PeakOilDesign

We've moved!

2006-12-21T18:28:00.000-05:00

Come check out the new site at peakoildesign.com! Please update your links to PeakOilDesign if you have a chance.

Forest Soil Managment

2006-12-20T10:06:00.000-05:00

Continuing with the topic of soil management, this article on the importance of forest soil nutrition for carbon sequestration was intriguing. If you hope to help fight global warming by planting trees, make sure you pay attention to soil nutrition or you may end up doing very little to remove carbon dioxide. It’s also something to consider if you want a healthy source of timber after Peak Oil.

Exciting news!

2006-12-19T09:06:00.000-05:00

In the near future, PeakOilDesign will be transferring to a new site with a lot more functionality! I hope to make the switch within a week, so stay tuned for the link to the new site. In the meantime, here's a teaser from the "How to use this site" document:

PeakOilDesign contains several tools to aid in developing post-Peak Oil communities. The front page features the original PeakOilDesign blog, used to present Systems Engineering design strategies for Peak Oil, sustainability news, updates on design projects, and other relevant thoughts. Feel free to write comments in response to the posts or other commenters.

The Community Organization Forums provide an opportunity for people to communicate with one another in an attempt to build communities. Users can provide detailed information about their skills and resources (via their user profile) and look for compatible communities. Established communities can provide information about themselves and run their own forums -- either to discuss internal issues or recruit new members.

The Guilds enable experts within a given field to share their information with the less experienced or discuss advanced topics with one another. Newbies and experts alike can share their experiences, failures, and successes.

Registered users have the option of starting their own blogs on PeakOilDesign. These can be used to share projects, ideas, or concerns. POD Blogs are an ideal place for discussing the design of your house, garden, or community and receive feedback from the POD community.

Newfound sites

2006-12-16T11:33:00.000-05:00

I've come across some sites in the past week with some very encouraging information and strategies. Oil, be Seeing You by author Richard Embleton takes a view remarkably similar to my own regarding the best approaches to mitigating Peak Oil effects. An excerpt:

I am not one who believes that survival, other than for a very few, consists of rugged individual survivalism on an isolated homestead in the midst of the wilderness or in reverting to a hunter-gatherer existence. We are social beings. Long-term survivability after energy decline must center on community, whatever form that community might take. The survivability of communities well past peak-oil, however, is far more than a case of self-sufficiency. It is also a matter of self-reliance, of having within the community the full measure of skills needed for survivability, of being able to produce or locally acquire everything that that community needs to function.

To that end, EcoSherpa has a post on solar panels made from blueberries. The site in general contains a number of excellent posts and really serves as a news source for edge-of-the-envelope sustainability news. They also link to a new site that could be promising, The Better World Homepage. I'd love to see how this one develops.

Global Warming meets Peak Oil Design

2006-12-13T10:34:00.000-05:00

Continuing with the discussion of weather effects from a couple posts ago, there are a lot of other requirements we can define.

Jeff pointed out that we need to more carefully examine how much rain falls during the growing season, rather than just the whole year’s average. I’m looking for the data on that for our selected Iowa location and I’ll get back to you.

In the following draft requirements, the term “withstand” may need some further definition. The understanding of what withstanding something may vary from person to person – some might consider it to mean every part of the structure and farm stays intact, and some might imagine it means only the core structure must survive. Any thoughts on a better way to define this term?

The Homestead shall withstand temperatures of 115 ° F or greater.
The highest recorded temperature in the area is 102 ° F. Although the global warming models predict only modest increases in summer temperatures, I added a buffer to capture any error. If it gets hotter than this, we’ll be in trouble anyway. (See this -- courtesy of BigGav.)

The Homestead shall withstand temperatures of -30 ° F or less.
The lowest temperature recorded in the area is -28 ° F. In my estimation, it’s safe to assume we will not see temperatures lower than that over the course of the Homestead’s lifetime. In fact, we should consider whether -30 ° is too restrictive and could needlessly increase the cost of the design.

The Homestead shall withstand no less than XX lbs. of accumulated snow load.
I need to find the seasonal snow depth maximum.

The Homestead shall withstand sustained winds of no less than XX miles/hour.
This exact number is up for debate. Typical maximum winds top out at about 60 mph over any sustained period of time, but I haven’t found any models of increasing storm intensity due to global warming.

The Homestead shall provide shelter for no less than 4 people from tornadic winds (300 miles/hour).
This does not mean that the house has to be designed to resist tornadoes – that would be near impossible to achieve. Rather, the requirement implies some sort of storm shelter – a room in the basement, a storm cellar, or a standalone reinforced building.

The Homestead shall withstand no less than 50” precipitation per year.
This requirement is designed to capture the maximum expected yearly precipitation in a year at our location.

One thing that occurred to me in developing these weather requirements is that we haven’t specified how long we want the homestead to last. Climate models typically don’t publish results past 2100 – and some research predicts further dramatic warming after than, depending on how the anthropogenic (human-caused) forcings change. Do we want this homestead to survive for our grandchildren? Our great-grandchildren? 200 years? More?

The further out we place our target end-life for the homestead, the more uncertainty we encounter.

How much space do we really need?

2006-12-11T10:58:00.000-05:00

According to some sources, typical work area requirements are 4-12 m^2 (43-130 ft^2) depending on the nature of the work or even desk configuration.

An interesting research paper (pdf) out of the U.K. on current trends showed that households in the “fuel poverty” band had an average of 102 m^2 (1100 ft^2) – which might seem like a mansion to the homesteaders of the pioneer days.

Today, the average living space per person is more than 40 m^2 (430 ft^2), which means about 1700 ft^2 for a family of four. Of course, many people today might find that a bit small.

The problem with defining living space requirements is that it is primarily a psychological, rather than physiological problem. A person can survive in a small cell indefinitely, but for most people this would be uncomfortable. There is the added complication that since our current society places a great deal of emphasis on large living spaces it may be difficult for even Peak Oil-enlightened individuals to transfer from something like a 3000 square foot house to one less than 1000.

The concerns with building too large are not surprising: time, cost, and labor. If you have only one or two persons to build your house, a large one will be prohibitive on a short time scale. Consider the availability of the proper tools – it’s easier (but potentially more expensive) to dig a foundation with a front-end loader rather than a shovel. Also, don’t forget to take into account heating and cooling your dwelling – even a well insulated mansion would use a lot of firewood!

If you can develop a scheme for staging construction that will allow for phased occupancy of the homestead, a large house can be made more feasible given time and cost constraints. More on this later.

Soil Management

2006-12-08T18:06:00.000-05:00

The Energy Bulletin had a fascinating post on modern soil science and management. There is so much we don't understand about how we grow our food, yet so few are willing to question the practices. It sounds eerily like Peak Oil and the way we use energy...

An excerpt:

"Magic" is how humans have customarily described the soil's natural cycles of decay and growth. Without a scientific understanding, our ancestors relied on observation and traditional practices to grow crops.

Modern chemical agriculture has been only marginally better at understanding the soil. Unable to control the natural cycles, it bypasses them with synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Despite the outward successes of modern agriculture, its heavy-handed approach brings with it pollution, soil degradation and other ills.

In contrast, organic methods like permaculture have attempted to work with natural cycles. Despite the many insights and successful practices that have emerged, a rigorous scientific model is still lacking. Permaculture and its brethren are accused of being belief systems rather than science. It's hard to make progress without having a common understanding of how things work.

Recently, however, soil ecology has developed to the point where we can open the lid on the black box of underground processes. We can begin to understand how micro-organisms maintain the structure and fertility of the soil. We learn that symbiotic relationships between plants and micro-organisms are not the exception but the rule.

Weather effects on Peak Oil Homestead design

2006-12-07T17:25:00.000-05:00

In the previous post we picked a specific location for our Peak Oil Homestead Example Problem, which enables us to do quite a bit. With these new assumptions we can better see our true requirements. With 34”/year of precipitation, we can modify our water requirements to take advantage of nature’s irrigation. With knowledge of our latitude, we can run calculations on solar incidence.

In the interest of furthering the design, let’s calculate what we need for growing food. Requirement 2.2.2 in the ORD is for 14,000 liters-per-day (lpd) of water. For four people on a vegetarian diet, we can liberally estimate that 1 acre of food would meet their nutritional needs (NOTE: This will be refined to a more exact number as the design progresses – remember Systems Engineering is an iterative process!).

The precipitation volume rate is therefore:
Vp = (34”/yr)*1 acre = 2.83 acre-ft/yr = 3,490,000 liters/yr = 9560 lpd

In this iteration on the design, we see that we can reduce our daily water requirement of 14,000 lpd by 9560 to 4440 lpd! However, remember that the 34”/yr is an average figure, and we should apply some engineering forethought and bump it up a bit.

Before we do so, however, we should consider the predicted effects of global warming on our particular region. Models call for increased precipitation in the Midwest through at least 2050, which can give us more confidence in our decision to rely more on precipitation for crop irrigation.

(The models also predict only moderate local warming for Iowa from global warming through 2050 for the summer seasons, and more significant winter season warming. The winter warming could mean a reduced need for home heating and is a factor to consider when we get to designing those systems.)

Given this analysis, it seems a refined requirement of 5000-6000 lpd for food production is reasonable. However, we have not yet taken into account possible effects of mulching, greenhouses, or other water-saving techniques! That will be taken account during trade studies in the next iteration.

Homestead Updates

2006-12-05T20:57:00.000-05:00

Development of the Peak Oil Homestead Example Project has been really dragging, so I’m going to kick it into high gear to keep things exciting and also more relevant to all types of PeakOilDesign projects.

We need to create more assumptions for the Homestead Example in order to develop the requirements further. This will take the problem from the realm of general application to the specific, so our focus should remain more than ever on the process itself.

New assumptions:
Location: Central Iowa, 5 miles outside small town
Topography: 20 acres former farmland, 20 acres timber, small stream
Weather: 34”/year precipitation; Avg winter temps 10-40 ° F; Avg summer temps 50-85 ° F
Budget: $100K

I’ve also updated the ORD for the project using some previously unassigned requirements. They were assigned as follows:

Objective 1.1: The Homestead will provide enough power for 4 people.

Requirement 4.1.1: The Homestead shall have railings (per Spec XYZ) on all exposed stairways.

Requirement 4.1.2: The Homestead shall provide safety protection for all sharp corners per Spec ABC.

Requirement 4.1.3: The Homestead shall provide safety barriers (per Spec AAA) around all hazardous areas and devices.

Orphan Requirement The electrical system shall provide protection for electrical outlets per Spec AAA.
(This requirement will fit under an as yet undefined higher-level requirement.)

Requirement 2.1.1.1: The water system shall provide potable tap water at 50 ° F – 86 ° F.

Requirement 2.1.1.2: The water system shall provide potable tap water at 112 ° F – 145 ° F.

Requirement 2.1.1.3 The water system shall provide a source shut-off mechanism.

Requirement 2.1.1.4 The water system shall remain above 40 ° F at all points.

