Home Renovations Today: Freedom versus "Grid-lock"

Collage: Home Renovations Today: Freedom versus "Grid-lock"
Illustration Credits: MS Office ClipArt
House with solar panel & Electricity, energy, homes
2012 @ wobuilt.com

“We often take for granted that our lights will come on when we flip the light switch, but the reality is that our reliability standards and the current state of the transmission grid leave us all vulnerable to blackouts.”
Richard Burr, Politician

What would happen if tomorrow you flipped the light switch and nothing happenned? If you turned on the tap and nothing came out? If you went to the grocery store and the shelves were empty?

The term “grid-locked” is fair and fitting. Like a Toronto motorist trapped in rush-hour traffic, our lives and progress are at the mercy of the grid. In simplest survival terms, we are not truly free.

We think of ourselves as being a first-world nation built on a solid, stable financial system and democratic society. The fact is, our so-called “freedom” teeters perilously atop a house of cards that has grown so large, complex, and reliant on co-dependent systems, any number of minor failures in any one of those systems could spell disaster for our established way of living.

How many of us could switch to a life without electricity overnight? How about growing (or hunting/fishing) our own food? Providing our own fresh water? Heating/cooling? Very few, indeed.

With ever-increasing food and energy costs, it is clear the grid—in all its myriad forms—is under a great deal of stress. Do we really want to wait until it reaches a breaking point? Do we trust those in power to look after our interests? What if every home could be a net producer instead of consumer of energy?

Home renovations today should address these issues. Put aesthetics aside a moment and consider the long-term sustainability of your living space; its resilience in the face of catastrophic grid failure.

Any sustainable community will have de-centralized and distributed production of the most basic measures of freedom (energy, food and water security) for inherent resilience and stability. The imperial “bigger is better” mentality of centralized production is oppressive and obsolete.

Wo-Built is a champion designer and builder of the future. We actively research and develop complete systems to address household needs at all levels—including the most fundamental.

Leaving no stone unturned, Wo-Built scours the world for best-practices in sustainability and the latest in green technologies to offer complete home renovation systems and additions that transform houses from victims of grid-lock to off-grid bastions of freedom, ecological responsibility and sustainability.

Wo-Built asks you to consider: we all buy home insurance "just in case." Strange, there is no insurance policy covering all the essentials without which our households cannot survive. The time to prepare our homes for the inevitable challenges of 21st Century is now. Wo-Built is taking the lead.

Attila Lendvai
VP of Strategic Development
Wo-Built Inc. - Innovative Design and Build

links:
greenhomebuilding.com: Building Today for Tomorrow: Avoiding Gridlock in your Home
"The typical gridlock image is of being stuck in your automobile in a traffic system that has bogged down because it cannot handle the volume of traffic. You feel helpless because you have to use the car, but it's not getting you where you want to go. You are locked into a dysfunctional system."
by Kelly Hart

choosingourfuture.ca: Choosing our Future: Building a Sustainable National Capital Region: Our Choices Today - Create Tomorrow.
Choosing our Future is an innovative joint planning initiative of the City of Ottawa, City of Gatineau and the National Capital Commission.

blog.homerenovationguide.com: Blogging about the world of home renovation and improvement.