Practical idea exchange about sustainable building development and living
From the category archives:
There is a definate arguement for prefab hosuing being sustainable. Component housing that is built off site can often leverage economies of scale and reduce waste in ways that single job homebuilders cannot. And they do not have to be ugly, here is a very interesting German design with one of the better bookshelves I have ever seen: cool german prefab house
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Interesting piece in today’s Sunday Real Estate Section of the Chron on “Vegas Show Stopper” a 9,000 square foot monster built out in the desert with “green technology”. Can you really be green or sustainable with a SFH at 9,000 square feet? My answer is yes, hedged with a small aside:
WTF 9,000 SQUARE FEET!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I guess I would reconcile my philosophical meets reality take on this by saying that the house can be green, but not sustainable. You can input lots of green features in a place like this, like the gas driven heat pump that the article crows about. But green inputs does not sustainable make. It’s too plain big. I get the whole I need to prove something look at me and my big green house/car/schlong whatever…ok maybe a big green schlong isn’t something to look at. My point though is that just because you call something green doesn’t mean it’s better. Green is a color, a fad, something the corporate types have co-opted into their marketing lingo to sell you stuff. Sustainable is a way of living. And even if a project incorporates the latest in “green” features, the sheer size is self defeating.
Anyhow, article here if you want primary source.
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Maybe it is counter-intuitive to talk about drought when it is raining, but it shouldn’t be. It can rain all day, all week, all month, so what? We use too much water. Period. Increasing supply is not going to get people to use water sustainably. If anything, more rain is going to let us be lazy when it comes to water use. Honestly, if it’s not on the front page most folks won’t give water a second thought. They probably won’t give it a second thought if it is on the front page anyways, given the declining readership numbers of daily newspapers, but I digress
Nothing promotes waste more than abundance. Let’s say enough rain falls to get our regional totals up to “average”. A family of 4 uses more than 150% more water than they did 50 years ago! “Average” yearly rainfall doesn’t cut it anymore. Agriculture and commercial users have to step up to the plate, sort of – but that does not absolve myself or you, the residential user, from our responsibility to sustainable water practices.
When you remodel your bathroom, think about a dual flush toilet. At the absolute minimum, make sure your unit uses only 1.6 gallons per flush (gpf). When your washing machine breaks, buy a front loading model. You might pay more coin on the front end, but you will lose money over time in your water bills. Do you have to have grass? Maybe you can plant a front landscape of beautiful natives instead. I even stopped showering, and my wife does not seem to mind, though she has taken to sleeping in the next room for some reason.
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Foundations are not like kitchens. People don’t leave a house that is for sale saying “Wow, did you see that foundation, how cool was that!” It is the quiet things however, that can have a major impact. The new concrete on either side of the embedded beam is fly ash concrete. Fly ash is a byproduct of coal fired power plants. It is used to replace some of the cement in concrete.
“For every ton of cement manufactured, about 6.5 million BTUs of energy are consumed…(and) about one ton of carbon dioxide is released. Replacing that ton of cement with fly ash would save enough electricity to power the average American home for 24 days, and reduce carbon dioxide emissions equal to two months use of an automobile.” (source?)
“Experts estimate that cement production contributes to about 7% of carbon dioxide emissions from human sources. If all the fly ash generated each year were used in producing concrete, the reduction of carbon dioxide released because of decreased cement production would be equivalent to eliminating 25 percent of the world’s vehicles” (source)>
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“The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is an international organization that brings people together to find solutions which promote responsible stewardship of the world’s forests.”
The FSC follows wood from the forest to the mill to the dealer. When you use FSC wood you can be assured that no ecosystems were wiped out making that 2X4.
Another type of FSC Certified product: reclaimed wood. This is tropical hardwood packing crate material used in global industrial shipping that has been re-milled by TerraMai. Wood that would have previously been thrown out has many uses. In our case, we used it to build a beautiful deck overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
Holding up the roof is a 16 inch think 20 foot long Paralam Beam.It is and engineered piece of wood – a lot of smaller diameter strips of wood mashed together with glue to make one giant, ultra strong beam. There are many benefits to using one of these: reducing demand for big solid beams decreases the pressure to cut down old growth forests; Engineered lumber uses wood fiber more efficiently than conventional lumber; and it prevents big beautiful old growth trees from being chopped down.
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