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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

Living in the Yukon we sometimes talk about what would happen to most "city folk" if their world fell apart with no supermarket and electricity.

Most of us hunt our own meat, grow our own vegetables, build our own cabins and get our own firewood. Tons of people up here are already living entirely off-grid.

We all agree, our biggest problem would be lack of gasoline to run chainsaws, and none of us really has a solution to that. Cutting firewood by hand would be doable, though it would be a full time job to get enough for the winter. A decent size house will burn through roughly 10 cords in a single winter.

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On the flip side, things like this[1] play out in severely rural areas. It always annoys me when people in rural areas paint a picture of how much "better" it is to be living there.

[1]: https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/when-a-woman-is-raped...

That story is not at all representative of the rural US in general.

Rural Alaska is a very, very different place with a different population and a different culture where survival and resources are a real, daily concern.

Most of the rural US has easy access to running water (parts of the West may be an exception) via a well, and real law enforcement is plentiful. Which is not to say county sheriffs aren't mostly crooked, but it's generally a genteel crookedness as opposed to "yeah rape is OK" crookedness.

lol. Really? People really think this is common? I just don't know what to say. It's not like that at all.

Look, generally speaking, people are decent and have morals. The vast majority do. Shocker I know, but it's true. Most people aren't racist, homophobe, rapist assholes. Doesn't matter where they live.

Sorry, but the parents post still has legs. Given a percentage of the population are in fact rapist assoholes and the fact that rural areas are naturally more private with more opportunity for occurrences, I will suggest there's good reason to believe there are very likely more occurrences of rapes that have a increased percentage of unreported incidents, which I will attribute to and increase in shame/fear (hard to be anonymous is a town of 600 people) and a lack of resources/convienance (multiple calls with no action and no rapekits on hand).

Seriously, from age 16 to 30 all I dreamed about was getting away from the city and moving into a rural cabin. Then I did and learned the truth. These days I'd sooner gouge my eyeballs out with a spoon.

> People really think this is common?

Rape and sexual violence are pretty common.

You might want to find a trustworthy source of numbers. Here's one for England and Wales: http://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandj...

I was talking about it being significantly more common in rural areas.

City folk here. I may not fit your mold because I grew up on a dirt road in rural Maine, but I think you might find the Yukon got a whole lot more crowded. I can do all those things too, just not here. I'd make my way north. I can't imagine I'd be the only one.

Why? You'd need less than 10 cords per winter as you moved further South.

How about dealing with mosquitoes/flies? I've talked to people who know what it's like living on the land in Siberia (ie. like the Yukon - permafrost and swamps) and it's a life threatening issue. You can't have any skin exposed so traditional methods of dealing with it involve things like greasing your face and using natural repelants. Again.. doable but very unpleasant and it makes it very difficult to do things in the summer.

A friend from Sweden told me that they have a family (regional?) tradition: Get out in shorts and a shirt only at a specific time of the year (not too many mosquitoes yet or when they are very young?) to get bitten as often as possible as a measure of immunization for the rest of the year.

I think the real threat are the flies. The ones that take a chunk of flesh out of you when they bite and hurt like a bitch

That's...a lot of wood. This is all hardwood, seasonsed for a year? How large a piece of property would you need to sustainably re-grow that much wood indefinitely (wood growth rates in the Yukon are slower than in more temperate regions)?

What is the R-value and ACH [1] airtightness at 50 PA of such a house? I've been researching using two feet thickness of Pittsburgh Corning FOAMGLAS with an airtight building envelope that conforms to PassivHaus airtightness standards, and comparing the capital outlay of that with the anticipated opex cost savings. But I live in a far more mild climate than the Yukon, so my payoff period is measured in many decades.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_changes_per_hour

No hardwood this far north, it's all pine.

Also, trees are small and take years and years to grow. I have no idea how much land you'd need to make that sustainable, but it would be absolutely huge! I'm thinking hundreds of acres.

Ten cord of pine in a winter must mean you have things buttoned up and insulated pretty well.

I grew up in Maine, and it's pretty common to go through 8-12 cord of rock maple, beech and ash in a winter. A lot more BTUs in that than pine, but a lot of houses are drafty old farmhouses... We only used pine in the fall and spring when we needed a quick fire to drive out the cold in the morning and heat up the hot water.

Burning pine, unless chimney brushes were part of your kit, the sustainability of the forest won't be an issue -- you'll torch the house quickly.

Yep, chimney fires are a very real concern. A couple of houses burn down every year because of them. We sweep ours once a month, there usually isn't much build up.

> 10 cords in a single winter

what's the interior temperature at that rate? Surely you can do with less if you can live with a lower temperature...

It depends if you have a new wood stove with a catalytic combustor and good thermostate or not. Usually we keep it around 18C (pretty low).

