Getting Off the Grid

we have a listener request to answer we wanted. You know, we invite our listeners at the end of every episode to send in any request they might have for us to cover in the future, and this is one of those episodes. So first we have to give a big thank you to Sylvia Ramsey who wrote in and asked us to address a few things. And she was thinking of I think several different podcasts, but we kind of lump them all into one in a way because they all seem to have a similar theme. So here is

the request. I listened to the podcast all the time. Could we have some shows about the technologies used to be more self reliant? For example, how electricity can be generated on a household level cheaply and sustainably, or passive heating and cooling of the home. What are the new technologies to retrofit an older home to decrease energy use. Can I make fuel for my car at home? Do

we have to use food crops to make ethanol? Also, I'd like to know a little more about regenerating soil that has been degraded by too much tilling or pesticides and fertilizer where you have no more remaining carbon and too much saline, so that it will grow food again.

So that's a lot of stuff, but it all kind of fits in this whole idea of self reliance fits on this idea of getting off the grid, not relying on the things that are provided by various companies and government agencies that make up what we think of as society, and becoming this more kind of self reliant unit. And this could be something that takes place in the middle of a city. It could be one of those scenario where you're saying, this is it. I'm gonna be a

hermit in the woods. Either way, you know you have to start taking into consideration how are you going to make this happen without too huge an impact on the life you are used to. Why is it always the woods? Why can't you be a hermit in the desert or a hermit in the tundra. You can be a hermit at either of those places. It's just getting at water is a lot more challenging in both cases. What about a hermit in the sea, A hermit on the fertile planes,

I think is probably the ultimate. Yeah, hermit in the woods is actually pretty tough to carry out, too, especially if you want electricity. Electrically speaking, if you don't want electricity, it's easy, but electricity is a big is a big problem. If you expect to have that in your life, then the woods may not be the best choice. Well, first we should talk about why it is that people would want to be self reliant and get off the grid, because it has taken our species hundreds of thousands of

years to get on the grid. I have electricity, I have running water, I have communication services like telephone, internet, I have all these wonderful things. I have easy access to food that I don't have to grow myself. It makes life pretty easy. So what are the reasons people would have for wanting to disconnect from all of this convenience. Well, I mean, we've got the whole self reliance at angle, This idea of being independent and not having to depend

upon others. One of the big issues of this world that we live in is that a lot of people. In fact, I would argue most people don't have the knowledge or skill sets necessary to survive without that system. So we are not like Cormick McCarthy protagonists. We know where all the people who died before the story started, right, We don't have those survival skills and we don't have the equipment we would need if the apocalypse came. So part of it is just this idea of being elf

reliant puts you in a better spot. You know, whether you think the worst could happen or you just think this is something that's important to me. From a philosophical standpoint, I'm saying that I want to be able to do this, and furthermore, I'm not comfortable perhaps taking this much from the rest of society. Right then, you have the idea of the people who want privacy. Yes, the folks who value their privacy are obviously going to want to find

ways to protect that as much as possible. Being on the grid means you're already giving up quite a bit of your privacy. Things like how much energy you use is going to be known at least by the entity that's providing the energy. And I mean also just just where you live and how many people know that you're there and when you're there, when you're using communication devices, then that definitely starts to give a lot more information.

The more you rely upon the grid, however you define that grid not just power grid, but this social structure, then less privacy you're going to have. And then, of course some of us, a lot of us, choose to give up a lot of privacy voluntarily we share things

on these communication systems. A lot of us just don't think about it, you know, you just kind of unconsciously give that information away, right like saying things like I'm really looking forward to this vacation, and you're not thinking, hey, I've already made it clear where I live, and now I've also made it clear when I'm not going to

be there, right, that kind of stuff. Then the next big category, I would say, and by the way, I'm not suggesting that any person only falls into one category, or that the three categories I'm talking about are the only ones. I'm just kind of identifying the big ones that I can think of. But one would be just the environmentally conscious, the people who want to make as little an environmental impact negative environmental impact as they possibly can.

