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Soylent [food replacement] founder Rob Rhinehart shares his thoughts on extreme sustainability.
I am electrically self-reliant. My home life runs comfortably on a single 100W solar panel, which cost $150 and was available on Amazon Prime. I tracked down a few manufacturers in China who all said it costs around $40 to make. The US for some reason leverages massive tariffs on Chinese solar panels, so they ship them through Malaysian customs. Why do the politicians even bother?
For storage a $65 lead acid automobile battery does the trick. It's 12V so can be charged directly from the solar panel, and holds 420Wh, way more than I use in a day. That's $0.15 / Wh so I don't see why everyone is so excited about Tesla charging $0.43 / Wh for the Powerwall, sans inverter and installation.
He got rid of his fridge and other kitchen implements to make it work. What are the biggest energy users in your place? Could you pare things down as much as Rob?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday August 05 2015, @12:59PM
There's also cooking big batches and freezing what you don't want to eat right away.
Prep too. Dump contents into slow cooker, come home to stew, soup, pulled pork, chili, who knows.
I also used to make my own taco seasoning which some people considered insane but its fun to vary the mix to your personal preference, no different than the secret chili recipe attitude. I got out of that hobby because I got a bad chipoltle pepper addiction, like the smokey spicy. I also used to make my own bbq dry rub for chopped chicken and that slow cooks up pretty well. Spending 30 minutes looking for ingredients and measuring and mixing them for one meal is a drag, but spending 31 minutes to make ten batches is no big deal and it divides down to 3 minutes per meal instead of 30. Its also usually hugely cheaper.
If you marinate meat for 10 hours while at work it'll turn into baby food, but you can mix up a homemade fajita marinade the day before, so cooking when you get home is like 5 minutes of work. And I never had a problem freezing citrus marinade so I'd make enough for like six meals at a time, buy a whole bag of limes at a time, etc.
Prep work is a drag. I don't mind cooking homemade applesauce... its the two hours of peeling apple prep work thats no fun. Its worth trying separating prep work from cooking, suddenly cooking is fun.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 05 2015, @01:50PM
Lots of prep work at a time is an excellent tip.
My wife laughed at me when I got one of these [webstaurantstore.com] from Ikea, but it's one of the best kitchen tools I ever bought. It's a must-have for fans of apples. Works on pears too.
Washington DC delenda est.