Shuttle launch on the horizon

2006-12-03T21:14:00.000-05:00

Discovery is ready to take off Thursday night, and my activity here on the blog should pick back up again once it's launched. If you have a chance to see the launch in person, take advantage of it. Night launches are rare and spectacular, and there aren't many shuttle missions left!

Defining the garden

2006-11-29T07:21:00.000-05:00

As promised, I pulled together a list of unordered requirements for the “Peak Oil Garden Project”. These are intended for general use, rather than a specific size garden in a specific area. We’ll deal with that later.

So, here are what I consider important requirements for an easy-to-maintain, productive organic garden. Feel free to comment on these, as my domain expertise in the field of gardening is very limited.

The garden shall ensure all plants are within X inches of a walking point.
Your value for “X” will vary depending on your own arm reach or if you want it to be accessible for children. A typical value (per Square Foot Gardening) is 24 inches.

The garden shall have walking paths greater than X inches in width.
A good rule of thumb would be about twice the width of your foot at a minimum.

The garden shall be mulched to a depth of X inches. Mulching specifications are found in the document “Mulching Guidelines” [TBD later].
I’ll work on putting together an actual mulching guidelines based on my readings and your comments.

The garden shall reuse all organic waste, excepting diseased plants or soil.
This can be accomplished using a compost pile, turning dead plants back into the soil, or simply using the plants as mulch directly.

The garden shall use only organic pesticides and fertilizers as defined in the document “Specifications for Organic Gardening” [TBD later].
Hard-wiring this idea into your requirements should help keep your hand firm every time you have an urge to reach for a bottle of commercial bug spray. (I’ll try to find a ready-made document to fill this niche – I’m sure some exist.)

The garden shall have no less than X different plant species.
The garden shall have at least 2 varieties.
These requirements help ensure biodiversity in the garden.

The garden shall be enclosed with a barrier per the document “Garden Barrier Specification” [TBD later].
This requirement is for guarding against critters. If something like a fence is impractical (e.g. a large lot), you can rewrite it so that you can use natural barrier strategies such as putting peppers on the garden perimeter. If you don’t have or anticipate such a problem with hungry animals you could probably exclude this requirement.

Engineering beauty

2006-11-28T16:58:00.000-05:00

On the last post, DJEB commented that his aesthetic garden designs may not fit very well with the concept of modularity. I agree that engineering does have the tendency to suck the beauty out of designs or appears at odds with permaculture principles, but this is only when applied in isolation.

In my view, modular gardening techniques such as square foot gardening do not necessarily imply rigid lines and boxes. The key principles behind such methods are to break up the garden into manageable chunks and to identify clear paths for foot traffic.

I see no reason why something like a spiral-shaped (or von Karman trail-shaped) garden wouldn’t meet the requirements for modular gardening. In some ways, such a shape is a better design choice: a spiral shape provides clearly identifiable walking areas and puts plants within easy reach from multiple points.

One of my own gardens is pie-shaped, and it easily meets the goals of modular design. With one board down the center (for walking) and walking paths on the edges, the garden is aesthetically pleasing and functional. So please, don’t let the seemingly rigid nature of engineering ruin your ideas for beautiful designs.

Subsystem design: Garden requirements

2006-11-21T22:57:00.000-05:00

Gardening is an inexact science, which can make for difficulty when trying to apply Systems Engineering. I’m very much a beginner in the realm of gardening, but I’ve gathered a short list of items from various readings that we can develop into requirements. For more in-depth help on permaculture and gardening try DJEB’s, Aaron’s, or Emme’s blogs, or check out Farmgirl Fare.

We may be getting ahead of ourselves here in the design process, but I want to work on some ideas for developing requirements on our gardens. To keep matters simple, we’ll make this a design problem separate and distinct from the Peak Oil Homestead Example Problem.

For now, I’d like to throw out some general concepts I’ve learned about sustainable gardening that we can turn into requirements in a later post.

1) Keep it modular – Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew emphasizes growing plants in an easy-to-manage area grid (as opposed to rows), which really appeals to my engineer’s mind. This way you can work on your garden one square at a time and avoid overwhelming both yourself and your plants.

2) Diversity – A variety of plants is important from a nutritional standpoint and as a method to thwart pests. Diversity becomes even more important when we consider the reports of dwindling pollinator species and climate change affecting growing seasons. A genetically diverse collection of plants could help protect against this and other random devastating factors (e.g. the Potato Famine…)

3) Mulch – A thick layer of mulch (some recommend at least 12”) is essential for a healthy, low-maintenance garden. It keeps the soil moist and soft, and prevents weeds from growing. The No-Work Garden Book by Ruth Stout is a great reference on gardening with mulch.

4) Composting – A constant source of decomposed organic matter enriches your garden and reduces (or eliminates) the need for fertilizer.

5) Raised beds – Raised beds protect against some hungry critters and improve soil drainage.

I’m sure the permaculturists here can offer many more key pointers :) I’ll take a look at how to transform these types of ideas into requirements over the Thanksgiving week. Happy Turkey (or Tofu) Day to all!

Peak Oil Money

2006-11-17T17:55:00.000-05:00

An article at LiveScience today discussed the results of a study showing that even thinking about money can lead to a reduction in selfless behaviors, even when the selfless activity has nothing to do with competition for wealth. It's unfortunate that we're wired this way, but it's something to consider when trying to build community. How can we encourage our neighbors to emphasize cooperation over competition?

The response from some will be "well, just do away with money altogether!", but I would contend that any measure of wealth would elicit the same primal instincts (this is a totally unproven hypothesis, but it seems likely to me). Wealth can be measured in land, trees, gold, energy, goats, or barbie dolls, it all depends on the culture of the social group. Even a small community of sustainble-minded Peak Oilers would not be immune. So given the idea that we can't live without some drive for the acquisition of wealth, how can we manage it to become a positive factor for sustainability and the community at-large?

My personal ideas for solutions to this innate human quality is to instill a sense of community with frequent social gatherings and encouraging daily personal visits to the homes of other community members. Such actions seem so simple, but I think go a long way in distracting from self-enriching behaviors to community-enriching behaviors. I know there are even better ideas out there than this; anyone care to share?

Florida gardening

2006-11-16T21:50:00.000-05:00

The growing season in Florida is just barely underway. I’m brand new to gardening (I haven’t gardened since I was a kid), so I started small with a couple raised beds. One is shown in the pictures below.

We have a sampling of tomatoes, cucumbers, kale, carrots, scallions, pepeprs, spinach, lettuce, and radishes on the left, and strawberries on the right. A good windstorm the other night knocked a dead branch full of precious deciduous leaves from my elderly neighbor’s tree, which I procured in spite of her confused stare at the request. It was a lucky find of free mulch for the strawberries in a place where leaves rarely fall.

If you build it…

2006-11-13T16:43:00.000-05:00

You are a genius. You just designed a 3000 square foot house completely powered by a 100-foot tall windmill and a massive rainwater cistern driving a paddlewheel. The three-story house boasts an intensive green roof, two wood-burning stoves, strawbale insulation, 2x12 framing timbers, and a greenhouse for your banana crop. Cool. Now build it.

If time and money are at your easy disposal, building your design may pose no problems. Of course, non-standard construction such as wide-board framing or green roofs will challenge most contractors, taking longer and costing more than conventional techniques. Plan on building it yourself instead? Anticipate things taking MUCH longer, especially if you have little experience or help. Building after Peak Oil effects have hit? Game over.

These concerns illustrate the reasoning behind including producibility requirements in Systems Engineering. It doesn’t matter how avant garde or functional a design is if it can’t be built with the available resources.

Consider your finances as you’re designing. Can you really afford a 30% efficiency 5 kW solar array with a tracking motor? Can you afford to use solar arrays at all? If not, what are the alternatives you can use to still meet your requirements?

In the context of our discussions, time is perhaps the most critical factor. According to some Peak Oil experts, oil production (and available energy) may already be declining. Can you risk taking five years to build your sustainable dream house? Can you risk even one? Maybe you should rethink your plans to ensure that you have a smaller-scale option available before you start on designing for more comfort.

There is also the matter of physically building your house. One or two non-experts can probably manage well enough to build an 800 square foot one-story house in short order, providing they have adequate tools and ingenuity. But suppose you plan on having a basement in rocky soil – your back will be in severe pain if you don’t have either a backhoe or 50 friends. Can you hand-mix enough concrete for it? Dubious. How about constructing your cistern? Think about what heavy equipment will be available or affordable over the course of your building schedule.

Producibility is just one more idea to keep in the back of your mind as you are designing, along with maintainability and reliability. Spending the time considering such things now could save you from heartache and failure in the future.

Waste of a good woodburning stove

2006-11-10T11:27:00.000-05:00

Apologies for the drop in activity -- I've been out-of-town and my internet connections did not pan out.

The other day we were looking at a house up north with a woodburning stove in the basement. Since the lot was heavily wooded, a woodburning stove was a great addition to aid in the warming of the house and transistion past Peak Oil. Unfortunately, the design of it was less than brilliant -- the stove pipe was routed from the basement to the roof outside of the house. It was such a bizarre thing to do, I could hardly imagine why they had done so. Besides the obvious loss of heat for warming the inside of the house, putting the stovepipe outside drastically increases the rate of creosote buildup. This raises the risk for chimney fires and constricts the air flow within the pipe.

The benefits of the wood stove could be recaptured by enclosing the pipe with brick and busting out the old exterior section, or by simply re-routing the pipe through the interior of the house. Both options are easy enough in concept, but a pain to implement on an already completed house and stove. This is just another prime example of why it's so important to lay out your entire system before you build it in order to save loads of work later on.

Bug Boom

2006-11-06T16:48:00.000-05:00

LiveScience had an article discussing the implications of an insect population boom in response to global warming. One sentence that stuck out at me was: “If they’re crop species, we could count on needing to use more pesticides and it could be very costly...” What are the implications for the organic gardener without access to (or desire for) pesticides? Over the coming years, it might not be a bad idea to study up on what type of pests munch on your crops in warmer latitutes, so you have an idea of how to fight them should they appear in your area. And, as always, ensure you plan out multitudes of crop diversity for your garden.

Child Safety Requirements

2006-11-03T06:36:00.000-05:00

There are important differences between requirements and specifications. Requirements give specific information about the project (or sub-project) at hand whereas specification give general guidelines to follow. I’ll try to illustrate the distinctions using one of the underdeveloped topics in the Peak Oil Homestead Example Problem: making the Homestead safe for children.

Notice that all ambiguous terms in a requirement must be defined explicitly or by referencing a specification. Also note that not all values are defined in these requirements and specs; there are placeholders that we will fill in with later research.

The Homestead shall have railings (per Spec XYZ) on all exposed stairways.

The Homestead shall provide safety protection for all sharp corners per Spec ABC.

The Homestead shall provide safety barriers (per Spec AAA) around all hazardous areas and devices.

The electrical system shall provide protection for electrical outlets per Spec AAA.

Spec XYZ:
Railings must be X feet high above the stairway. Railings with slats must have a slat spacing of less than Y inches.

Spec ABC:
Corners can be deemed “rounded” or “sharp” by inspection. If pressing your palm on the corner leaves an indent, it requires protection. Protection can consist of foam, sponge, or cloth securely attached to the fixture.

