Heating Options, Part One

It's hard to think about heating when I'm sweating and wishing for a fan. The sun finally showed up this week and temps have climbed into the upper 70s. Those of you living further South can stop snickering now – there's a reason I live this far North! (Well, 42 reasons, but climate is one.) Realize also that I am in long pants and long sleeve shirt for black fly protection. After all the rain, drizzle, and downpours lately I was beginning to think I lived near the *other* Portland! The lack of sunshine there is exactly why I don't.

When considering heating options, it's very useful to think outside the box and look at not only potential heat supplies, but also ways of reducing heat needs. The goal here is not how to make my environment a constant 72F, but rather to be comfortable in my environment.

I find the easiest way to be comfortable whatever the temperature is to wear layers. Feeling cold? Put another sweater on. Too warm? Strip down to a t-shirt. What you're wearing is much easier to adjust than increasing the heat or AC, and far more energy (and its cost!) efficient. It's also more adaptable to changing activity levels. It's not uncommon to find me in flannel-lined jeans, turtleneck, sweatshirt, and quilted flannel shirt during the winter while I'm doing some quiet low-energy activity, only to have stripped off the two top layers while doing something more active.

Another method I alluded to above is choosing the environment you live in. The Pacific Northwest has long appealed to me because of its mild climate. My ideal climate would be 40s at night and 70s during the day. However I have long claimed, in only semi-jest, that I am solar powered. Thus an environment with persistent cloud cover (even if it is a dry rain!) is contra-indicated for me. Obviously the population levels that do make their home there prove the internet maxim 'your mileage may vary' (YMMV).

One sadly neglected approach to comfort is simple acclimatization. Eric Brende, is his book “Better Off”, talks about joining an Amish work party after having spent a couple weeks on a road trip. He suffered from heat exhaustion by the end of the day while the other workers took the heat in stride. He realized that using the car's AC during the road trip left him unacclimatized to the warming weather back home. At the other end of the spectrum, early accounts of European-Indian encounters comment on the apparent comfort of the natives, wearing little more than loincloths, on 40F days. Most modern Americans, going from home to car to work to stores and back, never get the opportunity to acclimatize to what the weather actually is outside. This week I'm finding it difficult to make the abrupt shift from 40s and rainy one day to 70s and sunny the next, but I expect in another week or so I'll be fine.

When discussing heating in particular, something related to dressing in layers is the concept of warming the person, not the space around them. There is something remarkably delicious about climbing into a bed in a cool room with a hot water bottle at your feet! Some people use rice bags, warmed in the microwave or on the back of a wood stove. It's the same concept as the chemical hand and toe warmers used by skiers and other winter outdoor sports enthusiasts.

One layer many people seem to be unaware of is hats. If you wear a hat, or nightcap, to bed, you can comfortably sleep in a much cooler room. I use a knit hat that I can even pull down over my eyes. With a hat on my head and a hot water bottle at my feet, I'll happily doze off in temperatures in the teens, with little more than my nose sticking out. Getting up in the morning, however, is another matter entirely. I've never done any winter camping, so I asked someone I know who has – how was he motivated to climb out of his warm sleeping bag on cold mornings? His answer (which I suspected) was your bladder demands it! But what keeps you from crawling back in? I persisted. Essentially, being up and moving is warmer than the cold spots encountered if one squirms too much. I suspect there was also an “awake and bored” factor.

Which brings me to my final observation – if you're cold, move. The adage that wood heat warms you three times has a lot of truth to it: cutting, stacking, then burning. If you're sitting quietly reading, with a lap blanket over your legs and another around your shoulders, and feeling chilly, that's a cue to put the book down and get up and move around for a while. Just don't move around so much you start sweating, because the moisture works to wick heat away from your body.

So having (hopefully) reduced heating needs, but not eliminating them entirely, what are some of the options? I'll explore that in part two.

