{"id":252,"date":"2015-02-11T03:17:36","date_gmt":"2015-02-11T03:17:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/letthesunwork.com\/?page_id=252"},"modified":"2015-02-11T16:33:53","modified_gmt":"2015-02-11T16:33:53","slug":"shelter","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/letthesunwork.com\/shelter","title":{"rendered":"Shelter"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Most of the houses and apartments in the industrialized world are products of the fossil fuel age, built with the expectation of a boundless supply of cheap energy for heating, cooling, and transportation. That&#8217;s all coming to an end now, so thoughtful men and women are planning for a new paradigm about the way we we design our living spaces.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>They will be smaller<\/li>\n<li>They will be closer together<\/li>\n<li>They will be oriented toward the sun rather than toward the street<\/li>\n<li>They will be designed to be naturally warm in the winter and cool in the summer<\/li>\n<li>They will be part of communities built around shared solar rights, shared security, and an interdependent local economy.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So what will become of the McMansions that represent so much wealth in our modern economies? There&#8217;s a real challenge, isn&#8217;t it? As built, most modern large homes are dinosaurs, too large and poorly designed to maintain in the post-petroleum world by anyone but the wealthiest of the wealthy. We tell ourselves that we are ingenious; this will be our chance to prove it. Those of us who own large homes will pursue several different strategies to make our homes livable after cheap energy is gone:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>We will add lots of new insulation to them<\/li>\n<li>We will fit them with interval metering to shift our use of power from times when it is most expensive to times when it costs less<\/li>\n<li>We will live in parts of them and abandon the rest of them to storage<\/li>\n<li>We will invite others to live with us in them to share expenses<\/li>\n<li>We will retrofit them with root cellars and other climate-appropriate amenities to maximize food storage options<\/li>\n<li>We will use a variety of tricks and tools to shade glass from the summer sun and open glass to the winter sun.<\/li>\n<li>We will block off west-facing and some east-facing glass<\/li>\n<li>We will add insulating shutters around windows to minimize heat loss<\/li>\n<li>We will abandon some houses entirely, cannibalizing their parts to build smaller, more efficient houses on the same lot<\/li>\n<li>We will do other things Lee and Amanda aren&#8217;t smart enough to anticipate, because Lee and Amanda aren&#8217;t as smart as you are about your house.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Do you sense a continuing theme here? The very first thing you must do to design effective shelter (at least in the northern hemisphere) is to <a href=\"truesouth.htm\">know where South is<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Most of the houses and apartments in the industrialized world are products of the fossil fuel age, built with the expectation of a boundless supply of cheap energy for heating, cooling, and transportation. That&#8217;s all coming to an end now, so thoughtful men and women are planning for a new paradigm about the way we &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/letthesunwork.com\/shelter\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Shelter&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":4,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/letthesunwork.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/252"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/letthesunwork.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/letthesunwork.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/letthesunwork.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/letthesunwork.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=252"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/letthesunwork.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311,"href":"https:\/\/letthesunwork.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/252\/revisions\/311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/letthesunwork.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}