Root Cellar - Free Refrigeration

Do you think you can't possibly afford to keep a big family cool every summer in a 3 or 4 bedroom, 2 bathroom house? Here's one of the ways your ancestors kept cool for thousands of years without air conditioning. There were no lines for the bathroom and their enemies feared the consequences of trespassing on a family homestead like they feared the mafia.

Here's the reason why:

Survival Dan  has a nearly comprehensive rundown on the details of building your own root cellar. It's awesome.

But some things have changed in the high-tech age.

As long as you CALL 811 BEFORE YOU DIG, and install adequate drainage first, and construct your structure properly,  and don't dig a hole 20 feet from your septic tank, and don't skimp on the proper ventilation (don't construct a radon gas harvester, please), and don't use materials that off-gas toxic fumes, then you MIGHT...

MIGHT...

Have yourself some free refrigeration in winter AND something slightly cooler than the blistering hot sun in summer and storage rooms as chilly and cool as the hour before sunrise.

There are millions of ways to do it right and a few ways to do it wrong. The deeper the hole, the cooler. But there are some trade-offs.

But depth isn't one of them. You can go deep. Really deep. I'm talking skyscraper-sized. The deepest mine is 2.4 miles below the surface. There's even a proposed 65-story-tall skyscraper which would be buried under Mexico city. How deep can we go? A lot deeper.

Reinforcement:

The Viet Cong built over 120 miles of tunnels under the villages of Cu Chi. At first, reinforced by timber. But after the forests were killed by the neurotoxic herbacide Agent Orange, (still on sale to the general public today), they used steel taken from captured American military vehicles to reinforce their tunnels. They did not always have adequate ventilation and had to lay down for days with their nose pressed against the floor to get oxygen to breathe.

Sometimes it pays to build things that don't kill you by asphyxiation, scorpions, bats, snakes and insects. But if Uncle Sam is raining down bombs and poison gas, it might be better to live in a cramped tunnel 30 feet underground.

When it's not raining bombs, you might not need to go to such extremes. But you will need something strong. Soaked dirt and rock really wants to buckle those weak, flimsy steel things like shipping containers.

Why Go To The Effort?

A storm cellar is nice to have. Especially with the right vents and insulation, it might easily double as a long-term cooler in the winter. Dirt cheap, too.

Date night: Let's see if I got anything in the fridge.

Even one vinyard's wine cellar can bring greater justice and comfort to the world. And not just because it's cool and damp, even in the summer. I'll explain as we go.

The Proverbs are clear that the kind of woman you want has strong arms and selects a vineyard to invest in.

Why a vineyard? With vineyards come wine cellars. With wine cellars come many kinds of comforts and justice and even a place to entomb the fallen.

It's harder to build below ground than above it. In the old days, it would have taken competent masonry. But as you'll see, it's well worth the investment to be prepared for anything. When Jesus comes to throw fire on the earth, the best protection is a cellar, which doubles as a storm shelter. But it must also be well insulated, or else it becomes an oven.

So there's a reason the Lord guided me to learn about aircrete, whatever its disadvantages may be.

Things buried in the ground naturally keep cool year round. Especially with a little help from some clever venting and design.

Some designs are more clever than others. Didn't Woody Allen design this one?

Even if it is 60 degrees in that root cellar, nobody in the last 100 years has said, "Let's go hang out in the root cellar to escape this summer heat." Why not?

Because we've got AC now.

And because we're not given the whole truth about our past. Ever since Edgar Allen Poe came along, we're sorta steered away from cellars by the powers-that-be.

Consider the Fictional Crimes Committed In Cellars

Many of the old stories available to us describe kids cooling off at the local swimming hole. But to me it seems so unlikely that you'd want to spend all summer there every year.

Mexicans may nap in the shade to endure the heat of the afternoon, but sometimes it even gets hot in the shade.

From desert people we get all kinds of ancient methods of evaporative cooling. Damp clothing, dampened turbans... But no Wet T-shirt contests, oddly enough.

Wearing damp fabrics that wick away moisture is a little like being in a pool all summer. The only place it doesn't work is in areas with high humidity. Heat plus humidity is a killer.

As is dampness, cold, dark and humidity. The kind found in dank, musty, moldy basements.

Edgar Allen Poe was the author of perhaps the world's first dank meme.

He wrote about beating the heat of Carnival with a cask of Amontillado in the basement with a buddy. You remember the story from high school? Two men enter. One man leaves.

