I’ve seen Amish:
Burn chemicals and paints in a pile behind their shop
Have dumpsters full of plastic “sawdust” from a shop that makes plastic furniture
Rebrand cheap chinese electronics and batteries to sell in their communities (MillerTech)
Zip around on a one wheel
Ride electric scooters
Log out relatively pristine forest to make more farms
Log land that isn’t theirs, without permission, for weeks before being discovered and confronted.
Vote down school levies repeatedly until the local schools shut down
Open a retail store in a mall
These days the amish button isn’t nearly as great as you might think…still funny to think about how everyone would react though
100% for real. On top of the fact that the 4th panel would read:
POOF NO MORE HUMAN RIGHTS NO MORE REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH NO MORE FREEDOM OF/FROM RELIGION
Um, akshually, there would still be lots of burning things for heat and livestock. Livestock are the majority of all mammals on earth, outnumbering humans by a lot, only 6% of mammals are wild animals. In addition, lack of preserved food would lead to higher consumption.
BUT it being so unsustainable and full of disease would mean it would rapidly decrease populations, which would decrease ecological impact after a couple of generations, so it’s a sound strategy longterm.
My father claims the simple life on a homestead is way closer to nature and pollutes less than living in a city.
He cuts his wood with a chainsaw that’s using a mixture of gas and oil. This gas and oil certainly doesn’t come from the trees. Its imported. But it’s apparently the traditional way.
Then in winter he burns the wood to heat the house and it creates a circle of soot in the white snow all around it. But it’s all natural. On certain days, when you go outside around his house, you can taste the wood burning in the air. All natural!
If we all go back to owning our plot of land and exploit it like settlers, surely this is going to be good for the environment.
Yes and no. Chainsaw is really marginal polluter.
What warms your house in the winter? Where is dirtier snow? In your fathers homestead or in the city? Where is more generaly more particless in the air? In the countryside or in the city.
Wood is better than coal or oil, but worse than nuclear or renevables.
In Germany the countryside often is way worse. Especially in the winter. All of those super old, shitty wood furnaces pumping out fine particles often create a worse environment than on new year’s eve. Farmers shredding their crops, pesticides everywhere, polluted ground water from all the fertilizers, etc.
The 100k Population town I used to live in is way cleaner than the shit I have to deal with just a mere 5km outside of that town.
Tell him the NEW homestead way is better. Solar panels, lifepo4 batteries, electric chainsaw, heatpump primary wood burn auxiliary if you live somewhere it gets well below freezing.
Before anyone says anything solar still works on a cloudy day it just makes less, that’s why you size your array to make what you need when it’s cloudy not when it’s sunny. Summer can just have an over abundance of power nothing wrong with that
Tell him the NEW
This is where he’ll lose interest.
I’m trying and doing experiments. I have a cabin off grid on their land and it’s mostly solar, but I do need to burn wood during winter even if I don’t really like it. He has a sugar shack on another corner of the land and he’s also using solar, except the stoves and boiler. I bought him an inverter and he prefers this to the noisy generator.
However he pretty much hates everything else with batteries. My mother has an electric golf cart and he whines every time the lead acid batteries need maintenance or need to be changed (because of lack of maintenance). I could swap them for lifepo4 batteries, but they’re still going to lose capacity over time and we’re getting to the same point of “but I don’t have to put a $1000 worth of batteries in my tractor every few years”! Same “issue” with an electric ATV for the kids. He hates it because it needs to be charged and the lifepo4 battery had to be changed once. But apparently the cost of gas and diesel doesn’t register.
But yeah. So far at the latitude we’re at, solar power input and consumption varies a lot depending on the seasons. The solar setup is fine for the sugar shack because it’s used during the day in the spring, when there’s no leaves. But in the cabin, it’s been more complicated. I’m not there year-round and it works well in summer, but in winter the lifepo4 batteries need to be heated for hours if not days before I can charge them via solar, and get acceptable performance. It’s a work in progress.
I can highly recommend These batteries for home level power i have 6 of them and they make my offgrid life possible. Rated for 6000 deep discharges (or 16 years of literally daily deep discharge) they have a standard charge range of 5°C to 70°C naturally if you are in a cold latitude an even mildly insulted shed would be ideal to justify stay above that 5c mark.
If your sun is limited especially in winter consider giving east/west vertical panel orientation a shot. And that same site with the batteries has great deals on palettes of solar panels if you just need more in general.
If you aren’t already using 48V for inverters make the switch, much more efficient and long term cheaper. Put your panels into as large of a series string as your inverter will allow before parallel. Higher voltage incurs less resistance losses and it can be a pretty significant loss. Had an inverter die on me and had to drop to an older inverter while waiting for the replacement. It didn’t support the higher voltage as the newer one so had to drop from 320v to 80v ( from one string of 8 to pairs of 2 in parallel) ended up losing almost a full 1kW of peak potential
Thanks for the tips. I’m kind of stuck with the choices I’ve made in the past and I don’t want to upgrade or change before it’s really needed, in order to prevent waste. One is just a cabin where I go maybe a dozen times a year. The other is a sugar shack used in the day for only a few weeks during the spring so it just has a 3000W 24V inverter. It’s enough for the lights and the water pump once in a while. We really don’t need that much power for now but I’ll certainly switch to 48v when we’ll need to upgrade.
As for the ideal temperature, I’ve pretty much given up. The average temps in January are around -10°C and it sometimes goes in the -20°C. I thought about multiple ways to insulate and heat the batteries but in the end, I don’t want to leave this unattended in the middle of a forest. So far my solution in winter for the cabin is to carry a portable power station that was sitting in a heated place.
Lifepo4 is pretty much the one type you can safely leave unattended, it’s very very hard to get them to burn and even when they do it’s mostly smoke. Lithium is the big flame/boom one. The trade off is less energy density compared with lithium but for home storage thats less of an issue. The batteries i shared even feature fire suppression systems (basically an automatically deployed fire ratardant foam internally) for additional protection.
Building a little box of insulation around the batteries using some foam board panels and a water heater blanket with some water pipe heating tape you can get at most hardware stores would be the cheap easy way and should help with the colder month temps. And is easily picked uo and set aside in warmer weather
Natural and Traditional is an axe, not a chainsaw.
Forget the chainsaw. Just burning the wood like we did in the past creates smog over a whole region. Wood burning is banned in my city and I can literally smell it when I go to the next city where it’s allowed.
Where I live winters are brutal and most people switched to electric heating over time. If everyone would go back to wood burning, we’d have really bad air quality and smog in winter, even in the countryside and over small villages.
No more global warming, but a lot more sexual assault.
And deaths from tooth aches, small cuts, the flu…
And also, continued global warming.
Seriously, why does anyone think regressive religious principles would do anything but continue the pillaging of natural resources? Amish are just cosplayers riding on the successes of an industrial civilization, most of them are capitalists who use technology to create crafts to sell to midwest white middle-class folk as their primary means of sustenance.
Amish attitudes towards technology are so contradictory and flimsy they make fantasy genres like Warhammer 40k look sensible.
Global warming would continue tho even if this happened.
