How to make your home more resilient?

Jane Mulberry wrote:Good point, Pearl. If there was still some power but not enough to run a heater, a 100 watt bulb would so a long way in heating an enclosed space. But I also imagine the "tent" as less flammable and more insulating, maybe made from wool blankets rather than the usual thin nylon tent fabric?

For a small space, any wattage of incandescent bulb will put out heat (see Paul's threads on incandescent bulbs, and heating the person not the space)  but I guarantee if you bump into one, a 60 watt bulb hurts much less than a 100 watt.

If you are imagining a tent of wool etc, you are working off different parameters than I am, I have cheap nylon tents, and random things I can put over them, but I have no wool blankets to use, and no way to make them stay up if I do. Different parameters make different solutions. I also don't plan to put a tent in the house unless we get another of the lovely heavy ice storms with power outages like Feb 2021. So, as permies often say "It depends."

But having seen a nylon tent burn from being hit with campfire sparks on a windy night, I DON'T want that happening in the house. Was bad enough out in the woods.

I can imagine a tent fire would be scary and not something you want happening in the house! Melted nylon on skin = nasty burns.

I was thinking of my house where I'm most likely to be in an emergency no-heat situation. No tent, no tarps, but a lot of wool blankets I could rig up over tables and chairs.

Pearl Sutton wrote:

I think they'd be best applied in a (vented) indoor tent situation, like Pearl mentioned... somewhere.. If you can make an area smaller, while still taking plenty of precautions for safety - both from the flame and the carbon emission

I REALLY don't think I'd use a terracotta thing in a tent. Takes only one tiny bump or error to flame it all. I don't use open flames in tents. My idea behind tents in the house is to have a small area that can heat with body heat. Putting extra covering on a tent (blankets etc) would be a LOT more safe than fire of any sort in one.

And my thread on tents in the house   Tents as space reducers for heating

Yup - and not doing it would definitely be safest!

(1) I need to swap the carb on my Honda generator so it can run on propane, to overcome the stupidity of the idiots who tainted gas so it has no shelf life.

(2) Second on the metal roof, because fires are always a thing.

(3) Grit my teeth and cut down the beautiful shrub reaching all the way to the second story wrap around deck, to minimize fire danger it poses.

(4) Swap my aluminum windows for energy efficient windows (the one I already did was a game changer). Too, get rid of the two sliding glass doors that are huge problems for heat transfer.

(5) Since two of the three sliders are on one wall (28' long) and it's the west side (where the heat of summer hits the hardest), pull all the T-111 and bump the framing out to six inches, add better insulation and a vaper barrier.

(6) Insulate the daylight basement.

(7) Scheme really hard on a way to install emergency wood heat (surrounded by free apple wood).

( Scheme a way to install totes (cheaper than barrels) for emergency water (a good use for that Berkly or equivalent).  Scheme on how to keep them from freezing.

My chief thoughts for making my home more resilient are maintenance, basic supplies, and knowing where everything is.

Keeping the doors and windows and storm shutters operating properly, making sure they aren't stuck, the screens are sound, and everything locks properly and we know where the keys are. These are the first and biggest points for me. Next are electrical and water. Is everything in good working order?

Third is supplies. Do we have roughly 3 days of food and water, blankets for cold? Do we have cash. Do we have basic construction lumber and cordage. Do we have basic tools. Do we have emergency fire supplies - wood, coal, a stove and matches or lighters.

Last is organization and systems. Do all members of the household know where all things are? Can anyone find batteries and a flashlight, or a hammer, or the first aid kit.

I think... maybe a little optimistically that the answer to all of those questions is yes for my household. Though now I'm encouraged to ask my wife and son if they can answer them.

Edit: Improvements:

I am working towards a bit of food resilience. I hope to have the ability to provide a bit more redundancy in food sourcing through gardening and foraging. I'd like to learn how to fish and gather shellfish, and possibly also learn to hunt or trap small game - that is a source of food I have not explored.

Furthermore deepening community and social connections should provide a lot of resilience. Together we are strong. I have a lot of future plans for this, and my local community is working on it all the time as well.

Kate Muller wrote:

Reading your posts, one thing caught my attention.
Ordered, bought, had installed....

It is, of course, splendid if you can hire somebody to do the things you want. I understand "resilience" as being self-sufficient.

My precedessors were Russian aristocrats. In one year, they went from owning glorious palaces and profitable factories to being happy just to be alive and doing four jobs to support a family living in a dreary flat of 200 square meters. What kept them alive were practical skills.