After he was (most likely) killed for writing that story, Edgar Allen Poe's biography was written and published by a rival named (((Griswold))), a surname synonymous with the serpent who almost certainly bore false witness about Poe after murdering him, characterizing him as a drunkard who probably drank himself to death.

Which is about as defamatory as it gets. And adding insult to injury. A theme in the prophetic story of a boastful false accuser justly lured to his inevitable death. Fortunato's Achilles heel was a need to be considered the foremost adviser in matters of the authenticity of wine.

In the story, the godless Fortunato insults Montresor, his family and publicly defames Luchresi in the span of just a few minutes. Lost today is the sense of honor. The Bible says a it's better to have a good name than great fortune. The devil is an attention whore who takes his good name by stealing it from others while defaming and slandering his victims so that he will be worshiped.

But that doesn't work if your heart is full of forgiveness. The story doesn't account for this. Whether you're forgiving or not, it's still good to have hungry pigs, a wood chipper, a compost pile, and a cellar.

The man killed in his story was (((Fortunado))), and a paranoid murderer like Poe's rival Griswold might have recognized as himself in the story, interpreting it as a death threat.

If so, it's unremarkable if, just exactly as Poe illustrated in the story, he killed Poe 3 years later and then used the biography to insult his murder victim with impunity. Thereby revealing that the tempter himself can be reliably tempted to sin.

This is another of the devil's weaknesses Poe succeeded in revealing. Today it's lost on many. But not all.

"He will crush your head, and you will strike his heel", God said to the serpent.
The Gadsen flag reverses these roles, as does The Cask of Amontillado.

The attempts to out-devil the devil worked out for Montressor in the story, but not for Poe. At least, not in the same way.

If his plan was to tempt a murderer to kill him while leaving the precise means by which to identify and punish the murderer, then he would have in some sense succeeded at punishing his enemy with impunity. (If you believe in resurrection, anyway.)

The Cask of Amontillado was a precursor to works such as The Wrath of the Awakened Saxon w and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion which preceded the World Wars.

3 years after writing The Cask of Amontillado and The Telltale Heart, Poe turned up mortally wounded, injured, or ill, he couldn't say who'd done it or what had happened. But his own stories may have identified the murderer three years in advance. One who'd been biding his time to lure Poe into a vulnerable position and then kill him with impunity, just like Montressor.

The story seems to be saying, "Two can play at that game" and "I'm on to your tricks."

Despite claims he's an atheist, Poe remains one of the most brilliant, faithful if fatally flawed believers, now asleep in Jesus awaiting the resurrection.

But before his untimely death, it was Edgar Allen Poe who invented something else a murderer would have absolutely despised:

The detective story genre.

Of course, it's the Bible itself that teaches you how to be a detective, to follow up on a hunch, to hold fast to what's true and reason from first principles.

The world almost never teaches such things, but Jesus certainly does. Particularly if you're doing as he suggests. Visiting a prisoner, feeding the hungry, homeless, the poor, the stranger the orphan will tell you a lot more about this world than the television will.

Everything done in the dark will be brought to the light, just as surely as we can detect the size and number of planets around a distant star from the very faintest of all wobbles as they orbit around it, and from its flicker as a planet passes in front of it.

The devil certainly doesn't like white people landing on the moon, either. Engineering is, of course, vastly improved by the same kind of scientific detective work that catches a murderous saboteur in the act.

If you don't know about Poe's Amontillado story, the hints about the motive for the crime include the description of the family crest and motto. And the foot crushes a serpent whose fangs are embedded in the heel", a reference to Genesis, the bit about the Masons and "Yes. For the love of God."

All these telling you the identity of the serpent being walled up for inflicting a thousand injuries, as well as the religion of the man doing it.

Montressor is the Italian name of a family of distinguished soldiers who served the King honorably.

Montressor's smile at the "thought of his immolation" is another clue.

The family motto, "Nobody wrongs me with impunity." (Somewhat similar to "I will bless those that bless thee, and curse those that curse thee.") The story says says "we passed through long walls of piled skeletons." So it would seem that many have offended this vampire hunter's family, and they've raised the administration of justice to quite a high art. Given that "none have disturbed the bones in half a century." The bones were kept in a pile of some size. It's rewarding to take some note of many other details.

In forfeiting his own life to write works of art hated by our enemy, Poe has in fact laid a trap for the devil, while providing the means by which his own murderer may be detected.

In writing the detective story, he created a genre which made some of the greatest contributions to police work. Sherlock Holmes stories further invented clever methods of examining physical evidence and the inductive reasoning by which murderers would be detected and imprisoned.

