The resurrection of the genealogy DB (it crashed) has gotten me into the Dark Ages again, and fixing breakfast this morning I got to thinking how rich my ancestors would think I am.
Breakfast: I turn a tap, with a choice of hot or cold water to rinse a dish. I’m annoyed that the hot water takes ten whole minutes to arrive.
Ancestor: go to water jar, break the ice crust (it’s the Little Ice Age) and get some water in a pot, poke up last night’s fire, put on more wood to bring fire (and light) up. Put on wrap and go out back, dust off the snow and haul in 75 lbs of icy wood, which will make a small puddle on the fireside. By now the water is heated.
Me: I puncture two eggs and set them in the egg cooker, more water from the tap. I pop storebought bread into the toaster.
Ancestor: boil water for oats, add oats, boil. This is breakfast. There may be beer to drink. Unboiled water is seasonally not fit to drink, and can make you sick. While oats boil, open flour jar, measure out several handfuls of flour, get culture from small jar kept warm near the fire (a really big luxury: Wat opened a mill down the road, only a 3 mile walk from here), mix up dough, add culture, set in bowl to rise near fire.
Me: having breakfast. Get dressed. Choice of closet.
Ancestor: having breakfast. Dip up more water to boil for washing dishes (not self: baths are sinful. The local priest is agin’ ’em except on holy days.) No need to dress. Slept in clothes. Those get washed when they get muddy. Note to self: the water jar is low. Got to take the jug and fill it at the well, hauling bucket up, loading jar with 50 lbs of water, hauling it home. This is the reason for having kids.
Breakfast with my ancestor Godeswintha: Servant lights candles. Get out of bed, leave servant to arrange bedclothes. Godeswintha also slept in her clothes: it’s warmer. Break the ice on the washing bowl. Wash face. She has the same priest. Ask servant for slippers. Servant brushes and braids her hair.
Go down to hall where servants, up before dawn, since the lady rises at the crack-of, already have the fire going, the water boiled, the oats ready, and maybe have boiled an egg or two. The floor is covered with straw, partly for insulation in the fall. Rugs have not yet come in from the Middle East. The light comes from the fire. Godeswintha has beer for breakfast, since the water, while better, does not taste that good. She gives the day’s orders to Cook, consults with her maid about the linen, hears a report from house staff about a leak in the roof, and intends to spend the afternoon (when light reaches the solar) sitting and sewing her best embroidered sleeves and trim onto a new dress. She will get in about 2 hours good sewing before the light leaves the window. For the rest she will hear servants’ and villagers’ reports and make out a list for market day, which is only once a week.
Godeswintha still didn’t have it as easy as I do. And Godeswintha may taste an orange once or twice in her life, will never taste many spices I have in my cabinet, will have iffy medical care, and will probably die at 25 in childbirth. Her brother Godegund will die in a neighborhood skirmish at 38, repossessing a strayed village cow from a neighbor’s strong-arm guys on the other side of the creek.
Those days of hauling wood in to cook, heat, etc., aren’t that far behind us. When I was still in my single digit years, my mother worked for a seamstress. The seamstress’s mother had a wood cookstove in her kitchen and that’s what they used. They had a well, but I don’t recall if they used an outhouse or not.
I am amazed at the convenience I have. If I want a cup of tea, I pour water from the tap into the electric kettle, let it come to a boil, pour it over a prepared teabag into a mass produced ceramic or glass cup, I sweeten it with sugar, honey, or one of the artificial sweeteners. If I need light, I reach over and flick a switch, if I’m bored, and not reading, I can turn on the “g-d noisy box” (as Jubal Harshaw called it) and hopefully find something educational, not mind-numbing.
If I need to go to my doctor, 50 miles away, I jump into my internal combustion powered automobile, drive on a flat paved highway to get there in an hour or so, and know that my medical care is the best I can get. I don’t have to worry about butchering sheep, goats, hogs, cattle, poultry, I can get it at the market, same with my vegetables and fruits, already packaged and/or processed.
My choice of baths is either soaking in a tub or having a shower. My clothes are cleaned in an automatic washing machine, not beaten on a rock in the river.
