It’s been all quiet on the writing front while Robyn and I have set up our winter encampment site for our “Little House” (motorhome). Enormous ancestral black oaks ring Bearhaven meadow, whispering of the Maidu people whose acorn grinding rocks are not far from the year-round spring. Red-shouldered hawk has been a frequent caller, along with a band of curious ravens frequently circling to check us working on outdoors projects.

For electricity, we are supplementing the RV’s generator and her rooftop solar panels with twelve 20-year-old solar panels from our house’s original set. Robyn installed equipment in the RV to optimize both solar systems (contact us if you want details).

Not finding what we wanted commercially, we designed and built lightweight, portable racks to hold the panels off the ground and at angles adjustable for different seasons.

Such a fun project, just about right for the level of our construction skills and portable tools. We started with drawings and a small foamcore model to think through our design.

Each three-panel rack is made of 2×2’s and held together by bolts. (I always envied my boy cousins’ lincoln logs and erector sets back in 1950s era of gender-specific toys. Now that longing is fulfilled.)

Some shovel work to level the ground for each rack, a long wire run from panels to the RV, voila! Extra juice!
We’re warm and cozy now as the cold winter rains descend upon us, grateful for our sweet corner in this wild country, and welcoming an introspective season.

We pulled up to the pleasant blue house in north Oakland (CA). Built about a century ago, it’s residents call it HAUT house: House of Appropriate Urban Technology. The technology we came to videotape wasn’t its generous rainwater and the greywater systems, whose pipes provide underground irrigation for the edible gardens filling every space in this modest-sized yard.

No, we came to tape the composting toilet. Right here in the middle of a city, peoples’ pee and poop are composted to return needed nutrients to the soil — no wonder the garden is so lusciously dense!

Our personable tour guide Laura Allen shares the house with five friends. As co-founder and educator with Greywater Action, she’s has been educating about low-cost urban water conservation technologies for over a decade. She showed us the ground-floor composting toilet, which starred in her recent presentation on “The Lowdown on Composting Pee and Poo.”  Composting toilets are smart: no fresh drinking water is wasted, it reduces impact on aging sewer treatment systems whose overload is polluting our waterways, and provides the gardens just what they need.

We had a great time with Laura. Sitting in the backyard surrounded by huge fava bean plants and purple-blossomed borage, we were warmed by the sun and the buzz of happy bees while getting classically low-key visits from her two cats.

Laura showed us the ins and outs of the low-cost composting toilet. Inside, we saw that the key component is a urine diverter — the pee and poop are stored separately.

She took us outdoors to where the two containers below the toilet are accessed through a door on the side of the house. We were greeted by a half-dozen clucking hens who scooted along their sideyard habitat through a nifty open-wire tunnel. Laura said that the pee goes out to the garden almost immediately, while the poop composts over about a year in a large barrel.

And I assure you — there was no smell. Not at the toilet, not at the collecting containers under the toilet “throne”, not in the long-term storage barrels. In fact, the jar of fully-aged compost had that wonderful earthy smell of forest-floor humus.

Now, a composting toilet is not effortless, like flushing a handle and dumping gallons of increasingly-scarce drinking water needlessly down the drain.

Not effortless, but it seems like really low effort. Build it in a day and pay less than $200. It’s the right thing to be doing, returning us to a no-waste exchange of materials the way Earth does it. You’ll see it on Pee—k Moment’s first Pee and Poo show. No sh*t!

Watch video: “The Pee and Poo Show.”

What’s the most important convenience in your kitchen — Microwave? Refrigerator? Blender? Cookstove? Coffeemaker?

Someone asked that question awhile back in a blog and then pointed out: Running water.

Bet you didn’t think of that one. I sure didn’t. We take running water in our homes utterly for granted. Until it’s not working. And then we see how much we use water conveniently running out of the tap.

Recently our kitchen faucet developed a persistent leak, so on our day for in-town errands, we turned off the water supply, removed the faucet innards, and went for replacement parts.

But first, I filled up two big pots with water, as backup at least for teeth-brushing and for drinking water when we got home late that night.

Glad I did. Using the water in pots, we made it through breakfast the next day before Robyn swapped parts. Sure enough, they didn’t fit, so we’ll be back for round two (this is collapse practice, remember?). She reinstalled the originals (which stopped the leak, interestingly) and turned the water back on.

Now, that wasn’t terribly painful because we didn’t use water for showers or  toilet flushing (for that, we use buckets of rainwater collected off the eaves in winter, or shower water held in the bathtub in summer). Nor did we try to make soup or wash the dishes.

And it wasn’t terribly painful because it wasn’t off for a long time, and we’re water frugal. We figure we use about 10 gallons a day between us, as opposed to 192 gallons per person for the average California household (note: no garden watering here.)