The Heating Challenge

I must admit, milder climates are easier to deal with. My first go at an off-grid cabin was in Southern Indiana. 50F in December seemed just wrong to this Minnesota kid, but I wasn't arguing too hard! That cabin was 8x8, which meant leaving my toilet outside (although I did rig a tarp overhead). I had read warnings against insulating such a small structure too well and overheating it, so I wasn't terribly concerned. I had two different propane heaters – one a higher-end Wave heater hooked up to a 20lb tank, the other a portable Dyna-glo that used 1lb disposable cylinders. I'd run the heat for maybe an hour in the evening, sleep snuggled under blankets, and run the heat another hour in the morning to take the edge off. In a structure that small, everything was within reach and I only had to stick an arm out to turn the heat on before climbing entirely out of bed. I generally only used the more powerful Wave heater, occasionally supplementing it with the Dyna-glo if it seemed particularly chilly. Of course, chilly is a relative term! I find that 50-60F is comfortable given enough layers of clothing, above 20F at night given a decent head covering and enough blankets. I was going through a 20lb propane tank a month – I thought roughly $20 a month was a reasonable heating bill!

When I moved to Maine, I built a larger cabin, since expecting more snowstorms than Indiana I wanted to have my toilet indoors. So 8x12 this time, ideally enough extra space for a woodstove as well! Since I was expecting the weather to be colder I used 2” blue foam insulation in the stud bays and on the ceiling, but the woodstove I had gotten for free was too large to fit. Ah well, this is only the temporary cabin anyway, and I pulled out my old propane heaters. But even with the insulation this cabin refuses to hold heat! I was running the Wave more hours, and it started raining inside. Excuse me? Propane is 40% water, which puts a fair amount of moisture into the air. After the heating ceases, the air cools and can no longer hold as much moisture as it could when warm, and it rains. Well crud.

I found a small woodstove designed by the Army for use in the Arctic, now for sale (never used!) to the public for only $200. Ah-ha! So I ordered one, and was surprised to receive it and discover it was a multi-fuel stove, something the catalog description had neglected to mention – probably because the liquid fuel supply system wasn't available. No problem, I bought it planning to use wood. Except the space for the liquid fuel burner system took fully half the already small stove, leaving a teeny-tiny firebox only five inches tall! I installed it anyway, and it actually works quite nicely. It just needs tiny logs, which burn quickly, necessitating feeding it more tiny logs about every 10-15 minutes. And the cabin still refuses to hold the heat for more than a couple hours after the fire goes out. Well crud.

Thus I ended up moving into the main house for the coldest winter months, but once the nights got above 20F again, I was back out here. I still use the woodstove some evenings, but I don't dare use the Wave heater at all. The Dyna-glo does a decent job of taking the morning edges off though, and it's (safely) close enough to my bed that I only have to stick an arm out to turn it on.

Clearly I need better insulation for heat retention, but that opens a whole 'nother can of worms – just how temporary is this cabin going to be? What I do know is that this summer is going to be all about making sure I have a winter-worthy shelter next year. The options between here and there? I'm still pondering...

Cold Update and More Wild Plants

My cold seems to be dissipating nicely, although sadly not as quickly as it came on! I took Linda's advice and had chicken noodle soup for dinner the other night – I may try Yer Mama's version today.

I mentioned the lack of entries under decongestants during an unrelated edible plants conversation, and had it pointed out I should have been looking under the ailment, congestion, not the treatment. A-ha, a dozen results when looking at the correct entry! I was rather amused to find garlic as the first listing in the index, although that's only due to the plants being sorted by flower color. My amusement turned to intrigue upon learning that garlic does not grow wild, there are only domesticated escapees. But many of the same effects are attributed to wild leeks or ramps. But given the many benefits accredited to garlic, I duly noted that I should add a whole lot more of it to my cooking habits.