One wonders what life will be like in 3009.
My step-grandmother lived on a farm in a small 3 bedroom house that her grandfather built and her father added onto. They had city water but had a working outhouse until about 30 years ago. When the (huge) extended family was there to visit, the boys had to use the outhouse and the adults and girls were able to use the single bathroom in the house.
My step-dad lived slept in the granery when he was growing up, under circumstances similar to what you discribed above.
I lived only once in a house heated by a wood stove, that was a pain.
She had a brush? Most likely a comb. (Yes, I’m nit-picking.)
Although spices would be limited, the variety of food was limited by location. Check Platina (first printed cookbook)for a listing of food stuffs. I wrote a paper for my Renaissance Culture class on the foods available pre-1500. As a bonus, I went through Platina and typed all of the food items available into an Excel spreadsheet and added it as an appendix.
I still remember my parents hauling water from the spring to our summer house in the country. (Garden and tobacco acerage to care for on weekends.) We had electricity and bottled gas for cooking. Radio only. Aunt Ruby had a television up on the hill, but the reception was horrible.
True, re the comb: the ancient Minoans, Romans, and Greeks had them, but the knack seemed to die out for a while.
And don’t forget the broken teeth from inadequate milling -or bits of stone in the ‘flour’, and tooth infections which might if you were lucky -be cured by managing to pull the tooth…and if subsequent infection didn’t get started in the socket.
Also fleas in the stray – and lice.
The reason for having dogs in the mediaeval hall: fleas think they’re warmer. Let them collect most of the fleas and eat the food that drops, not to mention keeping down the deadly (literally) rats and mice. Personally I think they’d have been better off to have cats, but cats would only warn you about burglars, then stand behind you.
When I was about 8, we had wonderful cornbread: a guy had set up a real millstone, and bought local corn and ground it. You did have to eat it with caution: a millstone that’s new sheds gravel, and a millstone that’s due to replace also starts shedding, but oh, the texture and taste! Every cornbread I’ve eaten since has just been cardboard, with few exceptions. It somehow contrived to have more moisture in the meal, and was not uniform in texture. What they sell now as stone-milled has very little in common with that.
So there were some delicious things our forefathers had that we don’t.
I also recall when I was a kid, veggies and fruits were only in their season, and they were far from these perfect frankenfruits now offered. I was seven before I had an orange: my father bought 3 oranges for Christmas, imported for the season, and we had those and some in-the-shell brazil nuts and walnuts and thought it the best treat ever. The nuts and the orange showed up in our Christmas stockings. I will never forget the taste of that first-ever orange.
There were periods where longevity was surprisingly good – provided one survived childhood, and teenage accidents.
Have you read Barbara Hainalt’s ‘The Ties That Bind’?
It is a most interesting analysis of church and coroners records from the period just after the Norman invasion. (I’m a little hazy on the dates as my copy was borrowed by someone who ASSURED me that she was good about returning books…which I now know is always a danger sign!)
the further you go back into records, re longevity, the iffier the precison of birth and death dates gets, and birthdates are the iffiest, because parish records are long lost. If you died spectacularly, or in an otherwise known event, that’s accurate, and that helps you date other people. Women will optimally give birth between 18 and 25, so if you don’t know a person’s birthdate, look to the mother, much more than the father, who can go on siring children for decades, and replacing wives as they die off in childbirth.
But lest you feel overwhelmingly sorry for the women—it was pretty bad—the stats for longevity for young men are pretty awful, too. Dead at 25 is common. Dead at 38. After they reach 50, their chances of surviving go up. So also does their contact with horses, spears, knives, arrows, and draft notices from the duke.
Not forgetting, particularly among the non-great-houses, fire. I did some entries for Ancestry.com for a parish near London in the 1300-1500’s, and the number of times a whole family was buried together is amazing. If it was plague, they tend to write that instead of ‘was buried’. But when you lose a whole household and it wasn’t plague, fire is a good bet.
Lots of people, however, reached their 80’s and 90’s. They had smoke to contend with: smoke was everywhere. Allergies were not a good thing with indoor fires. But people survived. Good old Isabel de Beaumont used to have a husband a year, I swear, but those were dynastic links. And she had a lot of kids.