Spec AAA:
A safety barrier near any hot object such as a wood stove or water heater should be at least X feet away and composed of non-flammable materials.
Electrical outlets may be capped with plastic inserts or an external cover.

These specifications are not complete, but hopefully demonstrate what specs should contain.

Sustainable Power Resources

2006-11-01T22:13:00.000-05:00

For the vast majority of us working to transition to a comfortable post-Peak Oil life, our resources are seriously limited. We’re short of available time, money, land, and skills, and our windows of opportunity for acquiring all of these are rapidly shrinking. So, the more help we can get to build our future efficiently and cheaply, the better.

OtherPower has great information and products for building your own power, water, and heating systems from scratch. Done correctly, you can save quite a bit of money by building up your own systems.

Greener Shelter discusses a number of sustainable house design strategies. While they don’t have detailed plans, it might get you thinking in new directions for further research.

Sketchup is a free Google tool you can use to quickly visualize your design plans. It can really help bring your dream home to life.

I’ve only just started exploring Hammer Zone, but it has a lot of information on general home repair projects, much of which is still useful for sustainable design projects.

Why not blow away Peak Oil?

2006-10-27T10:36:00.000-05:00

RobTzu called me in to an interesting thread on LATOC discussing challenges to the notion that we can't save the world from energy decline after Peak Oil. In the thread, we calculated the required cost to replace the current world power usage fully with wind energy. Here was my contribution:

Well, my good calculator went missing at work a few months back, but I'll give it a try anyway :)

Actually, I get slightly different numbers, but your methods are essentially sound:

387.21*10^15 BTU = 4.09*10^20 J = 4.09*10^17 kJ
(reference #4 has an error: it cites 1054 for BTU -> kJ when it should be 1055 for BTU -> J)

For world power consumption for one year:
4.09*10^17 kJ /[(365.25 d)*(24 h/d)*(3600 s/h)] = 1.3*10^10 kW
(I'm not sure what number you used for the total time in the denominator -- perhaps I've made an incorrect assumption here on what you wanted to calculate)

Number of solar arrays = (1.3*10^10 kW)/(20 kW) = 6.5*10^8

Cost = (6.5*10^8)*$6000 = $3.9*10^12 ($3.9 Trillion)
However, I see a problem with using reference 2 for the price: it says that units from 2 kW to 20 kW start at $6000 -- so I think the lower number is for the 2 kW unit. We can either find a different source or use the 2 kW for $6000 (still low, I think), which gives us:
Cost = $39 Trillion

One more factor we're missing: In the first line of your post, Rob, it says that wind turbine power is really half the equivalent coal power effectiveness over the course of a year. So, multiply by 2:
Cost = $78 Trillion

Although this is significantly smaller than the numbers you calculated, the main point is still the same: It is incredibly difficult and expensive to replace the entire world electrical grid with wind energy. Even though the number I calculated is near world GDP, it would take at least a decade to scale up production to produce the required number of wind generators. This is if we commit all our economic resources to the project, including food (as Rob pointed out). And, this still doesn't account for what is required to meet current growth in demand.

Solutions for saving the entire world from living with reduced energy is not possible, even with massive conservation, and even if we develop commercial fusion tomorrow. That said, we can save a lot of people from hardship by a massive redirection of efforts if we start now. However, this won't happen anytime soon -- and the longer we wait, the less we can achive. For now, we need to focus on who each of us can protect with our given resources, and design accordingly.

Peak Oil Homestead Helpers

2006-10-25T13:09:00.000-05:00

Adjusting to life without TV

Trained farm dogs were essential in the past and will be so again in the future. Dogs help with herding livestock, fighting off predators, warning against intruders, and (of course) entertaining the children.

Our dog is a Catahoula (at least in part), although we didn’t know that when we got him from the animal shelter in Florida. Catahoulas are dogs typically trained for herding cattle and wrangling wild boar, and make fabulous hunting and guard dogs. We need to learn how to train him for these sort of activities eventually, but for now our main problem is trying to get him enough exercise with on our small suburban lot – they typically need 1 hour of free running time every day! And when he tries going over the fence at every squirrel and small dog, it’s tough to keep him contained. :)

So, my message today is to look into what sort of critters might help you out in your post-Peak Oil future, and make sure to include in your plans how you can best ensure you can keep them healthy and well-fed when the pet food factories disappear…

Water Requirements Throwdown

2006-10-23T08:39:00.000-05:00

Once you’ve reasonably developed the high-level requirements for your design, it’s time to whip out as many requirements as you can. As one of the major concerns following Peak Oil is adequate water supplies, we can start by focusing on water requirements. We’ll also explore a few examples of effective requirements writing.

Let’s start with the following test requirement:
The water system shall provide potable tap water at a temperature suitable for drinking.

This requirement has the right idea, but how do we define what temperature is suitable for drinking? We could say it will provide “cool” water, but there’s no solid definition for this. According to the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers cold tap water (for appliance purposes) is less than 86 ° F. There aren’t many solid references on “comfortable” cold tap water, so for now let’s choose (by intuition) 50 ° F for the lower end of cold tap water temperature range.

Similarly, we need a requirement for hot tap water. We can use guidance from the reference above:
The water system shall provide potable tap water at 112 ° F – 145 ° F.

Since one of our driving objectives is that the homestead will be safe for children, we need to ensure that the hot tap water isn’t too hot. However, there is a risk of Legionnaire’s Disease if they are allowed to incubate in hot water.
So we need a balance between water that reduces the risk of Legionnaire’s Disease yet doesn’t scald children. You can weight the competing concerns yourself, but remember that you don’t have to have a hot water heater – you could use a tankless heater or go old fashioned and boil water on the stove yourself. So there are design solutions that could meet the competing requirements.

With an eye toward maintainability, we can write:
The water system shall provide a source shut-off mechanism.
This function will enable practical servicing of the water system.

The water system shall remain above 40 ° F at all points.
This is to ensure the pipes won’t freeze in winter. It’s unlikely you would need a similar requirement on the high end – but worth considering if there’s a chance you could approach boiling (maybe a design-specific requirement when the time comes).

Peak Oil dividing lines

2006-10-19T07:39:00.000-05:00

The Peak Oil community is divided into three main camps: “doomers”, who anticipate devastating and total collapse; “optimists”, who believe technological breakthroughs will mitigate most of the crisis; and “cornucopians”, who believe any potential peak is decades or centuries away (or non-existent altogether).

Personally, I would fall somewhere between doomer and optimist. After analyzing production and usage data for energy, getting a good grasp of the physics of energy usage, and obtaining a limited education in the world’s complex economics, I’ve concluded that a major energy and economic collapse is inevitable in our near future. (This is even with excluding the converging crises of water, global warming, and pollution from the discussion.) I have no confidence that an energy alternative capable of approaching our increasing demand will magically appear.
However, consider these excerpts from this article in Counter Currents yesterday:

A community may not have enough foresight, labour, tools, or funds to create alternatives to whatever their members use now for heating, lighting, cooking, refrigeration, water collection, water pumping, and disposal utilization of gray water and human waste.
…
There may be pockets of survivors who will be able to harness wind, water and sun using civilized technology for a while, but eventually the machines will wear out.
Where do you buy replacement parts, how do you make parts without plastic or wires?
How do you refine the metals needed to make circuits and transistors?
Those who know, no longer do; those who do, no longer know. How much knowledge will manage to survive the post collapse period, for the time that comes after when it may become useful again?
…

The author paints a dreary doomerish prospect for the future, but for me it reinforces my belief in careful engineering design. I have no illusions that life for isolated communities will be difficult. I do have faith, however, that we will have the capacity to engineer novel methods to capture solar, wind, and water energy, if not sustain our existing equipment. Yes, manufacturing wires and silicon panels is difficult without an industrial infrastructure, but I believe we can find alternative (if less efficient) processes to do so.

Such is my faith in the power of technology – innovation won’t allow us to live beyond our available energy, but it will enable us to find sustainable solutions to continue a reasonably energized life.

Homestead Example Problem Update

2006-10-18T17:02:00.000-05:00

The link to the Objectives and Requirements Document for the Peak Oil Homestead Example Problem on the right sidebar now links to an updated document. The free site I'm temporarily using doesn't allow hot-linking, so there's an intermediate click required. This is just a temporary fix until I get a new site up and running.

Requirements Management

2006-10-18T05:14:00.000-05:00

Lately I’ve been focusing a lot on sustainable Peak Oil solutions, but we need to make sure we don’t lose site of the design process. In the spirit of keeping organized (which is about 85% of Systems Engineering), I’d like to direct your attention again to our development of the Homestead Problem. The Objectives and Requirements Document (ORD) for the Homestead Problem is linked at the top of the right sidebar.

We’ve slowly developed a number of requirements over the past few months, and now you can see where they fit within the hierarchy.

There are some key ideas in requirements management:

1) No orphans -- Each requirement needs to link back to either a higher-level one or an objective
2) Hierarchy – All requirements at a given level must describe the same system. The size requirements of your rainwater cistern (if you have one) belong at a lower level than your basic water requirements.
3) Baselining – Each level in the hierarchy should be frozen against further modification before advancing too far. This prevents you from constantly reworking all of your requirements and helps force you to ensure the “goodness” of the higher-level requirements. The common rule of thumb is that you can work up or down one level from your current one, but the higher levels must be frozen before continuing. (Example: Requirement 2.1.1 for 280 lpd of potable water is the highest-level; the next could be regarding the water system temperature; the next level requirement would be regarding a specific component of the system (say the cistern). In this example we can’t move on to the third level until we baseline Requirement 2.1.1)
This doesn’t mean you can never change the higher-level requirements, it just gets harder as your design matures.

As always, strive to keep specific design solutions out of your requirements. It can be difficult not to design, but try to focus on defining your needs before figuring out how to meet them. You design will be so much better if you resist the temptation.

Info on NETL or Morgantown, WV

2006-10-17T19:10:00.000-05:00

I may have the opportunity to transfer to a job with the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) in Morgantown, WV. I was wondering if anyone here could tell me about either the laboratory or the surrounding area. As our next move will likely be our last, I’m particularly interested in the sustainability aspects: soil, climate, community, and other resources. I think the job would be fabulous -- working on potential Peak Oil solutions (hopefully). Thanks to anyone who can help.

Peak Oil Summary & Solutions

2006-10-17T04:56:00.000-05:00

The absolute best Peak Oil article I’ve read so far was on Energy Bulletin yesterday. It sums up nearly every aspect of the crisis from a calm, rational perspective and presents the facts plainly.

From the article:

"From our perspective peak oil is not a tragedy, as long as it's handled correctly." As oil depletes and countries like China and India start to compete against the U.S. and Europe for increasingly limited supplies, Murphy sees a danger of more oil wars like Iraq.
…
"We are no longer attracted by the siren singers of breakthrough technologies that promise us we can continue living in a manner that denies a future for our children," Murphy told conference participants. "The solutions are not going to come from the same people who created the problem. The answers are not in the corporations of technology but in the villages and neighborhoods."
…
"There's this need to change our oil use driven by the supply question and from another direction by the global-warming question," Murphy said. "That's been causing a lot of cognitive dissonance. It took me about six months to understand that the issue is not how long the other half of the oil will last but that we can't burn the other half of the oil."

