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Part 1: The Toilet

The toilet in our upstairs bathroom had a weak flush, probably for at least a couple of years. I hate it when shit doesn’t work and I’m not afraid to fiddle with toilets, so I had tried everything in my repertoire: adding and removing water from the tank level, the bowl level; snaking out the drain, plunging the hell out of it. Nothing helped. I felt lost and with a vague dread that the poorly flushing toilet was indicative of bad drainage in our main sewer, and that nothing was going to fix that, and the bad flush was just going to remind me about it constantly for years.

I don’t know why it took so long for me to think of asking Claude about it. When I did, things immediately started to feel more manageable:

Alright, now we’re talking! But I already tried clearing clogs. But Claude presented me with another option here: “clogged rim jets or siphon jet.” What the hell is a siphon jet?! But then it got even better:

This is a suggestion I love as an engineer–it’s the core of good debugging. Isolate what my be the problem. I grabbed a bucket and did what Claude suggested, and was thrilled to watch the toilet execute a hearty flush. Huzzah! So now it’s time to look into this mysterious “siphon jet, what’s that anyway?”

Friends, I did exactly what Claude told me and it completely fixed the toilet. I felt like a hero, surging with a sense of accomplishment and DIY glory that was really not much dimmed by the fact I just did what an LLM told me to do. This took just three turns with the LLM to get exactly the fix I needed.

I’ve come to learn coding with Claude every day that this is what LLMs truly shine at–instantly bringing in the correct context to solve a problem that many other people have already solved and (critically) talked about the solution to on the internet.

Things were not so smooth for my next fix… although I ultimately prevailed.

Part 2: The Microwave

A few days later, Leslie complained that the microwave wasn’t heating things. Sure enough, when I observed it, everything seemed to be going right, with lights on, timers counting down, fans running–but it lacked that low rumble I was used to hearing and things were just not heating up.

My first instinct, confirmed by my fellow EE undergrads, was to chuck it and get a new microwave. This is because microwaves have high voltage parts inside that can kill you really good, in particular a high-voltage transformer hooked up to a high voltage capacitor that brings things up to about 4000V. But this was a fancy microwave, bought to match the range it’s installed above, so it was expensive (about $700) and maybe impossible to find in the same matching color.

It was time to talk to Claude about it:

Let me spoil things a bit and say that in the end I did fix the microwave, and Claude here named one but not both of the parts that had failed (the high-voltage diode). Claude’s great failure was that it never suggested the other failed part, even after several hours of debugging across several days, and only because I had some background in circuits was I able to figure it out.

I started by going through diagnostic procedures with Claude’s help on all of the high frequency parts. The expensive stuff seemed okay, but when I got to the diode (a passive circuit element that allows current to flow one way but not the other), I found that it was open (it let current flow both ways). Bingo! Surely this was it, Claude was very confident in the fix, and I managed to order the part overnight from Amazon.

This thing just took a pair of pliers and a screw driver to replace, and of course an encounter with the potentially-deadly high voltage capacitor. I got it installed, closed up the case of the microwave, and put in a mug of water for 30 seconds. To my great disappointment, it still didn’t work–still missing that low-frequency hum that showed the magnetron was running.

The limitations of LLMs

I was bummed. After my slam-dunk success with the toilet, I felt invincible, and like with Claude as my co-pilot, I could get through any home repair issue. But I was at a dead end. I spent another couple of hours debugging with claude, working over every component in the high-voltage circuit with my multimeter and confirming they were all working as expected. It was just where you don’t want to be in a debugging effort–all the parts verified working, but the system as a whole broken.

In desperation, I pulled up the circuit diagram of the microwave that was included in the service manual I’d paid for so I could be sure about which screws to take out to disassemble it. Here’s what I was looking at (yes, it was sideways in the PDF):

I found the little section on the right with the high voltage components, all of which I’d tested… except one. A fuse, circled here:

This was the second broken part. Claude had never mentioned this fuse, so I hadn’t tested it. I was on rails, under the confident guidance of the LLM. I was lucky to have training in electrical engineering and experience reading these diagrams–without that, I never would have solved my problem, and the microwave would probably have gone to a landfill.

