The following is an excerpt from The Carbon-Free Home: 36 Remodeling Projects to Help Kick the Fossil-Fuel Habit, by Stephen and Rebekah Hren. It has been adapted for the web.

Stopping to think about it, it’s no wonder that the taming of electricity was inspired by humanity’s desire for lighting. Being in the dark on a cold winter night is miserable. In fact, the first oil well, drilled by Colonel Drake in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, was done in the hopes that the gooey black stuff would replace dwindling supplies of whale oil, used for lighting. It did that and a whole lot more. Just the fact that a major part of the economy in the first half of the nineteenth century revolved around sending young boys out on ships to slaughter whales and boil down their blubber, the resulting oil being used almost exclusively for lighting, shows what a desirable and sought-after amenity home lighting is.

The alternatives to on-demand lighting are slim pickings. Whale hunting is a serious chore, and highly illegal to boot. All of the alternatives to electric lighting, besides increasing natural daylighting, involve burning something, either fossil fuels such as propane or kerosene or natural oils or waxes. The former are dirty and foul whatever room they’re burned in; the latter are expensive and difficult to accumulate in quantity. Both are horribly inefficient, converting just a minuscule fraction, much less than 1 percent, into usable light. The only reason to consider using these alternatives as your main source of lighting is if lighting is your only electrical need and you can thereby sever your ties to electrons altogether. If that is the case, we congratulate you. Be sure to make the best use of these inefficient lighting devices by using reflectors. Aluminum foil and/or mirrors work great and can triple the available light by directing it where you need it. Make sure you purchase nonradioactive mantles if you’re using a kerosene lantern, and please, be very, very careful around any flame and do not leave it unattended.

Natural Daylighting

Increasing the natural daylight in your home is something to take into consideration if you find from your energy diary that you need to turn lights on during the daytime. We are fortunate that our house, designed in the 1930s, has no issues with dark rooms. Every bathroom has a window and every hall has natural light. But some condominiums, apartments, and splitlevel or ranch houses we’ve seen have a serious lack of daylight.

Sunlight pipes (also called tubular daylighting devices) are low-tech devices that work wonders in dark hallways or bathrooms that have an accessible roof to penetrate. Be careful: every time you make a hole in the roof there is a chance for water penetration and damage. Solar tubes must be carefully installed and the flashing and caulking checked regularly.

Skylights require a large hole in a roof. Besides the potential for water infiltration (we’ve seen a majestic Victorian home whose ultimate ruin was an unmaintained skylight), skylights can allow substantial heat loss in winter and oftentimes direct solar gain in summer. Skylighting in new homes is simply bad design. For retrofits, solar tubes are much cheaper and easier to install than skylights (no heading off roof or ceiling joists) and much less of an energy liability.

Turning part of your south wall into passive solar glazing (large south-facing windows that allow in lots of warming sunshine in winter) can do wonders for brightening a dark home. The pros and cons of various solar-heating strategies are discussed in chapter 7 of the book.

There are some cool new technologies on the horizon for natural daylighting for areas where a window or solar tube through the roof won’t work. Fiber-optic cables with collectors can be snaked through a house from a roof to reach an area that couldn’t otherwise be naturally lighted. These are extremely costly, but prices could soon come down. Parans is a Swedish company that is now offering these for sale.

Biogas Lighting

If you live out in the country and have animals, then you have the potential to create large quantities of biogas (this is discussed in greater detail in chapter 9 of the book). In many areas, gas lighting preceded electric lighting, and new and used gas fixtures are still available. They are popular with the Amish, many of whom avoid the use of any utility-tied electricity (although not fossil fuels in general). Many of these lighting fixtures are very Victorian and quite fancy looking, and they would certainly make great conversation pieces for any visitors.

Resources to Check Out

• Kill-A-Watt. Tells you how much energy an individual appliance uses while you have it plugged in.
• Lehman’s Non-Electric Catalog. Started in 1955 to serve the Amish community in Ohio, and still going strong. www.lehmans.com
• Power Cost Monitor and The Energy Detective. Both give an aggregate amount for how much energy your house is consuming at that moment.
• Watt Stopper and Sensor Plug. Outlets turn on when someone enters the room and stays on for a set amount of time.

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