[beachy]

Its incredibly satisfying going off-grid. We have an off-grid cabin and its awesome turning up and finding the batteries fully charged and ready to dispense free electricity.

During the summer, rain water, solar power, cooking over a wood fire and walking or cycling to the beach means you can actually live at entirely carbon zero. One of the kids was fascinated by the idea that his iphone had been powered up using on energy from the sun.

Kudos to OP for doing all this in a city apartment!

[hueving]

>means you can actually live at entirely carbon zero

That's not enough. You need to also do something to offset the carbon dioxide that went into manufacturing everything and the transportation for it. Make sure you plant a few hundred trees if you want to be at carbon zero. You also need to plant trees to replace the wood you burn. And you need to offset the CO2 from process of making any food you bring in as well. Otherwise it's an unjustified feel-good exercise to claim you are living at carbon zero.

[unethical_ban]

Actually, one needs to kill oneself (not with fire). Living takes up carbon.

Come on. Acting as if any "carbon positive" living is immoral, is insanity.

[jcoffland]

He said the claim of living carbon neutral was incorrect not immoral.

[st3v3r]

No, they were letting perfect be the enemy of good.

[hueving]

Calling out blatantly incorrect statements is not letting perfect be the enemy of the good. Electricity side effects is such a small percentage of the CO2 from a single person that neutralizing it and claiming carbon zero is ridiculous.

[duaneb]

Why would planting trees not work?

[htns]

It takes decades for those trees to grow to firewood size. In the meantime there will be carbon "in flight". Since the trees will be cut down and burned again, effectively replanting only reduces emissions by some fraction, dependent on the growth time. Burning wood, especially at your cabin, has a high emission rate, so an electric stove might be better, and fairly certainly is if powered by a solar panel.

[duaneb]

Sure. But for some number of trees planted, you WILL eventually displace the carbon.

[amorphid]

Trees die. Decomposing, or burning, gives off all the carbon they soaked up.

[ptaipale]

Cut the trees down, make paper out of it, print government regulations and statistics and reports on it, store these in a vault permanently. You have a carbon sink.

[verbify]

That sounds like it was a submission for shithackernewssays.

[babuskov]

That comment just made my day :)

[jcoffland]

This is not true. Much carbon is left behind after burning or decomposition.

[reitanqild]

This can however take a decades or a few hundres years if not more. Around here they have found logs thousand of years old in the swamps.

[digler999]

> in the swamps

probably because theres not much O2 in the water compared to the atmosphere.

[TheCoelacanth]

It's a bit more complicated than that. The original source for the carbon that humans emit is the atmosphere itself, so overall humans are carbon neutral. And since a human body itself contains carbon, until it has completely decomposed the body itself is carbon negative.

[gregw134]

>kill oneself (not with fire)

lol...that's the funniest thing I've read all month.

[digler999]

> to replace the wood you burn

trees have a lifecycle, and for the time the tree was a live, it was sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. firewood needn't come from a living tree. and cutting some down can leave room and nutrients for others to grow.

[beachy]

Yes, we have a few hundred trees.

Good point about the food though.

[sandworm101]

>> at entirely carbon zero.

Not even close. You're still eating something. Unless that came from a magic farm, fuel was used to generate/transport that food. And to complete the picture, you still have all the external resources provided by a very carbon-hungry society. That includes everything from health and education to military infrastructures ... all of which burn carbon in epic amounts. Carbon zero is an idea, not something that any one person can every accomplish.

[soundsop]

Electricity derived from solar panels and stored in batteries is neither free from cost nor free from carbon emissions. The monetary cost and emission of carbon coincides with the manufacture of the solar panels and batteries rather than the generation and storage of the energy unlike many other technologies.

The costs and emissions of solar-derived electricity may be lower than alternatives but they are most certainly not free.

[beachy]

Yes, I should have said "ignoring the embodied energy of the panels & associated equipment".

This is somewhat justifiable for the panels since they have a 25+ year life.

Less so for the batteries, which have maybe an 8 year life with good care. We try to burn power as much as possible (e.g. running the water pump) when the sun's up, so it doesn't have to pass through the batteries.

[jcoffland]

A lot of carbon goes it to making solar panels.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/solar-energy-isnt-...

[dmoy]

Is burning wood carbon zero? My in-law/relatives in Alaska say it can pollute quite a bit. Though I don't know how that relates to any carbon zero metric.

[kileywm]

Burning wood is not carbon zero. It is the reverse of carbon sequestration in the sense that atmospheric CO2 was once converted to wood by the tree, and now the wood is being burned and the captured carbon release back into the atmosphere.

That could be nearly carbon zero (I don't know the contributions from soil and what mass remains as ashes, etc..), except when you consider the opportunity cost.

That burned tree, presumably healthy just prior, loses the ability to sequester any more carbon. A burned tree puts carbon in the atmosphere AND removes a carbon sequesterer simultaneously. That act is removing X amount of future sequestration until the tree would have naturally died and turned to soil. At that point most of that carbon would still be in solid form and not in the atmosphere.

I'm nitpicking at this point, but I lean toward burning wood as not carbon zero for the sake of opportunity cost.

[maxerickson]

It really only makes sense to measure the carbon capture at the level of the forest. When a tree is cut down or dies, it makes room for other trees to grow. Removing mature trees that are no longer growing very much can increase the rate of capture. Removing trees that are growing quickly and replacing them with smaller trees could reduce the rate of capture.

