"In 2019, Christy Schuneman got a job as tribal family coordinator with the Native Village of Unalakleet, a small community sprawled on Alaska's northwest coast. Unalakleet is remote, with no roads in or out, and the winds blowing off Norton Sound can chill the temperatures to minus 50°F in the winter. But Schuneman had grown up there, fishing for salmon and picking berries on the tundra, and was excited to move back to her roots.
However, when she looked for somewhere to live with her boyfriend and 4-year-old son, it was hard to find. Her dad's house was already full, with her four siblings and their families living there, but he had a sauna in his backyard - a 10-by-9-foot plywood box with a small window and almost no insulation. On a recent fall day, she walked through her dad's backyard, where two legs of moose meat hung from a wooden rack, to the tiny shack on the edge of his property.
'We were basically camping in the sauna for two years,' she said."
This article profiles a cold-climate-housing project by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Read more...
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Kat Friedrich
Editor in Chief
American Solar Energy Society
Monona WI
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