Breaking down energy needs: Insulation (Part 2)

2006-10-16T05:05:00.000-05:00

In the last post we discussed the common industry insulation measure known as the R-value. Focusing solely on a material’s R-value can be a major mistake, however.

First, R-values are determined under very specific laboratory conditions: in a warm, dry, wind-free environment. Of course, every home is subject to wind and precipitation, and even protected layers of insulation will be affected by weather. Fiberglass insulation loses nearly all of its thermal properties when wet, and allows air to flow through it easily even when dry.

In order to properly insulate your house, you need to seal your home against moisture and wind. Some go so far as to recommend against fiber insulation altogether.

Vapor barriers should be placed on the warmest side of the insulation. This is obvious in either very hot or very cold climates, but in places where the temperature varies wildly throughout the year the placement isn’t always readily apparent. No matter what the case, you should never put moisture barriers on both sides of the insulation – that will prevent the moisture that forms (and it always will to some degree) from escaping. Trapped moisture can both ruin insulation and lead to mold growth.

Solid insulation has a lot of benefits over fiber insulation. In general, it prevents airflow and is more resistant to moisture. Spray-on insulation (such as polyurethane) is better than pre-formed sheets as it allows a complete seal, but petroleum-based insulation introduces several Peak Oil/environmental concerns. Someday your insulation will need replacement, and the old waste insulation will need to go somewhere. In addition, such materials won’t be available post-Peak Oil, and if you didn’t make accommodations for natural insulation you might lose valuable home thermal properties you counted on in your initial design.

Properly sealing your home is critical. This includes horizontal sealing between studs; sealing around outlets, windows, and doors; and sealing between the walls and vertical connections. Eliminate air gaps at all points (such as at the top of walls), as air has a much smaller R-value than insulation.

So great, your home is now fully insulated and sealed all around with an R-value of 70…and now you can’t breathe because you have no air exchange. You need ventilation, and that will be the focus of a future post.

References:
Monolithic Dome Institute
U.S. Department of Energy
Kansas State University
Ecobuild Network

Conservation tips

2006-10-15T16:05:00.000-05:00

I recently came across a great website called Blue Girl, Red State with some excellent perspective on sustainability and environmental issues. They recently posted a collection of conservation tips I thought I'd share here.

An excerpt from the post:

If everyone would run their electronics through a zip-strip and flip that switch off when the electronics are not in use, it would save a tremendous amount of energy, at both the micro and macro levels. While we are making modest adjustments that are capable of having a huge impact: Never purchase another incandescent lightbulb for as long as you live. Buy the flourescent bulbs that are all the rage. They aren't a fad - I've been using them since the early 90's, when they first came out and cost through the nose. Now my light company is paying a rebate on the purchase of them in the form of credit on your monthly bill. Total cost after KCP&L subsidizes the purchase: $.99 - and you will save that much in three months time in saved energy consumed by each bulb. When you buy a new TV, get an LCD; skip the power-suckin' Plasmas and CRTs.

Breaking down energy needs: Insulation (Part 1)

2006-10-13T04:53:00.000-05:00

An often-mentioned number in home building is “R-value” or “R factor”. The R-value is a measure of a material’s resistance to heat transfer and is used to compare different types of insulation. It is calculated using the thermal conductivity constant, k:

R = [thickness (in inches)] / k
k = [BTU * inch]/[ft^2 * hours * ˚F]

Insulation must be treated as a whole-structure concept. Just as the amount of insulation in your home means little if you leave your door wide open, using very high-R material in the walls may provide little return if you use low-R windows. It’s all in the rate of heat transfer.

The following table provides some common measurements for R-values compiled from various sources. A few things to note: R-values are calculated under ideal laboratory conditions and may vary considerably “in the field” (more on this later); these R-values are valid for wall, roof, or floor calculations; R-values for green roofs can be complicated and will also be discussed later.

Material	R-value per inch thickness	R-value per unit
Metal	0.0
Concrete	0.08
Gypsum	0.6 – 0.9
Hardwood (oak, maple)	0.91 - 0.94
Softwood (fir, pine)	1.3
Plywood	1.25
Fiberglass	3.0 – 3.8
Strawbale	1.45
Sand/gravel	0.6
Stucco	0.2
Brick	0.1 – 0.2
Asphalt shingles	0.44
Aluminum/Steel Siding		0.61/panel
Loose cellulose	2.8 – 3.7
Loose fiberglass	2.2 – 4.0
Loose rock wool	3.1
Loose vermiculite	2.2
Molded polystyrene	3.6
Extruded polystyrene	3.6
Polyurethane foam	5.6 – 6.2
Sprayed cellulose	3.0 – 4.0
Carpet (with padding)		1.2 – 2.1/layer
Air (3/4” – 4”)		0.9
Windows
- Single		0.76 – 1.1/unit
- Double		1.2 – 2.2/unit
- Triple		1.3 – 2.6/unit
- Double, low emissivity		1.3 – 2.9/unit
Cement mortar	0.2
Vinyl		0.05/layer
Soil (fine, 20% moist)	0.08

Coming up next: The Fallacy of R-value Tunnel Vision

References:
Roofhelp.com
Oswego University
Grassroots

Developing Peak Oil Skills: Get organized

2006-10-12T04:59:00.000-05:00

Most people who have studied Peak Oil for even a short while recognize that certain skills are required in order to survive in an energy-deprived future. You have probably started collecting a short list of things to do or learn as soon as possible or perhaps just formed a vague vision of your future life.
Part of designing a sustainable home or community is designing our skill set. Each of us needs to develop requirements for ourselves based on our predicted needs and our existing skill sets. There are good lists like this one at Simple Living, and many such resources at LATOC, but each person will be different in their needs. Also, for this exercise I would emphasize skill acquisition over “activities”. Getting out of debt, moving to the country, making friends, and so forth are extremely important but belong on a different list than what I’m focused on here. A separate skills list will help keep you organized and focused on self-sustainability. You could set aside time every day or week to focus on skills development, working from your list.
I plan to run a continuous series within this blog highlighting my own learning process as I use Systems Engineering to design my future self. I’ll share what I’ve learned in hopes of easing the learning process for all who are interested. Remember that you cannot acquire a skill without actually doing it (repeatedly) and that your self-requirements list will likely be very different from my own.

My list of skills to acquire:
1) Food preservation: Canning, smoking, drying, freezing, etc.
2) Cheesemaking
3) Sustainable gardening
4) Building techniques: Foundations, framing, roofing, plumbing, wiring, carpentry
5) Blacksmithing/metalworking
6) Animal husbandry: Chickens, cows, sheep, alpaca; milking, butchering, shearing
7) Papermaking: Toilet paper, writing paper, wrapping
8) Hunting: Firearms, archery, trapping

Please remember a few things about this list: This does not include skills that I already possess; my list should complement my wife’s list so that we have an even distribution of required skills; and this list is dynamic – as I gain proficiency at some things I’ll be able to add more (less critical) skills.

Are we better off?

2006-10-10T23:12:00.000-05:00

For thousands of years, our ancestors lived in a low-energy world. They worked the soil without the aid of powered machines, raised their own crops, and independently produced nearly everything they used. The post-Peak Oil future will require that we live similarly to our powered-down predecessors. But will we be better off than they were?

Knowledge
Without question, there is far more knowledge at our disposal now than at any other time in the past. This knowledge is our greatest ally and increases our ability to not only survive but thrive. We understand the vagaries of electricity, medicine, engineering, ecology, and even education itself that will enable us to live comfortably and sustain our environment.

Environment
Agrarians of the past enjoyed rich natural soils, unspoiled waters, and pure clean air. Obviously, this is no longer the case in most areas of the planet. The industrial period has left in its wake myriad forms of pollutants in our land, air, and water. Most surface and shallow well water (sometimes even rainwater) must be thoroughly treated before completely safe for consumption – a near impossibility after Peak Oil. Some staples of our diet, such as fish, are often highly contaminated with mercury, bromine, and other toxic chemicals. Excess fertilizers contaminate the soil and severely damage aquatic ecosystems.
The atmosphere has also seen very serious damage, particularly in the form of global warming. The coming decades and centuries will see increasingly unpredictable weather. The climates and basic ecology of entire regions will dramatically transform, driving many to disaster. For some areas, climate change may bring beneficial precipitation and temperate weather – but the net effect will be negative for humanity.

Health
Citizens of the past (and some in the present) had to contend with an astonishing array of deadly and debilitating diseases. On the whole we have learned how to treat or outright eliminate many diseases and life expectancy has soared beyond pre-industrial levels. We will carry most of this knowledge with us into a Peak Oil future and we will combine it with healthier agrarian eating habits.
Unfortunately, much of our improved health is owed to technology—particularly plastics—that is essentially gone shortly after Peak Oil. Post-Peak Oil doctors will be forced to innovate in order to maintain our current levels of health.
In addition, the intervening industrial period has introduced many contaminants into our environment which lead to many serious and difficult-to-treat conditions. The end of oil will reduce their rate of accumulation of carcinogens and other pollutants, but many persist in the environment for long periods of time.

Resources
The global population boom in the last century has put enormous demand on all of the world’s resources. Oil is the prime example, but the geologic theories of Peak Oil apply to metals minerals, water, and even salt. The key factor is that the most easily accessible quantities were obtained first, leaving increasingly inaccessible residuals available for future use.

So are we better off? The answers seem mixed. We're better prepared to handle the challenges of an agrarian life, but we face a greater number of challenges than probably at any point in human history. In some respects, the question is moot; but in others, answering the question allows us to assess what we can take from our ancestors' way of living. One thing is for certain: we will be far worse off if we don't plan carefully for the challenges ahead.

Living history, living future

2006-10-09T16:06:00.000-05:00

During a visit home to Iowa last weekend, we took a morning trip to Living History Farms near Des Moines. It was refreshing to get a glimpse of simpler living and learn how they did it. It’s also interesting to consider how a pre-Oil way of life differs from a post-Peak Oil life. I recommend everyone take a healthy dose of the past to remember the peace of living towards which we’re working.

Peak Oil Home Electricity Requirements (Part 2)

2006-10-05T17:29:00.000-05:00

Smart design is about allowing for transition. Yes, appliances will eventually degrade and power sources will decrease in efficiency over time – but rather than requiring that you have all your sustainable skills and supplies in place by the time your home is built, allow time to transition from an energy-intensive life to a sustainable one. Don’t beat yourself up for using a refrigerator in your post-Peak Oil home, but learn to get by without it (e.g. using ice houses, root cellars, etc.) as part of your graduated development. Also, don’t design yourself into a corner for which you lack the skills or resources to cope.

If you design your systems to meet your current connected lifestyle with TV and computers (how else could you keep blogging?!?), when those devices are no longer useful you will gain spare electrical capacity.