The big fun in genealogy is not so much who you’re related to, as the things you turn up, the characters you run into: Fulk the Rude, Sven Forkbeard, Charles the Simple, Louis the Stammerer, Charles the Bald, Baldwin the Bald (related), Glumra the Loud, and Hugh Le Bigod.
It took me two years to figure out that Simon de Saint Liz and all his descendants are due to the British habit of spelling what it sounds like: his ancestors come from a place named Senlis (San-LEE) in France. Saint Liz. And Julia de Dampmartin and crew should be Julia de Dammartin (DAM-mar-TAN) (France) again.
Social upheavals are good for erasing records (and the people they record, for that matter). From the looks of the genealogical work done on my Dad’s side of the family, which traces itself to a village south of Mainz near the Rhine, any records older than say, 1620 were destroyed during the Thirty Years’ War, when the battle lines beween Catholic and Protestant forces pushed back and forth over that area. Each time the village was occupied, they burned the church, where everyone’s baptismal records and such were kept. Then again, there’s been a few arguments over that real estate since then, too; perhaps Napoleon’s artillery or a British Lancaster took out the poor building.
Just checked -I had two errors: Author is Barabara Hanawalt, and the title is ‘The Ties that Bound’
The model of social class in a society is also dependent on technology, especially agricultural technology.
If food-producing technology requires that a significant fraction of the population – say 40% – have to be farm workers, just to feed the whole nation, and say another 40% is involved in producing necessities such as clothing, housing, tools, etc. … then there is no way that society can ever be structured so that 80% of the population are not manual workers.
With technology at a pre-modern level, it seems that there are only two possible models for any society. a) a ‘barbarian’ model (I use this term very loosely) where everyone is pretty much on the same social level, except for a handful of leaders, and everyone does manual work to provide for their own basic needs, and b) the ‘civilized’ model, where 80% of the population has a lower standard of living than they would have otherwise, and supports an upper class which has sufficient free time for art, literature, poetry, mathematics, history, etc. – and for inventing technology. Social structures can then also be far more complex.
mmberry, a comb would have been better for picking nits out of their hair. I’m sure that not only fleas, but lice were common on their bodies. Although why the priest would have been against bathing is beyond me, especially when you consider the first sacrament a child would have been given was Baptism, a ceremonial washing away of sin. So, washing after Baptism is now sinful, except on holy days?
Cefwin certainly didn’t seem to mind bathing, nor did Tristen. So, perhaps they were healthier because of it. I’d hate to think of what I’d smell like, and be carrying, if I didn’t bathe for a month.
I’ve read that a lot of times, pioneer women would go into labor while out in the fields. They were pushing plows along, doing heavy manual work, and sometimes, when you’re that far out in the field, the midwife isn’t close enough. Then too, if the baby’s head is too big, or it’s a breech birth, you have more complications. My mother almost died in 1954 from a breech birth in the back seat of my uncle’s car as he was driving us to the hospital. Mom said that the doctor told her he’d lost count of the stitches at 150, and at one point, her blood pressure was undetectable.
Young men were subject to accidents, especially if they were working with animals like cattle, or if they were hurt out in the fields, not to mention the usual wars under the direction of the duke or king.
I am glad we’ve come so far in prolonging our lives, but deplore the fact we’ve also come so far in destroying lives.
The average Roman bathed once a day, or in small towns, at least once every other day (they divided the days or hours by gender). But the thought of all those naked bodies (and the reputation of bath-house misbehaviors) just fried it with the early church fathers, who were very suspicious of cleanliness as too much attention paid to the physical and not enough to the spiritual.
There is the ‘north woods’ approach to cleanliness: when you’re stuck out in the cold north woods and have only icy streams for bathing. If you’re carrying a lot of eau de ‘sweaty horse’, ‘woodsmoke’, ‘honest dirt’ and in icy cold, you’re really not as bad as in the tropics—unless you don’t like horse and woodsmoke.
The photos I’ve seen of early combs wouldn’t touch a nit. They were too widely spaced. I have no idea when brushes were first made or used on human hair.