And you know, we all know that not all, but a lot of electricity, depending up on where you live, can come from sources that end up burning a lot of fossil fuels, which create a lot of greenhouse gases, big carbon footprint. Yeah, let's talk about some of the costs of these grid conveniences like electricity. Yeah, I mean

that's a big one, right. I mean, so in lucky cases, you might be getting some grid electricity from clean power, right, or relatively clean power, because, as we talk about pretty frequently on this show, even something like getting solar energy from photovoltaics means that someone has to create the photovoltaic material, which uses a lot of nasty chemicals, right. Or building a wind turbine also means that the manufacturing process usually

has its own carbon footprint. It's one of those things where you start peeling back the layers and you realize that the big picture is a lot more complicated. Now, the actual production of energy from that point forward much cleaner. Sure, And that's great. So what's the number one source of gride electricity? In the United States. Well, it's our old friend coal. Yeah, coal, yeah, coal. Coal generates about forty four percent of all the electricity in the United States.

Is that number as of two thousand and nine. I think I believe so. And even then you're looking at you know, that's the largest of all the individual ones, so everything else makes up the rest. So it's less than half of all the energy, but still the largest

single slice of the pie. And it's also the source of sixty seven percent of the nation's sulfur dioxide emissions, twenty three percent of nitrogen oxide emissions, and forty percent of man made carbon dioxide emissions, meaning it's the largest contributor to air pollution. So overall, so there are other things like transportation that if you take transportation as a whole in the United States, may produce more carbon dioxide than power plants. But when you look at all the

pollutants across the board, power generation is the top. That's the biggest one, especially when you factor in things like heating and cooling. Right, So, getting off the grid, if you're able to generate your own electricity, presumably not through your own backyard coal power plant, you're not going to be impacting the environment negatively beyond whatever the initial carbon

footprint was of whatever device you've decided to use. Sure, there might also be the fact that the grid is producing electricity in a way that might not be the most efficient or convenient for you. Yeah, in the United States in particular, we have you know, there's this idea the smart grid. It's a great idea, and there's some

places the reality of the dumb grid right right. The smart grid is something that has been rolled out in certain areas, but it's not something that's infrastructure wide, right. The smart grid is this idea of not just is it delivering electricity, but it's doing it. It's able to dynamically change over time as conditions change, so it's not just a system that's constantly at ninety eight percent capacity

like one of the stories you'll read about. If you look into the power grids in the United States, so that most of them are almost at full capacity right now, and if something happens, if demand somehow changes, that can

result in brownouts or blackouts. We've seen that happen multiple times, especially on the West coast, but in the Northeast not that long ago, a few years ago, there was a massive blackout in the Northeast as well, and it's not like we can dynamically route power easily through these systems. A smart grid would have much more flexibility. It also would allow for if there was an interruption in service. Often the companies don't know that there's an interruption in

service unless customers start letting them know calling them. The smart grid would have the ability to let a utility company know if service had been interrupted in one point, and they could either re route stuff to make the affected area as small as possible, or immediately send out repair crews or both to address the situation right. And there's another way that the self reliance may come in. If you want to get off the grid, well, it might just be because hey, I want to control my

own production of energy. I don't want to have to call the power company and have them tell me, well it'll be a few days. Yeah, I want I would like it if if it meant that power was lost to the entire region I live in, I still have power because I'm generating my own electricity. I'm not dependent upon some external resource. I mean, apart from whatever you're using to get your energy. You like it until your

neighbors come banging on your door to watch your TV. Right, Uh, yeah, exactly, unless, of course, the blackout is so wide that you can't pick up anything. And technically, if you were truly off the grid, you wouldn't have a television. Maybe you could, you could have over the air. You could have an over the air like antenna, and you pick up broadcasts over the air that doesn't have any reflections, so you

would just be able to pick stuff up. But even then, if it's a full black out of the region, there aren't going to be any broadcast towers near enough to you to get to pick anything up. I was kind of joking anyway. Look, well, you're trying to catch up on Game of Thrones, and I'm glad that we knitpiced to death in that case. Yes, that's that's what we do. That's what we do. We make a joke and then we drive it into the ground. Let's let's pit more

let's pit more nicks. Okay, let's pick more nits. No more nicks, We'll pit more nicks. Okay, Okay, So, Nick Fiery, let's say you want to get off the grid. This idea appeals to you. Yeah, how would you do it, What are the steps you need to take and what are the factors you need to consider. Well, all right, let's assume for the moment that you do want electricity, all right, because if you don't want electricity, then this simplifies things quite a bit. But let's assume that you

need electricity for certain things. You have certain conveniences you're used to. Perhaps you still want to maintain some connection to the grid with communication devices, like you want to be able to communicate with loved ones who are still definitely part of society, or you really enjoy refrigeration. Yep, that's another big one. If you don't have a plentiful fresh food source that's going to be available all year round, then you're going to need something to keep that food preserved.

