Motion Sensors and Lights

Now that we know that we should always turn the lights off, the next questions is: Is it worth while to put motion or light sensors into the home to turn the light on automatically? Here is an excellent article, entitled "Does a Motion-Activated Light Switch Save Money?". The average consumption of the sensor is around 1W. So, for 24 hours a day, the sensor is consuming 1W. Government guidelines from Australia try push this "phantom" stand-by consumption down to 0.25W. Just this week I bought a lamp with 6 LEDs of which each LED consumes 0.06W, a total of 0.36W for all 6 LEDs combined. Instead of operating a sensor and a light one could just leave a dim LED light on all the time and in comparison to the sensor save energy and money. In conclusion, unless you are forgetful to turn the light off manually or for security concerns, a light or motion sensor for turning the light on at home makes little energy sense.

1000 Uses for old Pallets

This is fantastic video of only 2 minutes. It gives so many ideas of how to use and reuse old pallets. Just outstanding!

Energy Conservation

I just stumbled across this link on energy conservation. It is a very long list on energy conservation ideas, simple actions and DIY projects for your home. It has a lot of information on a single page. There is something here for everyone.

Earthships

Earthships are a form of sustainable housing construction pioneered by Michael Reynolds, primarily using earth-filled used tires, old glass and water bottles as construction material. This 90-min documentary entitled Garbage Warrior outlines his personal story and shows some marvellous examples of earthships in New Mexico. It is amazing to see his vision in the houses he built more than 30 years ago.

Home Improvement

If you are planning or working on some home improvement project or even a new home, have a look at these two recent presentations from TED. Both these videos give inspirational ideas on sustainable construction and building. Dan Phillips builds unique and personal houses from reclaimed materials. One can pick up many creative thoughts from him.

John Hardy has created a green school and this video presents his green school dream in Bali. It was interesting to see the first proposal for his school as made by an apparently traditional architect: all building as square boxes and the largest box in the center was labeled "the Administration Complex". It seemed so wrong that the administration should be the largest structure on the school campus. A nagging inner voice hinted that any school should be about teaching and eduction and accordingly the largest building should be dedicated to that objective. It was also speaking of itself to call it a "Complex" implying - even if only at a Freudian level - that it was a complex thing or complex solutions. We should strive for simplicity not complexity. Anyway, this "typical" architectural proposal was rejected and a set of building was realized following ideas from permaculture. The central building was designed as an intertwined double spiral which looked like a permaculture pattern to me. The building was named "Heart of School" (instead of Administration Complex), and yes part of it houses the administration facilities. As material they used bamboo and local natural materials. I found it creative and an idea worth copying to use thrown away glass panel from old cars with white paper placed behind it as white board for kids. Now that is cheap and functional design.

Refuse - reduce - reuse - recycle. These builders give us some examples of how it can be done and how beautiful the result can be. Maybe it will influence our next personal home improvement project.

Hemp

Hemp is a truly versatile material. It is well known that it was used for making quality ropes. It can be used for clothing. It is an excellent insulating material. Recently I found this video on hemp as a construction material: Hemp bricks are stronger and lighter than concrete. Hempcrete is sound absorbent , moisture absorbent, and has thermal mass. The list of uses goes on and on: paper, car bio-fuel, plastic-like panels, shampoos, soaps and food. No surprise that hemp is sometimes called the plant of 30,000 uses because it combines the utility of the soybean, the cotton plant and the Douglas Fir tree into one single plant. Now that is an impressive plant.

Greenhouse for $50

Well the greenhouse ended up costing $140, but this is not the point. It is great to see how to build a cheap greenhouse yourself without sophisticated tools. Interesting reading for any permaculturist: How to build My 50 Dollar Greenhouse.

Gardening Australia

Last week I watched a video which I believe was broadcast on TV in Australia. Peter Cundall gives a brief introduction and then Josh Byrne presents a complete permaculture project showing how one can turn a home with a mid-sized garden into a sustainable, healthy and productive environment. The video is 72 minutes and is entitled "Gardening Australia", professionaly produced in 2006. I found it a useful way to spend 72 minutes. It sheds a little bit of light on everything: water recycling, raised garden beds, small pond, chicken coop, etc. Here is the official site with the DVD: Gardening Australia, Permaculture.