The story I’ve heard and can’t prove at the moment was that Queen Elizabeth only ever had one bath in her life and that was her baptism.
Lol, I can’t vet queen Liz’s bathing, but doubt it was often.
On the other hand, I used to give an ‘exam’ via slides to my history classes, and two that got everybody were photos of bowls on a pillar, and a thing looking like a hamburger patty of clay, with a lot of holes.
The answer to A) a snake feeder, circa 1200 BC, snakes being the good-luck daimon of houses. (the most common guess was: Plant stand.) and b)a hair brush, same vintage. The pig bristles decay, leaving you with a hamburger patty with holes in it. (The best guess was cheese grater.).
Boy there’s lots of interesting bits here. On cats, evil, bad and linked with witches — conversely, cats are extremely susceptible to bubonic plague and can die wihtin 48 to 72 hours, so they wouldn’t be very effective for that; coyotes interestingly enough can be carriers [which is just trivia since bubonic plague has only been in North America since around 1900].
Combs cut from bone or wood, can be very fine toothed — but I imagine that brushes could be possible just by tying a bunch of reeds together [which Native Americans did], so the archaeological record can have large holes in it.
Bathing is a fun one — years back when I explained bathing habits of a few hundreds ago to husband, he was absolutely appalled. But not bathing isn’t too much of a surprise — if you can’t drink it, I don’t think I’d want to wash in it either. The Celts were big on sweats, and apparently discovered soap as we think of it, and saunas were big in lots of cultures, so getting clean might be a matter of perspective. The other problem with bathing in the Middle Ages is assuming you’ll have clean clothes to put on after. Since most people were given one outfit a year by the lady of the manor, you literally were sewn into your gown for the ladies and your tewes with attached feet and a tunic for the guys and you worn it until it pretty much rotted off of you. There wasn’t anything else to put on. For the upper echelon, you had undies solely to keep your body from touching the nice expensive clothes, which still might be limited in number — remember you have to make lots so each peasant gets a new one next year.
There’s any number of times I’m amazed that the species survived. One added little advantage to agriculture is tooth decay — which usually resulted in monstrous abscesses in the jaw — enough to actual eat the bone away, sometimes to an amazing degree. When you eat milled grains and they become a stable in the diet, it sticks to your teeth — good old placque. We figure that probably 50% of the Native American population died of septic shock from ruptured abcesses in the jaw. Then there’s snakes, spiders, tetnus, the flu [which probably was the basis for most historic plagues], appendictis, getting smashed by large animals, tornados [how did the Indians deal with those!] and all the other lovely things the Weather Channel lets us know about. Wars may not be the half of it.
My parents’ cabin was pretty close to that. They bought it with a cast-iron cookstove, an outhouse, kerosene lamps, an icebox (block went at the top, the drip pan was on the floor underneath) and a 5-gallon milk can for water (the faucet was at the meter, a couple of hundred yards around by the road).
They sold it with a cast-iron cookstove, kerosene lamps, an outhouse, a Servel fridge running on bottled gas, and water piped into the kitchen (cold only).
That was progress.
Our summer cabin was just that — a cabin, built of logs nearly 18″ square after trimming, mortar chinking, a fieldstone fireplace big enough to roast a whole pig in. Everything smelled of smoke, including you after a while. No running water; the obligatory outhouse, drinking water was hauled from a spring a quarter mile away, and if you wanted a bath, you could swim in the nearby pond. Electricity had been added maybe a decade before we took ownership. At least we had lights you could read by after dark, although we were still cooking on the Franklin stove.
After 20 years, progress was indoor plumbing (drilled a well, installed pipes, water heater and a septic tank), and a refrigerator and cooktop. You don’t want to drink the well water straight, though; this is coal country and the vein we tapped is full of bad tastes.