And perhaps you are not great at pickling everything. So yeah, it's necessary. So yeah, electricity is a big one. Well, you want to be able to generate it. If you're going to be off the grid, you're not going to be dependent upon any power grids out there. The probably the number one choice, I would say, would be solar. Now, solar power, of course, you're using solar panels, which we've

discussed many times. If you're talking top of the line super efficient solar panels, like the kind that are used in space under ideal conditions, they top out at about forty percent efficiency, meaning sixty percent of the energy hitting them gets lost. If you're talking about the kind that we could actually use in our homes, because those are reserved for like space stuff, and those optimal conditions really only happen in the laboratory, and it would be prohibitively

expensive for pretty much any human being apart from billionaires. Well, I mean, I mean solar power is still pretty expensive. Yeah, yeah, the initial expense is that's the big problem with any of these is that you have to make an innational investments. Yeah. Now, now, over time, you're going to save tons of money because you don't have to pay any utility bills. You have

to maintain whatever it is you're using. But if you're using regular solar panels, the kind that most of us would be able to get for our homes, that efficiency peaks out around twenty or twenty one percent. On top of that, each solar panels only generating a little bit of electricity, so you've got to have a lot of

them in order to get enough power. It affects the locations you can choose for where you want to live, right in case you don't want to be somewhere that's cloudy or has tree cover, or you don't want to be too far north right, you know, because they're going to be long get shorter. Yeah, there's long stretches of time where you're not going to get a lot of daylight.

So the closer to the equator you are, the more sun you're going to get year round, because otherwise they're going to be sections of the year where you're not going to have very much electricity at all. You're also going to want batteries because otherwise you're not going to be able to use any electricity after the sun goes down, which is when many of us want light. Yeah. Yeah, it turns out that turning all your lights on when it's already bright outside is not necessarily the most you know,

effective thing. In fact, you could you would probably be using things like daylighting, which is where you're using either a wind a series of windows, or even windvanced window technology. It kind of is there's actually I've seen a really cool one where you use like a kind of like a skylight that's installed in the house, and then it uses a tunnel system with mirrors to direct that sunlight down to whatever room you want. So it's like having a light that's that's just a's dictated by the sun.

So you still get light in the daytime, and then you only use the electricity at night when you don't have that daylight. I think in a lot of cases, whatever your source is, it's going to involve a lot of cutting back on the electricity you use. Yes, yes,

you want to be very, very efficient. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a second, but the point being that, yeah, you have to be you have to be strategic and where you're going to live so that you can make the most out of the sunlight you're going to get, uh, and you have to be strategic about how you're going to use it and how you're going to store it. But there are other choices as well, not just not just solar power ed Begley's

stationary bicycle power. You could yeah you could. Actually I didn't put it in the I didn't put it in my notes, but yeah, you could actually have things in there where you're using human power to generate some electricity eyes, and I'd imagine that would be election. It wouldn't be enough to power anything, you know, really significant, but I mean to help charge a battery. Yeah, if you really need to work out anyway, it's a pretty good way

to charge your cell phone. But if you're using a cell phone, right, it's more likely that you would use something like wind power. You could get wind turbines that you could you can use at your home. There are a lot of places that allow that. They have very you know, most areas in the United States have specific restrictions on how tall those things can be and how

how close they can be. And it certainly depends also on whether you live in a residential area or somewhere rural or et cetera, et cetera, because I mean just your home owners association if you own a home, for example, might have a problem with you erecting a large, fifty

foot tall tower that's behind your house. So about nuclear power also not practical, So getting back to things that actually could happen the wind power, Another issue there is that you'd have to be someplace where you're getting consistent winds. So some places are less conducive than others, Like if you happen to live near a coast, then that's awesome because you're going to be getting pretty consistent winds in one direction during the day in another direction at night.

