path: root/unused/upgrades.txt

I dislike upgrading things[^1]. This is why I have, at the age of, ahem, forty plus let's say, owned only 4 cars (two of which I still own), have more than a few t-shirts that are over a decade old and am typing this on a six year old laptop.

I subscribe to the currently somewhat out of fashion belief that if it ain't broke, there's no need to change anything. Spend any time with this idea and you'll eventually discover the corollary idea that the fewer the moving parts, the less likely a thing is to break. 

A lot of our trip will be spent well away from the repair facilities of civilization, which means that when things break in the bus, I am the one who will be fixing them. When something goes wrong I will have figure out what went wrong and then actually fix (or replace) it. This has very much colored the choices I've made in outfitting the various systems in the bus.

Since I have to understand the basics of all the systems, the simpler the system the better I understand it. As an added bonus the simpler systems are -- generally speaking -- the simpler it is to fix them, and, sometimes, the cheaper it is to replace them. For example I went with a traditional tank-base hot water system with a manual pilot light. This means I have to go out and light it every time we want to use it, but it means there's no 12V switch system to short out and break. It also means the tank takes up more room, but is of a very simple, easy to replace design. It's just a metal tank, nothing fancy there.

The propane system is similarly simple, two tanks a two-stage regulator and two lines, one to inside and one to outside for cooking outdoors. 

These two examples are just foresight though, some things are more complex. 

Rebuilding the bus has sent me on some deep research forays on a number of things that up until this point I had largely taken for granted. Eventually, to find a solution that I liked, that met all of the criteria listed above, I had to step way back and change the way I was defining the problem. Probably the best example of this is refrigeration. 

Unlike [the generator](/jrnl/2016/09/autumn-bus-update), which I tore out because I hate it, I didn't tear the 2-way propane/120v fridge because I hate refrigeration. I did tear it out in part because I wanted to learn to live without refrigeration, but also because I backed up and looked at the problem refrigeration is trying to solve.

No one needs a refrigerator. What we need is a way to keep food fresh for longer than it would normally be fresh. A refridgerator is one way to solve this problem, but it is far from the only. 

So let's look at the probelm. We need a way to keep food from spoiling, ideally, for convenience sake, indefinitely. But wait, what food? Does it need to be kept cold? Cool? Hot? Do you know which foods actually need to be refrigerated? I was a professional cook for 6 years and, as it turned out, I had no clue. Becuase refrigerators have always been there, I never really needed to know anything about which foods need refrigeration.

At it turns out almost nothing in your refrigerator needs to be there. A lot of it is even better if you take it out. Fruit is better when not refrigerated, ditto most vegetables. Some veggies will keep long when cool though. Leftovers need to either say hot or cool. Meat needs to stay cool. So then, after starting way back at the beginning -- what needs to be refrigerated? -- I realized we didn't need a fridge at all. 

What we need is a way to freeze things and then keep them cool as they thaw, before we eat them. The best way to do that, in my opinion anyway, is with an icebox and a 12V freezer. The freezer only needs to run when making ice or freezing food so it uses far less energy and can be powered entirely by our solar setup. The solution looks like this; freeze foods that need to say cool when you buy them (e.g. proteins like meat, fish, chicken, etc) and make ice when you need it. Then put everything in the icebox. Eat the food as it thaws. 

The rest, vegetables, condiments, etc can be stored in a cool dry place, in mesh baskets and so on. The problem gets solved without the excess energy draw and in less space.

I should note that just buying an icebox and slapping it in place will not be sufficient if you want your ice to last more than a day or two. I added around 4 inches of insulation to all sides of the icebox which will greatly improve performance (I put in roughly the equivalent of R 30 isnulation) and make it possible for block ice to last 4-5 days even when it's in the 90s outside.

Like so many experiments I've done through this site, I will keep you posted on how well my theory holds up in real world experience. But I think it'll do just fine because we're far from the first person to exist this way. In fact its the default way of living aboard sailboats until about the mid 1980s when suddenly a refrigerator of became a "necessity". It's also considerably posher than what most people around the world get by with right now. If most of the world can survive on less, I suspect we'll find a way to manage.

[^1]: Actually I just dislike things, but that seemed like too pompous of an opening. And a lot of my don't upgrade stance also comes from worrying that all these things we buy are implicated in a web of destruction that shatters lives and destroys the planet so we can [have a nice rug](/jrnl/2015/04/the-poison-youve-been-dreaming-of). I can sum up my approach in one sentence: buy as little as possible and, with a few exceptions, buy used.