Life at SoftAcres 11/01/18 - Building the Winter Shelter

Today I'd like to make a more technical post. I may have several of these posts focusing exclusively on each of my Five Basics for Modern Human Survival. The usual order is based upon the importance of each to immediate survival. The idea is that you can only survive for a few days without 1. Water, a few weeks without 2. Food, maybe a few months without 3. Shelter (at least in states like Maine where up to five months), and similar amount of time without 4. Heat (or the opposite--mitigating against extreme heat in some regions or seasons), and finally 5. Electricity, being what puts the "modern" in Modern Survival. Relative to the other four basics, survival is of course possible without electricity--as millions of people do get by in such a primitive condition. But, electric power is so much more useful to survival in a world of global communication, as well as one with electrical devices that can save human beings from slavish labor. The washing machine clothes comes to mind.

This was my long way of letting you know that I am not going to post these in order. Specifically, I'm focusing on shelter first, because you may be aware aware that it is my most limiting aspect. 

I have excellent means for harvesting and filtering water. Though I am usually able to buy enough food, I would never starve to death (theoretically) here in the richest nation in human history. Thankfully, the natural environment fed me well over this last summer, with plentifully forageable plants, and a modestly successful growing regime. Heat - until I can build a radiant heating system - is provided very effectively by propane. And, of course even my electricity is nearly adequate for my simple lifestyle. Only shelter has been the question mark. 

Last winter was anomalous, as I was able to rent a cabin from my very generous and supportive neighbors. This year though, I have built what I am quite sure will be able to protect me well enough from the harsh Maine winter. Unlike last year, when I couldn't even afford lumber to make a frame and instead relied on large branches or small trees that I'd cut down, combined with Walmart tarps. Due to not being regularly present on the land, the "shelter" simply ended up being a flimsy way to protect my stuff. As bad as it ended up being (many of my cordless and battery operated tools were encased in 4 inch thick ice, for example), amazingly, nothing valuable was ruined. It is a bullet I don't believe I could dodge for a second winter... Besides I want to prove to myself that I can rough it through a Maine winter.

So the following should give some idea about how the new structure was constructed. Many folks have asked about it. I'm quite happy with the way it turned out. It was a much large challenge to build than I had anticipated; not because I didn't know what I was doing, but because I built it entirely alone, with no power saws. 

I will say that I ran into so many seemingly project-ending puzzles (i.e. how do you span a 10 foot  2 x 4 length roof with a spine 8 feet off the ground without someone to hold one end while you secure the other, while keeping it level and straight?). Still, often after carpet bombing the forest with F-bombs and sometimes reaching impasses that seemed impossible to ford, I came up with some fairly creative solutions, if I don't say so myself. Mostly, it came down to using a tacking method with screws and/or finishing nails that I could later remove the ends of and readjust as needed, finally pounding in some 16 penny nails to hold it for good. Or I would sink the holding nails the rest of the way once things were aligned. Let's take a look...

Hammond Lumber delivered all the way out to my site!

The author coffee-ed up and ready to go.

Building around the tent was not easy.

Hot dog time.

I made a point to ride my bike down and back up the 1/2 mile private, each night after working,

or took it into town and back--trips that took two hours by foot took 20 minutes by motorized bike.

When rain and snow was suddenly the forecast, I left the spaces in between the rafters, 

just to get the tarp, up over and surrounding.

I installed more supporting joists and other wall studs after tarping the structure.

Good enough to keep the rain off! Later, I would disassemble the green house in back to consolidate my storage space, and then I removed the front wind screen that had served as my out door pantry.

The basic structure took two full 12 hour days for me to have ready for a freakishly bizarre mid October snow-wind-rain storm. Unfortunately, since that day, no further outside work has been possible. We went from sunny summer harvest to winter without the normal expanse of fall to cushion the shock. Since that day there has been either continuous rain, hellacious wind gusts (some exceeding 60 mph!), a combination of both kinds of weather, or other activities that were more important to being able to afford to eat--like writing and other income generators. So, I compromised a bit and laid the tarp covers over the frame, before installing more roof trusses and other strengthening studs. If I had done all that before covering the structure, it would have been a big-assed, wet, slushy/muddy mess that would have remained wet within the structure (with no more warm days to dry it out). 