This first estimate is by no means the final word on your electrical requirements. As your design matures, you may find that you don’t need anywhere near the initial estimates (after designing insulation, non-electrical heating, etc.) or that you can’t afford to generate that amount. If the latter is the case, you can fix your situation either procedurally or technically; that is, by adjusting your usage behavior or using more energy-efficient appliances.

For now, in the first design iteration, we will keep these values as test requirements and adjust things as we go.

Take a look at the numbers in table in Part 1. We can use the daily 65 kWh as-is for now, but the 27 kW of peak power is a huge figure. Already, it is obvious that running all of these electric devices at the same time is not practical (in fact, you would really have to work hard at it to run them all at the same time!) and procedural limits are required. Re-examining the list, we can see that the constantly running devices we don’t turn ‘on’ (e.g. fridge, water heater, etc.) could cause a peak of 6400 W (in the summer) if they all clicked themselves on at the same time. Using engineering judgment, we can then say that a limit of 3600 kW of transient electricity for the remaining appliances could meet the family’s needs. So for now, let’s choose 10 kW as our peak energy draw requirement.

Our second iteration on all the parts of this design will begin after we complete the other top level requirements.

Peak Oil Home Electricity Requirements (Part 1)

2006-10-04T20:53:00.000-05:00

Returning to the Homestead Example Problem, it’s time to focus on figuring our electricity requirements. For this, it’s best to start by estimating high and then paring things down as we refine our design.

The following table is a rough estimate for a family of four in a 2000 ft^2 house.

	26,720W (This is HUGE!)		64.4 kWh
	Peak Wattage	Usage frequency	Daily energy (kWh)
Refrigerator	600	8 hours/day	4.8
Microwave	1500	10 min/day	0.25
Oven	5000	3 hours/week	2.1
Stove (range)	2000	5 hours/week	1.4
Food processor	300	1 hour/week	0.04
Slow cooker	200	10 hours/week	0.29
Home heating	300	8 hours/day	4
Water heating	4500	6 hours/day	27
Lights (halogen, LED)	130	3 hours/day	0.4
Food processor	300	1 hour/week	0.04
Computer	200	4 hours/day	0.8
TV	125	4 hours/day	0.6
Air conditioning (if required)	600	8 hours/day	4.8
Deep Freezer	600	12 hours/day	7.2
Ceiling fans (3)	200	8 hours/day	1.6
Clothes washer	1200	1 hours/day	1.2
Dish washer	300	1 hour/day	0.3
Clothes dryer	5000	1 hour/day	5
Cell phone	5	2 hours/day	0.01
Computer	200	4 hours/day	0.6
Vacuum cleaner	1200	1 hour/week	0.17
Power tools	1000	2 hours/day	2
Toaster	1000	10 min/day	0.17
Stand mixer	300	1 hour/week	0.04
Misc. (clocks, radio, etc.)	200	4 hours/day	0.6

Please note that I am not advocating the use of any of these items – I just want to give a complete list of the most common appliances we use today. If you choose to use a dryer instead of a clothesline, or a dishwasher instead of washing by hand, that’s fine. This is not a forum for us to judge each other, it is a forum for developing design strategies.

These numbers are first iteration estimates, which err on the high side. This serves several purposes: first, it prevents us from overly restricting the design too early in the process (remember, we are still in the first iteration of the design cycle); second, as appliances age they become less efficient.

Tune in tomorrow for Part 2 where we refine the estimate to more reasonable numbers.

Sustainable Industry in Wisconsin

2006-10-03T05:12:00.000-05:00

The Madison Peak Oil Group has a post on one of the most promising stories I’ve heard in a while. Being in the aerospace industry, there are few opportunities for me to look for sustainable solutions in my job. But this gives me hope that there are possibilities I haven’t yet considered.

State firm's crane runs on veggie oil
From The Capital Times on September 30, 2006:

MILWAUKEE (AP) - A Wisconsin company is testing a
crane that uses vegetable oil to run its hydraulic lift system.

Most hydraulic systems use petroleum products that can
damage the environment if spilled. Manitowoc Crane Group
designed its truck-mounted crane to be used in or near
wetlands, lakes and other environmentally sensitive areas.

"It worked just like a regular boom truck. No problems," said
Jeff Johnson, chief operating officer of Scott Powerline and
Utility Equipment, a Louisiana company testing the crane.

Manitowoc Crane Group had been worried that the vegetable
oil would degrade or become rancid with heavy use, said
John Lukow, vice president of sales and marketing.

But so far, the test has gone well. Scott Powerline has put
more than 1,000 hours on its crane as it installs power line
polls near Dallas.

Manitowoc now plans to offer its eco-friendly crane to
others. In addition to using vegetable oil in the hydraulic
system, the crane runs on a soy-based biodiesel fuel.

The company doesn't expect the veggie crane to be a big
seller, but a spokesman said it gives construction companies
another option.

"You never know where they're going to end up, and where there
are going to be environmental options," spokesman Tom Cioni
said.

Trade studies for Peak Oil houses (Part 2)

2006-10-02T05:19:00.000-05:00

After developing varying design concepts to meet your requirements, the next step is identifying the key characteristics of each so you can make objective comparisons. For the three design concepts in Part 1 I have sketched out the advantages and disadvantages.

Troglodyte Home:
Advantages:
1) High R-value (insulation) due to surrounding soil
2) Underground rainwater cistern stays insulated
3) Protected from wind
4) Low profile (security concerns)

Disadvantages:
1) External stairs could be treacherous in winter conditions
2) Snow could block vents/skylights
3) Little natural lighting (even with skylights)
4) Vulnerable to flooding (depending on topography)
5) Risky in earthquake-prone areas
6) Radon gas concern
7) Very uncommon design

For the Semi-Trog Home:
Advantages:
1) High R-value for lower level
2) Above-ground cistern allows for higher water pressure
3) More potential for natural lighting
4) More psychologically comfortable than Trog Home

Disadvantages:
1) Requires more supplementary insulation than Trog Home’
2) Above-ground cistern vulnerable to external temperature
3) Somewhat vulnerable to wind
4) Uncommon design

For the Loft Home:
Advantages:
1) Significant natural lighting
2) Earthquake resistant
3) Traditional framing/building techniques may be used

Disadvantages:
1) Wind-prone
2) Requires much supplemental insulation
3) Very visible (security concerns)

Doing this exercise can lead you in new directions and allow you to create even more design concepts. For instance, you might explore the following design alternatives:
1) Move the cistern above or below ground
2) Use a well
3) Build the home into a hillside (walk-out basement)
4) Make the Trog Home shallower – allow more lighting/ventilation

Run the exercise again on the new concepts, and continue iterating until you have exhausted all possible designs. The results will be worth it when you finally settle on the design for your perfect Peak Oil house!

Trade studies for Peak Oil houses (Part 1)

2006-09-30T23:09:00.000-05:00

Once you have developed your high-level requirements you can start looking at various design choices that meet those requirements. Although the requirements provide a set framework for your design, there are endless possible solutions. Your mission is to compare your different design ideas and determine which one best meets your requirements. During this process you may discover that some things are more important to you than others, or that some requirements are missing, unnecessary, or incomplete. The earlier in the process you figure these things out, the better.
To understand this process, it’s best to see an example. Below, I have three basic home designs sketched out (2 I drew myself, 1 from the National Park Service – see last post.) These designs are intended to meet the requirements for the Homestead Problem (minus food production) as found on the side bar. Pay no attention to scale or my ineptness as an artist – these are not intended as engineering drawings.
I’m going to break this topic into two posts for readability. In the next post we’ll identify advantages/disadvantages of each concept and their compatibility with the requirements.

“Loft House” Picture courtesy of the U.S. National Park Service
The Troglodyte Home (inspired by Glenn & Kathy of the Design/Build Forum) is essentially a modern cave. The Semi-Trog home encompasses a mostly underground structure with a more traditional ground level common area and most of the structure underground. The Loft House highlights many sustainable systems in an above-ground structure with underground water storage.

National Park Service Sustainable Design

2006-09-27T23:15:00.000-05:00

The U.S. National Park Service has a fantastic guidebook for use in designing sustainable buildings. If you have a chance, I highly recommend you browse through the entire document (it’s not too long), but I selected a very choice snippet from Chapter 6 below.

The NPS sustainable design philosophy highly emphasizes education – visitors should learn about the building’s symbiosis with nature, gain an appreciation of the surrounding environment, and discover new ways to improve their own living. I think this is a philosophy we should all use when designing our homes and communities.

So many of us are struggling with educating our friends and families on the consequences of Peak Oil, climate change, and other dangers. By designing our homes to showcase nature, healthier living, and environmental stewardship we may lead them to that crucial point of realizing what is truly required.

From the U.S. National Park Service:

CHECKLIST FOR SUSTAINABLE BUILDING DESIGN

General

The design must

be subordinate to the ecosystem and cultural context

respect the natural and cultural resources of the site and absolutely minimize the impacts of any development

reinforce/exemplify appropriate environmental responsiveness

educate visitors/users about the resource and appropriate built responses to that environment.
interpret how development works within natural systems to effect resource protection and human comfort and foster less consumptive lifestyles
use the resource as the primary experience of the site and as the primary design determinant

enhance appreciation of natural environment and encourage/establish rules of conduct
create a "rite of passage"

develop an entrance into special natural or cultural environment that emulates the respectful practice of removing shoes before entering Japanese home . . . leaving cars and consumptive values behind

use the simplest technology appropriate to the functional need, and incorporate passive energy-conserving strategies responsive to the local climate
use renewable indigenous building materials to the greatest extent possible
avoid use of energy intensive, environmentally damaging, waste producing, and/or hazardous materials

use cradle-to-grave analysis in decision making for materials and construction techniques

strive for "smaller is better" . . . optimizing use and flexibility of spaces so overall building size and the resources necessary for construction and operation are minimized
consider "constructability" . . . striving for minimal environmental disruption, resource consumption, and material waste, and identifying opportunities for reuse/recycling of construction debris
provide equal access to the full spectrum of people with physical and sensory impairments while minimizing impacts on natural and cultural resources

Also, the design should

consider phasing the development to allow for monitoring of resource impacts and adjustments in subsequent phases
allow for future expansion and/or adaptive uses with a minimum of demolition and waste
- materials and components should be chosen that can be easily reused or recycled
make it easy for the occupants/operators to recycle waste

Context diagrams

2006-09-26T10:54:00.000-05:00

Systems Engineering is full of tools to aid you in mapping out your design requirements. One such useful visual aid is a context diagram. The concept is simple: for your system, represent all inputs and outputs as arrows leading into and out of the system. The challenge comes in accurately identifying the scope of your design and how it interacts with the surrounding environment.

Context diagrams are key for identifying the most vulnerable parts of any system – the interfaces. If the joining of two systems is poorly understood or designed, both can fail.

Depending on your particular situation, your inputs/outputs will likely be different from these examples shown below. For instance, if you use a ram pump for outside water, your community is urban, or you’re still connected to the electrical grid, your interfaces will be different.

Notice that many of the community interfaces are the same as for the house, even though the house in this example falls within the community. Also note that waste items such as grey water, black water, and solid waste do not exit the community – they are recycled within it.

