This post is a part of the series An Acre of Sunshine.
It is very easy to get lost in the morass of terminology surrounding the measurement of energy. There are some good reasons for why there is so much terminology, but much of it results from the history of what was discovered when, by whom, and used for what purpose. To try to keep things as simple as possible, we will stick to only 2 units of measurement, those that I find to be most familiar to people and that are easy to work with at the human scale. The first of these is the Calorie1, which is how we generally speak of the energy that we get from food. The average person consumes about 2000 to 2500 Calories per day. The meals, snacks, and beverages that a person consumes each day provide all of this energy. The second unit that we will use is the kilowatt hour (kWh). This is the standard unit of measurement for electricity, so all of you readers who pay an electricity bill should be used to seeing this measurement. Depending on where you live, the cost of residential electricity can be anywhere from a few cents to a dollar or more per kilowatt hour, with current 2015 prices in North America mostly being between $.10 and $.30 per kWh.
A couple of examples can explain how the kilowatt hour is
measured, and put it into perspective. Say that you have a 100 watt incandescent light bulb that you want to
use to light up your kitchen (a laptop computer working hard uses about the same
amount of power). That rating, in watts, is a measure of how much energy is
required to get the bulb to light up for any given second. With anything
electrical, it is the motion of electrons through the parts of the
device, be it a lighting filament in a light bulb or a
transistor in a computer, that allows them to function. It is beyond the scope of this piece to go into a deep look at the physics of electricity, but if you are so curious, here is a place to start. So our light bulb
needs a continuous supply of 100 watts to stay lit. What if we
wanted to talk about the amount of energy needed to keep the bulb lit
constantly for a full 24 hour day? To measure it, we can just say how
much time that energy was being used, and this is commonly done in hours. So
to run a 100 watt light bulb for 24 hours, one multiplies watts by hours
and gets 2400 watt-hours. To make the numbers more manageable, this can
then be switched to be 1000 times smaller by adding the suffix kilo-,
making it 2.4 kilowatt hours (kWh). 2.4 kWh is the amount of energy it
takes to keep that light bulb lit for a full day.
A second very different example can be from biology. How much energy, in kWh, does it take to run a person for a day? As mentioned above, a person needs roughly 2500 calories each day. Since they are both units of energy, it turns out that one can directly convert Calories into
kilowatt hours; 1 kWh is equal to 860 Calories. Applying this to our
daily intake of food, a person needs 2.9 kWh of energy to do our usual
goings on. So it takes just a bit more energy to run you, the
reader, for one day as it does for a 100 watt incandescent lightbulb. Put another way, a person runs on about 120 watts. The kilowatt hour then acts as a very human scale
measurement, in that a person typically uses some relatively manageable
number of kilowatt hours of energy for a day's activities.
All of the different units for measuring energy are potentially interchangeable, and I've provided a table below that shows a few of the common units that you may be familiar with and their conversion with each other.
Now that we have established a common language and an idea of scale for discussing energy, another table can show the amount of energy found in many of energy sources we encounter day to day. Many of these particular ways of storing energy will come up again the following sections. One caveat to make about the whole fresh foods here, like chicken or potatoes, is that much of the weight of these is actually water, which doesn't contain any useful energy. So while the energy in chicken comes mostly from protein and fat, much of a whole chicken is actually water.
Previous page: Energy capture, conversion, and storage
Next page: So how much energy does a person really use?
1 This blog will always be speaking of the dietary calorie, or kilocalorie, see here for a more in-depth explanation.
Saturday, 14 January 2017
Energy Capture, Conversion and Storage
This post is a part of the series An Acre of Sunshine.
Each time one form of energy is captured and converted into some other form, only some of the energy is converted to that new form, the rest of the energy is lost. This isn't to say that the energy disappears, as energy is neither created nor destroyed (see the 1st law of thermodynamics). Instead, I mean that only some of the energy goes to the targeted next step, and the rest goes somewhere less useful. Let's take the example of a typical car running on gasoline. The desired target for the energy from the gas is to move the car, but there are some unavoidable problems. In this case, the issues are such things as friction on the highway, which heats up the tires (converting some energy to heat), and wind resistance which slows the car by transferring some of the motion of the car into the air. The engine turns much of the energy of the gasoline into non-useful heat, doesn't burn all the gas perfectly well, and so on and so forth. For the example above of a gas-powered car, only about 20% of the total energy in the gasoline is converted into motion of the car. And this doesn't even include the fact that energy is often converted many times between different forms before it is used for the motion that we want, with losses at each and every step. For that gasoline example, there are inefficiencies and losses in taking the oil out of the ground, refining it into gasoline and other products, as well as transport and storage losses.