As backup, I have about 10 gallons of distilled water for filling the solar system’s batteries. They could be used for drinking water in an emergency. Not nearly enough for a week’s use, though.

Think about what it would be like to be out of water for a week. A break in the main, storm damage, a longer power outage.

What would it take for you to be prepared for a week without water?

A viewer asked how we live. I’ve written about how we planned for our off-grid solar-electric system. From a different angle: here are some of today’s activities preparing for winter.

Dry fruit and vegies. My frugal gleaner self picked figs a week ago, and then a new friend gave us a big box of heritage-tree Bartlett pears plus not-quite-ripe apples. I cut fruit (and cut out plenty of wormy parts), and am drying them up on the roof. Takes less energy and more nutritious than canning, plus no sugar.

Hoping these warm days will continue long enough to dry them fully. With our off-grid power, electric dehydrator units are too costly on our electricity budget.

(Side note: Why dry them up on the roof? If the fruit trays were outside on the ground level, Bear would certainly saunter by and just KNOW they were for her. All the wild berries on the property were for her, so I’m keeping these for the humans.)

Toast almonds in the solar oven. I’d soaked them overnight, now slow-toasting them in the solar oven at a low temperature. Hard-to-find unpasteurized almonds, from a regional farmer.

Wash clothes, water the sheet mulch. With the water system problem now solved, we can use water more normally. I’m catching up on extra washing while there’s abundant sun on the photovoltaic panels. I use a discharge hose to send wash and rinse water outdoors to the sheet mulch plot.

As the autumn sun moves towards equinox and we get less power each day, I begin to watch the battery levels and for sunny days to wash clothes (slightly more efficient to use the washer while sun is shining on the panels).

Clothes drying? Never a timing or resource challenge. Always solar-dried: outdoors in summer, indoors in winter.

Water the batteries. Every 6-8 weeks I add distilled water to the bank of golf-cart sized batteries that power the house. Come winter Robyn will be monitoring their capacity. After many gray days we need to run the backup generator to charge them.

Store firewood. I’m filling the woodshed with wood cut and split several years ago. Our 1500 square foot house is primarily heated by the woodstove. The propane furnace that came with this manufactured home would use too much in electricity — for fans pushing air through the ducts. And firewood is a renewable resource — probably ten times what we need drops each year within easy access.

Cut firewood. Robyn chainsawed some oak limbs into firewood lengths. They’ll get split, and then stacked outside to season for future years’ use. Thinning the forest around the house and along the roadway is a constant practice to create a defensible space in case of fire.

Dinner, cooked from scratch. Vegetables from the CSA (community-supported agriculture) box plus steamed quinoa, green salad, cheese. It’s a creative dance each week to use all the food we receive, especially items that aren’t our favorites. (I’m dehydrating the extra sweet peppers; what to do with the eggplant?)

So how do we live? Always mindful of, and intimately dancing with, ever-changing resources: sunshine, weather, electrical power capacity, water, food in season, and of course our own time, personal energy, tools and skills.

I haven’t gotten around to sending a Peak Moment newsletter this past couple of months because all our energy has been consumed with necessities: Infrastructure. In particular, our water systems. The requirement for water resilience has been underscored by Reality this summer.

We got our gravity-fed 4000 gallon water system functional (but not finished) for high-pressure fire hoses only one day before a wildfire broke out about eighteen miles down the canyon. Smoke and ash drifted into our woods, and the sunlight through smoke was an eerie yellow cast. By the time nearly 4000 acres burned, we were only two fire-widths away.

Our primary goal was to have the high-pressure water for fire hoses near the homestead when fire season was in full swing. We made it barely just in time, but those hoses have 75 psi (pounds per square inch) and could spray a dandy arc over the house.

The next water system emergency came about ten days later — last weekend. Our well is not recharging sufficiently to meet the needs of the three tenant-gardeners and four homesteads on our property. We risk burning out the existing pump. We had been working towards setting up a backup well — and now it’s on a fast-track of necessity. This second well will be connected to the existing water system, hopefully supplying water to everyone. (Note as of 8/30: it looks like the problem is circuit breakers in the generator. Good thing we already had the backup generator to swap in).

Resilience is the ability to withstand or recover from a difficult situation, a shock to the system. Water resilience for us means increased storage capacity and locations, redundant supply (multiple wells, pumps and generators), interconnections so any well can supply any site. (That doesn’t count rainwater catchment. Yet.)

The wildfire was a potent reminder of why we’re building water resilience.  We need resilience to response to climate chaos here in the arid west: extended drought, longer summers, increasing wildfires.

I’ll get to the newsletter and other niceties once this more-resilient water system necessity is functional.

Say, how are you set for water resilience — during drought, or if a water main is broken, or a power outage disrupts water pumping?