[IlliOnato]

I read the whole article with sympathetic interest, until the conclusion:

> One way to solve the problem of high power devices is simply not to use them -- this is the approach that's followed in sailboats, motorhomes and caravans

> Obviously, this strategy implies a change in our way of life. It would mean that electricity is used only for lighting, electronics and refrigeration, while non-electric alternatives are chosen for all other appliances. Not coincidentally, this is quite similar to how DC grids were operated in the late nineteenth century, when the only electric load was for lighting -- first arc lamps and later incandescent bulbs.

> Thus, no dishwasher, but doing the dishes by hand. No washing machine, but doing the laundry in a laundromat or with a manually operated machine. No tumble dryer, but a clothes line. No convenient and time-saving kitchen appliances like electric kettles, microwaves and coffee machines, but a traditional cooking stove operated by (bio)gas, a solar cooker, or a rocket stove. No vacuum cleaner, but a broom and a carpet-beater. No freezer, but fresh ingredients. No electric warm water boiler, but a solar boiler and a small wash at the sink if the sun doesn't shine. No electric car, but a bicycle.

[function_seven]

I get unreasonably angry when Victorian cosplayers think they've found the solution to our wasteful modern life. Simply eschew modern conveniences and spend hours each week beating your clothes against a rock!

Simple, instead of grocery shopping twice a month, ditch that wasteful freezer and walk to the farmers' market down the block before dinner each night.

Was it cloudy yesterday? Simple!, take a whore-bath¹ at the sink and be thankful your meetings are on Zoom these days :)

Ok, ok, those are caricatures of the final paragraphs, but that's what I hear when the word "simple" is abused that way.

[¹] Or, "PTA", which isn't much nicer. Any ideas on what to call this that's less vulgar, but still derisive?

[hutzlibu]

"Simply eschew modern conveniences and spend hours each week beating your clothes against a rock"

My question is, if those people actually tried that by themself before suggesting it, or if they just picture the women doing it somewhere.

I mean in this specific instance I can imagine they tried. And I did too, while off grid. It gives you a special connection to your clothes. But suggesting this as a general way of life is a bit offworlds.

[ip26]

I think if you read lowtechmag much it's fairly clear they are true believers and probably have done a fair amount of washing clothes the hard way. They aren't simply armchair philosophers.

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/10/mist-showers-susta...

[hutzlibu]

I know: "I mean in this specific instance I can imagine they tried"

But the person I was answering to, was speaking more broadly of people proposing "awesome simple solutions". Who in my experience seldom lived their solutions.

[hippari]

I grew up doing all of those by hands, with the exception of washing machine, I still do all of those chores by hands now.

And I'm still only in early 20s, not some old dudes.

We debloating our computers all the time, so what's wrong with debloating our houses, and our life ?

[radus]

Doing more manual chores is the opposite of debloating IMO.

[temporallobe]

Absolutely nothing wrong with that (I grew up hanging clothes on a line and using gas stoves, for example), but suggesting these kind of regressions as a drop-in solution to our modern lives is misguided.

[kwhitefoot]

> instead of grocery shopping twice a month, ditch that wasteful freezer and walk to the farmers' market

Middle class Victorians, in England at least, had things delivered. I imagine that quite a lot of cosplay characters are middle class.

In fact food delivered to homes of all types was a normal feature of life in England when I was a child in the 50s and 60s. Milk, eggs, etc., every weekday morning delivered directly to the door before breakfast, grocery van came to the street once a week, bread van twice, another van came a bit less often selling lemonade and other drinks.

Of course these services were not universally available, we were lucky to live in a moderately affluent town with a prosperous working class.

We didn't have a freezer until 1966 and I'm not sure that we suffered from the lack. But once everyone had both a freezer and a car those services became unprofitable and eventually disappeared.

[brobdingnagians]

> Of course these services were not universally available, we were lucky to live in a moderately affluent town with a prosperous working class.

I think that's key. The wealthy live well enough in pretty much any society. It is the poor who often have the greatest to gain (and lose, when mis-applied) from technological innovations and from having them become widespread.

[bluGill]

My grandma didn't have a drivers license. She had to use those trucks to get food, or wait for grandpa to get home to go to the store. Those trucks were a real life saver for her. Today women drivers are not a rare exception.

[tootie]

It's frequently much more energy intensive too. Cars are a lot more efficient than horses and dishwashers are more efficient than hand washing.