To me this captures perfectly the magic and limits of LLMs. I was right where LLMs shine with the toilet repair–a simple machine, a common failure mode, probably written about thousands of times in the training data, aka the whole damned Internet. But with the microwave, things got too specific. Claude knew in general how microwaves worked, what parts they had, even how to test them. There were forum posts about repairs to similar microwaves. But knowing about the specific parts of my specific microwave, and how they might be implicated in the failure–this was just too fine a detail for the probabilistic completion machine that is the LLM. When the right answer to your question is becomes sufficiently unlikely, an LLM can never produce it.

Things heating up again

It took three days to get a replacement fuse, because this was not a fuse meant to be serviced–it was through-hole soldered, and for a high-voltage circuit. But once it came in, I soldered it in, reassembled the microwave, and bam, water was heating again!

The problem: indoor air is bad

Although we don’t think about it much, indoor air quality matters. We spend most of our time indoors, breathing whatever is floating around. And because our houses are full of humans, that means dust, dirt, carbon dioxide just from us being gross; also things like volatile organics, combustion byproducts, and mold that come from what our houses are made of, what we do in them, and what likes to live in them with us.

Historically, this was tolerable because houses were not very “tight:” they had natural cracks and gaps in the walls that let in plenty of fresh air. But modern building practices have changed that: houses are made very energy efficient through things like spray foam insulation, complete water-tight envelopes, and tightly sealed windows and doors. This often has the side effect of severely limiting air exchange between the interior and exterior of the house, so indoor pollutants can build up inside.

Most people would read about this and shrug, because it feels like we are all doing fine breathing whatever air we’ve got. But not me! I’m constantly on the lookout for things to worry about, so a few years ago I started buying carbon dioxide monitors so I could torture myself with a constant feed of air quality data. I really like the Aranet4 CO₂ monitor, I now have three of them in the house.

While it can be very expensive to buy monitors for the many varieties of indoor pollutants, it turns out that carbon dioxide is a great proxy measure. Humans are always exhaling it, so when its high, it’s a good sign that the air is stale and probably contains high levels of other pollutants. Plus, studies show that levels of CO₂ frequently observed in indoor environments have measurable impact on cognitive performance along with unknown long-term side effects.

A critical aspect of the Aranet monitor is that I can integrate it via Bluetooth with Home Assistant, my centralized home automation platform. This integration allows me to produce horrifying graphs of the CO₂ levels in my children’s bedrooms

I’ve been watching these numbers with simmering dismay for a couple of years, not really sure what I should do about them. For reasons I have not been able to figure out, the levels are worst in the shoulder seasons, when the AC and heat aren’t running very much. Running the AC or heat seems to drive the levels down, somehow bringing more fresh air into the house. When CO₂ is hatruly high, I can always open a window. But the manual nature of that just doesn’t appeal to my sense of sustainable problem solving.

This fall, after watching the high CO₂ levels night after night, I decided to act–I was going to find a way to get more fresh air into the house.

The Solution: automated fresh air with an energy recovery ventilator (ERV)

So how can we improve on an open window to let fresh air in and stale air out? First, we could open two windows, so that a breeze could blow air through the house. That gives you an inlet and an exhaust, but it depends on the weather how much air turnover you actually get. And oh, the weather: that’s the other problem with opening windows. In Austin it gets hot in the summer and we use energy to cool and dehumidify the indoor air. Open windows just bleed out that conditioned air.

The home HVAC industry has devised a solution for this: an energy recovery ventilator. This is a box that pumps in fresh air from an exterior vent and dumps it into your house, while pumping stale air from an interior vent and dumping it outside. The energy recovery part is that the incoming air and outgoing air pass by one another in a lasagna-like heat and humidity exchange manifold called the ‘core,’ so the incoming air ends up with similar temperature and humidity to what’s already in the house. This saves energy (about 75%) that would otherwise be spent conditioning all the fresh air brought in Here’s a video from This Old House that explains it:

ERV install options

It seems intuitive that if you already have a ducted HVAC system, you’d want to reuse those ducts for the ERV. Maybe you could tap into the return ducts to pull stale air out of and then splice the fresh air into output. But it’s a bit tricky: the HVAC ducts and air handler are usually a closed system (they just recirculate interior air, optionally heating or cooling it). The ERV pulls new air from the exterior and pushes old out. If you try to run the ERV using the same ducts, you have to coordinate the HVAC fan so it runs at the same time, or else you’ll be fighting that system. In the worst case, you might cause condensation to form in your ducts, and you’ll probably also have to overspec your ERV fan so that it can deal with all the ducting pressure.

