greenspree.ca at The Sietch

Reposted from greenspree.ca

So you want to build your own straw bale home. You’ve seen them in green home building books and on TV shows, you saw green home builders wax poetic about their homes low impact on the environment and connection to the local ecology. You’ve researched all the possible alternative home building techniques and the thought of conventional framing makes you shudder. You are going to build a straw bale home no matter what obstacles the MAN and doubters have to say! Well far be it for me to try and dissuade you!

There are some things you should know and experience first though. This, in all likely-hood, is going to be one of the most challenging things you will ever take on. Unless you are an experienced home builder, and maybe even if you are, building a straw bale home on your own is a daunting task from your POV and you are probably underestimating almost every aspect of it right now. You are underestimating the time, cost, effort and patience it will require. There are some things you need to realize before you start and some things you will not be able to realize till you do it for yourself.

If at all possible try and volunteer or take a course on straw bale building, and if you can participate in EVERY stage of building! Even if you think you don’t need to experience the finish carpentry parts of building a straw bale home because the bales are all done at that point, you should! Having uneven, lumpy and delicate walls makes every other step afterwards more difficult.

Doing a one day or even weekend workshop is not going to give you a feel for what the sustained level of work and care is required to construct a bale building of any size. Workshops and seminars are usually scheduled on dry weekends complete with large groups of volunteers and people who have done this many times organizing things and solving problems for you. You on the other hand cannot count on sustained levels of volunteer labour to help you finish your house, if you are lucky and well liked you will probably be able to convince friends and family to attend 2-3 work parties over the duration of the project, the rest you will be doing on your own.

You will spend an unimaginatively large amount of time tarping and untarping your house as you deal with weather unless you live in a desert. You will become attuned to the weather in a way only our pioneer/farmer forefathers were, you will constantly assess how much time you think you will have before bad weather rolls in on a given day and the time it takes to tarp you work for the day. You will buy more tarps than you think is possible, start looking for sales on them NOW!

Unless you are an expert on natural plasters, you’ll need to at least use lime in your stucco/plaster mixes if not portland cement. Earthen plasters may be romantic and extremely eco-friendly but a leaky, rotten bale wall isn’t exactly a sustainable building practise! If you can, hire experts for this step, it’s one of the most critical components of your house and by far the most time and labour consuming one. If you do your own stucco, buy a mixer and start collecting buckets of every size and shape you can.

Speaking of tools, here is a list you should seriously owning:

• scaffolding – Enough to completely cover one side of the house minimum! You can always sell it afterwards and if you are doing your own stucco the time frame you will be renting scaffolding for makes buying a much more affordable option.
• compressor -From spraying slip on bales, nailing trim and blowing straw dust out of your other tools, you will use this every day!
• chain saw – Cutting bales without one isn’t really feasible.
• concrete mixer – as romantic as mixing stucco in a pit with your feet sounds, mixing literally tons of stucco is a lot more realistic mechanically!
• common home-builder tools – you should have the basic tools used on any construction site: corded and cordless drills, circular saw, recipricating saw, jigsaw, table-saw, chop saw, hammers, levels, squares, chalkines, snips, pliers, screwdrivers, chisels, prybars, saw horses, etc, etc, etc

I naively estimated I would finish my house in 6 months working evenings, weekends and with 4 weeks vacation. I am not a builder but have construction experience, had help from a long time carpenter and lots of friends and family. Two years later we limped across the finish line (more on that below). Easily the biggest area of time and labour was spent on stucco, tarping and untarping walls, erecting and moving scaffolding. If you choose to subcontract any part of the building this is the part I would strongly suggest you leave to the experts. It is the most important part of keeping moisture out of your house, which of any building technique is the most susceptible to water damage! If you live in an area where there are companies with experience stuccoing straw bale I would definitely recommend hiring them!