Part of my trepidation in utilizing wild plants comes from my cultural background. I was taught to read labels. (And to color in the lines, and stay on the trails, but I digress. Frequently.) But not only do wild plants not have preparation instructions or warning indicators, they don't even have a label indicating if you're even looking at the right thing! Is that water parsnip or water hemlock? One is tasty, the other deadly. Apparently red spruce pitch can be used as a poultice to relieve congestion, although it may also cause dermatitis. The bark of the strawberry bush was formerly used as an expectorant, but it may also be poisonous. Is the cure worse than the disease?

Ironically even labeled commercial items can have similar issues. In an online discussion I was reading recently, there were claims that the body burns sugars (simple or carbohydrate) preferentially not because it's the easiest fuel, implying we should consume more of it, but because it's a poison best removed from the system quickly. Wheat gluten sensitivity seems to be practically trendy lately, but I have to wonder how many people are simply discovering their bodies are healthier without the (biologically, evolutionarily) recent addition of grains to the human diet?

So really, how trustworthy are food labels anyway?

I think one of the reasons I'm interested in some of the old ways of doing things is just so that knowledge doesn't die out. While the natural world cannot support our current population numbers on a hunter-gatherer basis, I don't think that's a reason to discard all of the related knowledge, anymore than microwaves and convection ovens relegate cast iron dutch ovens solely to the history books. So even though learning and using wild plants, for food as well as medicine, isn't very high on my priority list right now, it is definitely on there. For now, I'll be concentrating on growing my own plants from labeled seed packets (with additional labels planted in the ground along with the seeds!) and simply familiarize myself with some of the wild ones occurring in my area. And eating more garlic while keeping an eye out for those ramps!

Balancing Acts

I think one of the hardest tasks when going off-grid is choosing what technology to keep, and what (not to mention how!) to replace. An important realization for me was understanding that this is a never ending task – some parts get decided, other parts have changing parameters and circumstances. Add in the confusion of how each individual defines off-grid, and you discover a nearly overwhelming plethora of options!

Nick Rosen covers the concept of off-grid more comprehensively than I've seen anywhere else: People who have off-grid vacation homes or retreats, often referred to as “the Cabin” or “the Cottage”; Transitionalists that supplement grid systems with personal systems, frequently concerned with the environment and/or peak oil; Those who simply have no money and have fallen through the cracks; Idealists who reject mainstream ideas and actions; Religious people who feel the need to be closer to God and community; Suvivalists whose “actions are based on a conviction that the entire social system as we know it is about to disintegrate”. And a completely different category I had never given much thought to, are those who reject the “surveillance society” of ID cards, bank accounts, and so on. I fully agree with his summary “We humans are complex creatures; nobody has just one reason for doing anything. Everyone I met was acting on a combination of motives, falling into more than one of the above categories”. (Off the Grid, 2010)

For the longest time, I wished someone would just give me a plan, a blueprint, of how I could live my life. After all, everyone else had one – graduate high school, go to college, get job, get married, buy house, have kids, collapse in front of TV every night, spend weekends shopping. Repeat until 65, retire, maybe travel a bit, then collapse in front of TV in nursing home far from family in either Florida or Arizona.

Huh. Satisfying? Umm, nope. Sustainable? Contrary to the optimistic eternal growth economists, I'm not seeing it. Blame my biology background, but the Lynx and Hare cycles always crash after growth. As big as this planet it, as vast as its resources are (or were), they are not infinite.

So. Now what. I can control only my life – what shall I do with it? This is where the balancing act comes in, along with personal definitions of off-grid. I have gone back and forth in several areas. As one example, electricity – to have or not? For many years, I thought not. But in these days of cell phones, it seems foolish to not have at least a little bit. Lighting is easier – I flat out prefer oil lamps and candlelight. But it's also handy to have bright flashlights for investigating middle of the night noises. And in the luxury category, nothing beats sitting in front of an electric fan on a hot humid summer day. So a small amount of electricity, judiciously used, seems appropriate. For me, for this point in my life, recognizing that the balance may change in the future.