Peak Salt?

2006-09-22T05:17:00.000-05:00

Salt is essential to our existence. Bloody wars have been fought over it, civilizations have risen and fallen because of its availability, and our own civilization depends on it every bit as much as oil.

Salt is obtained from two sources: Using seawater from our current oceans and mining halite deposits from ancient oceans. According to the Salt Institute, world salt production was 208 million tons in 2004, a figure that increases every year. In the context of our industrial civilization, there is an unlimited amount of salt – even far from the oceans, underground salt is staggeringly plentiful.

But consider salt availability after Peak Oil. If you live near the ocean, you can obtain salt using any of the dozens of ancient techniques – until rising sea levels erase suitable areas for salt flats. In the past, those living away from the coasts had certain options: they could obtain salt from animals that had consumed salt from subsurface deposits; they could obtain the salt directly from those deposits; or they could trade with those who harvested it from the far-away oceans – options that are in serious jeopardy post-Peak Oil.

Just as with oil, as our demand for salt grew we extracted the easy deposits first before moving on to the deeper (and harder to obtain) sources. Without heavy machinery, there are few accessible significant salt deposits inland.

If you intend to get your salt through animal protein, consider this: most livestock require salt supplements in addition to their feed. That salt must come from somewhere. Plus, aside from just keeping our bodies functioning, salt serves many other critical functions: preserving food, tanning leather, dissolving ice, and conditioning water. Life without abundant salt is significantly less comfortable than what we enjoy today.

Trade with the coasts is likely to develop as the sustainable solution to meet the salt needs of those living elsewhere, but it will take time for this natural system to develop (and with global warming affecting sea levels, production will be irregular at best – some believe the Roman Empire fell because of a slight rise in sea levels). It may also be worthwhile to figure out some simple salt reclamation methods. In the meantime, make sure your community design includes provisions for significant salt storage if you plan to live away from readily obtainable sources.

Water that flows uphill

2006-09-20T20:16:00.000-05:00

In developing requirements for the Homestead Example, we determined that 280 liters/day of potable water was required to sustain a family of four. What design solutions can meet that requirement? Some options include using rainwater catchment basins, drilling wells, collecting lakewater, recycling wastewater, or combinations thereof.

Collecting water is one thing, but if we want water pressure for indoor plumbing, our design becomes much more complex. Normal tap pressure is around 40–45 psi, and unless your rainwater collection tower is 100 feet tall, you won’t come close to that without a pump. Of course, using an electric pump brings serious risks when considering a sustainable (post-Peak Oil) system.

If you have a nearby river, stream, or dammed pond, you may be able to take advantage of some straightforward physics to supply pressurized water to your house without mechanical pumps. The Country Plans Design/Build Forum recently had a good thread on this type of system, known as a ram pump.

In a ram pump, the energy of water flowing through a large orifice (pipe) is transferred to water flowing through a small one. Depending on the dynamics of the source and target flows, a ram pump can provide tap pressures more than adequate for a typical household.

An earthen dam with a drainage tube can be utilized for a ram pump; however, beware the risks of placing a home below a dam of any kind. Run the numbers and see if the flow is strong enough for you to place your home out of the way.

A ram pump can be used to pump water into a holding tank for later dispersal (which needs to be tall if you want good pressure!), which could integrate well with a water catchment system.

Cleanliness is a major concern with any water system, much more so than it was in the pre-industrial world. Fertilizers and other pollutants are found in most surface water and in shallow aquifers. If possible, have your source water tested by a professional and install water quality monitors on your system. If your only suitable water is not fit for drinking, consider using a ram pump for a pressurized irrigation system.

Filters and separators are sometimes necessary for processing healthy water, but make sure you choose solutions that make sense post-Peak Oil.

Also consider Sling Pumps and Pasture Pumps.

An example ram pump design. (Courtesy of Green Trust)

Building Communities: Who do we need?

2006-09-15T04:53:00.000-05:00

So far this blog has focused primarily on developing single-family homesteads – while this is one design solution to a sustainable future, we need to ensure that we don’t lose sight of engineered community solutions to Peak Oil.

Rather than infrastructure, perhaps we should first examine who should comprise a community. I don’t propose this approach as a means to exclude people, but rather give community planners guidance to identify skills deficiencies. If a certain skill/trade/knowledge is found to be inadequate or missing, either someone from the community should acquire it or a new person should be invited.

I compiled a generalized list of occupations and skills that might be considered essential depending on the nature of the community. Please keep in mind that each community member should possess several of these skills, and preferably more than one person should be qualified in each area. Also consider the size and complexity of your post-Peak Oil community: Will you remain in a large city? Are you starting from scratch with a couple hundred people? Just a couple families? Is your community scattered or clustered?

In the near future (next few months) I will be transitioning this blog to a site that will include, among other things, a tool for community-minded people to meet up and develop plans based on individual skills, resources, and geographic locations. Keep checking back here as I improve on the PeakOilDesign concept.

Critical skills and knowledge for a post-Peak Oil Community:

Farming/Gardening (all types)
Nursing/General Practice Medicine
Specialized Medicine
Psychology/Psychiatry
Engineering (all types)
Teaching (Early childhood, K-12, advanced)
Security/Police/Military
Dentistry/Oral Hygiene
Cooking
Food preservation
Carpentry
Hunting/Fishing
Architecture
Clothmaking/Tailoring
Blacksmithing/Metalworking
Veterinary Medicine
Geology
Plumbing
Electrical Wiring
Meteorology
Religion/Philosophy
Seamanship/Sailing
Glass-making
Candle-making
Cheese-making
Paper-making
Firefighting
Animal training (dogs, horses, etc.)
Chemistry/Physics

Feel free to comment on or add to this list.

Framing a solution

2006-09-13T16:00:00.001-05:00

Framing is one of the most crucial and complicated parts of constructing a house. In turn, one of the most complicated parts of framing is designing the roof. As a continuation of the earlier discussion on green roofs, I’ll give an introduction to some framing basics.

(A quick disclaimer: You shouldn’t start designing until you are satisfied that all requirements are in place. There’s no harm in learning about design solutions, however, and this discussion is intended to give you a further part of the ‘big picture’ of the design process.)

In discussing green roofs, I mentioned that roof loading can be in the range of 2300 – 7000 Pa (50 – 150 lbs/ft^2) compared to 5 – 20 lbs/ft^2 for a conventional roof. This is a significant weight addition that requires non-standard designs for the roof and frame structure.

Since this is such a complicated and important topic, it’s going to take us several posts to lay it out. First, you should check out the extensive tutorials and free technical resources at the American Wood Council. Go through the tutorials and play with the calculators in order to understand the basics – remember, not all of the conventional wisdom applies if you are building a high-load green roof. Also, Miedrn at Snippets&Bits has a good post on do-it-yourself framing books.

As you are digesting the information on these sites and books, here are some Peak Oil-based considerations to keep in mind:

1) Wider joists and studs allow for more insulation and wider spacing. Evaluate using 2x6’s, 2x8’s or larger instead of your standard 2x4’s. The energy savings and strength improvements could allow you to relax the design in other areas.

2) Make a note of the local woods available in your area. If lumber prices skyrocket during building, or you have to make future repairs (a certainty), are your local trees strong enough to meet your design requirements?

3) Shifting climates – What do climate change experts say will be the future weather trends in your area? Will snowfall rates (and your snow loading requirements) increase? Decline? Getting an answer can help prevent under- or over-designing.

4) Exceptionally heavy roofs may require the use of beams or a series of tightly-spaced joists to allow a large enough span with allowable deflection.

5) Consider hybrid systems – Think about a solar collector on one part of the roof and green roofing on the rest. Or shingles/green. Or a mix of green roofing types.

6) Make sure that you have a deep understanding of building structures, particularly your own. More than anything, framing a house is probably one area where you will want to employ a certified professional. If your walls aren’t plumb or your floors or ceilings aren’t level, you will have more trouble with the interior walls windows, plumbing, and so forth. However, if you can’t find a contractor (e.g. post-Peak Oil) or can’t afford one, you had best know all about building and repairing your structure – a poorly constructed frame could fail with devastating consequences.

Site Update: Example Problem

2006-09-11T07:51:00.000-05:00

If you check out the sidebar, you'll notice new links to an Objectives and Requirements Document for the Homestead Project we've been developing. I'll post an updated version of the document as soon as I incorporate the results of some of the discussions we've had so far.

Give yourself a home warranty

2006-09-11T07:24:00.000-05:00

Your house won’t be much use to you if the solar panel tracking motor is always failing, or your rainwater catch basin frequently springs leaks, or if deer invade your garden. For a system/community of any kind to be useful, it must be reliable, and reliability must be considered early in the design.

There are many strategies for measuring and achieving reliability. For systems like plumbing and electricity, reliability may be quantified using the mean time between failures (MTBF). Modern appliance manufacturers, for example, typically base their warranty policies on the calculated MTBF – a 5-year warranty on a refrigerator probably means they calculated the MTBF as a standard deviation or more greater than 5 years. The only way to obtain this information at the component level is through testing or operational experience. You can try to estimate MTBF for assembled components using statistics.

The reliability of a system is a direct consequence of its component parts:
Rsys = R1 * R2 * R3… So for a system with 10 sub-components to be 99% reliable, each component must be 99.9% reliable!

Some strategies for reliable design:

1) Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy – Using back-up components in series or in parallel can reduce the chance of system failure. If your anti-deer fence were to blow down, do you have a backup strategy?

2) Contamination/Corrosion – Think about ways to protect machinery from the elements or prevent algal/bacterial growth in your water system.

3) Modularity – Just as for maintainability, using modular components is important.

4) Inspection – Certify each component as you machine or install it. Verify all tolerances.

5) Fail-safes – Allows the system to continue functioning under less than ideal conditions. Examples would be a spillway for an earthen dam or a relief valve on a water heater.

Blast-off!

2006-09-09T11:54:00.000-05:00

Atlantis has finally left the pad! I'm looking forward to a return to life without 12-hour midnight shifts...

A sewer-less future...

2006-09-08T11:11:00.000-05:00

This is the first of many posts I’ll have on grey water recycling. Grey water is essentially all wastewater that doesn’t need a toilet (that’s known as black water). Most buildings discharge grey water into the sewer or septic system, but there are concerns with both methods. First, post-peak, how reliable will your city sewer/water treatment system be? Second, running less waste through a septic system means less demand on that critical system. And in both cases why waste such a large quantity of water that, when properly handled, can be used for irrigation?

The fundamentals of grey water recycling are not difficult to understand, but nevertheless there are so many examples where people implement it all wrong. For a stellar resource on the topic, try Oasis Design. As this post is only an introduction to grey water systems, I’ll focus on some key concepts to keep in mind when designing. We’ll work on sizing such systems later.

1) Grey water is not clean water – Seems obvious, but it's somewhat more complicated than you might think. Grey water can be applied directly some trees, but should not be used to directly water lawns or gardens. This can be accomplished using subsurface irrigation.