That lesson has been shared in the family for countless generations. In times of upheaval, you may end up surviving on what you can do, not what you owned.

Jesse said, "IF you're talking total disaster you should have a home that you can shut down 80% of the house from having to heat that portion.

This is a great suggestion for how to make your home resilient.

In any disaster, especially where heat and/or electricity is involved, being able to keep a smaller space heated might prove to be very useful.

It is good to remember to heat "the person" rather than the space.

Here is a good article on how to heat yourself and not the whole house and save 80% on heat:

https://paulwheaton12.wordpress.com/2011/03/03/heat-yourself-and-not-the-whole-house-and-save-80-on-heat/

N. Neta, the author of the OP (original post), "How to make your home more resilient?" wrote,

But what if you can’t (or won’t) relocate or start all over again…

This topic highlights a problem that many people face: working with a house that is not ideal. Maybe it's too big, or carelessly designed, or built when fossil fuels were cheap, or any number of problems. How do we make a home better without abandoning it or selling it to some other inexperienced person?
In my case, I bought this house before I knew anything about permaculture or the climate realities where I now live. I trusted people that I should have questioned. I didn't know the questions! Now that I know more, I feel duty bound to make this house better. The more I learn, the more I wish I could have read threads like this when I got started. I am truly grateful for your careful consideration about how we can help each other be better stewards of place: land, home, resources.
Today, I did a little thing to make this house a tiny bit more resilient: I made a door snake with some worn jeans, filled it with cedar shavings for insulation and pea gravel for thermal mass. Such a satisfying project.
Please keep those ideas for improving our less-than-perfect homes coming!

That is such a good point, Amy! Many (or maybe most!) of us are working with homes that weren't designed with resilience in mind.

I hoped when I moved house it would be to one without the problems our existing home has. LOL, right.

The new place doesn't have the same problems. It has a whole huge set of different ones!

Yep - a buddy was building his own home forty years ago. The PUD guy inferred he was foolish for wasting money to build with six inch walls, for the increased insulation factor. The PUD guy pointed out our electric was the cheapest in the several, united states and D.C.  My friend's response was, "[w]ill it always be"?

Amy Gardener wrote:N. Neta, the author of the OP (original post), "How to make your home more resilient?" wrote,

But what if you can’t (or won’t) relocate or start all over again…

This topic highlights a problem that many people face: working with a house that is not ideal. Maybe it's too big, or carelessly designed, or built when fossil fuels were cheap, or any number of problems. How do we make a home better without abandoning it or selling it to some other inexperienced person?
In my case, I bought this house before I knew anything about permaculture or the climate realities where I now live. I trusted people that I should have questioned. I didn't know the questions! Now that I know more, I feel duty bound to make this house better. The more I learn, the more I wish I could have read threads like this when I got started. I am truly grateful for your careful consideration about how we can help each other be better stewards of place: land, home, resources.
Today, I did a little thing to make this house a tiny bit more resilient: I made a door snake with some worn jeans, filled it with cedar shavings for insulation and pea gravel for thermal mass. Such a satisfying project.
Please keep those ideas for improving our less-than-perfect homes coming!

Kelly Craig wrote:The PUD guy

I'm unfamiliar with this term. Is PUD for planned unit development? That's the first result I got on search.

Sorry about that - I, like too many others, take for granted too many things. It stands for Public Utility District [PUD].

L. Johnson wrote:

Kelly Craig wrote:The PUD guy

I'm unfamiliar with this term. Is PUD for planned unit development? That's the first result I got on search.

Jane Mulberry wrote: If there was still some power but not enough to run a heater, a 100 watt bulb would go a long way in heating an enclosed space.

Hubby recently melted a hole in one of those foam puzzle shaped squares with a light bulb, and many a barn fire has started with a chick heat lamp. Many Canadian Universities banned halogen table lamps due to the fire risk, so I'd be cautious of *any* heat source that might get too close because people bang or knock it. I admit I'm a fan of hot water if you've got no power but can heat it over a fire outside or woodstove inside. My canning kettle 1/2 full and brought to a boil will radiate heat for hours. It would still have to be placed in a way that you can trap that heat without melting anything!

But I also imagine the "tent" as less flammable and more insulating, maybe made from wool blankets rather than the usual thin nylon tent fabric?

For sleeping, I'd throw my camping mats and wool blankets under the dining room table, and put more wool blankets over the table if things were serious here. I have a laundry line across the living room in front of our wood stove, so if we were short firewood, I could contain its heat in an area about 8 ft by 12 ft fairly easily and even have a comfortable chair to sit on.