But not every place gets you know, great wind coverage either. Then you could have micro hydro power. Micro hydropower being that it's kind of a tiny version of the stuff you would see at say the Hoover Dam. That would

be macro hydro power. So if you're living next to a stream or a river or something, yeah, they look kind of some of them look like little outboard motors without a boat, right, just sit in the water and the water turns a turbine, right, and that generates the electricity which can then charge battery packs which you use to access power. You'd have to have some sort of inverter to switch DC to AC that kind of stuff. But you know, this is also a possibility. I've seen somewhere.

It's a man made try off that branches off of a natural stream and that's what ends up feeding the turbine or turning the turbine. S say feeding but turning it. So again, all of these mean that you have to be strategic in where you place your domicile. So if you're talking about retrofitting an existing house, obviously you're limited by whatever geographic features happen to be in that area.

You can make some depending again, depending upon where you are and Homer's associations, because some would say no, you can't put solar panels on top of your house. We're not gonna allow it on Some cities won't either. Yeah, but if assuming that they do, then actually, I'm not sure if that's I mean, always check your local regulations, right, I think it depends neighborhood to neighborhood actually, but yeah,

it all. There are also some cities that will allow you to not only use solar panels, but if you generate more electricity than you actually need and you're still on the grid, Like, you're not using this to get off the grid, you're using it to supplement coming in. If you actually generate more than what you need, some cities will allow you to sell that extra electricity back to the grid, right, depending on whether the systems that you're using are compatible with the local Yeah, there are

a lot of caveats, a lot of qualifiers. I'm off and on the grid, you know, me and the grid. We got a thing. We have an understanding. But yeah, at any of these, any of these considerations you can potentially use to retrofit a home. Again dependent upon the geographic and legal situation of that home. Okay, micro hydro power. That makes me think about water. We actually also get our water from a grid. Yeah, there's a you know,

most of us are reliant, not well. There are actually quite a few homes in the United States that have wells that use wells for water. But if you're living over over fifteen million households, lots of them. But if you happen to live in say an urban area like we live in Atlanta, so we're getting our water from the municipal system. But yeah, we have reservoirs of water. We have these water tower which allow us to use the force of gravity to help provide water pressure, water

mains and piping systems. Yeah. So if you aren't, if you don't want to be part of that, if you're saying, I'm being really self reliant, I'm not going to be on the water system, then you've got to be. You either have to be close to like a lake or stream or something like that where you're getting your water directly from there, or more likely what you're going to do is drill a well. Now, wells are going to depend on you depending on the location you may have

to drill well. First of all, you have to get someone who's truly a licensed well driller, because this is not full and around. You don't want to do yes yourself, unless you happen to be a license well driller, in which case you can't do it yourself. It tends to run from the last time I looked, between three thousand and fifteen thousand dollars, depending upon how deep a well you need to drill and how complicated the job is going to be, because there's really a lot to consider

if you're going to do this whole well thing. The location, any potential contaminant and disease testing and purification, the water that you're getting out, because so much stuff gets into groundwater that you might not be thinking about before you just go get a delicious cup of death. Yeah, if you happen to be really far from everything, then that might not be an issue. But you know the rest of us would have to Oh yeah, I mean we bury trash and landfills. Septic tanks can leak fuels, or

stored in underground tanks. We use all kinds of fertilizers and pesticides. Industrial and urban area runoff can cause all kinds of third eyes. Yeah, just think about all the homeopathic medicine you'd get. Let's not do that. Really, Come on, don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry. You don't like me when I'm not angry, Joe, You're not gonna like me when I am angry. You might also be able to supplement this with rain collection. Yes,

you can use cisterns to help collect rain. Usually you're using this where the gutters will end up all the runoff will go into a cistern, which then can be pumped into a home. Either pumped or if the cistern's on top of the home, gravity can help create the water pressure necessary for it to be circulated into the

home for use. Cisterns. Also, if you're using those, you have to worry about things like what your roof is made of, because some roofing material uses chemicals that could be dangerous to people, so you don't really necessarily want to use regular roofing tiles. You would have to probably look into something else that doesn't have that toxicity to it that could potentially leach into your water supply. Obviously

that would be in big issue. But any either way, you know you're drilling a well, using cisterns or a combination of the two, that would get you off the grid as far as water is concerned. Again, another one of those where you have an initial expense up front, but then in the long run you end up saving money, assuming that you do pay for water. Sure. The other

half of that, though, is the septic system. You're going to need some kind of system to dispose of your waste water, and the way that a septic system works essentially is that bacteria in the tank can break down the waste and then release it via pipes into a drain field where the soil will further break it down.

