My husband and I are building our first home together.
3 important things to note:
- The house is a dynamic experiment. We have a clear goal and strategy (more on this below) but don’t plan specific tactics in advance. This allows us to prioritize flexibility, cost, and speed.
- The house is off-grid. We have built a renewable energy system that uses recycled Tesla car batteries to store energy collected from solar panels on the roof.
- The house is on wheels. Specifically, a used Ford F550. This is not in pursuit of #vanlife. It is so we can’t cheat (again, more on this below), and because we couldn’t decide where we wanted to live (we are millennials).
Our goal is to do an honest accounting of the resources required to maintain a modern Western lifestyle.
The average American household uses 30 kWh of energy every day. Our goal is to bring this number down to 3 kWh, with minimal sacrifice to comfort and convenience.
Why?
Energy consumption is positively correlated with many quality of life indicators, and our global population is growing in both size and wealth. Communities around the world are using more and more energy.
This trend begs the question — what would it actually take to support 9 billion people living a modern, resource-intensive lifestyle?
Sam and I are are trying to generate a concrete answer to this question. We are using a 2 stage approach:
- Generate a control. It is impossible to know how to increase our lifestyle efficiency without knowing our starting point. In numbers. So first we have to quantify the resources we currently use to support our lifestyle.
- Experiment. Once we have a solid baseline, we can use the data to find areas of opportunity and experiment. The goal is to radically reduce our resource requirements without sacrificing the comfort and convenience associated with our lifestyle.
Building an experimental home.
We believe it is impossible to take detailed measurements and experiment freely in a typical American home.
These buildings are designed to conceal their inputs and outputs. They are built into city infrastructure that obscures the true cost of resource consumption and waste. Utilities are siloed and subsidized and hide opportunities to integrate and increase efficiency.
So how can we find out what would have to be true about patterns of consumption and waste to make a Western quality of life plausible for all communities across the globe?
We can build an experimental home equipped with the technology and flexibility to answer these questions and design solutions.
My husband and I started this project because:
(a) we are genuinely concerned about the future of the environment and committed to addressing the issues we see head on. We believe in radical change, not incremental change.
(b) we are scientists/engineers and like to build things.
(c) we are tired of wasting money on rent but don’t want to invest in a property that was built with total disregard for carbon footprint. These homes are money pits and not aligned with the way we want to live.
So, we are building our first home together in the name of measurement and experimentation.
Follow along at The Living Experiment.