When it's past -40C outside, I jam six of the biggest logs that will fit through the door of the woodstove in every ~6 hours. I even set my alarm for the middle of the night, otherwise it will be too cold in the morning.

My grandparents' old house (~100 years old) has two rooms - an entrance/storage with a stove for cooking and a living room.

The living room has the heater - a very interesting contraption, it's basically a stove that heats up the whole wall and a small bed, no smoke/heat is wasted.

Well in -20 degrees winters, water freezes near the windows (single glass) and entrance door. Inside it's about 15 degrees tops, but since you can sit on the heated bed, it's pretty livable (tho not by modern standards I guess).

My grandmother still prefers it over the bigger new house.

My main point is that in a catastrophic scenario, you can definitely do with a lower interior temp, even 10 degrees...

Would it be important to make the house more fuel-efficient? Super-insulating might return 10X the sweat investment. Also living in tight quarters - heat half the houses. But I don't see independent Yukonites doing that. (Yukonians? Yukonoids?)

Insulation is already big up here. Keep in mind when I say winter, I mean November->March where the high for the day won't be more than -35C, and the low is -40C.

Many Yukoners would have to band together. Newer homes in downtown are electric heat only, they always start to really worry when the power is out for more than a couple of hours in winter (happens all the time)

There is a German housing technology called "vacuum house" where instead of heavy insulation you build an airgap with a pump, creating low air pressure. Windows need to be shut and you need double doors (like an airlock) to avoid heat loss. Obviously it needs central airflow with heat exchanger as well. This creates a house that only needs the power for the pump and the heat exchanger instead of heating / cooling. Body warmth and cooking is enough to make up for the loss you have in winter. The little power you need can be created with Solar cells on the roof.

To me it seems like the future - if there's a drawback I don't really see it. Mass produced such a house minus the solar cells shouldn't be much more expensive than your average American house with air conditioning. The whole structure can be very light, so earthquakes shouldn't be an issue either.

Why arent't we all building this? Is there some problem I'm missing? Is energy simply too cheap to bother?

Thank you for bring this technology up. I wasn't familiar with it, but now I'm going to research how it works. I have a lot of questions about how it works in practice (structural considerations, materials, cost, etc.), but conceptually it makes sense.

Useful for extra-planetary construction, too, though I would be surprised if the idea isn't already used to some extent.

most of the plants and things were thing of building on don't have atmospheres, so most of the heat loss is radiative? I don't think an airless gap would do much to reduce it.

With that kind of growing season, what do you eat through the winter?

Do you keep a giant pantry full of pickled vegetables? Is it meat and bread only?

Lots of meat and salmon in the winter, and any vegetables you canned. Also stuff like potatoes, onions, carrots keep great if you just keep them dry.

Of course, there are supermarkets too :)

Have multiple families in each house in the winter to minimize wood cutting?

Do you think that in a situation like that, people would live together in communal buildings to minimize the amount of wood needed during the winter?

Couldn't you keep a large fuel tank on your property? Or are you worried this would attract looters? Maybe you could bury it.

Gasoline is inherently unstable and turns into a gummy, plastic-like substance after only a few months. Although there are off-the-shelf fuel stabilizer additives available, the max lifetime is only around 2 years.

Diesel fuel is subject to the same problems without special additives and precautions.

Surprising how many people don't know this. All those "everyone will be killing for gas" posts are ridiculous since gasoline will expire a few months after a global catastrophe.

Are there viable fuels that don't degrade like this?

Propane and isobutane seem to last well over 5-7 years (particularly if in unopened canisters), and anecdote suggests they will keep for over a decade. The limiting factor is how leaky the canisters and particularly valves are, given that they're gaseous and not liquid.

Ethanol (or Methanol) can be stored for a long time. (If you want to drink it, it even gets more expensive the older it is...)

Fuel goes bad when you don't use it, and that setup sounds expensive!

Convert them to run on ethanol? Or biodiesel?

Pretty sure biodiesel isn't a reasonable option - the extra bulk and mass to make a safe diesel-style engine would make a chainsaw unbearably heavy. Plus you'd have wicked problems with fuel gelling in cold weather.

Alcohol is possible - but it'd probably be a considerable overhaul. Most stock saws really don't want to run on gasoline that has any ethanol mixed in, although you can use E10 if you have to. And really you should be using at least 89 octane, if not the 91 high-grade stuff.

Chainsaws are also all pretty much two-stroke, so you'd have to keep a stock of the mix-in oil, or you're going to destroy your crankcase and pistons. Also, unless you want to burn up your saw bar and chain, as its whirling around at thousands of RPM, you need to have a good stock of either actual bar and chain oil, or, in a pinch, regular 20/30 wt engine oil.

Also biodeiesel is unusable in the winter. It freezes (waxes) long before regular diesel, which is around -30C or -35C. Diesels up here in the winter are trouble.

Pro tip: don't get sick!

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