Most experts seem to agree that it’s ideal to give an ERV its own dedicated duct system: a set of intakes that pull stale air from bathrooms and kitchens (producers of pollutants) and a set of fresh air outputs into bedrooms and living rooms (areas where people hang out).

My compromise for DIY ease: separate ducts; single input and output

There’s no chance of running a full set of dedicated ducts like the one in the second picture in my house. The existing HVAC ducting is squeezed in between the floors, inacessible with no room for expansion. Plus, the more holes I have to cut in walls and the exterior the less realistic this becomes as a DIY job. However, I happen to know that air circulation within my house is good by watching CO₂ monitors placed upstairs and downstairs: they hardly ever diverge, even when everyone in the house is downstairs.

So, I reasoned I could probably get away with one big vent pulling stale air from the interior and one big vent dumping fresh air back in, especially if I was a little clever about it. I decided to pull air out of the kids bathroom, above the shower, and dump fresh air into my office right next to a return air vent. This is akin to tying the fresh air into the return air duct directly, but without the pressurization / fan synchronization issues. I run the HVAC fan for recirculation 30 minutes of every hour, so there should be plenty of time that the return is pulling fresh air from the ERV and redistributing it throughout the house.

Combine this with the fact that the attic over the old part of the house already had two 12"x12" gable vents that I could reuse for exterior intake and exhaust, and I only had two cut holes (both interior) for the whole project!

Here’s a sketch of my final design:

The ERV is connected via 8" flex ducting to each of the attic gable vents and to the interior and to two interior 12"x12" vents, which are a bit oversized but the goal is for them to be silent when the ERV is in operation.

Shopping list

The ERV

There are a ton of ERVs on the market; the main difference among them is how much air they move. They typically have four ports (exterior fresh air in and stale air out; interior stale air in and fresh air out). I selected the Broan One (model BLP150E75NS-PC) because it has constant, automatic pressure balancing to make sure the amount of air it puts into the house equals the amount it pulls out, even when things change like a window opens or a bathroom fan comes on.

It has a middle-of-the-road air movement capacity of 150 CFM, more than big enough for my 2700 sqft house, especially because of my weirdo plan to have just a single intake and exhaust. It has simple washable filters (you can optionally add MERV) so ongoing costs should be low.

The Broan “One” series is a bit cheaper and much less diverse than the “AI” series which come in many physical port configurations and CFM ranges; the “One” series seemed to have the same auto-balancing brain and was released more recently. I also considered the Panasonic Intelli-Balance ERVs but they lack the automatic balancing and require more skill and equipment to “commission” (get the input and output airflow balanced for your house).

Price: $1056

The Rest

Here’s all the sundry items I needed to accomplish the install. I ordered the ERV online and bought the rest from Home Depot–I bet I could have gotten better prices from an HVAC supplier but most of them aren’t interested in a DIY-scale customer like me. Still, the overall price came in under $1700. The quote I got to install an HVAC-integrated ERV started around $4k. That actually sounds about right given the expertise required to do this right, including the system design, plus overhead.

Name	Pic	Description	Price	Qty	Total price
Broan BLP150E75NS-PC		The actual energy recovery ventilator	$1,056.52	1	$1,056.52
12"x12" to 8" register box		For duct terminations	$21.90	4	$87.60
12 x 12 inch return air grill		Covers interior vents	$15.98	2	$31.96
8 in to 6 in reducer		Convert 6" ERV ports to 8" ducting	$14.28	1	$14.28
8" 90-degree ell		To improve airflow when a bend was necessary	$8.90	3	$26.70
8" R8 insulated flex duct, 25'		For moving air to and from ERV	$102.00	3	$306.00
555 FlexFix tape, 1.89" x 120 yd		For connecting flex duct interior	$14.98	1	$14.98
324A Foil Tape, 2.5" x 60yd		Heavier foil tape for sealing	$23.97	1	$23.97
Foilmastic Tape 2" x 34 yd		For sealing seams in metal ducting (instead of mastic)	$29.98	1	$29.98
36" nylon ties (25)		For securing flex duct to collars	$17.90	1	$17.90
zip-tie tightener		For tightening big zip ties	$57.00	1	$57.00
			Grand total		$1,666.89

The install process

The biggest adventure by far was getting this thing into the attic and ducted. I watched many Youtube videos on how to work with flex duct, how to connect and seal the ductwork, how to spec size and length. I was shocked just how much disagreement there is about something as simple as how you connect the end of a piece of flex to a ceiling register–some people put mastic inside, some don’t; some people use zip ties, some use mylar tape, some use both. In the end I followed the instructions that came with the ERV: I used a zip tie on the interior liner of the duct plus mylar flex tape to seal it, then another zip tie around the insulation and more tape just to clean it up.