IN 1975 my then husband and I along with our three year old (the Proge) went out to the woods to build a house. We camped for the first six weeks. It was then that I began to realize that what we were doing was not primitive by a long shot. We had a gas pump to pump water into pressure tanks in the house. No electricity,but we had Aladdin lamps which were the equivalent of a 50 wt. bulb. We had gas refrigerator and gas stove. We had a Danish wood stove and a well built house. No tv (one of the best things we did for Proge was to leave the tv behind), but we had radio and tape. We had books and magazines. In many ways it was wonderful (Proge later described it like growing up in Rivendell),but it was time consuming. Cutting wood takes time, pumping water takes time. Heating water for showers takes time. I would not have missed the experience, but I like the now. I can turn off the tv when I want. I love learning about computers. I like my electric kilns and wheels. On the other hand it is nice to know that the world doesn’t stop for lack of a television.
Who was referred to in the quote “Her Majesty bathes once a month whether she needs it or not.”? Or was it apocryphal?
And even as recently as the 1900’s, a “middle class” person had three sets of clothes. One for Sunday-best, then two everyday sets (although one of those apparently was often the previous set of Sunday clothes once they got too dirty/torn/outgrown for Church). Think of that the next time you stand in front of your closet and say “I’ve got nothing to wear!”
And not germane to this discussion, but brought to mind by the discussion of jaw abscesses… a theory being proposed is that Sue (the T Rex) was killed by trichomonosis, a parasite found in birds. It apparently attacks the back of the throat and lower jaw of birds of prey, and eventually causes death by starvation. The holes in Sue’s jaw are suspiciously similar to those found in birds with the disease.
Until 1956 my family lived in a wooden shed used to store corn that had been converted to living quarters when my father was brought back from the war in Papua New Guinea to work his father’s farm. Cast-iron stove in kitchen for heating and cooking. Chip-heater in bathroom for heating bath water – once a week! Water from two thoudand gallon tanks that collected rain water from the roof. Clothes washed in outhouse with a copper boiler for heating the water in two concrete tubs, ringer etc. Outhouse quite a way from the house. My sister and I were ten before we went out at night to use it, otherwise it was a ceramic potty in the bathroom.
Kerosene lamps and candles and then later an Alladin when we got to primary school age I think. Enormous battery radio. When I was about twelve we got battery stored electricity, I was terrified of the wires. Also an army telephone to talk to grandma and grandpa across the road. I hated answering the phone. During one very bad drought we had to get water for the house from the Severn River about three miles away. A 100 gallon tank on a wooden sled pulled by the tractor. We killed our own sheep and grandpa grew vegetables on his side of the road with water froma windmill that pumped water from our side of the road. I never found out why we didn’t had a pipe to our house. The mailman delivered bread from the town 10 miles away twice a week with the mail. We went shopping once a week. See Google Earth long.151°47’32.84″ E lat.29°51’01.61″ S for site of farmhouse. Sold long ago.
OK, so you were outside of Glen Innes, off the New England Highway. I’ve travelled on the buses up that way, but not for many years. Chip heater in the bathroom – that brings back memories. My Grandpa and Nana had one of those as did some of the vacation houses we stayed at up at Blackheath or down at Bundanoon.
Going back to the “wood heat” thing.. There’s a huge difference between the process of using wood now and doing so anytime before about the end of the 2nd world war. It’s simply amazing how efficient modern machinery has become at harvesting and processing wood for firewood (and for lumber/building materials as well). The entire manual labor cost of wood has essentially vanished. Harvesting (meaning cutting trees down and limbing) and processing(cutting into pieces, splitting, etc. for firewood) is all mechanized today, or can be. Very similar to the modernization and mechanization of large scale farming.
As for actually Heating with wood – well, it’s not as simple as turning up a thermostat, with loading stoves, cleaning ash, etc. But, again, Modern stove designs mean much less waste (ash and soot), much higher efficiency (extracting more of the available heat content from the wood used) which means using much less actual wood for the heat needed. It is “point source” heating, and therefore difficult to comfortably heat All the rooms in a normal house, takes a bit of planning.
Wood is also one of the truly “renewable” sources of heat, although you do have the conflict of being “green” – no Oil, coal, Uranium or whatever is used for Heat, but you do have to cut down Trees.. In reality it’s not That “green”, all of the forestry operations do consume fuel, diesel mostly. Harvesting, skidding, hauling the logs (trucking), processing into firewood – all are mechanized fuel using operations.
