Frequently Asked Questions about Ripples
|| Collapse All
What is Ripples? Ripples is a personal project started in 2011 by Ryan & Amanda Bancroft. For every decision we face in life (what careers we choose, food we eat, house we live in, transportation method, etc) we ask ourselves “How can we make a difference with this choice, for both people and planet?” By sharing our story, as well as anything that made it easier for us (like a book or an organization that helped us), we hope to make it easier for others to make a difference in whatever ways work for them, across a variety of good causes – not just the causes we personally care about. Ripples is not a business, nor is it a 501©3 non-profit organization. We might be an organization someday soon, but the question we always ask is: how can we make the biggest difference? Right now, we are partnering with and supporting the mission of existing non-profits rather than creating a brand new organization. Ripples is not exclusively an environmentalist project. We do try to live sustainably and make a difference for the environment, but we also try to help many people around the world. We shop locally and buy fair trade products like food and clothing whenever possible, because we seek a world with fair wages. We actively fight racism and white supremacy by living and promoting choices that counteract climate change (which hits People of Color worldwide the hardest) and by using our platform to amplify marginalized voices (example). We think about making ripples in a way that includes, but does not stop at, environmental concerns. click here to close What is the inspiration for Ripples? Ripples work is guided and inspired by: Ripples is a personal challenge to oneself: how can I make a difference in my day-to-day life? Everyone’s answer is different. The following questions guide us in our choices throughout life. Not all of them are applicable every time we make a decision or take action. They aren’t in order of importance. We just try to keep these in mind and do our best. It may be helpful to post this in your home if you’d like to take the Ripples challenge, too! click here to close Who is involved in Ripples? Ripples is just a personal project of Ryan & Amanda’s – we’re trying to make a difference with our own life’s choices, and share what we do. We have thousands of readers who also teach us a lot, volunteers who are helping us with projects, master naturalists helping with our conservation work, and non-profits like the Northwest Arkansas Land Trust helping us protect 169 acres in collaboration with the landowner at the Historic Johnson Farm where we are based. Beaver Water District funded the conservation easement for the property. The OMNI Center donated $300 for our solar panels. Beaver Watershed Alliance funded the greywater filtration rain garden and offered guidance in its creation. We lease an acre of farm land from our friend in order to have space for native gardens and our house, and received a loan from another friend for almost half the cost of the tiny house. We assisted the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program in the nomination for the the Johnson Farm buildings and acreage now listed on the National Register of Historic Places (as of 2019) along with the Johnson Barn (which got listed in 1991). We host visitors who are interested in learning about sustainable lifestyles, or photographing or touring the historic farm. It’s never been just us! We have lots of help. But Ripples is primarily about how we’re trying to make a difference with our lifestyle, so it’s very personal and guided by our decisions, limitations, and goals. Think of it like a project in which someone is trying to see how far they can run, and they have friends and supporters cheering them on while they train. Maybe they’ll help other runners to train, too. The runner might donate to charity for running a particular distance. A friend might let them run on their property. Someone might hand them a water bottle. Ultimately, whether they run or not is their choice, but so many people make the running possible! We’re indebted and grateful to our community for supporting us since 2011. click here to close Where are you located? We live in an off-grid tiny house on wheels located at the Historic Johnson Farm on Kessler Mountain. In partnership with the landowner and the Northwest Arkansas Land Trust, we protect 169 acres for historic and ecological conservation. click here to close What is the Historic Johnson Farm? click here to close Are you an Eco Village, Natural Science Center, or Community Center? No, none of the above. Unfortunately our goals and the goals of our partners do not permit a housing project or large public facility on site. However, there are eco villages and centers throughout the region and world which may meet your needs! Browse our eco village resources for more information. The Ozark Natural Science Center is a fantastic place for school field trips and offers overnight programming, check it out! The Kessler Mountain Outdoor Classroom and Nature Center is great for field trips, and learners of all ages too! click here to close What have you done so far? What do you hope to do in the future? What we’ve done or are currently doing (updated 2021): What we hope to do soon: click here to close Did you build your tiny house? No, our custom tiny house on wheels was built by Backcountry