It's so easy to get complacent. Our power rarely goes out for more than an hour. We always have a good amount of food in storage. We've got friends if the problem isn't too widespread. We're good at fixing things and problem solving. We've done interior camping (as in canoe to the middle of nowhere for a week and bring everything you need). I just wish we lived in a more efficient house with some decent thermal mass and an RMH!

Steven Lindsay wrote:

N. Neta wrote:We’re focusing on... a solar water heater (at the moment still heating water with gas)…  

Solar heaters are so easy and cheap it's economically inviable for anyone to mass-produce them. The complications come in trying to integrate them into a pressurized pipe system and deal with freezing temps.
Any container able to hold water painted black will work, the more surface area facing the sun the better, such as a coil of black water pipe on the roof.
Water tanks can make a great trombe wall to release stored heat at night, and a large container will not freeze in an overnight frost but rather moderate the surrounding temperature.

Have you seen these? If I had space for a water tank I would get one.

https://www.solariskit.com/households

All in all, a nice gathering of concepts.  However, a couple of cautionary notes - an early entry discussed storage of water.  It is not a good idea to store water in plastic on concrete.  This generally is directed at storing water in gallon jugs, but any plastic tends to interact with concrete to push chemicals into the water, so buyer beware.  Sort of like not storing batteries on a concrete floor, use some form of insulating layer.  Wood or even cardboard should reduce any reactions.

Use of open flame in confined spaces is not a good idea since one of the combustion products is likely carbon monoxide.  Carbon monoxide preferentially binds to the hemoglobin in your blood, so it is additive and even small amounts if inhaled will become dangerous over time.  It does not leave the blood until the hemoglobin is metabolized out of the body.  One method is to heat some dense material outside occupied areas (no pets or other animals should be there either).  Then take the heated item inside and place it next to the body.  I grew up in a 200 year old farm house.  We heated and cooked with wood.  In the evening, soapstone would be heated in the oven and then placed in flannel sacks to be added to the foot of the bed.  Really made for warm feet, which often allows one  to feel warmer.  Adding lots of blankets and pulling the borders under your body creates a sleeping bag to keep warmer.  At least it helped those times I would wake up and pick up a handful of snow off the floor under the window!

Purchase wool blankets or wool over-clothes.  Wool will maintain heat even when wet and until it gets wet, it will release heat while absorbing moisture (could come from sweat or breathing).

A good canning or food preservation setup would be to purchase a cheap gas stove or wood-fired cook stove.  Put up a small tent or roof over a table and you can create what our ancestors called a "summer kitchen".  This allows smoking, drying or canning of food outside during warm weather to keep excess moisture, smells and heat outside so the home remains more comfortable.

While many people detest building codes, they often provide energy and storm resilient information that can be used to make a home safer.  A good review of all weather and natural hazards for your location is vital.  Ensure if you need to maintain access/egress to include drives/roads in your plan.  I have seen entire neighborhoods that seem above flooding but the roads in and out are blocked by several feet of flood - not immediately dangerous, but could create dangerous situation if health issues, fire, criminal behavior, etc. visit the neighborhood.

As to how indigenous peoples kept warm, they developed resistance to cool temperatures.  Inuit peoples could not run much of a fire in snow shelters.  Such shelters lose their insulation if they develop frost inside.  They would strip down and live at freezing temps.  They often used diets of high fat content - no worries about overweight issues, their metabolism cranked up to keep warm and fat is a very good source of calories.  Animal fat was also a great fire starter for damp wood.  Also, it is important to know the local vegetation.  Birch bark is very moisture resistant and also has oils that allow it to burn even when wet.  Cattail fluff is very good fuel and would likely create a wick for melted fat or other flammables.  Again, care needed to ensure one does not spread fire or dangerous gas in occupied rooms.

Clean water is absolutely necessary for resilience.  Many modern pipes are copper and were soldered.  Not as important for cold water, but one should never ingest hot tap water.  Hot water is very good as a solvent for lead and in some cases cadmium if plastic pipes have been used.  Good practice to run at least a quart of water through tap prior to drinking.  Most older faucets have a decent percentage of lead in the brass.  I see lately that those levels have been identified by recent legislation for lower percentages - depends on how much one wants to leave to chance.  Decanted initial water is great for washing and for flushing stools if that is your method of sewage disposal.  Rainwater has potential for use, but be aware that industrial smoke can enter rain clouds and often creates an acidic environment.  Percolating rainwater through a container of limestone pebbles followed by activated charcoal helps to remove pollutants.  Improves taste of the water as well.  There are filters for animal fountains with inexpensive filter + charcoal that could work as an after-filter.