Here’s the ERV after I lugged it up to the attic and screwed it into the frame I built to mount it on:

You can see the interior side of one of the attic gable vents I used. Because I used 8" ducting and the ERV has 6" ports, I needed to adapt the sizes, so I started out by attaching 6" to 8" increasers on each of the ports using foil mastic:

Next, I framed up the gable vent with an 8" round to 12" square register boot, just going absolutely nuts with foil tape. I love that stuff:

I attached the flex duct using the belt-and-suspenders approach of placing a zip-tie on the inner liner, then using flex duct tape (a sort of thin mylar variant of the foil tape), then pulling the insulation down around the collar, and zip tying and taping that. Seems totally bomber, like you could rip the collar off the ERV before this bond would fail.

Although it was almost certainly over-engineering, I used rigid 90-degree sections when I needed to turn the path of air in a tight space. The internet seemed to think this was important to avoid restricting airflow in the flex, which tends to sort of collapse if you take it through tight turns.

Here you can see the first of four connections to the ERV complete: the air path from the gable vent to the input of the ERV, which draws fresh air in:

The second gable connection takes stale air out of the house; it was about 20 feet away from the ERV and pretty tricky to route around all the existing HVAC flex. I also got to try my hand at using these hang straps that are recommended to keep weight off the register connections and sharp bends out of the flex.

Next came the excitment of the interior connections, which required cutting two new 12"x12" square holes. I already discussed my decision to place the fresh air output right next to a return vent in my office. Here’s the view from the attic and the loft of that register going in:

The stale air gets sucked from the ceiling over the shower in the kids’ bathroom. As part of this excavation I discovered some beautiful (not really) old wall paper that used to be on the ceiling as well as a grocery flyer from 1948:

Here’s how the final install looks–pretty crowded with all the flex but I was incredibly proud, and bore the injuries of a dozen scalp punctures from roofing nails and lungs full of aerosolized rodent poop and fiberglass (just kidding, I wore an N95 so the coughs only lasted a day or so):

I plugged it in and was overjoyed to see it configure it self and report that it was happily running at low speed: 80CFM in and out in perfect balance!

And boy was it effective! After a few hours running at full speed, the CO₂ was down at levels I’d only before seen after we’d been out of the house for days:

Connecting the ERV to Home Assistant

The final step in my adventure was tying the ERV into my smart home. Broan offers a bewildering array of wall control options, each offering a different subset of functionality to change how fast the ERV is blowing, how often in runs, whether it is controlled by humidity. I mean, there are at least nine controls for sale by them that work with my ERV.

Instead, I wanted to hook this into my Home Assistant system so I could monitor and adjust it with the rest of my smart home stuff. The Home Assistant community totally came through for me: someone reverse engineered the RS485 serial protocol that the ERV uses to talk to the Broan controllers and implemented an ESPHome-based control for it!

So, getting control was a simple matter of ordering the same ESP32-based relay/serial controller and flashing its firmware.

I was able to wire it up directly to the 12 volt rail provided on the ERV, for a total of five wires: +12V, -V (tied to ERV ground), RS485 data+, data-, and data ground (tied to ERV ground).

This was almost too easy, booting up on the first try and exposing lots of data and controls for home assistant:

So far, I have a simple timer that ticks the ERV up higher at night when everyone is home and turns it back down in the mornings. But in principle I could put this into a PID loop with the actual CO₂ levels the Aranets measure—the sky is the limit with Home Assistant, as usual.

The results

The ERV does its job well. Since I installed it, I seldom see CO₂ levels rise above 800, even at the usual peak at dinner/bedtime. More often they hover in the 6-700s (six-sehhhhhhven), well into the range where I’m no longer worried about them. Here’s a plot of CO₂ in Paul’s bedroom similar to the one at top. The spikes you see are when groups of people enter (usually kids playing). It’s so lovely to see spend almost all its time it down in the benign range.

