Sun Power

Goin' solar.
As of today, most of the house is "unplugged".  I started by turning off everything, then as necessity presented itself, I debated the need - and either flipped the breaker back on or not.  Some things will never get turned back on: refrigerator is staying off, baseboard heaters staying off. 
The plan:
Get woodstove installed and then get solar panels just for lights.  Heat and light - my biggest wastes of electricity.
Baby steps of course, I want to understand how the panels and wiring work before investing in a whole-house system. 
Once the only thing using electricity is the hot water heater, then I will move toward heating water using the sun too.  Gotta love it.
But, I need a little help.  Finding parts to build a solar system on the internet is a bit tricky.  Lots of shady sites out there trying to capitalize on this precursor to the "solar boom".  So if anyone can advise - much appreciated.

oh, check out the updated website: Frontier Post and Beam

Acceptable Loss

We try to time everything.
The more we can cram into the work day, the more efficient we have become - right?  I want to see each step of each process become so efficient that we are calculating the seconds it takes to wash our hands - and then get back to work.  There are only so many minutes in a day and I like to think of "the day" as two parts - because I will eat lunch somewhere in the middle, and chances are: no work will be done.  Several things can happen... Something great will happen and it will come easy, nothing great will happen - but not much time will be lost, or the opposite of both - so time becomes an equation of "greatness" or efficiency, even in a world where efficiency is a mere sense, like satisfaction or happiness.
So, what's the point?

I work six days a week and do nothing on the seventh - but in those six days did any process become more efficient, is anyone happier?  And if neither was achieved, can it happen next week?

Everyone measures time, yep, some more than others, but the amount of time we measure maybe directly proportional to the amount of satisfaction we desire to achieve - and the amount we accept to loose.  This is not a rant about using time wisely, it can be assured that such a routine will come with varying frequency forevermore.  We know that we can be very productive when we want to - especially as we search for better ways to do things, but the lost moments are lost forever.
I spent five minutes staring at CNN this evening and (as far as I can tell) learned nothing.  Whatever information I gathered will never be used, and frankly, I could have spent my time otherwise.  On the other hand, what if there was something to learn there - or something that could possibly help me later in time - that's the acceptable loss.
Big Picture is:  If you have a brain, you will look for ways to use it, and if it's to be successful or make life easier for yourself or others - your brain will search for ways to make it happen.  It's "built-in".  I won't always learn something from CNN, or satisfy each client, or reach a goal in each relationship - but everyday I narrow the loss in these scenarios.
Read some Alan Lightman.

Shameless Promotion

http://www.frontierpostandbeam.com/

click it, link it, post it, twitter it, paste it, sing it, work it, twerk it, just don't facebook it

Hey, look, I'm drawing a duplexxx...Sources say they're coming back in style.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiskwRaBBcc CLICK IT. come on, do it...

"Morbidly Obese McMansions"

This country is going through a significant change. We are a new nation still, one of the newest in the world, always changing, yet our ideas of development have remained the same. The land of opportunity- where wealth and prosperity could be identified easily by our possessions. Bigger possessions = bigger bank accounts. Life revolves around the marketplace and the choices of what you buy. We created a system of credit where naive consumers could only loose - it was mostly by luck that a few purchases were worth the same by the time they had been "paid off". I think we just didn't want anyone to have it too rough. Funds available all the time and a constant barrage of marketing resulted in a population always getting what they "want". Credit became the largest business in the country and it took us a generation or two to figure out that it wasn't usually helping us.
Not too long ago, people were buying huge houses not because they needed them - but because they could. Now people are buying a house as a suitable place to live, not a trophy. A similar event occurred about 100 years ago when smaller bungalows replaced the enormous Victorian-style homes of the time. It's true we can't keep building McMansions; we'll run out of space and materials before we run out of people.

Steady as we go....

Bamboo and "Green Buildings"

I think most people know Bamboo as a great renewable, eco-friendly building material. It grows fast, has nice strong fibers, it is lightweight, easy to harvest, the list goes on.... Plus, it looks good.