Continuing the kind of breakthrough work are non-fiction books like Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit, a significant influence which inspired a movie called Mindhunter which then became popularized as Silence of the Lambs.

If you know what most serial killers have in common, then you know the book could have just as easily been called the Jewhunter.

Spoiler alert: Rats prefer to live under the floorboards. They must know something we don't know.

Mindhunter reveals that many in the FBI are very reluctant to use Douglas' methods of "stepping into the shoes" of the killer. Just as many Germans officers were unwilling to learn from the enemy how to make emotionally effective propaganda. This is why only the best men are worth a damn.

Seems like it's all the more important to keep the best men if you want results. The FBI apparently doesn't do this anymore. Nor does the rest of the US government. Might be time to walk away, as our ancestors did. Our kind are more welcome in foreign lands than in our own. Particularly the most competent and capable of us.

In America, real genius has gone largely unrecognized and unrewarded since Poe's time. There's no reason to save a dying animal. The animal you'd save is the one that has some hope of recovery.

Douglas suggests using empathy to imagine how the killer feels. By stepping into the mind of the killer, using the facts of the case, he set traps for the killers, knowing them as well as Montressor knew Fortunado.

The Bible says the devil is unable to read our thoughts. But in scripture, men are frequently condemned to death or punishment by their own words. This is where we've gotten the importance of eliciting confessions from criminals. Although this process has been perverted in modern times. Particularly by feminist family courts, I hear.

Former FBI international hostage negotiator Chris Voss recommends empathy in dealing with kidnappers and hostage-takers. Tactical empathy, it's called.

It's a similar counter-intuitive approach. Voss had good reasons to buck the trend, just as Noah did.

Good thing, since following the crowd is ineffective and ultimately fatal. Again, the roots of tactical empathy can be found in the Bible, along with many other useful crime-detection tools.

But rumor has it the FBI's leadership ain't what it used to be. And once that's gone, the serial killers just do what they do. As I've said before, it only takes a few hundred protected serial killers acting with impunity to kill tens of millions over the course of a decade or so.

Knowing how many disappeared who witnessed 9/11 or were about to give testimony about the Clintons, it's sound advise to exercise caution. It's not that she's protected. It's that those who do their dirty work are also protected. By whom?

By the people who murdered my cousin. Potentially the the same people who killed my dad, who sent my family off to fight in useless, wasteful wars, who insisted that Pilot's soldiers kill my Lord and a thousand more such injuries.

Poe, a not-too distant cousin of mine, baptized in an Episcopal church in Richmond, Virginia would not have been unaware of the circumstances in Italy because they're much the same as they are in America and everywhere else.

Apparently there are some English teachers and even substitute English teachers who have their high school students read this story about the cask of Amontillado. Poe knew the Bible well and wrote a Hymn [to the Virgin Mary] in 1833.

Solving Problems On A Large Scale

It may be that you'll at some point want to have a root cellar of some size for long term cold storage of all that which you've uprooted. Abiding by all the applicable regulations, of course. It's not by sin that a man receives his blessings from the Lord, but by keeping his hands clean in the Lord's sight.

If you hang out in the basement or root cellar in the summer, there's every reason to believe it's going to be significantly cooler than sweating your skin off in the heat of August.

You don't have to sweat up in some hot attic all summer.

But I can easily foresee a time when we don't need to spend as much money on refrigeration now that design is cheap, education is cheap and abundant, and so many are courageously trying their hand at designing and building their own homes and homesteads. Maybe vineyards.

Very large-sized, electricity-free "refrigerators" can be cheap, giving you a competitive advantage over those using expensive modern refrigeration methods.

Although the method to beat is setting a modern freezer chest to just under 40 degrees, which uses 10% as much electricity as your typical stand-up refrigerator. During the winter months, especially due to its size, the root cellar still wins.

You won't lose a whole season's crop because a winter storm knocked down some power lines.

Saving stuff outside in the snow is a lot smarter than leaving it in the relatively warm refrigerator. But eventually it thaws. The sun comes out. We have unseasonably warm days, even when it's cold at night. Proper venting keeps chilly air drifting in while venting the warm air out. When it warms up outside, the root cellar vents keeps the cool air at the bottom. Warmer air won't flow in during the day.

If well-contructed, the temps in the cellar could stay within a couple of degrees of the lowest temperatore of the day for months.

A root cellar in New York could stay below freezing until mid March, and below 60 degrees, even in July.

You know who else thought of this? Your ancestors did.

Not that you listen to them, necessarily. 

After all, they don't talk much anymore. You didn't listen to them much while they were alive. You didn't raise your children while living with your parents who still lived with their parents. Why not?

