Homestead Energy Steven's and Christiane's story

     Stephen Heckeroth and his wife Christiane live in a comfortable off-the-grid house a few miles south of Caspar. Steven has helped elevate my consciousness about buildings and energy for a quarter century. He worked with me on the design of my house, one of us holding a ladder atop the chicken coop which previously occupied the site while the other perched above to map views and energy incomes. We have both learned a lot since then, and traveled parallel energy paths. More than an architect, but also a fine woodworker, hands-on builder, electric vehicle builder, and a deeply inquisitive thinker, Steven is better at finding ways to express the importance of a living within our energy income than anyone I know.

Steve: When I was young, my favorite times were our summer camping trips to the California north coast where I learned to respect nature. My dad was a highway engineer. He remains my mentor, but we didn't always agree. He'd say "we've got to build these freeways so people from rural areas can get into town." And I'd say, "but the freeways cause growth in the rural areas." Things like roads can be viewed as solutions, or problems. I don't think he and I have ever resolved that.
     From the time I was very young I wanted to be an architect. In 1970 I was in college studying architecture at Arizona State Universtity. This is where I participated in the first Earth Day, and it changed my priorities in terms of architecture, from aesthetics and the way things look to concern about the way things work. An article by Malcolm Wells influenced my thinking tremendously. In this article he defined the necessities of life as air, water, food, and last, shelter. Of course up until that point I identified with different necessities like a car, a house, and all the consumer items that we've come to associate with success.
     Another influence at that time was Mother Earth News and the back to the land movement. The very first issue contained a pattern for a teepee, and we promptly sewed one up on our treadle sewing machine, and started searching for land.
     Being clearer about the true necessities allowed me to concentrate on living rather than worrying about how I was going to make a living. That's an important distinction for me: the difference between a career and a life. My original architectural vision was to find an ocean point somewhere and build a monument that invented some great architectural style, but when I came to Northern California in 1970, after my experience with Earth Day, I looked for a place that would be able to sustain my family's life. We needed a fertile south slope with enough water for a garden and an orchard.
     At that time, there were the two centers of alternative thought and lifestyle, one around Taos, New Mexico, and the other on the Mendocino coast. We quickly found a piece of land on the Mendocino Coast three miles back from the ocean on a south slope above a river, 5 acres where I could put down roots.The first summers I lived here in our teepee, hand dug the 20 foot well, and started planning a barn built with timbers from trees felled on our land and recycled materials.
     I graduated in 1973, moved to the land permanently, and held a barn raising. All it took was a little notice at the local grocery store, and over a hundred people showed up. There were so many people here, it was hard finding work for all of them. Many of the people who showed up are still friends today. We happily moved from teepee to barn. I put up a 1925 Aeromotor windpump that same year and our first water system was completed with a tank on top of a redwood stump.The next project was a tower house with a 3,000 gallon water tank on top. The height of the tower gave us good water pressure. We also put up a wind generator, and for 7 years all our energy came from the wind.
     In 1974 I was asked by the College of the Redwoods to teach classes in Self-Sufficient Homestead and Alternative Sources of Energy. These classes forced me to articulate my vision. The students were hungry to know how to live lightly on the land ..but I hadn't figured it out yet!
     I read everything I could find on Alternative Energy and self-sufficiency. I asked a lot of emerging experts to do guest lectures on different topics. Jeannie Darlington, on organic gardening; Ken Kern on owner building; Michael Hackleman and Windy Dankoff on wind power; and a few others on subjects like buying land and farm animals.
     Reading Schumacher's book Small is Beautiful, published in 1973, lead me to the idea that happiness and meaning are found in sustenance, not consumerism. He brought me to another realization: happiness doesn't depend on consumerism and consumption.
     I have always felt a need to refine things down to their essence. Recently I have found my ideas confirmed by the Natural Step when I attend one of their workshops last year. Their four principles and four system conditions closely match my own ideas. Thinking about it since, I have reduced it to three life sustaining principles: We (1) should use resources equitably and efficiently, (2) we should not disrupt life cycles, and (3) we should not disperse poisons.
     Let's take a closer look at the first principle, fuel efficiency: The net energy value of the food we eat each day is about 2 BTU. One BTU is the amount of energy necessary to heat one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit. Using those two BTUs we eat each day, we maintain our bodies at 98.6°F. Recently a 14 year old boy survived for a week in the snow, and when he was found, his body temperature was still 96 degrees; he lived for another week before dying of respiratory problems. This is an extreme example of how efficient life is. We're 80% water, so if he weighed 125 pounds, a hundred pounds of him was water, about twelve gallons. Without the life in us, that's what we are: 12 gallons of water held together with some carbon and other trace minerals.
     To heat twelve gallons of water from 32°F to 98.6°F takes about 6,600 BTU per hour. And that was what he was doing there for a week. It would take a gas fired heater over a million BTUs to accomplish the same thing. He had eaten two BTU of food energy, and probably lost quite a bit of weight, but still this demonstrates the efficiency of the life force compared to a water heater. At the same time you're using your food energy to warm your body, you can also perform work. ride a bike 100 miles a day – although you might like to eat another BTU of food afterwards. Let's compare this with a car: there's 150,000 BTUs in a gallon of gasoline. At fifteen mpg, you'd use almost one million BTU to drive 100 miles. So riding a bike is about a half million times more efficient than burning fossil fuels. Seems impossible? Try burning an apple to stay warm or power your car.
     Let's talk about solar efficiency. The world's whole petroleum resource is estimated as a million terawatts, which happens to be equal to the amount of solar energy which reaches the earth every day. So if you multiply 365 days times the three billion years it took to create the fossil fuel resource you conclude that using direct solar energy is a trillion times more efficient than burning fossil fuel. And you also realize that all energy in this solar system comes from the sun.
     When we use direct solar energy, we can calculate solar efficiency. PVs are about 10% efficient converting the sun's energy to electricity. Thermal collectors are as much as 90% efficient at converting the sun's energy to heat. Photosynthesis is only about 1% efficient at converting the sun's energy to complex carbohydrates which we eat to energize our bodies. Riding a bicycle is over three times as efficient as walking. Riding a bicycle is about 500,000 times (5x105) more fuel efficient than driving a car. When you look at the overall solar efficiency of driving a car, multiply the fuel efficiency by one trillion (10x109) to establish that riding a bike is 5x1014 times more efficient . I don't want to be personally responsible for denying any future generations access to the resources that have taken the earth all these billions of years to create.
     Of course the automobile also violates the other two principles: roads,parking lots and driving totally disrupt life cycles. And I could rant on about the dispersion of poisons...
     What I want to impress on people is that we can't sustain life on geologic resources; they're in a different time frame than we are. We must slow ourselves down to being able to work with the resources that come to us in our time frame.
     When I really want to drive the point home about the automobile, I refer to the Baby unit. Burning a gallon of gasoline takes about 700 cubic feet of oxygen. In the first year of life, a baby breathes about the same amount, 700 cubic feet of oxygen. Every time you burn a gallon of gasoline, you're burning enough oxygen to support a baby for its first year of life. And it's even worse than that: the baby can survive in a biosphere because its exhalations are easily processed back to oxygen. The baby participates in a life cycle; the automobile does not.
     I'm working now 90% of the time at home. We should make where we live be the place where we want to be.