Most energy-saving appliance are actually energy hogs. They simply use outside energy to save human energy. Many people accuse off-griders of wanting to go back to pioneer days, as though there is no middle ground between fully plugged-in and pre-electric. So I did some brainstorming:

Modern: vacuum
Old: pull out and beat rugs twice yearly
Middle: throw rugs, broom, carpet sweeper

I think this has as much to do with design as anything. If a house is designed with sweepable floors, it requires less external energy to keep clean. Rather than pulling out room-size carpets to beat (I'm guessing they were needed to protect feet from rough sawn floors perhaps?), smaller selectively placed rugs and mats can be used to capture dirt at entries and increase comfort in areas that require a lot of standing.

Modern: internet in every home
Old: snail mail
Middle: shared internet

“How can you be off-grid, you're using the internet?!” Yes, the main house has internet, as does the library. It is too useful a resource of both communication and information for me to dismiss it entirely. See satisfaction, even if not sustainable.

Modern: (was) land lines phones and wires
Old: snail mail, trading post phone
Middle: cell phones, solar panel charger

If I had to run wires, I wouldn't. Leave a message for me at the main house. If I didn't have that option, I'd probably put a phone box next to the road with an answering service. But cell phones have freed us from wiring, and allow communications from broader areas than before. I've read articles giving Africa as a prime example of this – cell towers can reach more phones than land-line wires.

Modern: disposable
Old: do without
Middle: make it last, durable replacements

It appalls me the things that modern consumers throw away. My mom had Tupperware that was probably more than 30 years old; these days we have disposable storage containers. I knew someone who would get all new bathroom accessories every year. It was easier to toss last year's than to donate them. A saying commonly associated with the Depression was “Use it up, Wear it out, Make it do, Or do without”. Surprisingly, I don't actually agree with that. I prefer more durable quality – tools that don't break when you use them, knives with edges that can be sharpened. And then take care of them, don't abuse or neglect them only to hasten their need for replacement. In the same lines, use the appropriate tool for the job. No sense in breaking a shovel handle prying a rock out when you should be using a pry bar (a lesson I learned from someone else's mistake!) Although I have to agree, there are plenty of things we can do without!

So while it appears there is a simple blueprint for the Standard American Consumer Lifestyle (SACL?), I question its usefulness and actual applicability. We each have to take responsibility to examine many, if not all, parts of our lives, and decide how we can make each part serve us, rather than the other way around. Many proponents of Simplicity have discovered that they were serving their things, and in evicting the admittedly attractive deadbeats, discovered new freedoms. But each person finds a level that works best for them. One person finds freedom in carrying only a single key for her car, while another finds it in having no car at all. As much as I hate to admit it, there is no single plan or blueprint someone can give me. We might all start from the same outline, the same Hierarchy of Needs, but the details are as individual as ourselves, and up to us to figure out.

I hab a code

I got attacked by a sudden onset cold Wednesday.

9am: tickle in throat

11am: sore throat

2pm: coughing

4pm: chest felt bruised, exhausted from coughing

Started taking OTC cold med every 4 hours and went to bed after drinking a quart of OJ. Woke every 3h45m coughing, drank some water, peed, and took more med. By Thursday morning had swollen glands and very sore abdominal muscles! Drank some hot chamomile tea and trundled off to Doc – not strep, yay! Bought more cold medicine, spent afternoon dozing, reading, coughing. Sucrets helped with sore throat but now nose clogging up and bleeding from blowing too much.

I'm an annoyingly whiny sick person. It's a good think I don't get sick very often! But it really points out one of my weakest areas – health and remedies. I don't have many remedy reference guides. I looked at the index of “Medicinal Plants and Herbs”: No entries for expectorant. Cough – throughout. Colds – about 60 plants, more than that for sore throats, but hey, less than 50 for analgesics! Well gosh.