Probably because you wanted to pay extra for rent to live in sin instead with lots of easy women. Oh. Not a good plan, is it? I know. I did the same.

Childless women moved out to ride the cock carousel. I was lucky none of them wanted me for my money. (If they did, they didn't last.)

But your ancestors in the mid to early 19th century would store food for months out in a cold room while warming themselves up in the warm house by the fireplace. What's more calming than sitting around the fireplace telling stories with family before going to sleep?

When momma drifts off, exhausted from the day, grandma is there to hold the little babies until they're old enough to help watch their little brothers and sisters on their own.

Your ancestors knew things we don't. In fact, for thousands of years there were...

No Lines For The Bathroom!

That's right. There were was no line for the bathroom. You know why? Simple.

Because they'd poo in the outhoues and bathe in a washtub.

Why would any fool bathe in the outhouse? Insanity! Combine the two into the same room? Only a complete imbecile would think of such a thing.

They also had more "toilets" than you can shake a stick at. 16 children had 30 places to go to "the little buckaroo's room."

That means in a cold snap you can get away with storing the #2 poo in a bucket (or in a pot) and toss a little sawdust on top. Smell? What smell? With a lid on the pot, there's no smell.

Bathroom fans hadn't been invented yet.

No toilet paper. Why would you want that?

When you're eating a naturally high-fiber diet, there's very little need for toilet paper. Only when you eat highly processed modern food that turns into cement in your stomach will you need truckloads of toilet tissue every year.

Is it cold outside? No problem. Dump it at your convenience. In London, people found it convenient to toss it out the window. Which works a little better in the country than it does in the city.

There's no line. No waiting. No need to install 5 bathrooms in the house. You have a separate outhouse, a separate commode, a separate washtub, and one other thing...

A chamber pot to piss in.

Also called a bourdalou, some of them very fancy because they're for the refined upper crust ladies of high society.

The bourdalou is pronounced like "bor da loo". Hence the old expression "going to the loo", kept in her chamber. Which is why it's called a chamber pot. As long as you're not dirt poor, you'll always have a pot to piss in.

Cleanliness is next to godliness, and making a child wait outside a door to pee sounds like something out of a torture dungeon. Which is why the devil has designed things that way.

Our modern homes come complete with an artificial bathroom bottleneck to create the deception that their house isn't big enough for 15 to 20 kids.

The Howland House in Plymouth, Massachusetts. John Howland had 10 children.

Well, all you need is 4 or 5 rooms with up to 4 bunk beds each. What's the problem?

Can't fit a dozen kids in your house? That's a lot of bunk.

2 bathrooms is plenty. You just need to be more civilized.

Good luck getting that image out of your head.
Imagine posing for this painting for several hours. Today's fashion models have it easy.

When they didn't have enough bathrooms, the (19 and counting) Duggars spent years building a bigger house to live in. Instead of spending a kajillion dollars doing that, they could have just installed an outhouse.

I know America is obsessed with protecting children, but right now, America is literally protecting them out of existence.

Lest you think I'm obsessed with the loo, let me assure you there are other reasons for my concerns than public sanitation.

Racist reasons.

Some areas in America are already experiencing frequent outages, brownouts and rolling blackouts. Even New York.

Our electrical grid is already fragile enough when white guys are running it. And often enough strained beyond the breaking point, you've no doubt noticed.

But when the nuclear energy and hydroelectric dams are enriched by diverse dreamer immigrant refugees running the systems, then it's a matter of time before the nutty chimps running the asylum who never invented the wheel can't figure out how to make the glowing radioactive material turn into a reliable supply of amperage.

See the instability of the power grid in the Philippines and India if you doubt that darkness of skin color is directly proportional to electrical grid failures and other kinds of outages. Justice outages. Peace and freedom outages. National border outages. National defense. Things like that.

And if you don't speak Spanish yet, then hey buddy. This is Murica. Why don't you just learn the goddamn language.

A FEW DAYS before digging any holes, be sure to consult experts and call 811 before you dig.

BEFORE YOU DIG.

And you need to give them a few days. Why? There are millions of miles of buried utilities. It takes awhile to find them all. Whether you're planting a tree, installing a fence or mailbox, before injuring yourself, experiencing an outage, or getting fined for the repair cost of the damages.

Utilities will come out an mark the buried lines for you.

Because you don't want a free refrigerator to turn into a $20,000 refrigerator.

In my humble opinion, the best design for a cellar is provided by Edgar Allen Poe himself. It's not enough to build a cellar that does the job. But to do so with impunity.