Christiane: You've got to plan communities where people want to live and work. Go back to the village idea: you have your home or homestead and you are connected with other people through the work you do in the field, the office, in the schools. We need to get away from the arrangement which makes us get in a car and drive to get services. We need to be able to get the services we need by getting on a bike, walking, or over the internet. This would save time, so we could partake in the activities we don't have time for now: families, garden, a swim, just because we haven't given two or three hours to the car. And we'd get to appreciate our neighbors. But all this takes a revolution in planning.

Steve: That's why I'm on the County Planning Commission, and pushing for the use of GIS (Geographic Information System). GIS gives us an important planning tool we've never had before. It's easy for me to envision a county or city website accessible by parcel number. A complete GIS map might have a hundred layers: transportation routes, political boundaries, watersheds, flood plains, vegetation, solar access, climate, existing housing, employment, schools, shopping. And all the information about a parcel, like building permit applications and planning decisions are entered into the database. It would also be a welcome tool for surveyors, planners, contractors, the utilities and others working with land use information. People looking for land today have no access to information like the history and conditions that exist on a particular site. GIS could provide that information plus every decision ever made by a government agency that affected a particular parcel. Land use decision could then be based on accurate information instead of speculation. Realtors will love it because it's an instant sales tool; when you want to move, you'll access the database, enter information on the location of your new job, what your school and shopping needs are ... and out will come all the available housing within walking distance. This could dramatically change the present pattern of commuting.
     The only way I could see to accomplishing the transition to sustainable communities in the short term was to build a solar charged electric vehicle (EV), but that's only an interim solution. We must develop other ways to achieve mobility without pollution.
     In our society, we seem to equate efficiency with convenience. And they're really different things. Somehow, we even confuse convenience with comfort. And then our level of comfort depends on whether we are being entertained.
     I look at everything now in terms of those three principles. Are we after comfort, or are we after health? Are we after convenience, or happiness?
     If your goals are comfort and convenience, you're a couch potato.
     If you redefine the success of shelter in terms of health and happiness your shelter becomes a participatory environment which invites you to interact in its operation.
     When I design shelter for someone, I strive to make it work so it provides those necessities I learned from Malcolm, light and energy from Sunshine, and healthy Air, Food, and Water. The size of the south facing wall and roof of a building determines how much of the sun's energy can be collected. Glass makes solar heating possible because it's transparent to the short-wavelength energy from the sun, and opaque to the long wavelength radiation from heated objects in the house. The challenge is to provide enough mass to store the incoming heat for whatever time period the micro climate requires. The massacts as a flywheel to maintain comfort. Another necessity provided by windows and skylights is enough natural light to eliminate the need for artificial light during the day. The size and placement of windows is determined by the local climate. A rule of thumb for most of the US is that from 7 to 10% of the floor area should be window area on the south wall; 2 to 4% on the east and west; and less than 2% on the north.
     For thermal mass I use materials with the least embodied energy that will persist in the structure for as long as it took nature to create them. Rock from the site is good, but be careful with old-growth redwood, because it should last as long as it took to grow, 2000 years.
     Since I like efficiency, I try to get things to do more than one thing: synergy is the root of this concept. Starting with the foundation: rather than spending a lot of money on a foundation and then burying it forever, there are two other functions it can serve and increase the overall efficiency of the building: it can be thermal mass (which means it's got to be included within the insulating envelope) and it can serve as a room. In most parts of the country that's a basement, but in places where we have a temperate climate and don't need the basement for structural reasons (like frost heaving) we waste that potential.