[pleb_nz]

I read somewhere modern people spend the same amount of time doing chores as someone before electricity. It wouldn't surprise me if it were that far off the truth. We own so much more and are told we need things when in reality maybe we don't?

[DetroitThrow]

Absolutely untrue. My mother's life was changed significantly for the better when she got her first washer and dryer. She actually had more time for herself and for working a part time job.

[adrianN]

I definitely don't spend as much time doing chores as my grandma used to do before she had electricity. Recall that not too long ago "sewing your own clothes" also was a chore you had to do, and washing clothes took a whole day. Modern appliances made it possible for women to join the workforce because they freed up so much time.

[harry8]

Yeah was a really, really interesting social change. From the point of view of the middle class (~10% of the population of the wealthier nations?) when the appliances came in the station of women of that class went backwards. Servants became expensive and women who, post-childbirth had high-status and important roles running charities, political parties and such no longer had enough time for it. The suffragettes now had to do the work (assisted by appliance) of the house as well as run it.

Not many of us would reverse the changes that came with widespread home appliance availability and adoption on either a personal or societal level but every significant change comes at a cost to someone to whom you might well be sympathetic is something worth remembering when looking forward.

[ClumsyPilot]

Have your ever seen what it's like to wash clothes by hand? It's like a 3 hour hour process. Its arduous, tedious, and keeoing the house in order used to be a full-time job

Washing machine has done more to liberate women than all political efforts combined.

[tootie]

I think the distinction is we have 50X more clothing to wash. And it's partly because washing is so easy. I have a family of four and spend a lot of time folding clean clothes.

[ClumsyPilot]

I am not sure how this works. Even if you have a million pairs of pants, you only wear, and hence need to wash, one at a time.

My grandma really spent a lot of time washing clothes, so i dont think this is a significant factor

[Tade0]

My grandmother(aged 92) still washes by hand - both the clothes and dishes.

It takes a considerable amount of time.

And before anyone asks she raised five children like that and I'm not the one to try to convince someone who on top of that lived through WWII to change anything in their life.

[stjohnswarts]

Trust me it's not true. I grew up poor and we did lots of things by hand that would take hours more per week than all the automated stuff of today lol. I'm not going back willingly...

[psiconaut]

You might be referring to some of the studies associated with the "original affluent society" proposal. To think that all basic needs can be covered by a 3-5 hours of work a day is quite shocking for a judeo-christian that has been indoctrinated in the "work as a curse" tale.

For sure it all depends on how you define "basic needs", and how do you divide "work time" from "leisure time".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society#%22W...

At some moment I've heard of more recent studies about the myth of the increase in leisure time, but I don't manage to find any good reference now. In any case, I suspect Graeber had a point.

[bluGill]

There are two variables, time and cleaning standards. People clean to a higher standard with modern tools in general (in general, but not in all specifics).

My grandma took a bath/shower once a week - she grew up when a bath meant bringing water in from outside by hand, heating it on a fire, and then you had to bring it back outside to dump it - I sometimes shower twice a day, and I still use less effort over a week to get clean than my grandma did back in the day.

[throwaway0a5e]

An hour of labor with modern tech is far more productive than an hour of labor with 1890 tech. The modern person can perform far more work in the same time or the same work in less time. Even if you split the difference the net result when applied to chores is a much cleaner household.

[tsjq]

I came across a similar line in a Podcast 3-4 years ago. I was baffled at that line, same as the reply commenters here. it was Hidden Brain or Planet Money or Freakonomics. They didn't elaborate on that. & I forgot to dig into it

[nielsbot]

Can you explain how dish washers are more efficient than hand washing? Is it about water use? What if you don’t run the water while you soap your dishes and only rinse them in a rinse tub?

[spijdar]

I haven't watched this video in a while so apologies if it's not specifically elaborated on, but I believe it's covered here: https://youtu.be/_rBO8neWw04

From memory yes, it's partially about water usage, but dishwashers are in general just pretty good overall about efficiently using energy to maximize "food grime removed" per unit of resources fed in. Even if you're careful with water usage while hand washing, I think a decent dishwasher will beat you.

Another advantage is the dishwasher heats its own water, whereas with hand washing either you need to use a house-wide water heater or preheat water in a kettle or something, which will have its own energy wastes. This of course depends also on how your house's water is heated.

One page I found googling elaborates on these ideas, concluding that you could potentially be more efficient hand washing, but only with a lot of effort: https://www.treehugger.com/built-in-dishwashers-vs-hand-wash...