Bamboo doesn't grow where I live, not even possible - so we use logs. Comparing Bamboo to Lodgepole Pine is a bit like apples to oranges, but I would like to see them co-exist in a building as much as possible. I believe the two materials can work well together. Unfortunately, there are few climates where they both grow side by side, so creating a building of locally harvested materials is difficult.

Bamboo is the fastest growing plant in the world. It comes in several varieties, and they aren't all suitable for building. There are places where Bamboo grows up to four feet per day - that's amazing! On average, Bamboo can be harvested as a building material every seven years and will produce twenty times more material per acre than hardwoods. I like it.

I believe we can save a lot of energy if we use materials that require less processing. For example, plywood (or OSB) can be made from just about any kind of wood. Simply mix your wood chips with a bunch of formaldehyde and run it through the press and you have a nice, flat, sheet of wood to work with - after a lot of processing. There seems to always be an alternative to using materials that were manufactured or "processed" like this - you just have to look around. Also, these materials that make life easier, will shorten your life - and the lives of others. OSB (oriented strand board) is found in nearly every house in America. 3 ingredients: Wood (the dust of which is a known carcinogen), Formaldehyde (may cause reproductive harm and cancer, indoor air pollutant), Paraffin Wax (basically turns your house into a huge match, extremely flammable).

Another one I'm not so keen on are SIP's. A panel made from OSB and Styrofoam. Yes, it will give you some energy-tax credit, but it sure won't make the air in your house better. There will be more on this later...

I have been seeing a lot of claims to "Green Building" on the Internet. It happens locally too, with contractors advertising as a "Green Builder". OK, this is a HUGE topic that I will only make a few points about.

How are people saying a building is "Green" when it is made from manufactured materials? Just because you put it together in a shop and hauled it to the job site and bolted it together in 10 hours doesn't make it better for the environment. You know who you are. I think people are using this term a little too loosely. Does Green Building = Natural materials? Well, no it doesn't but should it? Obviously, this term is interpreted in many ways. By most definitions a "Green Building" must avoid environmental degradation by using renewable resources. Green Building means using less energy, keeping building occupants healthy, and having less impact on the earth.

be smart, join the US Green Building Council: http://www.usgbc.org/

Natural Building is a philosophy I like a lot too. Build a structure using materials that can be recycled, composted, or used as fuel. Combine this with Green Building practices, build things stronger than they need to be, think about the future, life is good...

Waste not want not.

What if someone has to tear this house down in a hundred years because it wasn't maintained or built properly? Where does all the drywall and plywood go? How much can ever be re-used?

OK. OK. I know that we never build with the intentions of ever destroying the structure, but that's a reality now. Materials only last so long, tastes change, needs change, and eventually the dirt it's sitting on will be worth more than the shabby structure.

Where I live, there isn't a junk-yard for about a hundred miles; so, if you have an old car or boat or camper you don't want anymore - it is now very inconvenient to get rid of. Therefore, people tend to take care of what they have - handing it down instead of throwing it away.

Money for nothin'

What if someday there was no place to take a dumpster full of old building materials? I bet one of those 10,000 square foot trophy homes in Plano, Texas would take up quite a bit of space in the landfill if it had to come down (or fell down). Right now it is much too easy to haul our waste to a hole in the ground and say goodbye to it "forever". When a house is being built, there is usually a dumpster on site to haul away all of the scrap pieces of drywall and plywood, bits of 2x4's and empty buckets of paint. The bigger the house, the more waste.

Maybe we shouldn't build so big, and maybe we shouldn't use materials that will never return to the earth. Fiberglass insulation and spray foam work great, but they are far from bio-degradable.

Jay Schafer's Tumbleweed Houses are about as big as my kitchen, yet have been so completely planned and designed that they now define space efficiency in a home. Structured around the premise that "less is more", building a Tumbleweed House probably creates about one trash bag full of waste while the Plano trophy home created multiple dumpsters full.