Energy storage is also a key concern; What happens if there is available energy and motion now, but you don't want to use it until some time in the future? Well, you need to find some way to convert the energy into some stable form, and be able to also have some way to convert it again for the end use. Stored energy is 'potential energy', meaning that one has the ability to cause things to move at some point in the future. An easy way to imagine potential energy is with hydropower. Say that there is a river running through a valley. There is a lot of water motion that is there, that could potentially be harnessed and put to use. But what if the river runs dry every summer, and you wanted to be able to have a steady supply of power? You could then build a dam. Instead of the water moving now, the dam stops it and holds it still in a lake above the dam. All of that water has potential energy because gravity would like to pull it down, but the dam stops the water from moving. In this situation, much of the energy (motion) of the water in the river is now stored in the lake, and can be utilized whenever it is needed. The motion of the water, when it is released, is used to spin a turbine (basically a big wheel), and this spinning motion can be used to create electricity (though in the past it was for things like cutting wood or grinding wheat into flour). Other forms of energy storage act by the same underlying principle. They capture and freeze motion in place, setting up a situation where motion can be re-directed in the future.
A huge amount of the energy coming from the sun is captured and harnessed by living things, and passed between different living organisms via a food web - big fish eat small fish, small fish eat insects and other tiny creatures, the tiny creatures eat algae. Though the details are vastly different, the same basic principles of energy storage and conversion apply across all ecosystems. All living things store their energy largely in the form of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates (such as sugars). Each organism needs a steady supply of new energy inputs to metabolize, to grow, to reproduce. The base of this food web in most places is of course the process of plants converting energy from the sun into sugars and then on into other more complex forms. A good rule of thumb is that each level needs 10 times more of the level below to support it (i.e., an order of magnitude). So, 1 pound of large fish requires: 10 pounds of small fish, 100 pounds of tiny creatures, 1000 pounds of algae. In biology these are known as 'trophic levels'.
Animals and plants both stock up on energy reserves in times of plenty to prepare for the times of scarcity. This is both for the short-term as well as the long term. In the short term, plants need to have the energy to make it through the nights, as well as at least a few cloudy days. For animals, there are times when food isn't always available. Predators in particular may go relatively long periods between feeding. And of course there is the winter. Here in eastern Canada, the lead up to the long cold winter has animals putting on heavy layers of fat, and the trees building up stores of sugars through the summer and early fall, then dropping their leaves while sending most of their nutrients down into their roots.
Previous page: What is energy?
Next page: Measuring energy
Each time one form of energy is captured and converted into some other form, only some of the energy is converted to that new form, the rest of the energy is lost. This isn't to say that the energy disappears, as energy is neither created nor destroyed (see the 1st law of thermodynamics). Instead, I mean that only some of the energy goes to the targeted next step, and the rest goes somewhere less useful. Let's take the example of a typical car running on gasoline. The desired target for the energy from the gas is to move the car, but there are some unavoidable problems. In this case, the issues are such things as friction on the highway, which heats up the tires (converting some energy to heat), and wind resistance which slows the car by transferring some of the motion of the car into the air. The engine turns much of the energy of the gasoline into non-useful heat, doesn't burn all the gas perfectly well, and so on and so forth. For the example above of a gas-powered car, only about 20% of the total energy in the gasoline is converted into motion of the car. And this doesn't even include the fact that energy is often converted many times between different forms before it is used for the motion that we want, with losses at each and every step. For that gasoline example, there are inefficiencies and losses in taking the oil out of the ground, refining it into gasoline and other products, as well as transport and storage losses.
