Fight the gas prices

[Doc]

That would see my wife bid me goodbye.

As for Pete relaxing for long life, I get the sense that fighting also keeps you alive. A few years back, on RB IIRC, he pointed out that he has a nice scar from a card carrying communist who arrived for hand to hand fighting. Relaxing would have cost Pete his life. So too other life threatening challenges.

Occhi

Those temps are based on no heat at all. That is your base stable temp level year round. You can raise those temps by opening the blinds and allowing the sun in to heat the tile floors, wood burning stoves, etc. It is possible to raise the temp, but the temp will never be lower than that.

http://www.earthship.net/

All I can say is, spend some time there reading and watching the slide show. People are doing amazing things with biotecture. People get the mistaken idea that all earthships are in the desert, which is not true. Those tend to be the best and most extreme examples though. People have built functioning earthships above the arctic circle, all over Europe and Asia, in deserts, in jungles, on the frozen tundra.

And for some reason, a lot of people seem to think that the base stable temp is something they have to live with... This is a common misconception. It is easy to make it warmer. Just open the blinds, and let the sun sink in to the thermal banks. The base temp is very important though. This means that the structure could survive at below zero outside temps and should never get colder than the base temp for the building, since most of it is below ground at stable earth temps, the thermal banks from sunlight, the decomp from waste, etc. Note that all of these are passive means of maintaining stable temps. There are more agressive ways of raising the temp, like a small woodburning stove can quickly turn most earthships in to ovens.

People are still improving the science for these every day, and they have come a long way since the 70s, when earthships were damp muddy holes in the ground. All that moisture? Taken care of by an abundance of plants, most of which are used to produce food. Cisterns have improved dramatically, which means no more septic tank smell from the waste cistern. Also, some egghead figured out a way to use passive solar energy to boil down human sewage in the cistern, which in turn heats your home. All that decomp really puts off a lot of heat. Somebody right now is looking at a way of effectively trapping the gas produced from the soft matter decomp waste cistern, since it is methane rich, collecting it, storing it, and using it to perhaps power something like a genny. Graywater can be passively filtered though various things like limestone or sand, and the resulting water is safe to use for plants or other applications.

The earthships above the arctic circle are the most interesting though because of the unusual sun situation. Long periods of darkness. Even in sunless periods, they do amazingly well and maintain a comfortable livable temp for the occupants. Some guy is trying to build an earthship science station down in Antarctica.

The more people that start living this way the better. The science behind them will keep improving. Already there have been improvements in the past 5 or 6 six years that are huge leaps and bounds.

Some egghead is looking in to something called vegetable based batteries, where the food grown would be used to generate electricity. I have no clue how that would work, but it sounds interesting. Ever seen a clock that runs on a potato?