Still – when you (as I do) live in the middle of miles of hardwood forest, what better source of warmth?
As for actually Heating with wood – well, it’s not as simple as turning up a thermostat, with loading stoves, cleaning ash, etc. But, again, Modern stove designs mean much less waste (ash and soot), much higher efficiency (extracting more of the available heat content from the wood used) which means using much less actual wood for the heat needed. It is “point source” heating, and therefore difficult to comfortably heat All the rooms in a normal house, takes a bit of planning.
Well, actually, nowadays you can easily replace oil with wood chips in a central heating system.
The following site shows an example:
It’s german language, but anyway. The principle is simple: the wood is mechanically converted to chips (1″ to 2″ , 3 to 5 cm in length, visible on one of the pictures). Those are stored and automatically fed into the oven. There’s a tiny fireplace of approx. 120mm (5 inches) in diameter, and the fire is started with a small electric device and hot air. Computer controlled, fully automatic, automatic cleaning, you’ve got to only fill the wood bunker and empty the ash tray every couple days or weeks. In our house, such a system has been in use for several years now, with almost no problems. And the cost for cutting the wood and breaking it down to bits amounts to 250EUR per year or so, for 100 cubic meters of wood chips.
Some stove designs, especially from colder countries, were pretty efficient.
Also, you don’t chop up trees for firewood. That’s a modern invention. You use coppices in 10 to 20 year rotations, and if you do it on a small scale, it’s perfectly green – sheer muscle power. That isn’t possible on a commercial basis, but if you’re managing a hardwood forest, horse power has its advantages.
We now live in an electric house, but we still heat with wood. Living in the forest it makes sense. Existing houses can be difficult to heat with wood, but if they are designed for it, it’s quite easy. And there is something to be said for the psychological comfort of a wood fire.
It’s raining today and boy am I glad that I don’t have to hassle with water or a driveway full of mud or the nearest phone being a mile away!
Well, electricity is the big game changer, of course. Comes under the heading of “any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic”. I’ve forgotten the original source for that quote, but it’s fitting.
Nothing in human history like electric lights, or ANY of the other things that electricity can be contrived to operate. I would argue that even the invention/discovery/application of Fire pales (pun intended) in comparison.
Strange the uses and applications we find for the stuff, at times. I’m living out on a dead end dirt road, far into the “woods”, about as divorced from civilization as it’s possible to get here in the U.S. east of the Mississippi river. New England, subcategory rural. Still have all of the accoutrements of “modern” life, thanks mostly to that wire suspended from poles alongside the road.
For example, apply electricity to the need for communication and you (eventually, and as of today)get Cell phones. And the internet. How did civilization ever Work before this.
Still do have to deal with the fact it’s a Dirt road, even so. Mud season (when the spring thaw occurs) can defeat even the best of modern transportation, if the road is not paved..
“Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke
We have always tended to electrically ‘splurge’ during summers, partially because during the rest of the year, we have habituated ourselves to live at about 65. And having had heatstroke more than once in my youth, I do not tolerate heat well at all. We solar-heat by the simple expedient of opening the curtains, and keep the heater set quite low. The only really heated room is the bathroom and that only for showers.
I’ve dealt with wood stoves in the winter, as sole heat, and it does teach you foresight: bring sufficient wood in before dark, or before the storm hits. 😉
And try to leave the small inhabitants of the woodpile outside…
I do try to remember that every time I flip an electric switch and cook an egg, that I’ve just consumed the energy budget of a small Mesopotamian village.
But I am encouraged by the (belated) proliferation of windmills. Common sense in the southwest. Plus now somebody has figured how to reprocess spent nuclear fuel rods and re-use them, which means greatly, greatly reducing nuclear waste.
I will not be surprised, either, if at some future times, old dump sites are resold to trash-miners.
Yes, the only truly clean source of heat (or Power, for that matter) is the sun. Ultimately that’s true regardless, but only energy from that source can be collected without impact on Some aspect of the environment.
