University Science Professor Moves into Shuttle Bus to Live Carbon Neutral
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Jeanine is a lecturer at San Jose State University and an ethno-ecologist. She was living in Northern California, renting these beautiful places out at reasonable rates, but she thought she needed to switch this up. She remembered this instant where she was driving behind a shuttle bus and she thought, "That bus is good-looking... It has these huge windows all around it. If it's a bus it must have its own air conditioning heating system."
She had a bunch of leftover pension funds, some of the tiny little ones that weren't going to do anything because at that time the stock market wasn't doing so great. Then she found a bus for exactly what her two pension funds put together added up to. She bought the bus and she drove to Sacramento and got a father-son team to put the floor in. She drove back to the place she was renting at the time. She moved everything out in one week.
She basically took her studio bedroom and configured it to fit in the bus. As an ecologist she teaches about environmental science and climate change. She teaches living responsibly, living sustainably and believes that she can't be an honest authentic ethical teacher if she is not living exactly what she teaches.Every year she's set a new goal for herself to live more sustainably. The next logical step was to live tiny, to live small. The thing with a lot of tiny homes is people build from scratch. She wanted to recycle, and the best way to recycle was to get a used bus.
The bus is a Champion Challenger with an E450 engine. It's a Ford engine with a shuttle bus chassis that would have fit 16 to 20 people. She has a 45 watt solar panel connected to one battery which is the house battery that came with the bus. It has a ton of windows which is what she wanted in her home. She installed screening all on one side of the bus. All of the furniture used to be in her bedroom studio.
The bed has been sawed to be half of its height. The screen allows her to keep all of her windows open and only partially curtained. She wanted to wake up with light and be able to see all the trees that are around her, but she also wanted privacy. Much of the artwork is made by different artisans from tribes and tribal communities here in California.
Her dog Luca has her bed right down there and she also has a walk-in closet which most women want. She has a privy and it can also serve as a shower, and a neat portable minibar. It's a ladies traveling case that has about 40 different liquors in it.
Most of her cooking is done on an induction cooktop but when she doesn't have access to grid power she cooks on a BioLite stove that is filled with little tiny chips of Redwood. She built into her systems here there's Plan A and Plan B and sometimes there's even a Plan C, so if she’s hooked into the grid she can use her two electric lights. She can run her electric heater and her induction stovetop. If she’s off-grid then she either uses her battery-powered lights or the solar panel and she uses wood fuel to cook on.
She made a decision to go with absolutely no propane because in becoming carbon neutral she wanted to maximize how she could generate her own electricity through solar. She didn't want to be reliant on natural gas or on propane and also it's dangerous. She felt really nervous about having propane around whether it was on the back of her bus or inside her bus. She has another pantry, the Yeti cooler. For her, it's better to store dry food in it because she would otherwise always have to be getting dry ice, and this keeps her food more temperature stabilized, so she has two, both with and without ince. She also has a tiny little Igloo Fridge that is low enough wattage.
The first thing people said to her was, "where you going to park it?" It took her a year to find a campground consortium where she can stay in these campgrounds for free based on her membership for three weeks at a time, but if she wants to stay in the same campground she needs to go out for a week and then come back in again. So then the challenge became okay where do she go for that week, and because of the place where she is there are always Fairgrounds there are state park campgrounds within say about 20 mile radius of five or six different places where she can be or she can simply put The Champion in storage and go stay with some friends.
Once she got over that initial hump of being geographically stable so she could do her professional work, everything became so much easier. Every semester her students do group projects that make a difference in the world, and this semester her students are helping her to become carbon neutral. They have set it up so that the students can come to her tiny home and audit her carbon footprint.
Once we crunch the numbers and figure out literally how many tea trees, how many palm plants, how much bamboo and how much grass needs to be planted, she will send the money over. She really likes the idea of becoming carbon neutral. If she’s going to teach about climate change and how we humans are affecting climate change, then she wants to make sure she’s practicing what she preaches.
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