Energy storage is also a key concern; What happens if there is available energy and motion now, but you don't want to use it until some time in the future? Well, you need to find some way to convert the energy into some stable form, and be able to also have some way to convert it again for the end use. Stored energy is 'potential energy', meaning that one has the ability to cause things to move at some point in the future. An easy way to imagine potential energy is with hydropower. Say that there is a river running through a valley. There is a lot of water motion that is there, that could potentially be harnessed and put to use. But what if the river runs dry every summer, and you wanted to be able to have a steady supply of power? You could then build a dam. Instead of the water moving now, the dam stops it and holds it still in a lake above the dam. All of that water has potential energy because gravity would like to pull it down, but the dam stops the water from moving. In this situation, much of the energy (motion) of the water in the river is now stored in the lake, and can be utilized whenever it is needed. The motion of the water, when it is released, is used to spin a turbine (basically a big wheel), and this spinning motion can be used to create electricity (though in the past it was for things like cutting wood or grinding wheat into flour). Other forms of energy storage act by the same underlying principle. They capture and freeze motion in place, setting up a situation where motion can be re-directed in the future.
A huge amount of the energy coming from the sun is captured and harnessed by living things, and passed between different living organisms via a food web - big fish eat small fish, small fish eat insects and other tiny creatures, the tiny creatures eat algae. Though the details are vastly different, the same basic principles of energy storage and conversion apply across all ecosystems. All living things store their energy largely in the form of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates (such as sugars). Each organism needs a steady supply of new energy inputs to metabolize, to grow, to reproduce. The base of this food web in most places is of course the process of plants converting energy from the sun into sugars and then on into other more complex forms. A good rule of thumb is that each level needs 10 times more of the level below to support it (i.e., an order of magnitude). So, 1 pound of large fish requires: 10 pounds of small fish, 100 pounds of tiny creatures, 1000 pounds of algae. In biology these are known as 'trophic levels'.
Animals and plants both stock up on energy reserves in times of plenty to prepare for the times of scarcity. This is both for the short-term as well as the long term. In the short term, plants need to have the energy to make it through the nights, as well as at least a few cloudy days. For animals, there are times when food isn't always available. Predators in particular may go relatively long periods between feeding. And of course there is the winter. Here in eastern Canada, the lead up to the long cold winter has animals putting on heavy layers of fat, and the trees building up stores of sugars through the summer and early fall, then dropping their leaves while sending most of their nutrients down into their roots.
Previous page: What is energy?
Next page: Measuring energy
What is Energy?
This post is a part of the series An Acre of Sunshine.
What is energy, really? With a focus on sustainability and land use, I will unsurprisingly spend a lot of time talking about sunlight streaming down on us from on high. We all have vague ideas about energy, thinking about the heat thrown off by a campfire, the electricity powering your lights or computer, but we don't often think about the threads that draw them all together. They seem like such totally different things, but they do have one thing in common; they are all forms of motion. All it means when one says that there is energy, or that something requires energy, is that it involves motion. While a physicist may quibble with this definition and want to talk about 'the ability to do work', at least for the sake of a human-scale discussion, energy simply is motion. For tiny objects, those smaller than can be seen with the human eye, it may be harder to think of them in terms of motion. Sunlight, electricity, and heat all include motion that is impossible to see and therefore hard to imagine. For the motion of large objects, such as a car, it is much easier to think about how energy really is just motion. The more massive the object and the faster the motion, the more energy is involved. Conceptually it is no different for microscopic motion. Electricity, and the running of all the devices powered by it, are all caused by the motion of small particles, usually electrons. The more electrons moving and the faster they move, the more electricity one has. Heat is also the motion of particles, and the faster the particles move the hotter that object is. For solid objects, say a metal stove, that motion is quite constrained, heat is the vibration of the particles that make up the stove; the particles of metal vibrate quickly, though they stay in close contact with each other, allowing the stove to keep it's shape and not melt away. And if you feel the heat coming off of a stove without touching it, you are actually feeling the high energy air particles, which picked up speed and vibration from coming into more direct contact with that stove.
Even chemical energy, such as what is used to power the human body or that found in gasoline, is about motion. In the case of chemical energy, it usually involves moving particles in relation to each other. Take the example of sugar. A molecule of sugar is simply a set of smaller pieces, atoms, arranged in a very particular way. That sugar molecule can be thought of as a tiny compressed spring; when the connections holding the parts together are broken, the pieces fly apart. Animals and plants have the ability to capture that motion, and use it in other places where it is needed. By the same token, making sugars, 'coiling the spring', requires an input of energy. Plants are able to capture some of the motion of tiny particles of sunlight, photons, and store it in molecules like sugar. It is no different for gasoline - the hydrocarbons in gasoline are just a different type of coiled spring that we release by burning, and then capture and use the resulting heat and pressure, which are again forms of motion.
