Video
Video Description
My name is Elias Yoda. I am Amish. I have never paid an electric bill in my life, and the upstairs bedroom of the farmhouse my grandfather built in 1934 stays cooler in August than most of yours do with three thousand dollars of machinery fighting for it.
In this video, I am going to show you exactly why.
I will walk you through what my grandfather built into this house, what his grandfather built into the one before it, and what every carpenter in my community still puts into every home we raise. I will tell you about the cupola on the roof, the four-dollar strip of cotton muslin nailed under the rafters, the gable vents your contractor probably sealed shut, and the trick my mother taught me in the summer kitchen when I was eight years old — using a single stove burner to pump cool night air through an entire house for about five cents.
You do not need to live the way I live to use any of this. You need a flashlight, an hour on a Saturday morning, and about ten dollars in materials from any hardware store.
I will also tell you the part that should make you angry: none of this is a secret. None of it. It has been written down for two hundred years. The reason you were never told is that nobody in the electric, roofing, insulation, or HVAC business makes a dollar when your attic breathes the way it was meant to.
We kept this knowledge in our community because we had to. The rest of the country forgot, because the rest of the country was given a machine to forget with.
Climb up there this weekend. Look at your gable vents. Then come back down here and tell me in the comments what you found — what county you are in, how old your house is, and whether somebody sealed those vents shut. I read every comment. The stories you send back are the reason I keep recording.
Next video: how my grandfather built a root cellar under this farmhouse that holds a steady fifty-four degrees year round, in January and August both, using nothing but clay, sand, and the slope of a hillside. Subscribe so you do not miss it.
Stay cool. Stay curious. And remember — the people who built this country with their hands knew things we are only just beginning to remember.
In this video, I am going to show you exactly why.
I will walk you through what my grandfather built into this house, what his grandfather built into the one before it, and what every carpenter in my community still puts into every home we raise. I will tell you about the cupola on the roof, the four-dollar strip of cotton muslin nailed under the rafters, the gable vents your contractor probably sealed shut, and the trick my mother taught me in the summer kitchen when I was eight years old — using a single stove burner to pump cool night air through an entire house for about five cents.
You do not need to live the way I live to use any of this. You need a flashlight, an hour on a Saturday morning, and about ten dollars in materials from any hardware store.
I will also tell you the part that should make you angry: none of this is a secret. None of it. It has been written down for two hundred years. The reason you were never told is that nobody in the electric, roofing, insulation, or HVAC business makes a dollar when your attic breathes the way it was meant to.
We kept this knowledge in our community because we had to. The rest of the country forgot, because the rest of the country was given a machine to forget with.
Climb up there this weekend. Look at your gable vents. Then come back down here and tell me in the comments what you found — what county you are in, how old your house is, and whether somebody sealed those vents shut. I read every comment. The stories you send back are the reason I keep recording.
Next video: how my grandfather built a root cellar under this farmhouse that holds a steady fifty-four degrees year round, in January and August both, using nothing but clay, sand, and the slope of a hillside. Subscribe so you do not miss it.
Stay cool. Stay curious. And remember — the people who built this country with their hands knew things we are only just beginning to remember.
#AmishWisdom #OffGridLiving #PassiveCooling #OldWaysAreBest #Homesteading #TraditionalSkills #SelfReliance #AmishLife #LostKnowledge #ForgottenSkills