A DIGRESSION INTO THERMODYNAMICS

It has always been my hypothesis that the ability to retain heat has less to do with insulating, and more to do with stopping air flow. Air flow under 40 degrees Fahrenheit sets up a catalyst, where micro-evaporation sucks energy out of the air. Heat is simply radiant energy (inferred light, in fact). It is sapped from humid air just like with air conditioning. Except, unlike A/C, the air never gets drier, since it is fed by the outdoors. That is why there are "wind chills" that make us "feel" colder than the surrounding ambient temperature. Cut out the air flow, and you can reverse the process by heating from within. The mostly sealed inside environment then dries slightly as the objects around the heat source literally begin storing excess heat on their own. 

I should mention though that since I'd be using propane to heat and cook with, the risk of carbon monoxide buildup needed to be factored in. Knowing that CO sinks to the floor, I left noticeably present air vents at the corners of the inner tent. On my first night using the heater (which is technically safe to run indoors, as it is exhaustless), and even with the openings allowing floor level circulation with outside air, the inside of the tent easily reached 70 degrees F within 10 minutes while the temperature outside was 30. And it took nearly a half hour after shutting off the heater to coast back to just under 50. That is a good ratio. It means (at least with the known variables I've just accounted for), that for every hour of heater use allows five hours of relative warmth. The trick is to immediately turn off the heater at 70 and get used to the dropping temperature enough to not be tempted into turning the damn thing back on prematurely. A furnace would do this automatically, via thermostat. In my tent I am the thermostat. 

Folks interested in thermodynamics, could have a ball analyzing how various factors affect the differentials of heat gain and loss. For example, it took reading at three different levels (6 feet, 3 feet, and floor level). It confirmed with a fairly high degree of accuracy that there is a rough range of about 15-20 degrees between ceiling and floor. Heat to 70 degrees at the ceiling, sit at a 60 degree desk, with thick socks resting on the 50 degree floor. Average temperature = 70 + 60 + 50 divided by 3 ~ 60. While this formula seems obvious, the mean (which in this case is also 60) is not always also the average. If one were to graph different scenarios, integrals describing the combined functions of multilevel temperature gains and losses can be fascinating from a scientific stand point. My life is going to be too short to study these in detail, me thinks. I just want be warm. But my German brain can't help being fascinated by za numbuws, herr reader. There are so many variables that can be adjusted, that an entire paper could be written just about how structure affects the behavior of energy at that one 30 degree example.

So, just one tarp layer, sealed at the top, that allows for ventilation at floor level goes some way toward stabilizing the system. The other experiment I dreamed up was a bit more outside the box. Surely, if one tarp layer was fairly effective, two (one on the outside of the shelter's frame and one on the inside (at a parallel plane) must be even better. Then while lying in bed mentally planning the inner layer, it occurred to me that when the snow melted I should try stuffing the spaces in between these two tarp layers with clean dry leaves, as I mentioned. I did exactly that. I had no idea if there would be issues I could anticipate. But I tested the lower angled part of the shelter by stuffing it first. It took fifty 30 gallon tote trips (!) just to fill it--a lot more effort than I thought. However, the result was extremely good. As I've been able to work on reinforcing the inner parts of the structure, I am filling them with anything I can for insulation. But I'm running out of time. The sky dumped a second storm's worth of 3 inches of wet heavy snow last night (I write this from over a month in the future).

I will have a follow up post showing just how well the shelter is doing now, after more snow, and an unreal number of extreme wind events. One major wind storm (I'd call it more like a tempest!) slammed the little house with 60 mph gusts, and sustained wind speeds of over 30 mph. The rounded edges where the tarp is pulled over sharp areas helps tremendously. It is like a kind of shrink wrapping. Still, that first major storm? I was genuinely frightened, and it takes an enormously dangerous situation to actually scare me. Now I trust my construction, but I have to admit to saying my prayers a few times in the last two weeks!

Thanks again so much for reading and donating your monetary and moral support.

LOVE!