greenspree.ca at The Sietch

One of the things I hear a lot in my new position is that people want to build their new homes energy efficiently but think that they cannot afford to. Whenever I hear this I always say without hesitation “You can’t afford NOT to build you home energy efficiently!”. There are huge misconceptions out there about the costs, methods and effectiveness of building new homes efficiently. Most new home builders do not help the situation and will tell prospective customers that adding more insulation to their house, installing a geothermal or solar heating system or building to take advantage of passive solar gains will add an unreasonable amount of cost and time delay to the building process.

Fortunately there are free resources out there for anyone to dispel these myths. A free software package from Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) can be downloaded called HOT2000 and it allows anyone to do energy modeling on their home and actually forecast what various changes will do to the energy consumption of there homes! It has a fairly shallow learning curve, with a windows interface, drop down menus and check boxes, and comes with a good help file and example files to build on.

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Time for an update on the house! “Step Five - Stucco” has been started but put on hold! We got caught by the cold and snowy weather and the fact that we were relying on hoses run from my sister-in-laws house for water to make the stucco and only managed to get two walls covered with the discovery coat. We tarped the exterior as well as we could and are going to concentrate on interior work for the time being.

Speaking of interior work, here is what we have gotten done since the last update on stucco. We bought and installed a second hand wood stove (yay heat!). The stove is a Lakewood “Unicorn” model that was produced in New Brunswick. It’s called the “unicorn” model because the cast iron doors on the front of it have unicorns cast into it. It’s a catalytic stove and there is next to no info on it on the web. We are learning it’s quirks and are grateful for the amount of heat it gives of and the blower that came with it that circulates the heat nicely.

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Having gone through bale building and seeing the problem areas involved with straw (admittedly some being self imposed) I have been thinking about developing a new green building technique that embodies all the positives of straw bales and none or few of it’s weaknesses. At the same time I wanted it to be simple enough cost effective enough to be built by any moderately handy family. My criteria for this new technique are:

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