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The New Independent Home
by Michael Potts
from Chapter 8:
Mobile Homes |
From an energy standpoint, it is hard to imagine a more miserable shelter solution than a mobile home. Using aluminum for lightness (a material embodying enormous energy because it is refined in electric furnaces from bauxite, and that is further cursed with good heat-conduction properties), these thin-walled, barely insulated, single-glazed monstrosities are serious blemishes on the landscape of our nation. They are "independent" in the sense that their occupants can, at a whim, pump up the tires, kick out the blocks, and be gone, but they are horribly wasteful. In fact, this impermanence commits the occupants to a life of unwitting disconnection from the land their trailers infest.
To heat or cool a mobile home requires roughly triple the energy of a properly insulated house of equal size. The residents, who invariably pay the energy bills, are condemned to perpetual servitude to the energy mongers, because of their abode's extreme inefficiency. It is practically impossible to operate anything but the smallest mobile home on an alternative energy system anywhere near the realm of acceptable comfort. Moreover, trailers are firetraps; heating a mobile home with wood is suicidal as well as illegal. Mobile homes are built tight of toxic synthetic materials, so their indoor air is dreadfully polluted. Evaluated by the freedoms enumerated in an earlier chapter -- rational construction costs, use of sustainable materials, reasonable costs to operate and maintain, and a responsible options for recycling the structure at the end of its useful life -- the mobile home is a costly mistake from beginning to end. Significantly, elsewhere in the world, not even the most disadvantaged people consider them even remotely habitable.
Apologists for mobile homes offer the excuse that it may be the only kind of habitation that can be afforded by low-income folks. That is absurd on its face: So much goes into making the damn things mobile that equal energy and equal care put into a stable habitation would provide a much more functional and beautiful home at much less cost to the resident and the environment. To what extent have the relaxed health and safety standards applied to trailers made their existence possible, while similar relaxations have not been made available to solid, responsibly designed low income housing?
The advice of many who have moved onto undeveloped land and lived in a trailer while building their home is, don't waste your time and money. Camp in a tent and build, instead, a guest cabin to weather the first winter while you learn the site firsthand.
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