Solar Micro Homes

Solar Micro Homes

This is a subject I have wanted to write about for a long time. Solar homes can be expensive to build because of the cost of the equipment needed to make heat and electricity in sufficient quantities to make it a viable project. Solar micro homes lend an entire new aspect to this fascinating and very important subject.
First, I would like to give you a little background on how and why I developed my attitudes towards housing, solar, and electric power etc.
In my lifetime I have literally gone from oil lamps to the Internet.
I started studying solar energy in 1950 when my Dad brought me a solar energy book from the library where he worked as a maintenance man and boiler operator for many years. I learned a great deal about buildings, and mechanics from him
Now my folks were very hard workers but they didn’t have a great deal of money. They were married in 1929 when the great depression started, and they had a five-dollar a month flat in Central Falls, Rhode Island. My Dad lost his job when the depression started and the two of them moved into a tent that they set up on a $50.00 house lot in Lincoln, RI that they had purchased in better times financially. My Mom and Dad took a series of low paying jobs at twenty-five cents an hour, and started building what we would now call a mini or micro home. It was only 480 square feet and there was an extra space in the attic for two tiny bedrooms. When I came along in May of 1933 they were still tying to finish the house and the three of us spent the winter of 1934 sleeping in the attic space which they got up to with a ladder through a trap door in the attic floor. There was no electricity, no running water, no bathroom, and only a small wood stove for heat. When they finally finished the house in the late nineteen thirties it still only had a sink with running water and the toilet was an outhouse in the back yard. We finally got a full bathroom about 1948, and it even had hot water from a tiny coal fired mini hot water heater. About 1950 we got a propane space heater for the living room and a propane dual range for the kitchen. My mother used to get upset because some people used to day that we lived in shack in the woods, but they had a lot more money than we did and frankly, I am extremely proud of my parents and my background because my parents and my life experiences from the old days made me whatever it is the I turned out to be today at 73. There is nothing like a little poverty and backbreaking work in a mill to give a person a little incentive to get ahead in this world! I started working part in a mill at 14 to help my parents out financially, but I never let it interfere with my education. I went full time second shift for my last three years of high school. But, that aside, the three of us were very happy in that tiny little home, and it was certainly better than the alternative like sleeping under a bridge etc. like people are doing today.
So now we come to the present day with expensive housing costs, high fuel costs, expensive automobiles, and too many low paying jobs.
I look back on my early life and we always got by in our very small home because we could heat it for next to nothing and we used little or no electricity etc. – you know the drill by now. We didn’t even have a mortgage because you couldn’t get one in the depression unless you had so much money you didn’t need one anyway! Well anyway, all of these recent events that we are experiencing have cause me to do a great deal of thinking, and the upshot is that I am going to take a bunch of the money that www.ChinaDepot.com is making and start a micro home company. Our homes will be solar heated and solar electricity. We will have a backup heater that will run on wood or used vegetable oil etc. We are going to make them as small as an eight x eight x eight cube. We are not the first to do this size by a long shot, but could be the first to offer full solar off the grid making it possible to purchase cheaper land with no electric power to it. I have decided that to make it more interesting building the model here at our place we are going to use as much free and recycled materials as possible. At this point, I don’t care if we make a cent on the project. I actually see this as a way to help people and also, these micro and mini homes will be an excellent vehicle for my many solar and wind inventions. These homes will be more affordable in some cases than a new automobile. They will vary in size from sixty-four cubic feet to two hundred and forty square feet. The energy bills will be tiny to almost non-existent depending on the needs and location of the users.
When I see the ever increasing energy costs here in the Northeast I do not see how an average working family or even a single person can possibly survive here with a large inefficient home or automobile for that matter. We could be looking at six dollar a gallon fuel and twenty-five cent a kilowatt hour for electricity. In my minds eye it would be a very wise business move to get in on the leading edge of the autonomous mini home business. I would like to invite a discussion on this subject on this blog. Also, a great web site to visit is www.inhabitat.com I intend to do a great deal more research and work in this solar and micro housing field.
Walt