But yeah, that's pretty important because and you still have to have someone come out and empty it about once a year even even with that, because even though it's it's distributing stuff through this drain pipe system, it's still accumulating waste that's not going to go through those drain pipes, and that you have to have someone come out and

empty it out. I lived in rural Georgia in a house that had a septic tank, So I remember distinctly the experience of having the the crew come out and pop the lid and and and pump it out, and it's memorable. Yeah. No. I also lived near a paper mill and a major poultry farm. So you know how they say that the sense of smell is really connected to memory. Yeah, I got some bad, bad smell memories, y'all.

Uh So, yeah, that's just to it builds character. But yes, a good point though, that you do have to think about where does the waste water go. You can't just you know, dump that back out either. That would that's not environmentally friendly, especially not if you've got a well, because then you're contaminating your own water source. Yeah yeah, so uh and then of course you want to find ways to conserve water, just like you want to find

ways to conserve electricity. Since you know you're going to be generating your own you want to make sure that you're using water wisely and that you're not wasting it in various ways. I mean, I've heard about people who will conserve water so far as to like if they're taking a shower and they're starting to shampoo their hair,

which I hear is something people do. It's been a long time for me, but that they'll actually turn the water off while they're while they're lathering the shampoo and then turn it back on to rinse it all out. And oh yeah yeah, or you know, collecting, collecting what's called gray water, you know, basically okay, water to to put put back out over your your garden or something like. Right, so that might be something like the water the drains from your sink would go into this gray water, which

you could then use to to water plants. Yeah, yeah, so yeah, it's obviously again one of those important parts where you want to conserve as much as you can. Now, let's talk about heating and cooling, because unless you happen to live in a magical land where the temperature is always a comfortable ambient, I don't know what's comfortable for you guys. I know what's comfortable for me. But let's say it's like sixty eight degrees year round, which might

be a little on the chilly side for something. Yeah, I'm pretty happy at like seventy six. Wow, too warm, too warm, But yeah, unless you have to live in some place that's magical. That's that temperature all the time. You mean San Diego, Yeah, san Diego. When it's on fire, then you would be You would probably need to have some form of system to heat and or cool your house so that in the winter you don't get too cold and summer you don't get too hot. There are

ways of doing that without using gas or electricity. Their effectiveness depends upon where, again, where your home is located. But for example, the passive heating systems all involve things like the materials that your home is made of. The orientation you're home is in relation to how the sunlight hits it, right, So there's this concept of passive solar construction.

And the way this works to take advantage of heating and cooling is that you build your house in such a way with relationship to the path of the sun during the different seasons that you're getting direct sunlight coming through the passive windows in the winter to produce a greenhouse effect within the house, so the maximizing the heat. Yeah, the light comes through the windows, turns into heat and

then is trapped within. But then the house is built in such a way that during the summer, the angle of the sun will be blocked by an opaque area that doesn't allow the sunlight to pass directly through, So like either an opaque area on the window itself or an awning of some sort something like that, Right, it could be either one. You could design the windows in such a way that sunlight coming at a certain angle doesn't pass through as easily. Right, So, yeah, that would

be a really helpful system. There are other things besides, Like you know, an air conditioning system, a full HVAC system takes a lot of power. Oh yeah, so that's probably way too much for your average like solar powered home. Well, if you're talking about efficiency in the home, heating and cooling, just those two things are a huge fraction of the total energy we use, and if we just got rid of that, that would already make a huge dent and in what you need. And in fact, there are a

lot of things you can do. Just again with the retrofitting of homes, there are a lot of things you can do that will really drastically affect that, like making sure you have really good insulation. Right, that is a huge, huge factor. So it seems obvious, but yeah, yeah, the basic materials, the amount of insulation. The quality of the insulation, and even the paint colors that you're using can make a very large difference whether or not your windows are