[Ichthypresbyter]

>Even if you're careful with water usage while hand washing, I think a decent dishwasher will beat you.

I once ran the dishwasher with the outlet hose in a bucket because the drain pump was on its way out. I expected to have to empty it several times, but at the end of the cycle there was less water in it than I would use to fill a washing-up bowl to do the dishes by hand (and the amount of dishes it cleaned might have required more than one bowl).

[hoseja]

And it's disgusting and water where I live is cheap and plentiful. Hate water austerity imposed on everyone because of megacities and people living where people shouldn't live.

[lovemenot]

Large human population is an issue. But if you accept that as a premise, Megacities are more efficient in terms of resource usage than equally-sized but geographically dispersed populations.

As for water usage, think first of agriculture, then industry. Only after that do cities come into play. Cities are relatively small water consumers.

[bluGill]

IF this was about water I agree with you. However it isn't actually about water it is about water heating. Hot water cleans better than cold, but it takes energy to heat water and that affects everyone (global warming). Thus less water is better.

There are also some water pumping and treatment costs (more energy), but they can be ignored as insignificant.

[nielsbot]

Thanks. I read the treehugger link—pretty convincing overall. Not sure why my question was downvoted tho. (Not accusing you)

[spijdar]

I didn't downvote -- it's fair to be skeptical that a machine that spends hours making loud whirring noises would be more efficient than just scrubbing some dishes in the sink. And I don't want to careful about making unequivocal statements like "dishwashers are always more efficient", I've just heard some convincing reasons why dishwashers in particular are pretty cool and (unintuitively) efficient.

[hutzlibu]

In my observation unfair downvotes come, when people are angry at something and looking at anything that looks like a scapegoat to direct that anger, which can be anyone not expressing the same mindset they have. Which was you by asking that question that apparently was enough to mentally puts you in the "stupid treehugger camp". I would not worry about it too much and try to not take it personal.

Their rational explanation is probably "how you can be so stupid for not knowing that common knowledge".

And well, even though I am indeed a treehugger, I also knew about the efficency of dishwashers before and also assumed it to be common knowledge, but I would never downvote someone because of a genuine question adding to the conversation.

[hippari]

You have to heat water to wash your dishes ? What kind of gravy sauce are you cooking in your pot.

[throw0101a]

> Is it about water use? What if you don’t run the water while you soap your dishes and only rinse them in a rinse tub?

Yes: if your dishwasher has the Energy Star rating then it must use ≤15L of water using the normal cycle per the EPA. This is half the volume of a small sink and a one-third or less of larger ones.

Most people run the water. In the US the average flow rate of a kitchen faucet is 8 L/min (2.2 gpm), so you can quickly use up 15L even just rinsing.

[bluGill]

Most people use as much water rinsing their dishes to almost clean before putting them in the dishwasher.

[throwaway0a5e]

Very few people are running the faucet anywhere near full blast when dish-washing.

My faucet is very slow, about ~1gpm (I timed it once upon a time because I wanted to be able to put a number to how slow it is). When hand washing I run at maybe 1/4 or less of that. Everyone else in my household runs it at less.

[AngryData]

Dish washers do reuse the same water far more than most humans would because it looks like you are washing dishes with filth. Most usually only run 3 small batches of water through them I believe. Not sure if it actually makes them more resource efficient versus mindful hand washing, but I wouldn't consider them inefficient at all.

[JohnWhigham]

If you're careful about water usage and use cold water, you'll always beat a dishwasher. Another thing people often forget about dishwashers: you're supposed to pre-scrub the hard shit off the dishes. Well, you just did half the mechanical work yourself, why not finish it?

I think part of it can also be (at least for me) upbringing. We always handwashed our dishes, and only used the dishwasher a couple times per year for big events.

[dijit]

I grew up handwashing too but I disagree with your assertion.

Firstly, you can't wash with cold water because soap doesn't activate with cold water, hot water also kills bacteria and helps cut through grease.

Fats themselves are hydrophobic and without activated soap you wont get them off... enjoy your "filmy" dishes.

Second, humans expend a lot more energy than you think. The act of standing and using our arms releases varying amounts depending on physical fitness but averages somewhere in the 1kg/h ballpark. https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jjphysiol/50/2/50_2_199...

Dishwashers use about 1800 Watts and are commonly run for 30 minutes, the average co2 in the USA is 0.92lbs per kWh.

Meaning it's _basically_ the same.

Then there's the freshwater usage, which is the real kicker, because dishwashers use significantly less freshwater, and freshwater filtering is the largest environmental impact of washing dishes (not the direct co2 output).