This is a small list of the major hurdles and challenges of building your own straw bale home, the main thing you should remember is to remain flexible and adaptable, learn how to problem solve and think creatively. Take things one step at a time and remember that the hard work is part of the journey but completing the house isn’t the destination, just another road marker. If you spend the whole time thinking of the end as a finish line you’ll burn out. About half way through I had to stop dreaming of the day we’d be done and focus on the moments we were creating being builders. We weren’t enjoying the process anymore and the whole thing felt like a massive burden.

When I was able to accept that this was just a phase of my life that would last some unknown length of time and only carry the burden of the task I set out to finish that day/hour/moment was I able to set down the burden of the project as a whole and enjoy life again. It was still a struggle not to slip into the old way of thinking but I got a lot more done and felt a lo better if I could set that burden aside.

When you are done (for the moment, there are always future projects for a home owner!) take the time to enjoy your home and sit back and take it in now and then!

So we have a new little Iz monster roaming around the house so I thought it might be time to post something on how we are trying to make this happy addition a green addition

First off, the big question, cloth or disposable. And the answer is both… We got some G Diapers from Laine`s sister and we used those in combination with 7th Generation chlorine free disposables. The G diaper system is great but you need at least 2-3 of the starter kits to be practical and Isobel has already grown out of the fist size set we have. We are looking into other cloth diapers and have gotten some good advice from friends with newborns as well, but the 7th Generation diapers will fill the gap.

As far as wipes go, we decided to forgo the wet overpackaged, over scented and over processed commercial wipes and simply use reusable towels (commonly referred to as J cloths, but we have a different brand) and wet them in warm water before using them. Iz likes it better when they are warm and we just launder them with the rest of her stuff, and they are good as new! We found the packaged wipes gave her bum rashes more often.

We also used almost exclusively hand me down clothes for her with a few good “dress up” outfits we bought just for her. Hand me down toys and mats and playpens have also been a blessing as well.

If you have any good tips of green baby care, or questions, let me know!

One thing I run into time and time again as an energy efficiency adviser is lack of consideration of a house, or any other building, as a system. Buildings are a complex arrangement of systems not totally dissimilar to biological ones. And what one does to one system in a building can positively or negatively impact others.

Let me give you a few examples:

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the things I have realized when my wife and I found out we were going to have a baby this winter is how much I am still polluting the earth, even being as earth conscious as I think I am. I still buy lots of plastic and styrofoam products, disposable products, over packaged products, etc… We justify it to ourselves as saying there are no alternatives or at least no convenient alternatives and buy some of our food bulk but that’s about the extent of it.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

How much (useful) energy can you derive from rain falling from your roof? How can you best capture wind energy with many small wind turbines? Are there other options for using solar energy besides PV’s and solar hot water heaters? What are some other small options anyone could use that have cumulative benefits and are easy and cheap to install?

It’s a thought I had the other day when considering energy production for our house in the future. While on the road for my job I passed by an off-grid (even though the grid was 100 feet away) 3000+sf home with solar hot water, solar PV panels and a 100′ tall 3 or 5 KW wind turbine. It was massive and made the property seem very out of place next to smallish 1400-1800sf bungalows all around it. I decided that one large scale device to provide all or nearly all of my energy needs was not a route I wanted to take. I started doing mental calculations and plans to incorporate many small unobtrusive energy production devices into our house and land. We have a hectare so we have some room to play with and it is a former farm field so can plan around future trees, wind rows, etc…

Read the rest of this entry »

The First Air Car to Hit the Market – Associated Content

While I am sure there will be questions about this technology, and the safety behind it, it sure does sound promising! If you can couple this car with green, clean, home energy generation (wind, solar, micro-hydro or perhaps even a small bio-diesel generator!) it would truly be emission free driving! And ranges of 500 miles and 68mph make it a true contender against internal combustion engined vehicles. Prices on average of $8000 don’t hurt either.

It also does away with the need for heavy, toxic and hard to dispose of batteries that are the weak spot on otherwise promising electric vehicles.

I am excited to see what the future brings for these affordable green cars!

