We’ve romanticized “self-sufficiency” to the point where it’s become a vibe more than a verifiable outcome. After years of trying to close loops at household scale, I’m convinced most “self-sufficient” setups are just externalizing dependencies into longer, less visible supply chains: lithium batteries, inverter firmware, stainless fasteners, trace minerals, drip tape, veterinary meds, seed stock refreshed every few years, replacement gaskets… the list is endless. If we’re honest, a lot of so-called independence is just a time-shifted, imported kit.
I want to pressure-test this with something more rigorous than anecdotes: a dependency audit of household-scale self-sufficiency that accounts for maintenance entropy, replacement cycles, and embodied inputs. Think of it as a Dependency Bill of Materials (DBOM) for a homestead, with a “half-life” metric-how long the system runs without external inputs before performance or safety degrades below acceptable thresholds.
Questions I haven’t seen tackled head-on here:
- What’s the actual optimum scale for sufficiency by service (food, water, energy, sanitation, medicine, materials)? Which ones collapse under household-scale, but stabilize at block/co-op/village scale?
- Has anyone done time-use and exergy tracking on a full season to quantify “resilience per hour” and “resilience per kilogram” of imports?
- For PV-based systems: what’s the mean time to failure if you stop buying consumables and spares tomorrow (fuses, MC4s, BMS units, charge controllers, replacement cells)? How many critical single points of failure are lurking?
- Food loops: beyond calories, how do you close micronutrients and salt? What’s your plan when seed viability is poor for two seasons in a row, or when pollinator pressure shifts?
- Animal systems: what’s the minimum viable stock of meds, minerals, and tools to keep health and welfare acceptable without a steady supply chain? How do you measure that?
- Water and waste: what’s the maintenance debt on your “low-tech” systems after three years without new liners, filters, valves, or sealants?
- What’s the shortest “import moratorium” stress test anyone has actually run? 30, 60, 90 days? What failed first, and what surprised you?
Proposal: crowd-build an open DBOM template that lists each subsystem, its critical components, expected life, failure modes, and local substitution paths. Pair that with:
- A 90-day import moratorium simulation for each season.
- A “community vs household” toggle that reveals which dependencies become tractable if shared (tooling, spares pool, seed bank, water treatment, repair guilds).
- A resilience budget that caps imports by mass or embodied energy, so we can compare claims fairly.
If self-sufficiency at the household level is mostly a comforting story, let’s prove it-or disprove it-with data. Who’s willing to share real inventories, failure logs, and time diaries? And what’s the cleanest framework to make this comparable across wildly different climates and contexts?