I hope these are useful comments.  I used to work in groundwater and soil cleanup as an environmental hydrologist so most should be safe and useful.

They would sleep next to each other to share body heat and often during very cold times would shuttle from inside to outside.  They did not worry too much about schedules, just getting sufficient sleep.  Siberian indigenous peoples were known to enter near-estavation status with lower heart rates and sleep for long periods.  Not sure how long adaptation took to lower over-sleep negative impacts.  Too much sleep for many peoples can cause major health impacts.  Interesting thoughts and good area for research.

Some good points.

A clarification. Storing batteries on concrete or the ground was a problem in the past, but has not been a problem for some decades. The cases used for batteries do not conduct electricity. However, a dirty battery can conduct electricity between the terminals, draining it.

As to storing water in concrete or plastic, remember, we are talking life and death availability of water, after the tap shuts off. That is why a few of us talked about filter systems, LIKE the Berklys.

On the battery-concrete thing, it was mentioned information suggested a possibility other than conductivity causing drainage. The concern was about a chemical reaction.

I couldn't say yea or nay to that possibility. I had not heard about such a problem. I am ignorant of any way the concrete could interact with the sulfuric acid, since there is no direct contact between the two.

I do some copper plating and store sulfuric acid on the floor with no concern about compromising concentration of the acid, which would be a concern, because it would alter the outcome of the plating process.

SIDE NOTE: I just ran a search and the only thing I could find was WAY BACK info: Initially, batteries used wood cases and glass to encase the cells. Hmm. The wood would warp and this would cause the glass inside to break.  Also, "batteries would sometimes lack a case altogether, allowing electrical discharges into the concrete. Then came porous rubber cases which contained carbon atoms: this also created electrical activity between the cells in the presence of moisture, leading to prematurely discharged batteries."

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/general-science-you-asked/concrete-truth-about-batteries-stored-concrete

Richard Henry wrote:...

As to how indigenous peoples kept warm, they developed resistance to cool temperatures.  Inuit peoples could not run much of a fire in snow shelters.  Such shelters lose their insulation if they develop frost inside.  They would strip down and live at freezing temps.  They often used diets of high fat content - no worries about overweight issues, their metabolism cranked up to keep warm and fat is a very good source of calories.  
...
They would sleep next to each other to share body heat and often during very cold times would shuttle from inside to outside.  They did not worry too much about schedules, just getting sufficient sleep.  Siberian indigenous peoples were known to enter near-estavation status with lower heart rates and sleep for long periods.  Not sure how long adaptation took to lower over-sleep negative impacts.  Too much sleep for many peoples can cause major health impacts.  Interesting thoughts and good area for research.

I think this is important to know. Humans are able to survive in difficult situations ... but they have to be prepared. At least those indigenous people were used to the low temperatures. So probably it's good for us to practice 'being in a cold environment'. And of course the right kind of clothes are helpfull too (wool and fur).

I was thinking about this thread this past week.

One thing that makes for resilience is having fail-safes and back-ups.

This really plays on the permaculture idea of a network of diverse interactions.

For example you need light to see. So you can go outside during the day. But you may need light at night, or when there is bad air you need to close out from outside. So you need some form of interior light. If you are on grid wonderful, you have electricity, until you don't. Okay no problem because you have flashlights. But you also have candles. And it so happens that your woodstove has a nice mellow glass window that gives a little glow.

Maybe not the best example for diverse interactions, but multiple back-ups is illustrated.

Not only light though, also water - grid water, backed up by rain water tanks, backed up by a well, backed up by some stocked bottled water, map to a nearby spring, etc.

Back-up tools also, don't only have one way to cut things, multiple ways to cook.

Not feeling very concise or eloquent, but I think the idea is clear.

L. Johnson wrote:... also water - grid water, backed up by rain water tanks, backed up by a well, backed up by some stocked bottled water, map to a nearby spring, etc.

Documented outside resources like a nearby spring is an excellent suggestion. Many springs run year-round, so the water may be accessible even if the weather is freezing. People and animals can get into trouble much faster from lack of water than most other things (except possibly extreme heat - but there are ways to cope with heat if you've got water!)