I guess the lesson from all this is that while I would eventually like to learn what the forest has to offer for future ailments, it is such an infrequent need that I will continue to depend on modern pharmaceuticals while focusing on other more frequents needs, like food and shelter! Not exactly sustainable, but one of the most important lessons I have learned to cling to in times of daunting obstacles is simply: start where you're at.

My Cabin

The weather has been cool and rainy lately, which has me thinking a lot about both heat and water supplies (lotsa rainwater!). But first, I'd like to give you a quick tour of my current cabin.

I rent land from a friend who lives in what I refer to as the main house. The cabin I built last summer is intended to be temporary until I build the “real” cabin, so it's a quick and dirty job thrown together with 2x4s and 4x8s – commercial lumber and plywood/OSB. Sadly, the 2” blue foam insulation proved utterly inadequate to Maine winters and I ended up back inside the main house for a few months, and likely will again for a few days while I tackle the re-insulation job.

The cabin is a one-room affair, well lit with windows on three sides and a windowed door on the fourth. It has a shed roof with a 10 foot front wall and 8 foot rear wall. There's a decent overhang in the rear, but I wish I had more overhang around the other three sides as well. Lesson learned!

I consider the tall West wall to be the front. The door is on the North end wall. Standing at the door, on the left along the East wall is a table that serves for eating and writing, with some nails above it for hanging my coat and other misc. items. Then the window with the sawdust toilet below it. A bedside table is next to the head of the bed, which is under the window of the South wall. Currently the bed is on the floor, but once I get the insulation issue rectified and walls finished, it will be up on a platform with storage underneath. At the head of the bed are a couple more nails for hanging up clothes; at the foot is my newly rediscovered “Trees of Maine” poster.

Back at the doorway, on the right along the West wall is the kitchen, then a wood stove under the window, and a short heat barrier wall between the stove and the foot of my bed.

The kitchen climbs that tall South wall, where even I, at six feet tall, need to pull out the stepstool to reach the top shelves. I use a Whisperlite stove for cooking, a dishpan under a solar shower bag for a sink, and an ice chest on the floor for a frig. I rotate frozen water bottles every day or two from the main house for the cooler.

So I have a table and chairs, toilet area, kitchen, woodstove, bed and bedside table in here, with space left over to do pushups and situps. How big do you think it is? RVers are most likely to make a close guess. Did you catch the fact that my bed lies along the entire south wall? The building footprint is 8'x12', but with some loss to the walls, I have about 85 square feet. A friend of mine has dubbed it the Shoebox! He was shocked, having seen it during construction and unable to imagine it as a living space, to visit me living here and realize it really does work well! Except for that pesky heat issue, but that's a story for another time.

Since it isn't actually finished, I don't have a lot of stuff in here. No point in putting up storage shelves only to take them down to re-do the insulation and finish the walls. But I do have what I need, and soon will have what I want, at hand or at most two steps away. Plus the small space encourages me to be selective about what I purchase and keep. The space suits me very well. Besides, I have the woods right outside my door as my playground! And that's the most satisfying part of all.

Learning Plants and Trees

One thing I've noticed as I get older is that learning no longer comes easily to me.  Or more accurately, retention of what I have (supposedly) learned.  I am finally coming to terms with this unfortunate reality, and am working on more effectively sorting and storing the copious notes I find myself always taking.  A clipboard of loose-leaf paper has become as constant a companion as my sunglasses. 

For while my retention may be suffering, my curiosity most certainly is not!  There are few subjects about which I am not constantly looking for more information, more details, additional examples of how the pieces fit into the whole. 

Trees, and increasingly under-story plants, are two excellent examples of this.  While I understand the concepts of succession, that no forest is a static entity, that it's always changing as parts die, openings are created, some species populate quickly while others bide their time, I've never learned (or is it retained?) the cast of characters and their roles. 

Two discoveries brought this all to mind today – yesterday's observation of baby ferns, aka fiddleheads, popping up all over the forest floor, and, while retrieving something else entirely, coming across a “Forest Trees of Maine” poster I purchased last fall. 