properly treated so that they are sealed well. That kind of stuff. These are things that you can do to any home, whether you're building a new one or you're retrofitting an old one, that can dramatically impact the amount of power you need to for climate control. Now, one of the other things I was going to mention on here that's an alternative to a traditional air conditioning system is what some people call swamp cooler. It's called a swamp cooler because it's using water to help take heat

out of the atmosphere. The idea is that you have a device that has some material that's got water soaked in it. It's soaked in water in some way. You use a fan to blow the air from outside through this thing. The warm air makes contact with the water material the material soaked in water, and heat from the air ends up evaporating some of the water, and that means that the air itself loses heat so it becomes cooler.

So the air that ends up blowing into your home is cooler than the air than the ambient temperature of the air, so you get this overall cooling effect. However, this only works if you are in a place that has a relatively dry environment. If you're living it does not work, all right, The air already has too much moisture in it. Really put this to good use, yeah no, yeah, we already have too much humidity the air is. The air is pretty much saturated with humidity, so it's not

an effective way of cooling. I mean, you could just as well just put a regular fan inside a house and just have air blowing around, and that circulation might help some, but it doesn't necessarily make the air feel cooler. Same thing with a swamp cooler if you haven't live in a high humidity area. But that's another alternative. So I've got kind of a big one. Now, Okay, what

about data and communication services? All right, So if you are able to go outside and shout and everyone you need to talk to can hear you and shout back and you can hear them, you're set. Otherwise this is a problem because communication, by its very nature, requires that there be some sort of system there for it to work. If you're talking about anything beyond you know, line of sight. Yeah, or like I mean, I guess I am radio or something.

But yeah, well even then you got to have the well, yes, you could do a ham radio I guess, but even then that's long distance. Anyone could listen to you, so it's like a party line. I guess. This sort of depends on whether you like what you're reasoning is for

wanting to get off the grid. If it's something about privacy, you just might not want to have these services, right because anytime you're going to use an electronic device that is used for communication, there by its nature, there needs to be something that identifies that device so that other information, other communication can get back to you. Otherwise all you've got is something that allows you to broadcast but not receive.

Oh well, and in the case of the Internet, there are more and less secure in private ways to browse the net and to people. If you're using the tour browser, for example, that gives you a little more privacy. Although we did an episode of Tech Stuff about the tour routing network and the browsers use that's used to acts and as we pointed out in that episode, that's using it is not enough like you have to go well,

above and beyond that. If you if you truly want to reduce the data footprint you're leaving behind that identifies who you are, you have to go to some pretty extreme measures in order to really ensure that that happens. But assuming that's not your goal, if communication, if privacy is not the thing you're worried about, then you know,

it's less of a problem. You could have something like a cell phone, and assuming you have cell phone service wherever you've decided to erect your magical house, then you should be fine. Again, assuming of course, that you're also generating electricity because I'm guessing your cell phone is running on it. Yeah, Or you could just go with the

wireless internet service provider. Yeah, yeah, Yeah, there's there's some that use cellular networks essentially to use that, you know, and you just use a dongle or some other kind of modem like device, router like device to get access to it. So yeah, if privacy is not the reason why you've decided to, you know, cut all ties to the grid, then that would be kind of that would be one of the routes I would go. Yeah, I've

got a question. Okay, let's say I'm living in a house off the grid, and Jonathan comes over with his huge collection of original Star Wars action figures in the original packaging, and I just start tearing them open, of course, because I want to play with the toys. You're a terrible friend. What do I do with all of the original packaging? Where where do I put all that? Joe?

That's not gonna be a consideration you need to make, because I will have killed you in hollowed up to Roddy for use as a sleeping bag Tonton style, the only fitting way for the horrible thing you've done to Mike. See. But if I do that at my house, the garbage people will come and pick them up and take them

away as long as they're in one of the designated bags. Right. Okay, So we're saying, like, what if your house is not anywhere near someplace where you have this kind of the service, or what if you're choosing not to use it not choosing not to use it? Okay? So all right, well

you've got some choices. First of all, you want to reduce the amount of stuff you have to throw away to the absolute bare minimum, which means that you're going to be thinking a lot harder about the things that you're purchasing, assuming that you are purchasing things still from outside sources, right, So you want to be able to do the three RS right, Reduce, reuse, recycle, So you want to reduce as much of the stuff that would