2) Grey is not poisonous water – While grey water should be handled properly, it is unlikely to make you sick. Plants you water with grey water are safe to eat (provided you don’t water the edible parts directly). And remember, the only chemicals in grey water are the ones you put down the drain.

3) Avoid pumps and filters – This is especially important for post-Peak Oil considerations. Pumps will break down, filters will clog. Use nature’s services: gravity and soil filtration.

4) Avoid storing grey water – Grey water is the byproduct of your laundry, showers, baths, and cooking; as such, it contains dirt and bacteria. If left in a holding tank for more than 1 or 2 days, these bacteria will frolic and putrefy. Your system should rapidly discharge into the soil.

5) Don’t over-design – Grey water recycling can be as simple as emptying your bathtub by bucket or a single discharge line into the soil. Your level of design should correspond to your maintenance availability, irrigation needs, and actual water usage.

In short, grey water recycling can have tremendous impact on your overall water budget. It can allow you to relax the requirements on your water collection system and help with growing your plants when it's designed carefully and implemented properly. More to come on this in the future…

Launch delay

2006-09-06T10:11:00.001-05:00

The launch of Atlantis is on hold due a problem with the coolant pump on one of the fuel cells. As a side note, an elegant sustainable design feature on the shuttle is found in the fuel cell/life support systems (the current anomaly notwithstanding) – the water byproduct from the hydrogen/oxygen reaction is used by the astronauts on-orbit. It saves on launch mass and serves as a good reminder of how sustainability is key for space exploration. So do your part for the space program – design and test efficient systems :)

Calling the Maintenance Man

2006-09-05T16:58:00.000-05:00

There are a number of practical considerations you should keep in mind early in the design process, which fall under the “-ilities” category – things such as maintainability, reliability, availability, and producibility. These characteristics of your system/community describe the practicality of building, using, fixing, and upgrading your project. I’ll talk about each one in turn, but for this post I’ll focus on maintainability.

Easy-to-maintain systems are especially critical for a post-Peak Oil community. If a pipe bursts, is there a plumber who can fix it? If your electric refrigerator fails, who can fix it? What parts will you use to fix it? How long will it take to fix? When specialists, available replacements, and time are scarce, the capability for quick and easy fixes is critical.

There are a few guidelines that will help you design maintainability into your system at all levels:

1) Replacement parts – Plan for acquiring and storing replacement parts for each of your systems, OR provide a method for fabricating replacement parts using materials on hand. You can be efficient about this – figure out which parts of your system will have a higher failure rate (e.g. valves or light bulbs) than others (e.g. pipe or wires) and plan accordingly. Ideally, you should have a plan for fabricating all replacement parts over the long-term, or accept that some parts of your system will eventually fail – oil scarcity = parts scarcity.

2) Modularity – Keep your interfaces simple so that replacement of a single component can happen quickly. For example, suppose you need to replant a portion of your green roof – if you designed your roof as a collection of modular containers, you can swap one out for a fresh one rather than spending all day replanting on a sloped surface.

3) Test points/Break points – Allow for trouble-shooting, especially in complex systems. Think of the circuit breakers in your house: they work to isolate a portion of your home electrical system and help you narrow down the source of problems.

4) Consistency – Try to use the same parts wherever possible. Rather than having one kind of faucet in the kitchen and another kind in the bathroom, consider using the same model. This will make your replacement parts a little easier to manage and limit the amount of information you have to remember about different types of components.

Go Atlantis!

2006-09-05T16:57:00.000-05:00

Sorry once again for the dearth of posts. With all the problems and delays with the launch of STS-115, I’ve been running on empty. I’m still figuring out how to balance blogging with work, family, preparing for Peak Oil, and other endeavors, but I should be able to put more focus back on PeakOilDesign once we get our bird in the air.

Eating your roof

2006-08-16T12:09:00.000-05:00

Producing food is a critical need for any community project. Your first thought might be traditional gardens or farm plots, neatly ordered into precise rows, tucked away on a back corner of your yards. That’s certainly one vision of personal food production, but is far from the most efficient. Why not let your food production aid in other areas of your design?

A key point of many advocates of sustainable design is using a green roof because it saves energy (and money) you might otherwise use for heating and cooling. However, many designers of green roofs often miss a key point of overall efficiency, which is using edible plants for green roofing. If you’re to go to all the trouble of planting greenery on your building, why not plant stuff you can eat?

Of course, installing a green roof isn’t as simple as throwing some dirt and seedlings on your roof – it takes careful design to understand how a green roof affects your structure, internal temperature, rainwater runoff, and so forth. So let’s practice running some numbers. (Note: equation key is at the end of the post.)

Heat flux is a measure of the rate of heat energy over an area. It is the primary measure of energy losses and gains for home construction. For a traditional shingle roof in the Midwest, summer heat flux is 2.37 W/m^2 compared to 1.57 W/m^2 for a green roof, which is an improvement of 33% (summer heat flux is used here because in winter, everything’s white!). For a simplified calculation, let’s assume a flat roof for a square house 10 meters x 10 meters.

For asphalt shingles, H = (2.37)(100) = 237 W
For a green roof, H = (1.57)(100) = 157 W

The net energy savings over the summer months (June-July) can be calculated as follows.

E = (237 – 157W)*(90 days)*(24 h/day) = 172.8 kWh

This can help drastically shrink your estimates for energy and insulation requirements. (There is also an insulation effect from the soil I will roll into another post targeting earthen insulation.)

Using native soils, the typical loading on a roof could be 2300 – 7000 Pa, as opposed to under 230 Pa for a shingled roof. This is a significant weight addition and many buildings need structural reinforcement before they can support green roofs. A discussion on calculating structural requirements is upcoming, so I’ll save it for that post, but keep this in mind during your brainstorming.

Also, many green roof projects today use plastic barriers to prevent water intrusion into the building. One sustainable post-peak alternative might be using clay instead, but remember this would add significant weight and require greater roof reinforcement.

Green roofs may seem like a lot of work, but consider this: most shingles are made from asphalt, which is made from oil. As oil prices and scarcity increase, how will you protect your roof? A well-planned green roof seems like a good solution. (But there are others…)

Key:
W=watt
m^2=square meter
H = heat flux
kWh = kilowatt hours
Pa = Pascals (unit of pressure)

References: www.greenroofs.com
ASHRAE Journal

Web hosting recommendations

2006-08-15T15:07:00.000-05:00

While blogspot is pretty good for straightforward blogs, it’s clear that my plans for this project require more functionality than they can offer. So, I’m looking for advice on good web hosting companies from those of you with experience.

I need a decently-priced service with some good tools for file sharing, forums, web-forms, and content search. I’m handy enough with HTML, but I don’t have a lot of time to spend developing advanced features.

With those thoughts in mind, does anybody have some good suggestions?

Comment roundup

2006-08-15T14:49:00.000-05:00

There are a number of discussions and questions in the comments this week about some very key issues. I wanted to capture my thoughts in a full post so nobody misses them.

One commenter keenly pointed out that there is a distinction between sustainability and self-sufficiency. Sustainable design typically uses self-sufficiency as a path to sustainability, and that is the approach I’m using in the ‘Homestead Project’ example problem. Self-sufficiency is, of course, not failsafe: an independent farmer may still allow his field to erode away; a lazy hunter might leave half his kill to rot; or an electrical generation system may leach toxins into the environment.

I think he is correct in that the sustainability goals he cites should further modify our example problem. However, I feel there is no problem with a sustainable community being ‘high-tech’; it need only have ‘less tech’ (as in quantity) from what most of us are familiar. In fact, if we are truly looking at ultimate long-term sustainability for our species, we must develop the ability to expand civilization into space. We risk premature extinction if we do not. I believe this is a possible goal for a sustainable civilization, an assertion I will discuss at length in the future.

Also, please don’t misunderstand the purpose of the example problem. I have started with a small ‘community’ of a single family primarily to illustrate principles of Systems Engineering without getting lost in the complexities of a large community. I’m not making choices for anyone – everyone decides for themselves what their future looks like. A family which chooses self-sufficient isolation will most likely be vulnerable to lack of medical care, limited food diversity, depression (from lack of social interaction), critical tool shortages, and many other serious risks.

I plan to use the ‘Homestead Project’ as a baseline for building one or more larger projects, ones which serve to explore the trade-offs between individuals' skills and strengths, critical infrastructure, community size, strategies for government, and thoughts on security, among hundreds of other considerations.

If you remember one thing from this post, remember this: Do NOT get bogged down in the details of the example problems on this blog! Focus more on the structure, less on the content, as every project’s design and solution will be different. We will explore solutions and design strategies (look for such a post tomorrow), and that is when you want to critically examine the content.

Designing With Spoons: A Philosophy

2006-08-14T17:07:00.000-05:00

Back in college I had a friend who was convinced the only utensil she needed in life was a spoon. She lived by that assertion – hacking away at dry dorm steak, deftly balancing leaves of lettuce, and smoothly buttering her bread, all with a spoon. The rest of us would laugh or shake our heads, wondering to one another about what a quirky girl she was.

It wasn’t until recently that I made the connection between spoons and her interest in environmental science: using only curvy silverware was an exercise in conservation. By reminding herself at every meal of what she truly needed she forced herself to consider what else she could do without.

In designing a sustainable future for ourselves, we must constantly remind ourselves what we might comfortably live without. Would our quality of life suffer if we didn’t jump for that new iPod? What if we stopped watering our lawns every day? Why not grow our own food?

These types of questions should be applied to sustainable design at every step of the way. Happiness is possible – perhaps only possible – without gregarious consumption. If our future pool of available resources is limited then it becomes even more critical to understand our true requirements.

The future is wrought with uncertain challenges, from Peak Oil to global warming to overpopulation. At some point we will be forced to live without many seemingly essential tools of our existence. If we make conscious decisions now, and design ourselves out of an unsustainable lifestyle, our challenges will seem more manageable.

My advice: Design smart, design completely, design for happiness. And make sure to include a spoon.

Space Shuttles gotta get flying...

2006-08-14T16:41:00.000-05:00

I’ve been pulling 12-hour shifts at work for the past four days, but I’ll get back on the posting wagon again after tomorrow. In the meantime, enjoy the more philosophical post to follow shortly.

Acceptance Criteria

2006-08-11T16:04:00.000-05:00

Something very critical to your overall design mindset is the concept of Acceptance Criteria. There are the qualities your design must have in order to be considered even a marginal success. Every other design goal can flop, but if the Acceptance Criteria fail then all is lost.

For our example problem, the Acceptance Criteria are things you (literally) cannot live without – food, water, and shelter. [An aside: This points me to another missing goal, Goal 5: “The community will provide shelter.” Seems obvious, but obviousness is no guarantee of success. BTW, I will soon be posting a document containing the goals, objectives, and requirements we’ve developed so far for the example problem.]

So how do you characterize the Acceptance Criteria? For this project we might say that the community must: 1) Provide at least 280 lpd of potable water (see earlier post); 2) Provide at least 8400 calories/day of food (also earlier); 3) Provide at least TBD* square feet of enclosed living space; and 4) Meet the first three criteria by 2009.

