LilNaib

We use a simple homemade compost toilet, saving 150kg of climate change emissions per person each year, and instead of creating sewage, we create compost.

Quick answer to your question: I'm using about 12 liters.

But a good answer depends greatly on some variables specific to your own circumstances:

• air temperature of your kitchen
• what's inside your fridge (empty space vs. thermal mass)
• the size of your fridge
• how well insulated it is
• how well maintained it is
• how often the door is opened
• how long the door stays open
• whether the door opens out, or up
• whether it has both refrigerator and freezer units
• how cold the ice/water jugs are

I've noticed the fridge consumes more electricity in summer, as we don't have AC, and I keep the house between roughly 54-60F (12C to 15C) in winter. In summer the kitchen ranges from 16C in the morning to up to 33C, although with shading improvements it's now more often 26-27C in summer.

I've also noticed a big difference in the jugs when the overnight low is -26C vs. -6C. At the coldest level, the jugs don't thaw in the fridge for 2 days at least, while a minor freeze gives at most a day of free cooling.

Our fridge is of the style with a refrigerator section above and a freezer drawer below. They are in separate, insulated compartments with their own access doors. I assume that with the ice in the fridge, almost all if not all of the electricity used is to keep the freezer cool.

I'm guessing at the usage based on a couple observations: 1) our LFP battery that we use for the fridge etc. during peak pricing times drains much slower with the ice and 2) the fridge is noticeably quieter with the ice jugs. It would be better to measure for a month with a kill-a-watt tool.

You’d think in Canada someone would have figured out a way to harness that cold from outside for part of the year.

Look into the "cool cupboard" associated with David Holmgren, who talks about it in his book Retrosuburbia. IIRC it uses simple geothermal and natural convection to keep certain foods cool.

I live in a cold place and lately I've been taking water jugs outside to freeze, then bring them in once I go out in the morning. With them, the fridge hardly runs any more. I'd prefer something automatic like a cool cupboard for certain things and a well insulated fridge running straight on DC solar.

Many people believe that methane leaks are badly undercounted, and that a proper accounting would show that these methane leaks make so-called "natural gas" as damaging as coal, on the basis on grams of CO2 per kWh of electricity generated. (Coal is obscenely dirty which introduces other problems, but that's an issue deserving of its own conversation.) So this is an important first step.

Hence why I said to purify it, and I only mentioned propane in the context of cooking, which is virtually if not always off-grid, so no piping.

You're not responsible for the whole world but you are responsible for your own actions.

As an additional (future) option, I love the idea of creating biochar, capturing the resulting syngas, and purifying the syngas for use as a plug-and-play alternative to propane compatible with their existing cookware.

I think this is sound from ecological and social standpoints. Propane is basically a byproduct of fossil fuel refinement, and as that goes away, so too, will propane, leaving behind a ton of wasted cookware etc. including the embodied carbon in its manufacture. By replacing the propane with another gas that's a byproduct of sequestration rather than fossil emissions, we save the embodied carbon and financially incentivize sequestration, while the people with cultural attachments to gas cooking can continue on.

Agreed 100%. We need to ignore these people (COP), stop letting them steal the oxygen from the room and deploy the alternatives that make them irrelevant.

We need fertilizer from Haber-Bosch

Chemical fertilizer is not only unnecessary, it's tied to poor agricultural approaches. In contrast, farmers who practice regenerative agriculture and/or permaculture don't use it and get excellent yields. A specific example is Gabe Brown, whose farm gets above-average yields compared to neighboring farms and is far more profitable, not needing to take government handouts to stay in business. Meanwhile, the soil at his 5,000 acre farm is far healthier and sequesters many tons of carbon per acre vs. neighboring farms.

For more info, read the book Dirt to Soil by Gabe Brown. You can also read a bit here:

https://soilhealthacademy.org/team/gabe-brown/

I used to live in an area with many lakes, and each January there was a weekend-long event out on the ice with games, ice swimming challenges, food etc. When I was growing up you could drive pickup trucks on the ice and leave wooden ice fishing shacks on the ice for weeks at a time or longer. In the last decade or so the event has been increasingly cancelled as the ice is often not even safe enough to walk on (let alone turn into a parking lot for trucks). Hell, they even had a gigantic bonfire with dozens of Christmas trees. Next day, you couldn't even tell there had been a fire there on the ice. All of that is going away.

We have to race full speed ahead at decarbonizing our own personal lives and our shared electric grids.

This is a feedback loop, as snow reflects sunlight (heat) back into Space, so a lack of snow exacerbates climate change, thus increasing the areas getting less snow, thus warming the planet more, thus...

They said they bring them to the landfill.

That's awful, creating tons and tons of methane - and they even have to pay for dumping. Just so stupid all around.

When I get some land I'll have a standing open invitation for select local arborists to come and dump truckloads of woodchips on my land whenever they want, for free.

is it actually less harmful to burn wood in a fireplace than to bury it at the risk that methane develops and gets released?

Yes, it's absolutely better to burn wood for heat in a modern fireplace. Doing so replaces a large amount of fossil fuels that would otherwise be burned to generate direct heat or electricity for electric heat. Although passive solar heating is by far the best method of home heating, modern fireplaces are vastly superior to anything that contribute to climate change. Since I assume your concern about fireplaces is about particulate emissions and air quality, I can happily say that modern fireplaces emit hundreds of times fewer particulates than ones from just a few decades ago. While considerable work has gone into improving fireplace design, one can't say the same about cleaning up our energy grids and climate emissions.