     Going up into the house itself, I like the idea that rooms can change their functions. So one person might live in a single room, with a bed in one corner that can also be a couch, but can be curtained off. Throughout the day, the room changes its function — bedroom when you awake, then a kitchen, then an office, then the gym — more like the concept of living on a boat, where space is at a premium. It is at a premium, because all the embodied energy of the materials is so precious!
     Every surface that encloses the space offers an opportunity to serve more than one function. Every wall has its particular synergy: the south wall is where we let in the majority of the light, collect the heat; thermal collectors mounted vertically replaces the need for siding, and have twice the heat gain in the winter as in the summer, because of the sun's lower winter angle. I like the east side to open into the garden, because in this part of the country it's the most protected side; the entrance is there, too, and early morning warm up comes from that direction. The west gives a window on the end of the day, and must shelter us from the prevailing wind, and prevent the house from overheating in the late afternoon's sun. The north is well insulated but still offers ventilation. If you lack suitable wall-building materials on the site, I like soil-cement or regular concrete on the inside of a good insulating envelope. Straw bale has great insulation, but offers little or no mass; rammed earth is exactly the opposite: tremendous mass with no insulation. Straw works well in dry northern climates if you also build in plenty of thermal mass. If you have a diurnal cycle with cold nights and hot days through the year, rammed earth works well, but in climates with cold winters, it only gets colder and colder.
     The ideal wall might be a strawboard core, which has the same insulative value as petroleum-based foam, with a thickness of durable shot-crete (sprayed-on concrete) on the outside for durability and inside soil cement for thermal mass. Interior walls provide privacy, out-of-sight storage, services — if you put plumbing in exterior walls, you have to give up some insulation, so I like to put the plumbing in the inside walls. I like to cluster functions that require the same service, like kitchens and bathrooms sharing a plumbing wall. A woodstove is only a backup to solar heating.
     The roof serves many functions, from the obvious — keeping out the weather — to the creative — integrated PV collectors on the south-facing roof, eliminating the need for a separate structure and membrane. By using thin-film amorphous technology, which handles diffused light more efficiently, the need for a tracker is eliminated. Whatever the material, the roof must be lightweight and well-insulated, and should provide ways for exhausting excess heat and letting in light. My first choice would be wood framing and straw board insulation with a 50 year plus metal roof. I learned an important lesson in the 1970s when Ken Kern died because heavy rains caused his rammed earth dome to collapse on him.
     Back in the 1970s, my focus was self-sufficiency, but the lessons I learned helped me make the leap to sustainability. Self-sufficiency exists in isolation, sustainability requires that everyone works together for a better future .

Christiane: There are other options to the self-sufficient homestead, like work-trades, barter... we need to work out complementary arrangements with suppliers of the things we need. We need to build community.

Steve: Serious gardening over a half acre requires a tractor. When I worked a big garden by hand, I saw that time was a limitation. Living in a peasant mode, subsistence farming in our modern environment, doesn't work. A human can produce a horse-power-hour per day , 2,500 BTUs. I tried Morgans, learned how to work them, and realized that it takes 13 acres of land to feed a horse in this climate, at least 20 times more than it takes to feed my family. This taught me to look to the sun for my energy source. My experience with EVs showed me that I could easily charge an electric tractor from the sun.
     Regular gas or diesel tractors need weight for traction. The batteries provide that for an electric tractor. By using wheel motors, with the batteries right between the drive wheels, you optimize traction. You can have a PV shade canopy to charge the batteries and with the additon of an inverter you have a mobile solar power source for your electric chain saw and power tools. Plus all the farming benefits of having a tractor. Every implement that currently exists for a gas tractor works better on an electric tractor because the PTO is powered by a seperate motor and does not depend on ground speed. Electric forklifts have been in use for over a hundred years, and so the battery and motor technology is highly refined, and crosses over perfectly to the tractor. So my totally solar homestead is now a reality.

Steve Heckeroth & Christiane McLees Homestead Enterprises: Solar Design and Renewable Energy Products Box 151 Albion, CA 95410 phone/FAX 707-937-0338     EMail Us!    solar@renewables.com