[JohnWhigham]

you can't wash with cold water because soap doesn't activate with cold water

Bunch of pseudoscience. I've never noticed any difference between washing with cold or not.

hot water also kills bacteria

Ultimately doesn't matter because they're all being washed away by the soap molecules anyway.

The act of standing and using our arms releases...

Lol, are you seriously trying to reason that what little energy you burn is more than a dishwasher?

[ClumsyPilot]

That energy use is likely an overestimate - thats mostky the heating element and it doesnt run the entire washing cycle or the water would boil

[jamincan]

Humans are expending energy regardless of whether they're washing dishes or not. The question is how much extra energy they expend when washing dishes over whatever they might do otherwise.

[readflaggedcomm]

>you can't wash with cold water because soap doesn't activate with cold water

That may be true for most laundry detergents, which have to pull grime out of fabrics, but not simple dish soap. Just look at how well Dawn works to take oil off concrete, for example. Nobody's heating that up.

[hippari]

Human body will have to expense energy regardless whether you do it with house chores, or going to the gym, or a walk in the park.

[sokoloff]

> Another thing people often forget about dishwashers: you're supposed to pre-scrub the hard shit off the dishes.

Once you’ve removed the bones and massive solids, the modern dishwasher can do an astounding job on the rest. Put a little detergent in the prewash (or on a Bosch, just in the tub) and let the machine do the work. (I also grew up washing dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. It’s almost never needed now, but old habits die hard.)

[maxerickson]

Modern dishwashers encourage you to do nothing more than scrape off any leftover food, there's not "you are supposed to scrub".

(essentially, the instructions are to remove the same things from the dishes you would remove if hand washing them in a sink with no disposal...)

[da_big_ghey]

These are dishwasher about 20 years ago not modern. Modern dishwashers are so "efficient" that they are not really removing much. Often I am finding dished come back out also dirty after, so now I spend more water and time on a hand wash again.

[el_oni]

> Any ideas on what to call this that's less vulgar, but still derisive?

I like bird bath for this.

I agree with your overall sentiment, I do also aknowledge that we (as a society) are very wasteful with resources. I would like to see some form of incentive for using less power and producing less waste.

My energy provider during the first lockdown actually paid us to use electricity because it was being produced at renerwable plants and would otherwise go unused. We set our washing machine to start during the period they would pay us and did our morning routine a few hours earlier. That small incentive was enough to change our behavior

[throw0101a]

> [¹] Or, "PTA", which isn't much nicer. Any ideas on what to call this that's less vulgar, but still derisive?

Sponge bath?

> 1. A quick sponge bath by hand, using a wet washcloth or a pre-moistened towelette, to extend the interval between showers or clean up after casual sexual intercourse.

* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/whore_bath

* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sponge_bath

[starfallg]

> Simple, instead of grocery shopping twice a month, ditch that wasteful freezer and walk to the farmers' market down the block before dinner each night.

This might be a positive though. Having moved to the UK years ago, the average trip to the supermarket is for around a few days of food, a week at most here. The supermarket is 7 minutes by foot or a 4 by car. It means we buy a lot more fresh items, and this is natural due to the limited amount of freezer space we have (60/40 fridge and no chest freezer in our house). It's arguably better than the experience I had back in Canada plus for the same quality of food, it's much cheaper over here.

So it isn't exactly the same as the olden days with wet markets and whatnot, but it's much closer to it (they even have manned meat, fish and deli counters at our local).

[dspillett]

> whore-bath at the sink / Or, “PTA", which isn't much nicer. Any ideas on what to call this that's less vulgar, but still derisive?

Not particularly derisive, but I've always called it a “pits & bits” wash. I've heard it called a “got lucky rinse” too, presumably a variant on the whore-bath.

[nine_k]

Simplicity is not a synonym of ease; very often it's an opposite.

Making something both simple and easy is a highly sought art.

[HideousKojima]

Pirate bath/shower is what I've heard them called: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pirate%20bat...

[hippari]

Victorian ? Where I'm living that's what most people do ( well except for the washing machine ).

I think the same applied for the majority of population in underdeveloped / developing countries.

[darkerside]

Getting unreasonably angry is usually a pretty good sign that you're trying to distract yourself from a good point that was made

[darkerside]

Not trolling. If the response were, "_simply_ throw a small child into the nearest wishing well", you wouldn't be angry. It's only because there is truth therein that you are upset.