Zero impact if you disregard the construction of a building that is designed to have the maximum capability of doing the collecting. But you were going to build a house anyhow, might as well do it as “solar” as possible.
Passive solar (for Heat, anyhow) is actually simple. Lots of southern exposure, all window (or as much as practical). No shade overhang, or carefully designed to reduce shaded glass area as seasons change and the need for heat increases. Large amounts of heat sink, usually meaning concrete, brick or stone construction. The idea is that you let as much light (solar energy) in as possible and hold/store the heat long enough to warm the space until the next appearance of the sun. Overnight, normally. Works fine as long as the local climate conditions don’t include a lot of overcast days during heating season.
Exactly the opposite of what you would do in a Hot (say, desert southwest) evnvironment, where Shade is what you want and direct sunlight exposure is an anathema.
You also do have to consider the necessity of limiting as much radiational and convective cooling as possible out thru all of that glass. Those sub-zero nights tend to negate all of the energy Gain on a sunny January day.
Still, even here in the northeast it can work effectively. This place is a passive solar example (circa 1948), concrete home. While there is a “normal” oil fired central heating system we heat almost exclusively with wood. Sort of an “open” floor plan (and the entire southern side of the house is glass, ceiling to nearly floor) and two wood stoves (trying to “distribute” the warmth a bit). The total wood consumption for a year ranges between 4 and 6 cords, total oil useage along with that is negligible – less than 50 gallons now for the last four years. Cheap enough.
Wood can cost nearly nothing except my time. That’s IF I choose to do the cutting, splitting and etc. myself, from the property. Quite possible, but the last few years (not getting any younger..) it’s become routine to purchase the wood as “log length” by the truckload, then do just the cutting into chunks and the splitting. With the equipment at hand (chainsaw, splitter, pickup truck) that much of the process is easy. Most of the physically demanding work is involved in felling the trees and limbing. That’s where letting a forestry operation with all of the expensive harvesting machinery deal with it.
A normal “log load” will process into about eight cords of wood, nearly enough for two winters for me. The cost for that log load has been running in the $500 range (in This neck of the woods at least) for the last several years. That’s Cheap, no matter how you value your time investment to acquire that same amount of wood “manually”. Or compared to the amount of oil that would be used to heat the house in the absence of the wood.
Besides the intangible benefits of a wood fire, coziness and etc. The bit of a smell of a fire in the air (outside, thank you) on a chilly fall day. All of that. Just one of the advantages of a rural lifestyle 🙂
Ha! I live in southern California, and the smell of a “bit of a fire” in the air is more likely to cause anxiety than happy thoughts out here.
I do the passive heating/cooling thing. This past summer I’ve only run the AC very occasionally, mainly for a couple of hours at a time at the very end of the day, when the house is just too warm (about 83-85 is where I finally give in, especially if I am cooking). But mostly it’s been open the windows at night, when it’s down to the low 70s or high 60s, shut them in the morning, let the house slowly warm up during the day, lather, rinse, repeat. Now it’s getting too cold to do that. And I admit that this would work much better if I could actually bring myself to close the shutters, so that less heat comes into the house. But I like to look out them and see all the birds and plants, so I don’t.
There’s a story about that… as land for dumps became more scarce, the obvious thing to do was to start sifting through the existing dumps for all the recyclables in them so that you could take those out, recycle them, and fill in the area with actual non-recyclable trash. It was actually just a side-bar in the story, in which the main character came from a family of trash-miners.
As to the entire bathing idea, I have to say that if I only had one (or two) sets of clothes, and the house is cold enough that there is ice on the water jug, jumping into a large tub of water does not seem very appealing, or healthy. Also, I was watching a movie (I think it was “Liam”), about some Irish coal miners, and they did the “one tub of water and take baths sequentially” thing, and that water got filthy fast. So even if you did take a bath, there was no assurance that you would be clean at the end of it.
Oh – 65 degrees would be Chilly. You get used to the warmth of the stoves and find that a thermostat setting of about 70 is fine (in case the furnace should be needed) and that usually the house is 75 degrees or higher with the stoves in use.
You get used to That sort of thing and find that (at least here) running the air conditioning in the summer is a Very occasional need.