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Here is a text translation from the US Radio Network interview with Michael Dresser discussing the new book "Thriving During Challenging Times." Welcome back on Michael Radio, you're listening to thought provoking talk on Dresser After Dark on the iron man USA Radio Network.
Economic collapse, climate change now americans must return to the independence that built this country in finances and sources for food and water heating powering homes and there's never been a more important time for that word called independence. OUr guest Cam Mather loose all of the electricity grid producing all its own power from the sun and the wind closes on food and has reduced its expenses to a minimum while living the the typical american lifestyle, he is the author of Thriving during Challenging times, the Energy, food and financial indpendence handbook and Cam, I welcome you to the show.
Cam: Oh Michael, thank you.
Michale: thank you so much for being here. okay. I'm picturing this and I think it's great but i'm picturing you living out in the middle of nowhere and back in the 1820's. is there a little diffent from that?
Cam: well that's true. we have a very high tech operation here in terms of the publihing business we run with the computers and high speed internet on satellite and all the other toys that most of the americans would have but we just power with the sun and wind. you certainly don't have to be living in the country to do it and the beauty of what's happening was a lot of our utilities that you know, the electricity grid is encouraging people to this and so they're offering tons of urban people to sell the equipment to themselves which is good for your pocketbook but it's also good for them because it makes the grid more resilient you know.
Michael: so Cam I'm sitting on the house and let's say i'm sitting about a quarter of an acre. so i have room to grow my own food, i can do my own gardening and then what about the power? what do i do, how i actually create a power?
Cam: First thing I would do is I would put a solar domestic hot water system on my roof. That is simply a solar panel that you put on your roof to heat the hot water that you used for showering and washing and then washing clothes . that unit would be let's say five or 6 thousand dollars but the payback and current energy prices right now is probably five years and again, some utilities, gas utilities that are offering an incentive for people that distribute this. but i give you the fastest paybackand its probably gonna produce about 60% of your hot water and then after that you would look at solar power in terms of solar record which would be putting on photo solid panels on your roof to generate electricity and initially you would probably use that power to load in your hose and the various appliances that you have but again what's important right now from a lot of facilities, people would be putting your excess electricity up on to the grid sometimes what you'll find is the utility will pay you a premium to do that because they know how many millions and billions of dollars of cost to build new nuclear plant and coal plant. what they are trying to do is move to a more distributed generation system. you know you're putting extraelectricity to the grid and that your neighbors are using in that sort of way that works like the internet but with a bunch of smaller nodes but rather than large centralized power stations
Michael: okay,let me ask you. let's go back to the solid panel on the roof for hot water. what if you live in a like,I'm Wisconsin obviously it snows here. so what happens then?
Cam: most of the slots that you would put on or design for that is that the dark materials are placed for about a 45-degree angle which means that when the snow hits it on a snowy day, the next day when the sun comes up because its dark you'll find that the snow will ran off quiet quickly and snow won't be a problem.
Michael: but will it still pick-up the heat?
Cam: it won't on a snowy day, it's only gonna get, it's only gonna get about 60% of your hot water. there still days when you're gonna need your natural gas to turn on your electric or your propane but what its telling its the offsetting some of that on renewable fossil fuel that you're purchasing now and isolating you of the energy shots that will come as natural gas and becocmes more expensive.
Michael: so okay, on essence what you're doing is you're truly doing your balancing now
Cam: yup.
Michael: Okay, alright. well that makes sense.
Cam: at a certain point wherein people that you know would like to be competely independent of all these utilities etc. and so you know that you'll find some people doing down including one of my friend on campus is he bought under new energies that we publish. i mean these days we'v gone off the grid and propane and what he's done is he put off all through his wood stow which he uses as his hose so he basically has hot water, enough hot water year round to produce all from heat but i would have to purchase any propane or natural gases or electricity.
Michael: Now i live for about 20 years with a wood stove in the house and believe me they're absolutely wonderful and they worked. but did you get the crease build up and sometime there can be a littl bit of a problem. I can tell you the fire deparment where we used to live would say "it's Dresser, it's calling me again.
Cam: Well there's no question that you want to make sure you got a good high quality of APA certified wood and make sure it burns clean and you want to make sure you don't burn green firewood. but what i would suggest is gonna appeal to a larger scale of your audience. eventhough heating of wood is renewable energy source because trees keep growing and they look like something like a geothermal system. C pump on the grounds where essentially you put a trance in your ground or you drill a well in front of your house which can be a suburban houseand you put a pipe down to drip liquid to the ground , extract heat from the ground bring that heat into your home. purchase some electricity but for every unit of the electricity you put in you get above 3-7 units of heat of so its a very efficient way to heat your home, it's renewable ang again reducing your exposure just like the natural gas
Michael: and so..okay cam let me ask you this "are we looking at a roughhly about 10-15,000 dollar investment to do this, roughly?