I have been told that fiddleheads are a Maine springtime delicacy.  Cue the TV announcer – Act Now!  Don't Delay!  Limited Time Offer!  But fiddleheads aren't something from late night television, although I wouldn't be surprised if there is an 800 number you could order them from.  For a limited time anyway.  But were the baby ferns I saw the delicacy type?  Details, I want details!  I recalled discussion of fuzzy vs. papery, but no clue which is preferable.  Enter my heroes, reference books.  Okay, I'll grant the internet is a kind of giant reference book, but I prefer ones I know have been edited, that I can hold in my hand, even carry into the woods.  Oh sure, you could carry the internet into the woods on a smartphone, but given the spotty reception around here, I'll stick with books, thanks.

So I borrowed a friend's “Edible Wild Plants” book, which has all of two, count them two, ferns in it.  Immediately I wished for an additional fern reference guide, because what if I'm looking at a non-edible variety?  Then I realized my quest for more information, more details, was getting in the way of my true goal – are these the edible delicacy type of fiddleheads?  Sadly, the answer is no.  The prize is the Ostrich fern, covered with larger, papery, brown scales.  What I found better fits the description of the Bracken fern, covered with silver-grey hair.  As a consolation prizes, the book does note that “while the fiddleheads of other ferns can presumably be eaten (none are reported to be poisonous), many are bitter and unpalatable.”

So the fiddleheads I have seen might be bracken, or they might be some other species, but they are not the coveted Ostrich.  And if I fail to remember hairy vs. papery come next spring, I know where to (re)learn the distinction.  In the meantime, I'm keeping my eyes out for the papery ones! 


Several years ago I lived a brief stint near the Hoosier National Forest in Indiana.  I would drive the few extra miles to pass through the forest on my way to town.  The property I lived on had been selectively logged, so while it had trees, it didn't have TREES!  I was desperate to know exactly who/what I was looking at, and a neighbor obliged me, spending a lovely afternoon tromping through the woods pointing out various specimens and some of their defining characteristics.  At the end of our walk, he told me to pick three trees and learn them, then next year pick three more, and so on.  But I want to know them all now, I wailed.  How could I restrict myself to learning only 3 per year?

That walk was 7 years ago now, and how many trees do I know?  The same 5 I knew before that conversation, the standard inventory of Maple, Oak, White Birch, White Pine, and – well crud, maybe it's only 4 instead of the 21 I would know had I heeded his advice. 

After I moved to Maine, I again went for a walk with a knowledgeable local, trusty clipboard in hand.  Somewhere I have a double-sided page full of notes with details such as which birch has “armpits” or chevrons below each branch.  I did mention I'm still working on that note sorting and storage process, yes?  My current method is a three-ring binder of papers off my clipboard, added in chronological order, there being far too many topics to categorize that way!  Sadly, the notebook dates back only to its inspired inception – all of my other notes are living quiet lives in piles shoved into boxes, patiently waiting to be re-discovered. 

As someone who loves and needs trees around me, I'm embarrassed I don't know them better.  One species I learned the name of last year, the Tamarack, I have learned to love the shape of this year.  When I'm clipping trails through the woods, I'm usually following old skidder trails left from logging on the property a decade or two ago.  The forest is reclaiming those skidder trails, and I'm happy to cede much of the width, but not all of it.  Accordingly I find myself cutting many saplings, but often on the branches encroaching on a human, rather than machine, sized trail.  The Tamarack lends itself to this operation by having obligingly flat branches that when removed pile neatly off to the side.  In contrast, the White Pine, apparently another vigorous reclaimant

So I am in fact up to five species in my retained knowledge bank: Maple, Oak, White Birch, White Pine, and Tamarack.  Current thought is this year's three will be the Yellow and Grey Birches, and whatever that is outside my door.  Time to grab the tree guide reference book!