A note about the site: I’ve migrated blog content for overt.org from Wordpress to Hugo. Hugo stores posts as Markdown and then converts them into static HTML for publication.

I migrated to Wordpress from PostNuke in 2004, which included writing my own PostNuke to WordPress converter by hand in PHP. Before that I had written my own CMS in ColdFusion, backed by an Access database. So that’s 20 years of Wordpress! A good run.

Hugo keeps things simple and lets me manage the content in a git repo. Of course, I had to convert from Wordpress to Hugo, but in 2025 that just meant a vibe-coded Python script from Claude Code that did a fabulous job of extracting all my embedded images and videos for the last 25 years, converted historical comments into Markdown, fixing many broken links in the process.

After extracting all the embedded images from Gallery (now hosted on Piwigo) I also decided to put gallery behind a password. Although it was getting 200k+ hits per day, I don’t think any of them were from people I know :) If you’ve known me for a while you can probably guess the username and password.

Some consequences of this migration are no more comments and no more search. But you you click the archives on the right you can search through the title of any post, and using site:overt.org on your favorite search engine is gonna work too.

Fun little weekend project: I got a QuietCool AFG SMT PRO-2.0 attic gable ventilation fan that was “smart” in the sense that it came with a Bluetooth-based, proprietary app for configuring the fan with temperature thresholds, timers, etc. But I have an existing Home Assistant setup in my home, and for “smart” to be useful to me, it needs to show up in Home Assistant as a switch that I can turn on and off in response to the many sensors I already have configured there.

I was pleased to learn that the “smart” controller used for this fan is an ESP32, which means that a robust open-source ecosystem exists to replace its firmware with something that works directly with Home Assistant. Even better, it has a Wifi controller on-board, even though the fan controller is sold as a Bluetooth-only.

I found these excellent instructions for flashing the fan with Tasmota, an open-source firmware that is more general purpose and not natively integrated with Home Assistant.

Instead, I wanted to use ESPHome, a system that uses YAML files to declare what sensors and actuators are available and integrates natively into Home Assistant.

So I used the first instructions to locate the pins I needed to connect the smart controller to a FTDI adapter to back up the factory firmware and flash on ESPHome. First I disconnected the smart control box from the high-voltage supply (important!) and opened it up so I could get to the main PCB. There are six relevant pins: two you short to put the device into “bootloader” mode, and four corresponding to power, ground, transmit, and receive:

To make things easier, I soldered on headers for these:

I used this USB-to-serial adapter that came with a ribbon cable to connect the board to my Mac. No drivers or anything were required–it showed up as /dev/cu.usbserial-XXXXXXXX.

For safety, I pulled a backup of the factory firmware:

brew install esptool
esptool -b 115200 --port /dev/cu.usbserial-BG01OKCI read_flash 0x000000 0x400000 quietcool_backup_flash_4M.bin

After this, the real magic of Home Assistant started to shine. Using the ESPHome Builder described in the setup guide and a bit of help from Claude, I created a YAML file that described the attic fan, including exposing a ‘fan’ entity. I was able to flash it directly from my browser using Webserial–how cool–even though the Home Assistant server was off in my utility closet.

After the compilation of the firmware and flash (which took about 5 minutes), I pulled the bootloader jumper and power cycled the board, and it was automatically detected by Home Assistant:

Finally I reassembled the smart controller box and connected it back up to high-voltage supply and the inputs to the fan and it all worked like a charm. I’m definitely going to looking for more of these ESP-based devices to incorporate in the future…

Last week I had the opportunity to participate (for the first time) in Burning Man, wherein I camped out in the desert for a week with 70,000 or so other like-minded folks who collectively instantiated a ‘creative, connected, thriving society,’ if only for a brief moment. Burning Man made a big impression on me because of the sense of community I experienced there, which was unlike anything I’ve encountered before and which has inspired me to dive deeper into community building out here in the ‘default world,’ as burners call it.

If you’ve heard of Burning Man, you might think of it as a music festival, or an art festival, or a bacchanalian orgy of drugs and sex in the desert. Burning Man does contain all these things, but none of them are essential to it. From my perspective as a first-timer, what makes Burning Man go and probably what has sustained it for decades is its radical idea of community, and the commitment of virtually all its participants to that idea.

what is community?