Cam: uhmm, yeah, if rounds for a c pump can be a little higher than that, could be 15-20k depending on the nature of your property and what is the drilling throughout or whether they can go horizontal or vertical or depend upon the property, a lot of the people, a lot of the drillers would just put 3 little drops to your driveway but what you have to look at is the beauty of the ground C pump is that you have high efficiency of gas now you also have to purchase a centralized air conditioning unit and the beauty of the ground where the c pump is that it works on reverse on the summer so the air conditioners are host in summer, each were host on winter so i mean that what is happening right now is that the price of the heat pump is getting more on the line much closer in line with the price of the high efficiency of gas and a central air conditiner. and you'll find some municipalities right now including Central Government of the United States is often large for you to put on the ground for c pump because they know that our supplies of natural gas are limited and they want you to move toward to a renewable energy source like this to isolate yourself and energy shops
Michael: okay, so we're looking at roughly around 25 thousand dollars if you're gonna go in cold and you're gonna build the house to do this and a lot of that from what i hear you say is trade-off
Cam: well it is. yeah, i guess what we can say is that right now is the downturn of the economy, gas prices are reasonably low but what happens in NOrth America we hit basically peak natural gas to keep drilling more and more wells and finding what's natural gas so you need to start looking offshore with liquid natural gas in places like Iran, and Russia and places that cannot be very friendly to Americans. I think what's gonna happen is that the places where natural gases go up and it's gonna go up very quickly and it's gonna go very high. so essentially, yes you're making a bit of an investment right now to go around for a c pump but the beauty of it is the day you put it in you stop buying natural gas and you only buy some of electricity but much less in terms of actual expense and you would use natural gas, and so the beauty of this is that it's good for the environment, you're producing your greenhouse gases, you're becoming less dependent on form of fire of natural gas which more and more where gas will be coming from and your isolating yourself from the inevitable energy exhaustion that's gonna happen because the world is simply running out of these resources.
Michael: you know i spent 23 years of the interiors of Alaska and left in 2006 and I remember how expensive that was because we had big oil tanks and you know, you don't heat the house and even when i left there it was 4-5 bucks a gallon for this stuff so it was not cheap.
Cam: yup . we've been very fortunate we've lived in a very fortunate time in history in terms of having lots of readily available and inexpensive natural gas ang gasoline and diesel and some fuel that have provided us with incredibly high standard of living but those days are rapturely gone to a close and if you listen to somebody like Pat Birol who is the Chief Executive of the International Energy Agency, he is suggesting we're getting close now to heating people well and it sounded from somebody who from many years that's not very likely. so what's gonna happen is you got 2 billion consumers in china and india right now, if you wanna get off your bike in the car so we're not gonna be competing with the people all over the world basically for a resource that is gonna be taken down the back side only if the price is gonna take higher
Michael: what an interesting turn of events in 2 billion people that want to get off their bikes and get in their cars and you got us wanting to get off of our cars and get on our bikes.
Cam: and suddenly that would make everything they can to get rid of those internal combustion and put on electric motors cause I know it's sort of crazy.
Michael: yeah, and this, by the way if we don't look at it now, i'd rather look at these things now and take it all a consideration than wait 5,6,7,8 9 10 years from now when it might be too late. you're right, oil is not a renewable source and someday it's gonna be gone and whatever we gonna do with everything that is depending upon oil and we would talk about oil, that's just not gasoline, look at the plastics and all the derivatives coming from that also.
Cam: yup, and look at your dinner plates, i mean for every calorie of food energy that you consume, 10 calories of food, food energy has gone into it in the farmer's tractor and the truck that go to the manufacturing plant and the electricity that when it gets the plant cold and cans and bottles and so yeah, we have a very very you know positive feeling in terms of trial as well. again another reason to look at maybe going for your own food on that quarter acre or at least finding something like a CSA or community supported agriculture where you can get to know what a local farmer buys for certain portions of his dollars . that way you know you have a local suppliers who's gonna be left lessexposed to energy shock and if it's not the head of what it coming from California to New York states.
Michael: Cam, by the way is there a website we can find you at?
Cam: you can, it's aztext.com
Michael: and also thriving during challenging times, where do we buy that?
Cam: you can buy that at any bookstores, you can get it in our website and it's just coming out in the bookstores now and amazon should be selling it in a day or two
Michael: okay, you've got zero carbon car, renewable energy handbook, smart power and Biodiesel, are all of these things on the website?
Cam: they are, those are the books that we published and are available on our website
Michael: Dynamite! And the "All you can eat gardening handbook", now that's my handbook
Cam: haha...yeah, that's the next book yet. that's coming this winter.
Michael: wonderful. Cam Mather thank you very much and again, keep up the good work cause realistic play old too expensive to do the conversion now. do something before it gets too late and once it's too late, we've all gonna be in the problem. let me ask you one quick question. is there anything that i should have asked you that i didn't that would brought up information that the audience need to hear?
Cam: no, i think we've covered it all, i can suggest it's all in the book to talk about the importance now because i think that would get people have more flexibility to take some of the opportunities that will present themselves during the challenge of times
Michael: hey cam, thank you very much for joining us
Cam: you're most welcome. thanks Michael
Michael: bye.
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