[Karrot_Kream]

Low Tech Magazine always writes like this. They always offer some idea which seems interesting on its surface but leaves gaps. They then end the article explaining away the gap with a moral polemic about how we need to change our ways and return to an older way of life. These days I just take the magazine for what it is; a medium containing interesting ideas but overall disingenuous and often impractical.

(Though I do think that Americans uses clothes dryers _much_ more than they should. Most other G20 countries do not. In our household we hang dry any load of laundry that doesn't involve our heavy blankets, and that usually ends up extending the life of our laundry as well, while taking just a few additional minutes. (See, "often impractical" not "always impractical").)

[SilverRed]

Not always using a clothes dryer is fine and good advice. But not using an electric kettle and replacing it with heating water on a gas stove is so beyond absurd I'm shocked how they even came to this conclusion since gas stoves are less efficient and much worse for the environment than a kettle.

And a kettle is so low impact anyway. It uses a high amount of power for a very short time and spends almost all of its life turned off. The faster you heat the water the less waste there is as it cools during the heat process.

[citrin_ru]

> since gas stoves are less efficient and much worse for the environment than a kettle.

It is not obvious at all and requires calculations.

When you use electric kettle you use energy which was obtained mostly from coal and gas (60% of it in the US) and efficiency of the conversion is less than about 40% on average (limited by efficiency of a steam turbine). Then about 8% of this power is lost during transportation/distribution.

When gas is burned in a gas stove 100% of its energy converted to heat. The only problem - some fraction of this energy heats a room instead of a kettle. But it is not bad if you had to heat room anyway (where I live 8-10 months out of 12 I'd prefer indoor temperature to be higher then it is).

I expect this loss to be smaller than 50%, but I've not found credible numbers for this.

Efficiency for an oven may be low because it measurably heats a kitchen, but ovens is another story.

[eldaisfish]

>It is not obvious at all and requires calculations.

Heating water in a domestic setting on a gas stove is incredibly inefficient and you don't even need a calculator to know why - put your hand adjacent to the stove and feel the heat being lost. This is not a small fraction, it is significant unless you run the stove really low and spread that heat over a large area.

Now put your hand and any point outside an electric kettle and see how much heat you can feel. Almost none.

This isn't really as complicated as you're making it out to be.

[citrin_ru]

Thermal loss of course bigger for kettle on a gas stove than for an electric kettle. But while electricity is generated on a gas/coal powered plan a lot of heat emitted into the environment, and we cannot ignore this if we are interested in overall efficiency.

[ip26]

This has been studied a fair amount, from memory gas is in the low to mid 40% range, induction & immersed coil are in the mid 80% range.

Gas stove is nominally competitive, but as soon as you start adding renewables to the power mix or considering indoor air quality & venting, electric seems like the path forward to me.

[megous]

It should be possible to just heat the 1l of water in a kettle and in a pot using gas, and compare the electricity and gas consumed.

Time-wise I'd think it's quite comparable, in my experience.

This of course depends on sizes and quality of kettle/pot. Wide pot, with large surface area and a quality heatspreader on the bottom will get the water boiling more quickly. Also covering a pot is a must.

Sometimes when I'm in a hurry I split the water between a pot and el. kettle, to get a boiling 2l of water faster, and there's no huge difference in time to boil.

[rini17]

Have you tried induction stove? It loses almost no heat to outside of pot and that makes palpable difference.

[SilverRed]

An induction stove is pretty much the same thing as a kettle for heating water. The OP post is against kettles because they require AC power which their solar panel and battery can not sustain.

But somehow gas doesn't have to be accounted for and just comes for free.

[ClumsyPilot]

But in this conversations its basically an electric kettle.

[IlliOnato]

Well, if you burn wood to boil water, it's a renewable, right? I am sure we can use wooden stoves for cooking.

Besides, why you need to boil water for tea or coffee? These days tap water is safe for drink, and if you want to add extra flavor, you can chew your tea leaves or coffee beans... ;-)

[emacsen]

> Though I do think that Americans uses clothes dryers _much_ more than they should.

There are many reasons for this. Some of them are cultural, and other are legal.

Many Americans simply don't remember drying clothes on a clothes hanger outside, and aren't used to hanging them indoors as many Europeans do. And to be fair, indoor clothing hanging is time consuming in comparison to "transfer clothes from one machine to another".

But what many don't know is that it's often banned in many home owners' associations, and banned in many apartment leases, meaning that hanging your clothes outside is actually a luxury that many simply can't partake in.

