Looking at the raw family budget started us on a road where we’re making a LOT of different kinds of decisions – even departing from the traditional way of thinking about Earthships.
Here’s the origin of the story of why our decisions & designs look may look strange…
I almost fell over when I learned we spend about $1500 a month in food – without eating out! This means OUR Eartship greenhouse REALLY matters. If it can save even 1/3 of our food – that’s $500/month in not spending future money. Our food costs rival the mortgage!
Traditional Earthships don’t try hard to feed you. Earthships forego traditional Greenhouse best practices – air turnover rates, and maximum/minimum temperature controls. These issues aren’t part of the designs. For newbies, automatic temperature regulation – protect plants from extreme heat and cold, and can more than double plant growth rates.
This kind of thinking led us to upgrade the Earthship greenhouse – to save money on food because it really matter$ to us.
My point in the post is that budget driven thinking is causing us to look at ever aspect of the design – like it will reduce OUR resource consumption, and living cost the most – instead of just adopting the already super-cool Earthship design.
I think my next post will take a look at our construction budget – and how cost sorting elements drove successive redesigns of high-priced elements – and knocked 15K or more out of the construction materials costs several times. Remember that mortgage thing I mentioned in the video?
Life would be a lot easier if we needed less money. It turns out that those dollars we HAVE to spend also reflect our ecological impact. So sustainable, in my mind is also affordable…
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