Tiny Homes. They provided all the off-grid features, including solar from Backcountry Solar, a rainwater harvesting system, and Separett composting toilet. click here to close What are the specs on your tiny house and which off-grid features does it have? Have more questions about the specs on our tiny home? We’d be happy to share further details. E-mail us at: MakeSomeRipples@Gmail.com click here to close Do you have Internet? What do you use? We use an unlimited 4G hotspot provided by the Calyx Institute. Service routes through Sprint / T-Mobile, and will operate on almost any LTE band (depending on the capabilities of the hotspot). This allows us to remain un-tied to any physical grid, gives us a modem with an extremely small footprint, and allows us to benefit from the extreme stability of LTE connections. Our stability tests showed almost no dropped packets, so they run extremely well. Also, Internet is integral to the Ripples experience. Amanda uses it to maintain her art business, and we invest a significant amount of energy into this Ripples site, our Facebook presence, and various forms of research that help us maintain our homestead. click here to close What kind of AC do you use and could you describe it? We use a Midea U-shaped 10,000 BTU unit, a relatively new design rolled out in 2019. Here’s the Amazon link for it. We actually purchased it via Indiegogo, the crowdfunding platform. This project costed about $400, as compared with at least $1,500 for a mini split (plus installation) with similar capabilities. This unit uses the inverter technology usually found in mini splits to radically reduce the total power consumed, as well as a smart built-in thermostat. Even more importantly, for a house with a tightly sealed envelope and passive solar design, though it has the ability to ramp consumption up to 10 amps if that’s needed, it can run as low as 1 amp, or about 140 watts, when providing very modest cooling. Traditional window AC units have an “on” or “off” setting, with no ability to modulate how much power they consume. In essence, they can run at full blast (or a couple of settings) and, during this time, provide only some degree of climate control, while also gobbling immense amounts of energy. This greatly limits their ability to provide scalable (based on house size, humidity conditions, external temperature, etc.) indoor climate regulation. This unit is installed in an existing window, requiring no professional installation. It has most of the features of a mini split that costs several hundred more, that requires wall penetrations, and a standalone outdoor compressor. This unit is an excellent fit for off-grid, if the house inverter has the capacity to handle it plus any other simultaneous loads one has planned. click here to close What kind of heater do you use? We use a Rinnai 8,000btu Propane heater. Here’s the HomeDepot link for it, from where we purchased it. This project costed about $1,600 total – $1200 for the heater, and $400 for installation + parts. This heater has nearly the highest AFUE rating of any direct-vented propane heater on the market, at about 80% – 82% (depending on the resource you reference). Many less costly direct vented heaters have sub-70% ratings. For a savings of perhaps $300 – $400, they will cost more in propane over the course of a few years. That aside, this more premium model offers the following benefits: click here to close What insurance companies are covering you and your tiny house? We’re receiving homeowner’s insurance through the fantastic TinyHome.Insure / Strategic Insurance with Martin Burlingame. They think of everything and we’re very confident they will provide excellent coverage. We are also required to purchase an umbrella liability policy through State Farm. It’s been very easy working with them! click here to close How did you get financing? Originally, we’d saved up enough to buy a house outright. However, the off-grid systems and overall project cost was way higher than we anticipated. We were told all we needed for a loan was excellent credit, and knew we needed to avoid traditional bank mortgages because tiny houses on wheels are not yet accepted by most lenders. Our back-up plan was to apply with LightStream, which specializes (among other things) in unsecured tiny house loans for people with excellent credit (our scores are about as high as they can be). We were still denied due to insufficient recent debt (we paid off $29,000 in student loans within 4 years, but that was 7 years ago and instantly disqualified us) as well as a secondary reason of insufficient income (Amanda is self-employed, a common hurdle to getting a loan). In the end, we couldn’t have pursued this project without the help of a friend who agreed to loan us the remainder of the cost of the house and establish a payment plan and contract with interest. It worked out great for everyone! click here to close How are you “off-grid”? There are many ways to technically go “off-grid.” Our version of going “off-grid” involves avoiding public utilities that harm the environment, like non-renewable electricity and septic systems. This saves us money on water and electric bills, but note that the cost (for us) was steep and offers not many returns on the investment. Our tiny house on wheels is completely off-grid, with all electric solar, rainwater harvesting, and composting toilet. We will continue to buy food from