greenspree.ca at The Sietch

When most people are planning to build a new house they usually think about the number of rooms they will have, the layout and floor plan, maybe the type of heating system but rarely the insulation.  Most people assume a new home built to code (whatever that jurisdiction the code is from) means that it must be well insulated and energy efficient.

While that may be true is some progressive jurisdiction, a lot of places the code barely mentions insulation, in any meaningful way at any rate.  Or if it does it’s a minimum standard that falls well short of where insulation levels should be.

Insulation pays for itself, in most cases from day one as the increased cost to mortgage payments are more than offset by monthly energy bill savings.  It’s rare that more insulation doesn’t help your bottom line in the short and long terms.

Some interesting ways to build conventional type houses with lots of insulation include:

Insulated concrete form insulation:

example: http://www.plastifab.com/news_events/images/thermal_insulation/adv_house.jpg

Insulated concrete forms (ICFs) are hollow blocks made of foam insulation that are stacked and filled with concrete. There are connection ties that hold the inside and outside foam together and rebar is installed to make the wall stronger.  Average r-values are about R25 and this type of wall has a high thermal mass and is very airtight.  Walls tend to be thicker than conventional construction and costs are significantly higher.

Double wall cavity insulation:

example: http://www.housing.yk.ca/pdf/SuperInsulatedWallSystemHandout.pdf

This type of wall uses a double framing system with a cavity that extends into the attic and is filled with loose fill insulation like cellulose or fibregalss.  R-values range from R30-40 and the system is cheap and easy to build and insulate.  It is a thick wall however and requires more square footage of the building than other systems.

Additional insulated strapwall:

example:http://oee.nrcan.gc.ca/residential/personal/home-improvement/images/interior-cut.gif

The addition of an extra strapwall on the inside of the exterior structural wall adds more insulation and allows the vapour barrier to be buried in the wall behind the plumbing and electrical reducing penetrations and increasing r-values and air tightness.  Average R-value is about R22-24, costs are less than ICF and wall thickness is fairly high.

Extra layer of rigid insulation:

example: http://oee.nrcan.gc.ca/residential/personal/home-improvement/images/additions.gif

The addition of a layer of rigid foam (polystyrene, polyisocyanurate, etc…) adds an extra amount of r-value for very little extra thickness or costs.  Air tightness is unchanged from conventional construction but the use of foil faced foams does add radiant reflection.  R-value average from R22-26, thickness and costs are only marginally increased.

There are other methods (structural insulated panels, spray foam, natural building like strawbale, etc…) but the above are common methods that can be done by just about any contractor or homeowner/builder.  If you are building new talk to your contractor or do some research on additional insulation techniques that will save you money and reduce energy consumption!

cross posted from http://greenspree.ca

http://greenspree.ca/post/8960467166/super-insulated-wall-systems

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!

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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