I live in a large city in a single family homestead. We manage to do a few things low tech. A wood stove heats our house with the help of the furnace blower to circulate the air. We enjoy cooking on the stove, also. We gather the wood, and split it by hand and stack it in the back yard. We sometimes use a chainsaw, depending on where we are gathering the wood. If it is on the street, we use the old fashioned two-person saws or smaller ones. We do this to cut down on noise. Much of our wood has come from rehabs in the neighborhood. Builders are happy for us to haul lumber away so they don't have to pay to landfill it. The beautiful old growth or reusable lumber is given away to people directly. We only cut up and burn scrappy wood after we have removed the nails by hand. But that is still a lot.
On another subject, I do use a washing machine. However, I use it as a semi-automatic machine. I learned this when I lived in Asia in the 70's. and I washed clothes by hand. When I got a semi-automatic washing machine, I thought it was an absolute luxury. You do all the wash loads first using the same water, one after another. Either take the wet clothes out of the machine and put them into buckets, or let the machine expel the wash water into buckets. You then reuse the water for the next wash load. You do the same procedure for the rinse cycle and then the spin cycle. I usually get three loads from one amount of water; first, light colors, second, dark colors, third, dish towels. There are pros and cons : You use a lot less water, but you are stuck near the washing machine to prevent it from going into a full cycle. The buckets of water or wet clothes can also be heavy to lift. It forces me to exercise or do a project near by, while baby-sitting the machine during this time. Not really low-tech, but maybe lower-tech?
I hang my laundry outside on the clothes line or on the trees, or inside near the stove when the weather is bad. That is just me, as others in the homestead prefer to do their own laundry in the conventional manner.