If you've got land, there is resilience created by having outbuildings that can be quickly re-purposed in part or in the whole if bad things happen. Most North American houses are bigger than necessary for the number of people. Having even one room in that house that has extra insulation and is reinforced for storms and human body heat alone will keep people warm and safe there. Many people take refuge in their bathrooms during things like a tornado watch. Have you ever tried sleeping in a metal bathtub??? A walk-in closet would likely be more comfortable, particularly if you have enough warning to grab sofa cushions, pillows and extra blankets!

Knowing about nearby springs is good, but one should try to ensure that source of water is not contaminated.  If sampling is too expensive/difficult, how about ensuring a filter that removes contaminants?  I would suggest a closable container of pea gravel followed by a container of clean quartz sand and finally a container of activated charcoal for potable water.  Or, a commercial filter of which there are many.

My primary water is fed from a spring by gravity with no pump needed.  I admit I have not checked for contaminants with sufficient frequency, but use a zero water for backup.  The spring has a very low total dissolved solid count to begin with, so the filter on the zero water lasts for a very long time.

It is important to look at your area.  What might be upstream of any potential spring?  Do you have limestone karst (cave or reef coral) bedrock.  Caves allow water to flow with very little of the cleansing surface streams have.  When I used to spelunk with college friends, a couple of them were biologists who claimed after testing several cave streams that they would never ever drink cave water.  Too many streams run next to or through livestock pasture.  Herbivores, especially cattle have an instinct to protect their water source by reliving themselves as soon as they start to drink.  Sounds counter-intuitive until one thinks about how much other drinkers might avoid that same watering hole.  In many rural areas of the country there were local dumps where anything and everything was dumped and that may be now leaching through soil aquifers.  A major corporation had to pay millions to clean up just a fraction of past dumping at multiple locations locally.  I also know of a landowner who made a few bucks letting this company dump old electric transformers into his quarry lake.  Yeah, that was a mistake.  Think superfund site as soon as it was detected.

Do not forget that springs can be used for other purposes than drinking water.  When I was very young, we kept our milk and butter in a spring box out by the swamp.  The box stayed in the low 40 degree F range all season long.  It is also possible to find springs in ponds and lakes by observing where ice does not cover until later and also melts faster in the spring.  Placing a barrel with holes around it will allow the spring to flow out and provide a cooling spot that can  be used for keeping perishable foods in the summer.  Building a small windmill that pumps air into a bubbler (could be an old soaker hose) around the spring will provide habitat for fish that may provide a source of food in hard times. Too often, trout and other cold water fish need cooler, oxygen-rich water to survive and they cannot find that if lakes are becoming anoxic from too much nutrient loading from surrounding lands.  I have studied deep water areas in good sized lakes where not enough oxygen was found where the temperatures allowed salmonids to survive.  Tourism was able to out-compete the environmental needs for available habitat.  Because it is below the surface, people do not understand the impacts their fun is having on the other inhabitants.  Sorry, preaching again.

To increase comfort with lower fuel use, consider lining walls, floors and ceilings with commercial aluminum foil - shiny side to the inside.  This will allow infrared heat energy to be reflected back to bodies inside and allow the thermostat to be lowered a couple of degrees or more.  Also wear heavier clothes inside.  There is no good reason to run around a house in t-shirts and shorts in the middle of the winter.  Making inside shutters of waste foam and aluminum foil will pay dividends.  Not only will you be making use of a material that most landfills hate, Styrofoam glued to aluminum foil, possibly on an old screen for stiffness will drop drafts amazingly.  I used some sheets of Styrofoam to keep a freezer full of food frozen on a three day trip from NY to CO years ago and repurposed those sheets over the inside of windows in a very poorly insulated home.  The windows were aluminum frame and single-pane glass.  Before the shutters, the bedroom was very drafty and cold.  After the shutters were placed, the drafts stopped as if by magic!  A second plus was the total privacy afforded.  In another house, I made the shutters with old panels and Styrofoam and made small windows in the shutter that allowed us to see outside while maintaining excellent privacy.  I placed small acrylic covers on each side of the shutter to keep heat transfer lower.  Think about making a heating room in your structure where the family can gather during cold snaps or power outages.  I suggest using chlorine bleach or perhaps vinegar in a covered pail with water for a latrine if the lines in the house need to be bled to prevent freezing.  If you are in a very cold area subject to power outages (and almost anyone in the north country is), consider when you build that running plumbing at a very low angle from highest point to intake with a valve next to the intake shutoff for drainage.  That way, if the house threatens to freeze, it will be possible to shut the intake off, open the drain valve and crack the highest faucet to allow the system to drain sufficiently that freezing will not lead to damage.  That way, recovery is just shutting the faucet and drain valve and opening the intake.  At least so long as your intake has not frozen.  