About Blackle – Energy Saving Search

In a simple yet ingenious way, Blackle saves energy by using a black screen, requiring less monitor power! Little steps!

It shows real leadership and a key understanding of how the planet is to be saved in providing this service. It’s up to all of us to make informed choices in how we consume (or don’t consume) and how we choose to live. I think I’ll look into making both my websites darker…

How much land do you need to be self sufficient? Again inspired by Red State Green’s recents posts I decided to do some research on my own. Prior to this, in a comment on “A matter of national security”, I used some somewhat high output figures I found on another site that basically said about 0.11 of an acre would be all that is required for a family of four. I decided to find some better numbers and also instead of just going by 2000lbs of food per year per preson, use the recommended portions of the CanadaFood Guide.

Assuming everyone followed Canada’s food guide, and using chicken for meat and dairy alternatives and/or trading or somehow offsetting the cost of purchasing some of the food, this is how I see it breaking down (weights of food taken from http://www.stambaughfamily.com/equiv_1.html):

Food Guide per adult male:

10 servings (1/2cup) of vegatables and fruit. Lets say your servings are 1 cup of tomato, 1 cup of spinach, 1 cup of carrot, 1 cup of cabbage and 1 cup of potato. That corresponds 74kg of tomato, 50kg of spinach, 55kg of carrot, 110kg of cabbage, and 83kg of potato per year.

8 servings of grain products. Lets use 4 servings of oats and the equivalent in flour of four servings of bread. That corresponds to 21kg of oats and 20kg of wheat flour per year.

2 servings of dairy. Lets assume soy drink, 1 cup ea. or approx. 23kg of soya beans per year.

3 servings of meat and alternatives. Let’s use chicken for all three (75g ea.) That’s 82kg per year.

More after the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

Red State Green » Blog Archive » A matter of national security

Fellow The Sietch blogger Red State Green has posted an interesting article on self sufficiency and food supplies.  She has garnered a lot of attention on the post with dozens of comments ranging from support to abject scorn.

Most of the scorn seems to be coming from folks who are saying things like:

Uh… don’t want to rain on your self-sufficiency parade or anything, but do you also intend to build a fortified castle around your Victory Garden? Because if you don’t and civilization collapses because we can’t get Big Macs anymore we’re heading straight for the homestead that has all the chickens, pigs, and home-made preserves.

Mmmm. Jellies and jams.

And:

Are you serious? This is the most ridiculous idea I have heard yet. Oil embargo equals starvation? Give me a break. For one, you aren’t right in saying most of the food is produced in other countries. Yes, most of what we eat is made in other countries, but we export far more food than we import. The breadbasket of the USA (you have heard of the entire midwest, right?) could easily support the entire country. Also, higher food costs aren’t really a big deal, given that we already have some of the lowest food costs in the world.

But let’s take a step back and assume that this absurd principle could work. No gas in the cars? Uh oh… I guess that means walking or biking are out of the question. I bet people would kill each other over gardens before thinking about, I don’t know, walking to the store.

Let’s take the other scenarios. Terrorists bombing all our pipelines is not only unreasonable (since the United States is in anti-terror mode), but given that this country runs on oil, it would probably take only a few days to fix, causing at most a small spike in prices. A flu pandemic is an unlikely but possible occurrence, though I think the flu might be slightly more concerning than plans for food. Come on. No quarantine causing starvation would be placed into effect — the starvation could kill far more than the flu.

Victory gardens were a wonderful way to make people feel involved in WWII, but they weren’t the difference between life and death for Americans. This situation isn’t any different.

And I have to wonder if these people really think it is better to not have any means of self sufficiency at all then learn how to garden and provide at least a portion of your own food?

Another common theme was “aconomies of scale” and the great myth that commercial agriculture is the only efficient way to raise crops and livestock.  I don’t even know where to start with that notion, I suggest those that believe that do some serious research on traditional and third world farming practices and let me know what they conclude.