necessarily be thrown away eventually as much as possible. You know, keep in mind, like if you're genering your electricity, you're going to have batteries and eventually you're going to have to replace batteries. So that's one of those things that you've got to remember, Like batteries do not last forever. Solar panels the same thing. You're going to have to replace those at some point. And some electronics like that

can in fact be recycled. Yeah, so there's the recycling part of you know, making sure you can recycle as much as you can, or you know, buying things in glass jars that you can reuse rather than in a plastic already use a lot of glass jars. It is nearly impossible to live without producing any waste, but you can definitely cut way, way way down, and you can do composting to take care of organic stuff so that you can compost it down and that's a big help too,

sat resource for your garden. Yeah, some stuff you would probably have to eventually, you know, haul out to a dump of some sort because you're just not going to get around it. There's going to be some stuff that you cannot recycle or reuse. But if you can reduce that to the bare minimum, then you will dramatically decrease the impact you have environmentally speaking. So yeah, that would be what I would That's why to tell anyone who

was thinking about this. Okay, what about Sylvia's questions? Okay, yeah, she asked about ethanol, like does that necessarily have to come from food crops? And the answer to that is no, it does not have to necessarily come from food crops.

There have been experiments using switchgrass, which most people think of as kind of an irritating plant that otherwise has no use, but in fact, you can use switchgrass to create ethanol, and a US government study found that switchgrass could provide as many as one one and fifty gallons of ethanol per acre per year. And that's actually way better than say corn, which is technically that that's the most popular crop used to make ethanol. Well, it's a

popular crop in America. Yeah, and a large amount of it is being used for biofuels, although I do want to put in that frequently the type of corn that is used in biofuels is either corn waste or a non edible not non human edible form. Yeah. Corn, Well, to mean, we don't have to worry about making the corn nice and juicy, because all you're doing is turning it into fuel. So do they make it out of

the baby corn because people shouldn't be eating that. No. I can show you this whole video about how they package babycorn. Though we watched a baby corn industrial video.

It's essentially made of terror. Yeah. So at any rate, if you're talking about corn, the average bushel size in twenty twelve would yield closer to four hundred and forty gallons per year, so or bushels, see like per acre, we're looking at an acreage thing sore and fifty gallons of ethanol versus four hundred and forty gallons per year with corn. I mean that's obviously a big difference. But even if you could grow this yourself, like she also raw enough. Yeah, she asked about the ability to make

fuel for your car at home. Clearly even if you were able to grow, like you have an acre of land, let's say, and you've dedicated it to growing switchgrass, you might be able to grow plenty of switchgrass. To feel that car, she's got to process that that switchgrass. You have to turn it into biofuel. That's a pretty intense biochemical engineering related process. It's not something that you can you know, you don't just put it in a pot of water and boil it for like five minutes and

then you got fuel. So yeah, but of course something like horn to ethanol or switchgrass to ethanol are not the only ways to create biofuels. You can create biodiesel out of algae, you can create it out of cooking well. Yeah, Now most engines are not tuned, even diesel engines, because you have to have a diesel engine. By the way, don't put this in a gasoline power vehicle, but diesel engines can some of them run on essentially what used

cooking oil. So you'll hear about people who kind of I remember a guy in Athens who was doing this where he would go around to restaurants and collect their used cooking oil and use that in his converted vehicle. That use this as biodiesel for his engine. So the issue there is that not all engines are very well tuned for this. You could require lots more maintenance, a lot more cleaning in order for it to work. But

it's potentially something you could do. Yeah, there's a coalition of dairy farmers in Vermont who work with their local utility companies to process their cows waste and use them thing gas to produce energy. Yeah, that reminds me of

mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Bartertown ran on something similar. Then you had the question about soil regeneration, this idea of it's a problem that a lot of farmers have run into where the top soil that they depend upon, that's the layer where stuff actually grows is eroded either by weather or through using grazing lands improperly, that kind of thing, and you end up with desertification. Things turns into a desert.

