A modern home’s lack of foresight
2 February 2009 7 Comments
Last week — during and following the great ice storm of 2009 — my wife and I were without power for four days, almost 100 hours by her count. We learned very quickly how inept so many modern American homes are when it comes to, well, self-sufficiency.
We toughed it out for two nights, but after seeing our own breath upon waking the second morning we decided that was enough. The house registered 43 degrees (the lowest it would get, from what we could tell).
Our little bungalow, like so many other American dwellings, lacks a fireplace (or wood-burning stove). Such a simple implement, a staple in buildings for millenia, and quite basic to everyday activities such as lighting, heating, cooking and romance and our little Hygge and Fika (as we’ve so named our cottage) falls short in this category.
Our American homes aren’t built to function without electricity. Sure we have candles and battery operated lanterns, and perhaps even portable heaters. But kerosene and gas heaters are supposed to be used in “well-ventilated” areas (which makes me wonder why I have one built into the third bedroom in my house), lest you die from carbon monoxide. A friend suggested that these function just to cut the chill. That is how I’ve used ours, but it wasn’t enough to cut the chill back from 43 degrees.
Why, pray tell, aren’t houses built in a self-sufficient manner? How difficult would it be to design for south-facing windows to capture the winter sun and westward eaves to eschew the summer heat? How difficult would it be to plan a home around a hearth? Even before my first significant brush with an ice storm, last week, I built these things into the homes in my head (if ever I get the chance to design and build my own).
The simple answer is that spec homes, which constitute the great majority of humble Stateside abodes, are built as money makers more than as places people live. It seems to come back, again, to the short-sighted culture we live in. The developers want to make money now. The buyers, first-time and otherwise, want the amenities their parents patiently waited for years to earn in their first home, even if it means the home is a cheap piece of poo.
How can we change this aspect of our culture? Please, let us change this aspect of American culture!
Image from Wikipedia.
The Aesthetic Elevator 
We too lived through the ice storm but we were lucky we did not loose power fully…yet. We stored water and did all kinds of things to secure warmth and basics, but we both looked at each other many times and said this exact thing. If we were farther in the country we would have been harder hit, no doubt, we also would have a working woodstove or fireplace and other stuff taken care of. We have lived very rual most of our lives, coming into the cities in the past 7 years to work. Living in expensive boxes on little plots of land, next to people you probably won’t like. That and the bonus that if we were to have an emergency, we would be worse for it because we are not out farther, where stuff like that happens all the time…where you are always ready for survival mode. Great post! We are ready for most emergencies, but I’ve never seen anything like this ice storm before, and I have lived all over the country, it was amazing and scary. I hope you all are warm and safe now. All the best!
Amen to that! I live in San Francisco, and even though we don’t have ice storms, Mark Twain did write that the “coldest winter” he ever spent was “a summer in San Francisco.”
Many of our homes are not even insulated!
Winter before last, the first I spent in the house I had bought, I totally froze. This fall, I paid a lot of attention to insulating: weather-stripping doors, putting balsa wood baffles around the leaky inside of the windows, blocking the hole under the sink where the pipe comes through from outside with no collar! This made a huge difference and saved me about $30 a month in heating costs.
I love your blog!
Great post, Paul! We, of course, went through the same thing and found out just how dependent on electricity we were, as well. A neighbor bought a $4000 generator, only to find that, in the first days of the storm, no gas pumps worked, because they too used electricity. Ironic. Then other neighbors bragged over their gas heat. Well, what if the gas line ruptured? You’d be in the same boat, really. And the woodstoves – you still need the WOOD to burn to keep it going – what if you had no supply? What secondary heat source can we use that is safe, doesn’t require gas, or kerosene, or wood, that can be used in an emergency? It’s an interesting debate, for sure.
We bought a home built in 1939. It has a fireplace, but has been converted to gas. I guess we could throw logs on it, though, in an emergency. If we had any logs. We do have big windows, too. If we had an emergency and we had logs, I’ll bet we could close off the bedrooms and upstairs, fire up the hearth and sleep in the living room. But we’d starve to death. We only keep food around for a few days. This is a project we’re working on!
We don’t keep much food around either, though we stocked up, sort of, for last week. We knew if we really needed to we could grill (assuming a tree hadn’t fallen on the grill). Further, my wife eats gluten free per her health, and that makes circumstances like this uber complicated.
Our little bungalow, I failed to mention above, was supposedly built in ’55. However, the tag on the attic fan said ’47. I suppose a lot more homes in PA have fireplaces anyway, since typically Arkansas winters are fairly mild.
An ordinary fireplace is nice, but it won’t heat an average-sized American home. Ours helped a lot – even when the rest of the house was really cold, it was tolerable right around the fire – but a wood stove or fireplace with an insert would have been much better.
Also, BIG houses are less efficient and harder to heat/cool. Small, snug units are more sensible.
You’re right, single fireplaces are useless against a whole house, esp. a big house. But fireplaces can be designed to be more efficient than so many modern ones are IIRC.