[ClumsyPilot]

"it's often banned in many home owners' associations, and banned in many apartment leases"

That seems extremely inappropariate. Are there no restrictions on what they can ban, like can they ban children or cooking curries?

[bluGill]

There are a few restrictions, but not very many. You agree to them before you move in, so you are expected to not move there in the first place if you don't like the rules.

I just refuse to live in one which solves it for me.

[ClumsyPilot]

But they can change the rules, right?

[emacsen]

The HOA or landlord can modify the terms, but they're disincentivized to do so.

The reason that both HOAs and landlords disallow outdoor clothes drying is that it's seen as an eyesore. People associate clotheslines full of clothes with images of testaments in NYC in the 1920s and representing overpopulation and or immigration.

Landlords in particular don't want people hanging things from the apartments- even objects like small satellite dishes are often not allowed.

What many don't know is that in the US, many of these rules are simply null and void:

https://www.sightline.org/2012/02/21/clothesline-bans-void-i...

The challenge is that this requires a great deal of work on the part of the homeowner, and in doing so they would be entering into a conflict with the HOA. They would win in a court, but they would need to put up the money to fight in court. Even if/when they won, the HOA would make life unpleasant for them and likely retaliate in some other way.

[stjohnswarts]

I can't do it because the mold spores and pollen would make life very miserable.

[tetromino_]

Re clothes dryers - many Americans don't have much choice. Most apartment buildings in the US prohibit drying clothes on the balcony (to avoid giving the impression that poor people might live there). And some towns and neighborhood HOAs prohibit outside clothes lines even for residents of single family houses.

[bumbada]

In good income houses and apartments in Europe there is a specific place that is designed for hanging your clothes, that is not very visible from outside, like an internal patio, or an outdoor balcony with metal screens that let most sunlight and air go through, but you can't hardly see from outside.

In those places it is typically forbidden to hang clothes outside their specific places because it is not aesthetically pleasing.

[Karrot_Kream]

I've usually hung my laundry indoors or on the stairs if I lived in a place with stairs. I realize this requires some space, but usually keeping the clothes in front of the window is enough to have them dry.

I've had one of [1] these for years and it hasn't let me down yet.

[1]: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/frost-drying-rack-indoor-outdoo...

[jusssi]

Effectiveness of indoor hang drying depends on air humidity and circulation. In our previous place, at end of August indoor RH would be around 70% (edit: outdoor would be around the same so opening a window wouldn't make a difference). In practice that meant that some of the clothes hadn't completely dried the next day, and were starting to smell.

[flavius29663]

I'm hanging my clothes next to the dehumidifier. We need the dehumidifier anyway for the basement. It dries the clothes in no time, they're already on hangers, without wrinkles, and without wearing them out like the drier does.

[OtomotO]

TIL... Land of the free my ass

[Karrot_Kream]

Housing is one of the most heavily restricted activities in the US with institutions like HOAs or rental companies often applying all sorts of restrictions to enforce homogeneity or cultural values.

[cassepipe]

TIL means "Today I learned. Well today I learnt.

Edit : Don't downvote. I am just the messenger. I just wanted to spare the googling to someone

[stjohnswarts]

i wonder if your comment saved energy or used up more energy than no comment at all. I guess we'd need to know how many people don't know and want to know what TIL means.

[ashtonkem]

You do have to wonder if they’re confused on why this isn’t persuasive to normal people. Go cook outside on a rocket stove[0] and washing clothes by hand every day? Come on.

Meanwhile the thing that has actually gotten people out of their cars is the ebike. It turns out it’s much more effective to produce a more convenient and comfortable solution for people rather than just demand that they go back a century or two just because.

0 - It’s also telling that such advocates never seem to actually say who should be stuck doing all the labor that machines like washing machines now do for us. Washing clothes and dishes by hand is hard labor, and someone is going to have to give up their career or free time to do it if we’re going to ban these machines. No extra credit if you figure out who will get stuck with the task…

[Karrot_Kream]

> 0 - It’s also telling that such advocates never seem to actually say who should be stuck doing all the labor that machines like washing machines now do for us. Washing clothes and dishes by hand is hard labor, and someone is going to have to give up their career or free time to do it if we’re going to ban these machines. No extra credit if you figure out who will get stuck with the task…

Yeah lol I always find this the funniest part of Low Tech Magazine. While they're always breathlessly moralizing, they rarely think through (or at least write about) the social ramifications of the changes they propose. They do have some interesting ideas though, such as the use of thermal cookers, and burning biomass in a rocket stove may not be the worst idea if you live in an area with a temperate climate and a dirty grid. Perhaps more practical though would be just incentivizing ordering at a restaurant, since a restaurant will be more energy efficient at preparing food than an individual will.