Bringing up car engines, or cellular structures for that matter, illustrates the crucial point that there has to be some structure that can capture energy and use that motion to do something useful. Energy that is just 'out there' isn't useful at all. These energy capturing structures are all around us. Almost any object in our every-day environments can capture heat energy, be it rocks, engines, plants, or even people. Whether that energy is useful really depends on the situation. All living things are able to usefully use chemical energy of various sorts, and plants have the added abilities to capture and convert the sun's energy into chemical energy. For human technology, we have invented all sorts of other structures that can capture and use different forms of energy. The engines of cars, ships, planes, and trains usually capture the energy resulting from burning fossil fuels, and billions of devices are able to usefully use electricity. Windmills capture the motion of the air, hydropower is about capturing the motion of water, and finally photovoltaic solar panels, like plants, capture the motion of the photons coming from the sun.
To boil down all of the above: Energy = movement
Previous page: An introduction
Next page: Energy capture, conversion, and storage
What is energy, really? With a focus on sustainability and land use, I will unsurprisingly spend a lot of time talking about sunlight streaming down on us from on high. We all have vague ideas about energy, thinking about the heat thrown off by a campfire, the electricity powering your lights or computer, but we don't often think about the threads that draw them all together. They seem like such totally different things, but they do have one thing in common; they are all forms of motion. All it means when one says that there is energy, or that something requires energy, is that it involves motion. While a physicist may quibble with this definition and want to talk about 'the ability to do work', at least for the sake of a human-scale discussion, energy simply is motion. For tiny objects, those smaller than can be seen with the human eye, it may be harder to think of them in terms of motion. Sunlight, electricity, and heat all include motion that is impossible to see and therefore hard to imagine. For the motion of large objects, such as a car, it is much easier to think about how energy really is just motion. The more massive the object and the faster the motion, the more energy is involved. Conceptually it is no different for microscopic motion. Electricity, and the running of all the devices powered by it, are all caused by the motion of small particles, usually electrons. The more electrons moving and the faster they move, the more electricity one has. Heat is also the motion of particles, and the faster the particles move the hotter that object is. For solid objects, say a metal stove, that motion is quite constrained, heat is the vibration of the particles that make up the stove; the particles of metal vibrate quickly, though they stay in close contact with each other, allowing the stove to keep it's shape and not melt away. And if you feel the heat coming off of a stove without touching it, you are actually feeling the high energy air particles, which picked up speed and vibration from coming into more direct contact with that stove.
Even chemical energy, such as what is used to power the human body or that found in gasoline, is about motion. In the case of chemical energy, it usually involves moving particles in relation to each other. Take the example of sugar. A molecule of sugar is simply a set of smaller pieces, atoms, arranged in a very particular way. That sugar molecule can be thought of as a tiny compressed spring; when the connections holding the parts together are broken, the pieces fly apart. Animals and plants have the ability to capture that motion, and use it in other places where it is needed. By the same token, making sugars, 'coiling the spring', requires an input of energy. Plants are able to capture some of the motion of tiny particles of sunlight, photons, and store it in molecules like sugar. It is no different for gasoline - the hydrocarbons in gasoline are just a different type of coiled spring that we release by burning, and then capture and use the resulting heat and pressure, which are again forms of motion.
Bringing up car engines, or cellular structures for that matter, illustrates the crucial point that there has to be some structure that can capture energy and use that motion to do something useful. Energy that is just 'out there' isn't useful at all. These energy capturing structures are all around us. Almost any object in our every-day environments can capture heat energy, be it rocks, engines, plants, or even people. Whether that energy is useful really depends on the situation. All living things are able to usefully use chemical energy of various sorts, and plants have the added abilities to capture and convert the sun's energy into chemical energy. For human technology, we have invented all sorts of other structures that can capture and use different forms of energy. The engines of cars, ships, planes, and trains usually capture the energy resulting from burning fossil fuels, and billions of devices are able to usefully use electricity. Windmills capture the motion of the air, hydropower is about capturing the motion of water, and finally photovoltaic solar panels, like plants, capture the motion of the photons coming from the sun.