local farmers and cooperatives; we’re NOT back-to-the-landers hoping to farm and provide for all our needs (although we admire such people for their skills). We’ll continue to use the banking system and keep our internet. This website is 100% solar hosted through AISO. For transportation, we carpool together into town to combine errands (which we do on foot) and work shifts. The Razorback Greenway bike trail is coming very close to the property, and in a couple of years we’ll be able to return to our previous habit of bicycle commuting and only occasionally driving to haul supplies or carpool. click here to close How is your website solar-hosted? This website is solar-hosted by AISO. They have a 100% solar-powered datacenter, where they host our website files. click here to close What kind of solar cooker / oven did you buy, and what's it like? We bought the All American Sun Oven, almost entirely made in the USA. It’s been fantastic to use, and cooks or bakes everything you can cook or bake in an indoor oven or stove (cookies, lasagna, rice curry, bread, soup, chili…) Please see our newspaper column Solar Cooking with the All American Sun Oven for detailed information and a recipe! click here to close What type of composting toilet do you use? Separett Villa 9210, which includes a vent fan, mechanical rotation for the waste bucket (no crank), and a separate urine diverter to keep liquids apart from solids. Waste inside the bucket is dehydrated over time with the vent fan, which reduces odor and prevents flies unless your flies are small enough to fit through window screens to get inside the home and toilet (fruit flies and kin). Our toilet hasn’t smelled bad very much, surprisingly. It takes some adjustment to learn how to properly sit on the toilet for #1 and #2, and some urine does get into the solids bucket no matter our best efforts. It’s particularly difficult during menstruation, when the toilet needs cleaned after each use. It’s recommended to pour a small cup of water down the urine diverter after anyone uses it, so that residue doesn’t build up in the system and odors are eliminated. The toilet is sleek and beautifully designed to appear like a flush toilet, but it uses no water besides the cup for flushing out urine. It’s also called a “dry” or “composting” toilet, but this unit is not actually a self-contained composting toilet. The composting process occurs outside in buckets at the owner’s discretion. Our liquids, along with water from the sinks and shower, are diverted into a greywater filtration garden filled with native plants like swamp milkweed, and mulch. click here to close What about your cat, Solo? How will you handle cat litter? Sadly, our cat Solo passed away in February of 2021. We used biodegradable septic-safe and compostable World’s Best Cat Litter. Here is our research about composting pet waste. click here to close How do you do laundry? We don’t have a washer/dryer inside our cabin, so we go to the Sit & Spin Laundromat in Fayetteville about every two weeks. They have some sustainability practices there. We wear most clothing more than once (until they smell or get dirty). Some items we dry in a dryer at the laundromat; others we line dry outdoors on the balcony or on a UK-based Pully Maid rack on our ceiling! click here to close What vehicle do you drive? As of 1/5/2023, we drive a 2011 Chevy Volt, which Amanda named “Snowy”. This is our first foray into EVs (electric vehicles), but is actually a PHEV, or plug-in hybrid electric vehicle. It can travel between 25 – 40 miles on a charge (16.0 kWh battery of which 10.4 kWh is usable), depending on driving style, terrain, and temperature. As backup, it has a 9.3 gallon gasoline engine. When we upgrade our solar electric system on our Homestead, we plan to try and charge it as often as possible using solar power. We are using it to reduce our reliance on gasoline, familiarize ourselves with maintaining an EV in Fayetteville, AR, and to continue pushing forward our goals of environmental stewardship. click here to close || Collapse All
Kessler Mountain offers not only outdoor recreation, but historically significant sites. The Historic Johnson Farm is technically on what was once known as Rieff’s Mountain (in the gap south of Kessler). It was the center of olden-day Rieff’s Chapel Community and has its own active cemetery, wagon road lined by stone fences / rock walls, and one-room schoolhouse foundation stones at the original site. The farm began around the 1830s. The Johnsons arrived in 1908, maintained the 1800’s orchards and planted new orchards of pears, apples, peaches and more. The family continues to own almost 169 acres of the now inactive farm, but at its largest size, the farm encompassed about 400 acres. The Johnson farmhouse was built during the mid-1920s on the same site as the late-1800’s central hall cottage, and is in excellent condition. The Johnson Barn built in 1933 is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, with the farmhouse and orchards listed on the National Register as the Benjamin Franklin Johnson II Homestead District in 2019 through the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program and the Rieff’s Chapel Cemetery was listed next. With hundreds of Johnson letters and photographs from the 1800’s through present-day, the farm and its various families have woven a fascinating story. Questions? E-mail us at: MakeSomeRipples@Gmail.com