[bluGill]

> since a restaurant will be more energy efficient at preparing food than an individual

Really? Most restaurants have a grill and deep fry vats hot 100% of the time even when nobody is there.

[ip26]

never seem to actually say who should be stuck doing all the labor

They are probably not actually closet misogynists or anything like that, they probably just haven’t thought that far ahead.

[ashtonkem]

> They are probably not actually closet misogynists or anything like that, they probably just haven’t thought that far ahead.

I agree, this is more probable than the closet misogyny theory. But it's still not exactly a ringing endorsement to say "whoops, we didn't think about who would have to do all that labor once we took away all those labor saving devices!" It's not like this is some hard to predict third order effect, after all.

Overall, the whole argument they're making is kind of silly. Washing clothes by hand sucks, people rushed to buy machines to replace this labor for a damned good reason. If someone's plan for the future involves persuading people to go back to doing labor the vast majority of people don't want to do, then they should prepared for a lot of failure. Given the continued sales of brand new washing machines at my local home improvement store, I would argue that they have failed thus far.

(Ironically, there is probably a good lower-tech argument in making labor saving devices simpler and more reliable. The short lifespan of our appliances is both deeply unpopular and environmentally problematic, and doing anything to make them more repairable would both be good for the environment and incredibly popular.)

Back to their original argument, there's a reason why I hold up the e-bike as an unqualified success that the authors here are incorrectly ignoring. Cycling enthusiasts--myself included--have argued for decades that biking is better and people should switch over to using bikes for more trips. Repeated appeals to the environment, the wallet, and ones health haven't really moved the needle much in this area. Yet it's the high-tech (gasp!) e-bike that appears to be finally getting commuters out of cars and into the saddle. It turns out that while moralizing is fun, actual change involves making compromises towards the convenience and comfort of your average person.

[ip26]

Yup, I'm with you, lowtechmag has a lot of articles that seem unmoored from reality. There's always a few good ones though. There's one arguing if the grid was designed for 98-99.9% uptime instead of 99.999999% uptime, we'd a) survive just fine b) have cheaper power and c) be more resilient against power failure when it inevitably happens, which I found pretty thought provoking.

[Gibbon1]

The rocket stove reminds me. I've seen lots of stuff on low tech 'improved' cook stoves for people in developing countries. I think women in those countries would be happier served with a pressure cooker and a two burner induction stove running off solar panels. All horrible high tech, but actually cheap commodities in practice.

[Karrot_Kream]

An induction hob with a single ring/burner takes anywhere from 1.3-1.8 kWh of energy. It's almost impossible for the type of person that would benefit from a rocket stove to have access to a solar setup which could generate that much energy. Moreover, most of the time these families/individuals are impoverished enough and/or live in places with bad enough infrastructure that even gas for a gas stove isn't available. In these situations, biomass rocket stoves make the most sense.

(Cooking actually takes quite a bit of energy unfortunately and is probably one of the hardest human activities to make carbon neutral. Luckily there's a lot of low-hanging fruit to tackle first before the question of cooking efficiency comes up.)

[ashtonkem]

My fairly large solar setup provides a max of about 6.5kW under ideal circumstances (which isn't always when we need to cook, FWIW), but it's far far beyond what a typical woman in developing Africa could afford.

[Gibbon1]

Run the numbers. 400-500W of solar provides enough energy per day. Two 150ah batteries can handle the peak load.

[zo1]

I live in, arguably a good part of Africa, and even here it would be a stretch. Infrastructure and "throw money at the problem" type solutions don't work great in rural areas even if you have local communities buy in and assistance.

You're better off just giving poor people here free electricity, which a lot of places do.

[ClumsyPilot]

In these places thats a lot of money, and have much, much higher priority items for such investment

[adrianN]

If I were someone who would benefit from a rocket stove, I'd likely sell the six solar panels and the induction stove and use the fantastical amounts of money I make that way to pay for my children to get an education.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

> Meanwhile the thing that has actually gotten people out of their cars is the ebike.

This is not my experience. People just put their ebike on a rack and drive it somewhere to ride it for fun.

[ashtonkem]

And this is why it's useful to check the literature, individual results might provide misleading anecdotes.