I’ve recently been reading about the power and untapped potential of communities. In particular The Abundant Community by John McKnight and Peter Block lays out a framework of requirements for the creation of communities made of neighborhoods and families that provide a lot of what people have grown accustomed to buying or contracting out in a consumerist society: health, safety, environmental stewardship, food, raising of children, and care for the elderly and marginalized. McKnight and Block describe “universal properties” of abundant or “competent” communities:

• The giving of gifts - every member of a community has skills or resources to offer to the community, and they share their gifts freely
• The presence of association - we can amplify gifts from community members by forming associations to support things like parks, schools, music, etc
• The compassion of hospitality - strangers and the marginalized are welcomed into the community and have access to the benefits of gifts

The authors argue (convincingly, to me) that if a community exhibits these properties then it can replace much of what we buy or obtain from government institutions and at the same time dramatically enhance human connection, self-reliance, and physical, emotional, and environmental health. I have personally experienced this in the community that supports the public elementary school my kids attend, and I am inspired to expand my efforts into the other communities that surround me.

Now, compare these properties and goals with the ten principles of Burning Man:

1. Radical inclusion
2. Gifting
3. Decommodification
4. Radical self-reliance
5. Radical self-expression
6. Communal effort
7. Civic Responsibility
8. Leaving no trace
9. Participation
10. Immediacy

It’s clear to me that what Burning Man is trying to build is a cultural movement founded on abundant community. What’s truly amazing is how successful they are, at least from my personal experiences over the last week.

burning man’s gift economy really works

Principles 2 and 3 say “Gifting: Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value” and “in order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.”

These are nice words, but how does it work in practice? In my experience, it is utterly transformational compared to the ‘default’ society I’m accustomed to.

Burning Man is a city composed of thousands of camps, and every camp contributes gifts to the community. The gifts might be daily coffee and tea service (this is what my camp provided), or yoga classes, or bike repair, or a cost-free pub, or lessons in trapeze arts, or a dance party, or any of a hundred other things. These gifts make Burning Man go, they set the menu of activities for the day, and they support the day-to-day functioning of the temporary city.

What’s incredible is the shift that occurs when you interact with gift purveyors instead of paid service providers. Every thing on offer is “free,” and that instantly sparks gratitude in the recipient and the joy of giving in the purveyor. It transforms every routine interaction into a positive one ripe for human connection–you are always just minutes away from a new friendship. And you’re eager to share your experiences, thereby building a network of connectivity among camps and individuals.

This gift-oriented posture spreads beyond camp services and pervades everything you do. Whether you’re out and about on the playa or just hanging around your camp, you find your attitude toward other people has changed. If you see someone in distress, you offer them help. If someone is lost, you give them directions or just walk them to where they need to go. You find yourself picking up trash and even trying to keep the porta-potties nice. You come to expect this kind of behavior from everyone else you encounter, and it makes you feel warmer and more connected to those around you. I experienced all of this, even as a relative introvert, and I was captivated and inspired by it.

inclusion, participation, and immediacy

I belong at Burning Man. Of course, I’m very used to feeling a sense of belonging as a white, cis-het male. But, incredibly, the inclusiveness of Burning Man is so baked in and pervasive that I did not feel defined by that identity, and in fact I felt invited to challenge and subvert it, and I had a blast doing so. At Burning Man, people are not interested in “what you do” or even “who you are.” They are interested in your participation in what’s happening right now, with them, and you are welcome to decide on the spot how you’ll behave or act in a way that is gloriously unconstrained by your accumulated sense of identity or personal baggage or whatever.

A few fun examples that come to mind: there was a camp devoted to swings of various kinds, including a series of rings you crossed like a monkey. The camp provided instructions for how to cross the rings, with the final step being “take off your pants!” So, I dutifully followed each instruction until I was confidently sailing across the mats they provided. Then I was gently encouraged to consider following through on that last part–and soon I was experiencing pants-free monkeyness with a crowd of strangers cheering me on. Why not?! At another camp was a group meditation session where pairs of strangers peered into each others’ eyes continuously for minutes at a time, often leading to tears–of recognition, relief, connection. On the playa, hundreds of interactive art pieces invited viewers to climb, swing, enter, or ignite the art as they viewed it. I have never experienced such intense connection with art before in my life. I ended up giving a teary bear hug to my favorite sculpture, The Cosmic Messenger, when I had to leave it for the last time.