Rural Renaissance

Over the last 3 days I read the book Rural Renaissance by John Ivanko and Lisa Kivirist. I liked it. It pretty much describes the direction I am mentally heading. I am about 5 years behind them. I am looking for a rural plot with an old farm house to reform and repair. I have been looking for about 5 months now and seen some 10 properties. I want to give this old farm house (once found) a new live and make it our new home. All the things I plan on doing are described eloquently in this book. They moved from Chicago to a farm stead without much knowledge. Step by step they learned all the basics: the first tomatoes, first chicken, adding a small pond to the garden, planting veggies with permaculture in mind, fixing up the house with a wood burner, eventually adding solar panels, growing our own food, living ecologically, ... It is good reading for all permaculture beginners and also for people who want to give their life a new "green" focus, wherever they might live (city, suburbs, countryside). Every section has a summary page with cross references to other books or web sites with more details. The book is hands-on, with many examples and personal anecdotes.

I recommended this book to my wife so that she can better understand me and my reasons why I want to leave our comfortable city flat behind. A lot of the motives and hopes discussed in the book are shared by me. I want a simpler life, a healthier life and a life where day-by-day I am in tune with nature. There are also some major differences between my goals and capacities and the authors. Unlike them I have no intention on running a B&B out of the farm home and I am certainly less social and outgoing as the authors who bring together a lot of different folks to share their rural adventure. Still I found it nice reading, feeding my dream and adding a few facts to my theoretical understanding of permaculture.

Compost and Manure

Do you want to start composting? This book The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure by Joseph C. Jenkins is for you. I cross read it this weekend and I found it excellent. There are a lot of practical tips how to create your own compost pile and how to maintain it. It includes all the do's and dont's. It also explains composting human manure which I also found interesting. Recommended reading for everyone who wants to start composting or ever thought about an outhouse or similar solutions for dealing with human waste. The author provides even many composting videos on this video page.

Building and Construction

This topic is way above my head. I am an absolute beginner, have no experience and have no immediate plans to do any building or construction myself. Still several times I stumbled across some information that I found interesting or intriguing. Take everything with a grain of salt.

There are many concepts for ecologic building materials and construction methods. Many of them try to reduce heating cost and use natural products as material. Compressed earth, in the form of bricks or filled into used tires make good walls. Compressed earth can also be combined with wood logs or bottles. A lighter combination is straw mixed with mud or straw squared covered on the outside with mud. Of course plain old wood is a common material.

Most buildings face south to absorb the maximum of sun and many use earth mass to absorb and store this free energy for heating and cooling. Some suggest a house-inside-a-house, a house with an outer shell with lots of windows and glass, again for the purpose of free/reduced heating. Buildings with grass and small vegetation growing on the roof caught my eye. Looks fantastic.

On the inside both heat storage and insulation are key concepts. Wood is a medium insulator as well as a medium heat store. Earth is both, a good store and a good insulator. Rocks are a great storage medium but a poor insulator, similar for cement. On the insulator side there are further materials like: hemp and cork. There are also special volcanic bricks that are a good insulator (similar heat resistance as wood) and hold up to pressure and weights. Furthermore there are special bricks that trap the air better and force the air to take long paths through the brick, thereby increasing drastically the insulating effect of the brick. There is a lot to think about and consider when trying to build eco-friendly.

Here are some sites to look at to grab ideas. www.earthship.net, www.enertia.com, Sustainable Build, a Green Building Source book, and the Open Village Construction Set (Open Source Ecology). And there is even a Green Building and Remodeling for Dummies book. A friend of mine has the book Building Green by Snell and Callahan which I found appealing.

It is such a vast topic. One will have to do lots of research before getting seriously into it.

Heating

Wood and sun seems to be the logical choices for sustainable heating. My brother uses wood pellets and friends use chopped wood. Where I live local law requires any new house to either install solar water panels or a wood pellet furnace.