> This paper reports on a review of the European literature about the impacts of having an electrically-assisted bike available to use, together with results from a trial in the UK city of Brighton, where 80 employees were loaned an electrically-assisted bike for a 6–8 week period. In the Brighton trial, three-quarters of those who were loaned an e-bike used them at least once a week. Across the sample as a whole, average usage was in the order of 15–20 miles per week, and was accompanied by an overall reduction in car mileage of 20%. At the end of the trial, 38% participants expected to cycle more in the future, and at least 70% said that they would like to have an e-bike available for use in the future, and would cycle more if this was the case. This is consistent with the results of the European literature which shows that when e-bikes are made available, they get used; that a proportion of e-bike trips typically substitutes for car use; and that many people who take part in trials become interested in future e-bike use, or cycling more generally.

The real key is that e-bike users will ride further, which expands the range of trips that the owners will consider via bike.

> John MacArthur was the lead author of the NITC report, and told the Electric Bike Report, “While many of the rides we surveyed were for recreation, on average we found that the average trip on an e-bike was nine miles,” adding, “historically on traditional bicycles we see a trip of more than five miles being a barrier.”

> Additionally, the electric assist of the e-bike helps to generate more trips, longer trips and different types of bicycle trips. These findings are represented by the high value attributed to being able to avoid or tackle hills easier, ride farther and faster with less effort, and being able to carry more cargo or children when needed.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Another big factor might be that I live in the US. Generally speaking, everything you want to go to is a lot farther away here.

[ashtonkem]

Given the rapid urbanization of America, that will not be true for long.

Assuming that the 9 mile limit holds, that is a pretty long distance in most cities. I live in the suburban edge of a small city, and downtown is only 6.4 miles away for me. Even when I lived in LA, 9 miles was more than enough for 80% of my trips or so.

[pl-94]

This is a low tech blog. It is difficult to reduce your carbon footprint while experiencing an exponential urge to consume new tech.

Tech products footprint is either during consumption (most of the devices requiring heat or cold) or during production (the other devices like smartphones).

Obviously this rule is a trend and countries with low carbon electricity are exceptions.

While most people are OK for lasting a smartphone a bit longer, the same logic would imply to reduce the heat/cold consumption.

So yeah in this sense, a freezer is a luxe we can't afford.

[ciconia]

I think it's a perfectly reasonable conclusion. Supposing a future with 0 to low fossil energy usage, we'll all need to adjust.

If you want governments to do whatever needs to be done to limit climate change, you also need to be willing to "pay the price" in the form of reduced material comfort.

Besides, there are quite a few people (a big chunk of the world population actually) living today without dish washers, without microwaves and without coffee machines.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

> If you want governments to do whatever needs to be done to limit climate change, you also need to be willing to "pay the price" in the form of reduced material comfort.

Which is why nothing significant has been done, nor will it.

[pomian]

Some things you can't recreate. But vacuum cleaners, refrigeration, freezers, coffee machines, kettles, dishwashers, and even driers, are all possible and available. Not sure about a microwave, but normal heating elements are there.

[pkulak]

Exactly. The problem here is that everyone will just switch to gas for everything. Dryer, stove, water heater, car, etc. That’s terrible!

The 380-volt DC sounded nice, so long as DC to DC is more efficient than AC to DC, but I have no idea if that’s true.

[Reason077]

The article overstates the conversion losses anyway. Modern solar inverters are something like 95%+ efficient.

Consumer devices vary, but it’s a safe bet that modern cool-to-the-touch GaN power adapters are far more efficient than those old black bricks from the 1990s.

Saving a few % just isn’t worth all the incompatibility and inconvenience of rewiring your entire house for.

380-volt DC sounds dangerous!

[xxs]

DC-DC actually converts DC to high freq. AC 1st, then uses a transformer and then rectifiers, smoothing, feedback, etc. If no isolation, i.e. common ground is fine, a choke instead of a transformer is fine too.

[elcritch]

One possible benefit of a DC-DC circuit is that the converter can choose its switching frequency. That can give some room for optimizations for power or size.

[stephen_g]

So do AC-DC converters. They rectify the incoming AC, then it’s basically the same as a DC-DC converter. They have a switch that produces basically PWM in the hundreds of kHz to low MHz range, that it punches through a transformer.

[agumonkey]

For some it's stupid for some it's less clear.

Instead of driving to the gym and bike 1h you may commute by bike (with enough safe paths its pretty nice, not perfect but pretty nice and health improvements come very rapidly as a bonus).