cold these days, even though we can buy highly insulating and comfortable clothes unavailable to our ancestors. Look at the everyday garments of people two or three centuries ago, and you see that what look like costumes to us were appropriately heavy and insulating. The business suit handed down to us from European gentlemen was made for a cold climate and colder age, even though people continue to wear them in paradoxically air-conditioned offices in Arizona and Florida.

Clothes insulate the body the same way that batting insulates the home, by trapping poorly conducting air pockets between the hot and cold spaces. As Kris De Decker of Low-Tech Magazine pointed out, though, insulating the body means warming only a tiny layer of space between us and our clothes – which costs much less energy than insulating our now-giant living spaces. If we feel warm, however, it achieves the same result.

Since every degree of indoor heat translates to about 9 to 10% more energy, a 20-degree change in temperature could bring heating expenses from exorbitant to almost nil. As one of our home builders said, “If you’re wearing a T-shirt in the winter, you’re spending too much money.” (4)

As house insulation can be expressed using measures like R-values, clothes insulation is measured in the lesser-known “clo” unit. A “clo,” developed by scientists in the 1940s, is defined as the amount of clothing needed to keep a couch potato feeling about 70 F indefinitely. In everyday terms it’s a three-piece business suit. So put on long underwear, sweaters, and so on, this can reduce your heating costs 50-70%. (5) (6) (7)

One last and often-overlooked factor in winter warmth: most of our ancestors worked hard. Chopping wood, keeping animals, pushing barrows – even the most everyday chores from childhood to old age required physical activity that we rarely get today. Physical activity might be the most important factor in keeping the body warm.

My friends back in Minnesota were living with minus-40 temperatures recently – Centigrade and Fahrenheit, for that’s where the two scales meet – and that might seem to require more insulation than clothing can provide. Indeed, according to De Decker, keeping a resting person warm at those temperatures requires the equivalent of 12 suits layered on top of one another. Walk around, though, and that figure drops to four, and when running to 1.25

If all of this sounds overly Spartan, keep in mind that most of our ancestors lived in harsh winters with no central heating, no electricity, no coal, oil or propane. Go far back enough, and they even survived an Ice Age, and most of the time they not only survived, but prospered. If you want proof that we can thrive during cold weather on far less energy than we use today, just look around you.

References:

1a Caplow T, Hicks L, Wattenberg BJ (2000) The First Measured Century: An Illustrated Guide to Trends in America, 1900-2000. PBX

1b Pew Research Center (2010) The return of the multi-generational family household.

2 – American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) Standard 55-2010, Thermal Environmental Conditions for Human Occupancy.

3 Lane M (2011) How warm is your home? BBC News. 

The “Little Ice Age” was the period from the 1600s to the 1800s, when winters became much more severe. It may have happened, strange as it sounds, because Europeans introduced diseases to the Americas; up to 95 percent of the population of two continents died off, their farms grew back into forests again, the trees sucked up trillions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the greenhouse effect was quickly reduced, and global temperatures plunged. That era, when Londoners held “frost fairs” on the solidly frozen Thames River, is the source of most of our Dickensian Christmas imagery, the reason we sing about wanting a white Christmas even though most of our climates don’t allow for it anymore.

4 – Low-tech Magazine (2011) Insulation: First the Body, Then the Home.

5 – ASHRAE (1985) ASHRAE Research Project Report RP-411: A Comprehensive Data Base for Estimating Clothing Insulation, January 1985. 

6 – Gagge AP, Burton AC, Bazett HC (1941) A practical system of units for the description of the heat exchange of man with his environment. Science, 94: 428-430, 1941.

7 – Goldman R, Kampmann B (2007) Handbook of Clothing: Bio-medical Effects of Military Clothing and Equipment Systems, 2nd edition.