Either way, there is a limit to how much carbon a given forest will capture (rot releases it just as well as fire) and it will only do it for the life of the forest, which is usually not a geologic time scale.

[JoeAltmaier]

Doesn't that exactly describe a carbon-neutral lifecycle?

[kileywm]

Good point, I really didn't complete my thought. Updating my comment to explain.

[lucaspiller]

Biochar is a potential solution, although the technology isn't there yet (at an industrial scale).

If wood is heated in an oxygen free environment it will turn into a form of charcoal. At the same time it will release gases (like methane) that can be captured and used as a fuel separately.

Rather than burning the charcoal, it is put back into the soil which effectively traps the CO2. This also improves the condition of the soil and reduces the need for fertilisers.

[JoeAltmaier]

I think rotting logs release about the same carbon as burning. Rotting 'burns' the log too.

And much of what we burn is replaced, right? With younger, faster-growing trees.

[yardie]

It's a net zero emission as long as the trees come from a sustainable forest.

[hueving]

Only if the person actually plants a tree for every fire they burn. Even then, that does not offset the ash and other chemicals in the thick smoke ejected into the air that causes huge pollution problems at any scale.

[maxerickson]

A healthy forest plants trees all on its own.

[swsieber]

I'm wondering how forest fires being a natural thing fit into your viewpoint. I don't think that fact entirely negates your point, but it does seem to dampen it at least.

[khedoros]

Trees contain carbon. Burn trees, and they release carbon. New trees end up growing in the ash after it falls and re-capturing carbon. It's a natural, cyclic process.

The problem isn't that humans release carbon or other pollutants (burning trees, coal, oil, etc), it's the scale we do it at, and that we don't automatically re-capture it without doing extra work like planting more trees.

[savanaly]

>Only if the person actually plants a tree for every fire they burn.

But wouldn't a tree be more likely to grow, and in the long run the expected number of trees in a forest be unaffected by the felling of any given tree? (the same can't necessarily be said for the felling of hundreds of trees of course).

[jcoffland]

Not to mention the well documented health issues related to regularly inhaling wood smoke, even in small amounts.

[digler999]

> and other chemicals

you mean "the chemicals" that came from nature in the first place ?

[tertius]

Yes, like plutonium, but we're not going to be dumping that all over the place either.

Cyanide is also "natural" but not great for our health depending on the context. The same for the "chemicals" that, when burned, cause some nasty stuff compared to if it wasn't burned.

* I love burning wood.

[Retric]

Carbon is not the only form of pollution, burning stuff generally puts a lot of nasty crap into the air.

[dmoy]

Wood specifically is like 50% carbon by weight, no?

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Long-term exposure to burning wood for heating and cooking can cause heart and lung disease.[1]

The main air pollutants in wood smoke are particulate matter (PM), carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides and a range of other organic compounds like formaldehyde, benzene and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.[1][2]

Using reverse-cycle refrigerant heating (or 'heat pumps') is probably the least worst polluting method of heating. Modern heat pumps can generate (well, move) four times more heat energy than used to drive the pump[3], with the added benefit of moving the source of pollution away from populated areas, or being carbon neutral via window, solar, hydro, geothermal.

1. http://www.health.nsw.gov.au/environment/factsheets/Pages/wo...

2. https://www.environment.gov.au/resource/wood-heater-particle...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump#Performance_Consider...

[Retric]

Heat pumps only really work well when they have access to fairly warm temperatures. They are kind of worthless in the far north and direct fuel use is significantly more efficient.

If you burn coal for power at 40% efficiency and run a heat pump at 400% efficiency that's only 1.6x heat gain ignoring transportation losses. Drop that heat pump down to 150% efficiency and heating oil can become a better option.

In most areas using solar thermal heaters with backup resistance heating is actually the best overall option. But, in most of Alaska heating oil is much more viable.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Very good points, yes I hadn't thought about much colder areas. I'm at 41 degrees south where heat pumps still work okay.

[theoh]

Aarg, sorry for downvote. Finger slipped.

I think you're right about the cleanness of heat pump systems. Unfortunately they do not have the libertarian freedom flavour of a wood fire.

[daurnimator]

That would imply 50% non-carbon.

[DougWebb]

Most of that is probably water.

[fiatmoney]

"Crap in the air" tends to precipitate. In Alaska, over either an ocean or an area in which no one lives.

[pessimizer]

Burning wood is ultimately carbon neutral, deforestation is the problem.

[reitanqild]

And here we need to be careful: around here there is a major problem with trees filling up what was once farmland.

No problem you may say but it means less local produce and more import, both import of meat as well as animal food.

[pjc50]

Where's that? How productive/marginal was the farmland?

[grecy]

Up in the Yukon and Alaska plenty of people live in off-grid houses/cabins year round. It's amazing to never get a bill for your house - no water, no electricity, no garbage collections, etc. etc.

Friends have a 10kW system which in summer provides plenty of power for a sump pump for water, a big TV, espresso machine, etc. etc. In the winter they have to watch what they use, and they usually run the generator for a couple of hours a week to keep the batteries at a healthy level.

[ChemicalWarfare]

upvoted but also agree with others pointing out that you're far from being 'carbon zero', not that there's anything wrong with it :)