So how do you reverse that process? And there's not a cookie cutter approach to fixing this because the problems tend to vary depending upon each situation. I read an interesting series of case studies that were done in Australia in twenty twelve where they I think it was nineteen different cases of people using different approaches because their situations

were different enough where merited it. Some of things involved breaking up the ground a bit so that you had more facets that were exposed to the air that would actually help encourage organisms to grow again within the soil. Some of them involved introducing certain types of plants to help create that top soil, or rotating crops through that

was another big one. Changing the grazing patterns of cattle because it's Australia, so almost all of them were cattle farmers, changing the kind of fertilizers they were using so that they were relying more on organic fertilizer rather than non organic. All these things were ways to regenerate the soil so that it could actually grow the right kinds of plants, whether that was just grazing material for the animals or whether it was crops, like a lot of them were legumes,

as I recall. So if you're able to do this, and you're able to reverse this process, you can start to get into this natural cycle, the self regidrating cycle, which is what you would typically see in nature, assuming there's not some other kind of climate change going on. If you're just looking at how it nature, the top soil gets replenished over time just through the natural process

of things dying off and breaking down soil. You can actually get back into that cycle, but at least initially, it requires a lot of management because you actually have to reverse the process of turning into a desert. So there are other things. If you wanted to reduce the saline content, it usually means that you have to introduce a lot more water, so that's a big consideration too, where you're getting that water from. None of these none

of these solutions are necessarily very easy or inexpensive. They could be very expensive to implement, but ultimately, especially in the long run, they're beneficial. So you have to look at the long term benefits versus the short term setbacks. And then of course there's the idea about you know,

retrofitting homes. There's lots of technology out there to help you cut back on the amount of electricity you're consuming, and we talked about cutting back that heating and cooling, which is a big that's a huge chunk, right, and all of those those smart smart meters, the smart meters, Yeah, smart meters. That's great because the smart meter allows you to really keep an eye on how much electricity you are consuming on a day to day basis. You know most of us, don't you know. I don't know about

you guys. I know that my home has an old style power meter on there, and I don't go and look at it every day, and even if I did, I probably wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of what was going on. But smart meters give lots more information and in fact can even hook into an account that you have where you can monitor the account online if you wanted to, so you're not having to

go out and look at some external meter. You could just pop online, check a web page and see and you can actually monitor how much electricity you're using and be able to determine what is causing any sort of spikes. Another good thing is to use like major appliances like a washing machine or or dishwasher at night as opposed to daytime, when it's off peak hours, off peak hours exactly. Another good thing is to get the energy Star appliances,

which use less electricity. They have to actually go through a certification process that proves that they are energy efficient. Using smart thermostats like the nest system is the big popular one right now, right, so that way you know you're not trying to cool your home to that sixty eight degrees that I like so much when you're not there. Yeah,

lots of things like that are ways of helping. Also, just those those different power strips you can get where when you switch the power switch off, it won't allow devices to sip vampire power. Vampire power is when you turn the device off, but it's still draining electricity. It's still got to pull a load on your electrical circuits, which means that you are spending money just by having your stuff turned off. If you have these power strips that actually cut that off, then you don't have to

worry about that. So that's another thing to look into. And in a lot of ways you might say this is kind of nickel and diming in cases like if you're already pretty careful, but really every little bit counts and it adds up over time. And only that. Again, if you know that your house, let's say, is getting electricity from a coal power plant, and you don't have the option of investing in some renewable energy source, maybe

that's just not an option for you. Based upon homeowners associations or the financial burden, then these other methods may be the best way for you to reduce your carbon footprint in a responsible way that doesn't impact your life so sadrastically. Yeah, So, thank you so much to Sylvia for sending us this terrific list of questions. And I know that we kind of glossed through a bunch of

a bunch of them. So if anyone would like to hear something more in depth about any of these these last few topics that we that we kind of kind of summarized perhaps but didn't go to in depth with uh you guys, let us know. Yeah, if there's something like you thought, well that was really interesting, but you you you didn't go nearly deep enough, let us know. We can do a full episode on it. Yeah, and I would love to hear from you. Yeah, And so

follow Sylvia's example, guys, write us. You can send us an email address is FW thinking at discovery dot com, or drop us a line on Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus, or handle at all three of those is FW thinking, and we will talk to you again really soon. Wow. For more on this topic and the future of technology, visit Forward Thinking dot com brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places