To lower potential for freezing your incoming water line, try to ensure there is no traffic over the line.  Frost can dive several feet if even a dog run is allowed over the water line.  Additional protection can be achieved by placing water lines in inexpensive sewer lines.  I placed pex line through a 4" pvc inside a 6" pvc under my driveway.  Under the lawn, I used hay and old wood boards over the line.  Back when I used to install those things we dug up lines in the winter and the area under the boards and hay would be completely unfrozen while frozen soil would drop below the trench bottom on each side.

With our little acre came a house bus that's entirely comfortable.  We're 2 years in to a 10 year mortgage, so will live in the bus until we've paid off the land and then decide if it is time to build.  

We're finally to these resilience projects this summer - if the damned rain ever stops...

The plan is to:

1)  Diversify our generation of electricity.  We're good on solar most of the year, and in the times when we're not we'd have to exponentially upsize our system to meet our meagre demands.  Instead I'm adding a wind turbine this summer and a thermoelectric generator - we already heat with a wood stove.

2)  Diversify our fuel source for wood stove.  First on the list is horse poop fire bricks made from locally sourced materials.  Second is a solar firewood kiln to take advantage of whatever wood materials come available when they come available.

3)  Redevelop our water systems so our water gets used several times before being cleaned up one last time and discarded into the surface of the temporary cattle trough cum duck pond that should push dirty duck water from the bottom of the trough into the subsurface annual garden irrigation pipes.

4)  Diversify our energy storage.  We hold three days of electricity in our batteries - it helps that we use barely any power in the first place - but batteries aren't a long term solution in my opinion.  Compressed air storage is what piques my interest the most, but we'll see what I come up with when that project is front and centre.

5)  Revamp our hot water generation.  We're currently using an LPG califont which we'll save for back up, but I got a great deal on a used evacuated tube solar hot water heater that needs to get set up, and then for 1000L of hot water to help see us through winter.

6)  Handle our sewage on farm.  We have a 400L black water tank that I take to empty about quarterly.  I don't intentionally compost our food scraps or anything else, so composting our excrement is definitely a no-goer, but I will put in a Solviva style worm farm and finally start keeping those nutrients on our land where they belong.

And then, of course, there's the constant project that is diversifying the food crops that we grow.  We've got a healthy annual garden going, and I'm adding perennials all the time.  The goal, at this moment, is to spend $100/paycheck on our long term food resilience.

Finally, we have clay soils, but because we're right under a volcano it's not the good kind of clay for rammed earth - it expands and contracts too much which I've seen attributed to the ash.  After doing some research about our particular soils, it looks like we've got a good aluminosilicate content for making geopolymer, so I'll hope to investigate that this summer because, ultimately, being able to make stone from locally sourced materials could have a massive impact on so many of the things that we want/need around here.

Thomas - I think that compressed air energy storage is interesting but not that scalable.  Here is another storage system that uses gravity.  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336934141_Storage_Gravitational_Energy_for_Small_Scale_Industrial_and_Residential_Applications

One can use low or irregular energy producing systems such as wind or solar to life a mass upward on a tower (or in a cave/mine shaft) to store considerable energy that is generated as it falls in response to gravity.  

-----Edited to mention that I'm no engineer so this is just what information I've pieced together in whatever ways I can understand it.-----

Gravity batteries don't make sense in our context for a few reasons - mostly we use so little electricity the costs to implement simply could not work out favourably.  We'd also hit water quite early into the dig of a 12m hole which means we'd have to add even more weight to make some usable power.  When we do, though, their assumed discharge time is .5 hours which, with our current AGMs means, I think,  I'd have to further complicate the system with supercapacitors else lose that power as heat or overload and kill the batteries by ignoring their charge rate.  In the battery-less system of my dreams, .5 hours won't keep the fridge cold over night even allowing for the battery to start and stop it's discharge in lockstep with the demand from my fridge compressor.

If you haven't yet, I'd recommend anyone to read the articles on Low Tech Magazine about compressed air (and every other article on Low Tech Magazine, too).  Compressed air was the power of choice for some massive cities, and it's much more efficient using it to do mechanical work directly.

That said, I'm not certain I'll land at compressed air, but it is a strong contender.

Jumping in with some hot off the press news about Rocket Mass Heaters from Permies - a great way to make your home more resilient.

The new free heat movie trailer is here starring Rocket Mass Heaters at center stage:

For more info, also take a look at https://freeheat.info