Wood

Roughly how much wood does one need to heat one year? I know there are many variables (size of home, how warm you like it, the type of wood, the type of wood burner, insulation, ...).

Friends use very efficient wood burners. They can be found in Holland at http://www.tigchelkachels.nl/?pag_id=1584&site_id=31 and in France at http://www.poele.com. These wood burners are on the order of 90% efficient and produce about 2% of the pollution of a standard wood burner. My friends like the way they function better than a standard wood burner. First you make a very fast burning fire which lasts about 70 minutes. Then you close everything up, and they stay warm for 12-16 hours. Once the fire is out, the combustion chamber can be used for cooking (very easy in the French Finoven).

Wood burns at up to 600C. The air that goes out the pipe to the chimney is 180C in the optimal case. If it is hotter than 180C then it is less efficient as heat is lost. If it is below 180C a clean burn and a swift evacuation of the gases cannot be guaranteed. Some of the wood burners offered at the linked site (see above) are 800 to 960kg heavy. One might have to support the floor to support that weight. Some ovens due to the construction material are limited to a maximum number of fires per day (e.g. 3). More fires will result in the material cracking. Other models allow an unlimited number of fires. The size of the burning chamber indicates how often you will have to make a fire. The larger the size of the chamber the fewer fires you will have to make. The air usually circulates inside the wood burner in a strategic fashion. Some burners have side doors so once a year ash can be vacuumed from these circulation side vents. Once the flames are gone usually the vents are closed and optionally cooking can start. A single large wood burner like these can heat up to 50 square meter. Heating is done directly, i.e. warm air circulates throughout the home through open doors, walls absorb and pass on heat, etc.

In Spain I have seen other wood burners and even fireplaces that have a second "clean air" system. The "dirty air" from the flames goes through the metal pipe straight through the chimney. However, build around the burner or fireplace are air chambers with clean air. There are vents on the bottom, close to the burner. Here air from the room enters, it is heated through the warm bricks, rises and is carried in clean air pipes into neighboring rooms.

When thinking about wood burners and insulation. It is true that hot air rises, but hot walls carry the heat into all directions, also down. So, consider this when planning for your insulation.

A fire is 6-7 kg of wood which produces about as much heat as burning 2 kg of heating oil or about 20 Kwh. Heat loss is minimal because these wood burners do not get as hot as standard wood burners, so they do not heat the air as much (when you are 1 meter from a surface, the physiological temperature you feel is the average of the surface temperature and the air temperature, low temperature heating heats surfaces more than the air, so you have the same thermal comfort with a lower air temperature which reduces heat loss). This year my friends estimated they made 500-600 fires around 4000 kg wood / year or about 8.5-9 steres (cubic meters of stacked wood) or about the equivalent of 1100 liters of heating oil or 11,000 kwh/year or about 110 kwh/meter^2 year. (They do not heat the bedrooms, though they are insulated. They aim at about 17 degrees in their living room, but if the weather stays below 0C for a week, it gets cold in the house unless we spend the entire day making fires). The ADEME estimates that the French use about 400 Kwh / meter^2 year to heat their homes. This is enormous. According to a German plumber, a well insulated German house uses about 100 Kwh /meter^2 year to heat, a very well insulated German homes use about 70 Kwh/m^2 year to heat. When we moved into the house, I assumed that it would require more energy to heat (per meter^2) than a modern house. Now that I have studied the question a bit, I have found that it should take less heat than most modern houses because of the enormous thermal mass which enables us to store passive heat. Insulating the outside of a wall is much better than insulating the inside because the house can then store more passive heat. They still have more insulation projects ongoing to decrease heating requirements by about 15% per year and they plan on installing trombe walls next year.

Another model of wood burner is the Lopi Endeavor which is recommended in the the book Rural Renaissance by John Ivanko and Lisa Kivirist. The EPA has found the Lopi Endeavor non-catalytic stove to be the cleanest burning large stove ever tested at that time.

Solar

Roughly speaking, 4 square meters of solar panels for water heating should provide enough hot water to cover about 60% of the yearly requirements for a 4-person family.