Your Acceptance Criteria should be in the back of your mind at every stage in the design. Post them in your work area. Look at them every day. If you start getting bogged down in one area of your design, take a step back and look at what’s really important. Electricity and plumbing are nice, but without the essentials you don’t have anything to put in your wafflemaker nor any way to flush a toilet. Keep the list of Acceptance Criteria small. Stay grounded and don’t let your project snowball to the point where it overwhelms you.

* TBD = To Be Determined. It is okay to leave a placeholder for data you need to look up. Just don’t forget about them and never move on to the next level of design until you fill in the blanks. (In my case, my notes with the information are packed up in a box at work – I’ll give you an update when I track it down.)

Water, water everywhere...

2006-08-10T15:32:00.000-05:00

Just to get the designer wheels in your head started spinning, Peak Energy posted a good link to a story about a successful ground heat pump.

I have a little bit more to say about basic requirements as discussed in the previous post. Looking at Objective 2.1 (“The community will provide indoor plumbing adequate for four people.”), I’m starting to think that the driving goal (Goal 2) should be changed so that we can use it to address all the water management needs. This type of modification is common as Systems Engineering solutions are developed and I hope it shows you how fluid the design process is.

So, instead of Goal 2 reading “The community will have indoor plumbing”, how about “The community will provide adequate water supplies.” We’ll leave Objective 2.1 as it is, but add Objective 2.2: “The community will provide enough water to sustain four people.” Now that we fixed our goals and objectives, let’s define some requirements.

Taking some liberties with the data, the average human needs approximately 5 liters per day (lpd) for drinking, 45 lpd for hygiene and bathing, 20 lpd for cooking activities, and 3500 lpd for food production according to the Pacific Institute. (Very good link by the way.) Bear in mind these numbers reflect only the water “at the tap” – they take into account moderate efficiency improvements over the average American’s lifestyle and say nothing about recycling or help from local rainfall.

I will put these numbers into two categories: personal and agricultural, with respective values of 70 lpd and 3500 lpd. For the four-person community, this comes to 280 lpd for personal water and 14,000 lpd for agricultural water. This leads naturally to two requirements – “The community shall provide no less than 280 lpd of indoor water.” (Requirement 2.1.1) and “The community shall provide no less than 14,000 lpd of water for food production.” (Requirement 2.2.1)

Notice two things about these requirements: 1) They are wild-ass estimates and will surely be modified as your design develops and 2) they are intertwined with each other and their parent objectives. I could just as easily put Req 2.1.1 under Objective 2.2. Assigning requirements often comes down to intuition or preference, but remember that in the end every objective (for any project) must have at least one requirement. This ensures that every objective is met.

In future posts I will talk about planning for changes in your local water allocation due to global warming effects, aquifer depletion, or upstream pollution.

Estimating basic requirements

2006-08-09T20:02:00.000-05:00

Okay, I promise this is nearly the last boring post before really diving into design strategies and solutions. I’ll try to make this as interesting as I can, but bear with me – this is important!

Now that we have satisfactorily defined our example problem, we can start figuring out what tangibles we need. This process is known in Systems Engineering-speak as requirements definition.

Requirements can be a complicated business, in identifying them, organizing them, and even properly writing them. I will illustrate proper requirement definition with a few examples, but I will not go into much depth on everything that goes into effective requirements. You can learn that much more effectively by reading some of the references I cite or taking a Systems Engineering class. That said, I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to define clear requirements for your project, whatever its scale. You need to have a clear understanding by all parties involved, using requirements that can’t be misinterpreted, or you risk disaster.

Let’s pick one of the objectives from the last post and start figuring out some requirements to satisfy it. Objective 3.1 states “The community shall produce enough food for four people.” That seems like a good place to start.

According to the USDA, the food intake requirement per person per day is about 2100 calories. To meet our objective of producing enough food for four people, we can write Requirement 3.1.1: “The community shall provide no less than 8400 calories of food per day.”

Notice the form of the requirement: it says nothing about how we will provide that food. It never says anything about farming, livestock, hunting, gathering; it says nothing about food storage; it says nothing about greenhouses or any sort. It says only what the designed community must provide in order to be considered a success. This is an example of a high-level requirement. As we develop a solution, we will start making design decisions and lower-level requirements will start to fall out. (Note: As we move into lower levels, the requirements will change from “The community shall…” to “The garden shall…” or “The storeroom shall..”, etc.)

For now, Requirement 3.1.1 looks like it meets Objective 3.1 well enough. This is an iterative process, so we may change it as we develop a better understanding of our true requirements (i.e. the two children don't need 2100 cal/day at the outset, so maybe the requirement could start small and ramp up as the kids' needs increase). I’m going to leave it at that tonight and continue discussing requirements in the next post. Then it gets fun, and we can start tossing around design solutions and strategies.

Setting up the problem

2006-08-06T16:05:00.000-05:00

A Systems Engineering solution begins by accurately identifying the needs, goals, and objectives of your project. These items can be as broad or narrow as required, but they are strictly used to define the problem, not imply any sort of design solution – that comes later.

In engineering terms, a need is driving force behind a project. No numbers are allowed in need statements, only concepts. It is not uncommon for a project team to spend a week debating the best need statement, and its importance can’t be understated. Without it, everyone involved has a different idea (or no idea) about what they’re doing and might develop either incompatible or completely wrong designs. It’s also useful just for organizing thoughts.

I’ve introduced a very broad target need for this blog, which is the need for designing sustainable communities. But what does that mean? Are you starting a community from scratch on a barren patch of land? Are you reshaping an entire existing city? Are you constructing a home for only one family? The answers are different for every project, which makes the job of forming an engineering methodology all the more difficult.

For me, the best way to learn a concept is by case study: applying the theory to a real-world example problem. For the sake of argument, let’s pick an example and use it to illustrate the concepts every community designer needs to understand.

Say you have a 40-acre piece of land, half-woods and half-arable land, with no existing structures. This may be a dream situation for many, but remember this is only an example and you should have no problem applying these ideas even if you have a half-acre plot in the city—you’re just starting with a different set of resources. So what are our needs? One possibility is “There is a need to have a sustainable community on the existing land.” That’s accurate but very loosely defined – what do you mean by ‘community’ and what is meant by ‘sustainable’?

To keep things from quickly spiraling into complexity, suppose you have a family of four (two adults, two pre-adolescent children) defined as your initial community. Suppose further that you are beginning your project pre-peak (transport costs are low, all devices and materials we desire are within reach), you want your community completely self-sufficient, and you wish to retain a comfortable existence with electricity and indoor plumbing. These are the ‘non-negotiable’ facts.

With this new information in hand, we can write an even better need statement: “There is a need to have a homestead for our family that is completely self-sufficient and allows for a comfortable standard of living.” Great! That’s enough for us to continue on towards defining our goals and objectives for the project.

A goal is a statement describing how you will meet your needs and an objective provides a measurable method for meeting the goals. Like needs, goals do not contain numbers.

For our project we can define several goals:

Goal 1: The community will have electricity.
Goal 2: The community will have indoor plumbing.
Goal 3: The community will grow its own food.
Goal 4: The community will be safe for children.

You might be able to pick out a couple more yourself for the given example. Notice that while the goals are more specific than the need statement, they are still very broad statements.

Each goal must have at least one objective attached to it. The objectives may contain numbers, but remember we are not yet designing anything here, only defining the problem. For the goal statements above we may specify some objectives:

Goal 1: The community will have electricity.
Objective 1.1: The community will provide enough electricity for four people.
Objective 1.2: The community will use modern electrical appliances.

Goal 2: The community will have indoor plumbing.
Objective 2.1: The community will provide indoor plumbing adequate for four people.

Goal 3: The community will grow its own food.
Objective 3.1: The community will produce enough food for four people.

Goal 4: The community will be safe for children.
Objective 4.1: The community will be designed to minimize the danger to children.

As you can see, each objective is measurable and some include numbers. However, none of them point to any particular design solution.

Alright, so what have we gained with all this work? Let’s put the entire problem definition together (notice the organization – 90% of engineering is staying organized):

Need: There is a need to have a homestead for our family that is completely self-sufficient and allows for a comfortable standard of living.

Goal 1: The community will have electricity.
Objective 1.1: The community will provide enough electricity for four people.
Objective 1.2: The community will use modern electrical appliances.
Goal 2: The community will have indoor plumbing.
Objective 2.1: The community will provide indoor plumbing adequate for four people.
Goal 3: The community will grow its own food.
Objective 3.1: The community will produce enough food for four people.
Goal 4: The community will be safe for children.
Objective 4.1: The community will be designed to minimize the danger to children.

Wow. It seems like we just did a whole lot of work for nothing but a half-page of text. Why bother with all this Systems Engineering garbage? Why not just jump right into designing and building? If you run into any problems during the process, you’ll just fix them and move on. What’s the big deal?

The truth is the vast majority of projects that do not apply Systems Engineering principles are doomed to failure from the beginning—either by spiraling costs or schedule, designing into a corner, or outright disaster. You must put in the time to carefully plan your community because you literally can not afford for this project to fail. The lives of you, your family, or even your neighbors might depend on your community’s success. Consider everything, ignore nothing, and keep your design flexible. Don’t be intimidated by the scope of this design problem, even if you have no engineering experience: I and every other reader of this blog will help guide you through what you need in order to design a robust and sustainable post-peak oil community.

There is so much more to come…

References: Customer-Centered Products by Hooks and Farry
Systems Engineering Principles and Practices by Kossiakoff and Sweet

Designing the Future

2006-08-02T15:08:00.000-05:00

The Peak Oil community focuses its efforts on two main themes: predicting the peak and exploring sustainable life. There is a great deal of discussion on sustainable design and organic subsistence farming, but there is very little in the way of comprehensively engineering future communities. I would like to change that fact.

A formalized engineering framework is needed in order for effective post-peak oil design. This goes far beyond the sustainable design or green building initiatives -- Peak Oil Design requires careful analysis of not only the nature of your shelter, but what you will produce, how you will produce it, how you will store it, and who you need to produce it. The list is lengthy and complicated.

Much of this information already exists singly within the blogosphere and elsewhere, but it is not taken as part of a comprehensive design. My approach is to use a Systems Engineering methodology to pull the required information together and develop the skill set needed.

Systems Engineering is an approach to defining all required aspects of a system by a comprehensive life-cycle analysis. It is an iterative technique that requires individuals from many different specialties in order to succeed. In the course of my career as a NASA engineer*, I have found systems engineering a very powerful and necessary tool.

My vision for this blog is to develop an engineering method for complete design of post-Peak Oil communities. I plan to post on varying aspects of community design -- anything from construction techniques and crop planning to required skill sets and security -- all progressively developed into a formal engineering methodology that we all can use as a blueprint for designing our own communities.

The key to systems engineering is open communication and iterative discussion, so comments are absolutely essential for the success of this project. One important thing to remember is that this project will never be completed -- as more information is compiled, the domain expertise of the Peak Oil community will expand and further enable a thriving sustainable future. Let's let this be the first post of many!

* Any opinions or statements found on this site are not representative of NASA or the U.S. government