It’s worth mentioning how the “immediacy” principle feeds the feeling of freedom and connection. Aside from a few moments taken to grab a photo or send a proof-of-life text message, there just wasn’t much use for cell phones at Burning Man. When you encountered someone, they were right there, with you–not about to return their attention to a phone, or marching off to a meeting or some other commitment. Everyone collectively agreed to pay attention to each other and the world around them, and it electrified every interaction with so much more potential. It made me realize how much we give up by being coy or insular in our day-to-day interactions.

the mini community of your camp

Most Burning Man participants come as part of a camp. Camps range in size and ambition, from just a few people to more than a hundred, and from offering coffee to bringing huge art cars and concert venues. Within each camp, attendees support each other by pooling resources like water, cooking group meals, joint trash and gray water management and expansive shade structures. But also core to my positive experience was the emotional support, knowledge, and invitations to participate that came from my fellow campers, many of whom had ten or more burns under their belt. Every one of them was eager to help explain how things worked, to help me find my way, and to invite me out to see art on the playa or to a 2am dance set with a special DJ.

The camp provided a home base to chill and recuperate, where faces were familiar and a sense of safety and security pervaded. It was a place I could make direct contributions in cooking, cleaning, and coffee service. It provided a framework to be a healthy, functioning participant in the broader Black Rock City community. In addition, my camp was wonderfully multi-generational and multi-disciplinary, with participants ranging from new college grads all the way to retirees, tech folks to lawyers to journalists. They showed me that everyone belonged in our camp who was willing to give back in turn and support the others there.

Most of the people I know who enjoyed the burn had a similar camp experience. It is possible to camp solo on the fringes of the city, or to be a part of a camp that you buy your way into, but that often doesn’t result in such a positive experience–and I think it might be unhealthy for Burning Man in general (see below).

threats to and limitations of community at burning man

If it sounds like I am drunk on the utopia of Burning Man’s community, that’s because I am. But I am also aware of how delicate it is, and of how unsustainable it is in the form of Black Rock City.

The most important threat is from non-participating attendees. On your Burning Man ticket in huge print is the text “No Spectators.” At the top of the website for the event is the admonition “Burning Man is not a festival! It’s a city wherein almost everything that happens is created entirely by its citizens, who are active participants in the experience.” Alas, I witnessed a certain set of BRC citizens who definitely seemed like spectators. They stayed in “plug and play” or “oligarch” camps that made minimal community contributions, where camp members did not know each other, and where membership was simply purchased for some thousands of dollars or financed through personal wealth that employed staff to insulate their members from the obligations of community participation. It’s hard to describe how, but you could tell who these folks were when they were near–they seemed to be looking ‘at’ Burning Man rather than being part of it. At night, I could feel gravity wells formed by groups of these folks as they moved among the dance parties and free bars, hungry for the next experience that Burning Man would provide them.

I also have to acknowledge that Black Rock City is not a sustainable community. It is made possible through a huge amount of paid infrastructure (sanitation, power, emergency services, etc) combined with a year’s worth of effort and contribution in art, activities, and supplies that is all very much not free, but rather jointly contributed by people who make their money in the ‘default world’ and then funnel it into Burning Man to make it such a spectacular yet very temporary space. In this way, BRC is not a model community, but rather a radical experiment in how a community could feel if consumerism and class could be magically erased.

go to burning man!

I first considered attending Burning Man twenty years ago, buying a ticket for me and Leslie in 2005 when I was on the cusp of grad school. I ended up not going because I hadn’t realized all the demands that were placed on participants, and I wasn’t ready to meet them. And, to be honest, I had decided that by 2005 “Burning Man was over.” I mean, how could something that had been going since the 90s still be cool? This year I was able to attend because I was invited to an already-functioning camp that created a space for me to show up and contribute. And what I discovered was that the culture of Burning Man is alive and well, because of the community that is created there.

If, like me, you’ve been curious about this strange experiment in the desert, then I encourage you to connect with a camp and make the effort to go. In Black Rock City you can taste a version of community that is incredibly inspiring and encouraging, even as it is evanescent and endangered. I’m convinced that it carries important lessons for those of us seeking to build and improve communities in our daily lives.