To boil down all of the above: Energy = movement
Previous page: An introduction
Next page: Energy capture, conversion, and storage
An Acre of Sunshine - Introduction
This post is a part of the series An Acre of Sunshine.
I always wanted to own property in the countryside. I loved the hiking, fishing, canoeing, and other related outdoor pursuits. But there is something different when one is the owner, the land manager, and if done right, the steward. When we relocated to Ottawa, the Canadian capital, finding a place outside the city to call our own was something that was at the top of the list. Within a year of our arrival, we found our perfect spot - nearly one hundred and fifty acres of field, forest, and wetland, spread across rolling hills and nestled alongside a river. It felt quite wild to me, but they called it a farm. It was little like the flat open farmland that I was used to seeing throughout my childhood in the Midwest, where fields run together and the only trees are often those just adjacent to farmsteads and along fencelines. On this property, there was no barn or silo, but rather a few modest hilly hayfields, and a forest where trees were cut occasionally for lumber or firewood. When my wife and I had begun looking for our countryside escape, we thought about what we wanted mostly in terms of lifestyle and recreation. But it is a farm, and we had become farmers.
From the time we purchased the property, my mind was overflowing with the possibilities of what we could do there. Of course, much of my attention was on all of the recreation that our family would be doing, a broad swath of sports, including snowshoeing and cross country skiing all winter, hiking and fishing the rest of the year, a bit of deer and grouse hunting thrown in during the fall. But it was never just about recreation, it was also about stewardship and sustainability, taking proper care of a space, using it in the present, but preserving it for the future. As much as possible, we also wanted to live lightly on our new property, preserving the full range of flora and fauna that are found there. A primary reason for choosing this particular property was the natural aesthetic of the place, which we wished to preserve. Since I was a young child, I had dreamed of living out in the wilderness, of living off the land. But as I grew to adulthood, I realized that the sort of rugged independence where I would build a house by hand and grow all my own food was not the dream that I was pursuing. I have no desire to be fully independent from the rest of the world; people are social beings, and productive societies always exist by allowing everyone to specialize, each to his own talents and predilections, and then cooperate so that each person has their needs met. We all need and want those goods and services that allow us to survive and thrive. But we all share the same world, and we need to make sure that we, combined, live in a way that is sustainable so that our children and their children will be able to continue to prosper as we do today.
Real sustainability isn't the same as simply conservation, and leaving all natural places alone. While true nature refuges are critically important, people also need to produce many goods from the land to support themselves. I felt that part of my responsibility was to continue to keep this land productive, to help provide for human needs as well as to be a wild and natural place. A question kept coming back to me: Was our farm, in this rocky and hilly Canadian forest, even capable of being productive enough to support my family and our needs? As I began to work through all of the possibilities, I considered how it was possible to compare them; Should we grow trees or corn? One way to answer these questions was to simply ask which one would yield the highest dollar returns. This is certainly the typical way that farmers make their land-use decisions. While we wished to make a few bucks, concerns of sustainability stayed at the fore, and our main incomes will always be off the farm. I then had an epiphany about our land use planning. It wasn't the most original, but it is one that is key to land management, and I'll share it with you: All farming and most sustainable land use is the farming of sunlight, capturing some of those rays and using the energy contained in them. One takes sunlight, and converts it into maple trees or wheat, chickens or deer. So my realization meant that the question that I was asking about providing for my family was really a question about energy. I started to come around to thinking about sustainable land use more broadly as being about energy; how much energy could we capture and use? Was a farm like ours capable of producing enough to support the energy-intensive modern lifestyle of my family? How much energy does it really take to support a family anyway?
At the same time as we were purchasing our property, we were also busy with starting to design a house that we would build on a hilltop overlooking the river. For years I had also been interested in architecture, particularly green building practices and energy efficiency, and so we decided to design from the start a place that would be incredibly energy efficient. We received an extra push for efficiency from the fact that our building site was so far from the nearest powerlines that it would have cost a small fortune to run power to our new home. Solar photovoltaics were going to be the only reasonable way to provide electricity. Going with off-grid solar almost automatically puts one in an energy conservation mind-set, because for every extra light or computer you want to power, you need to pony up more cash upfront to install more panels and batteries. Energy of all kinds was going to be at a premium at this location, so we made decisions to reduce use and keep all appliances and mechanical systems efficient. To reduce heating needs, we took inspiration from several different green design movements to incorporate passive solar design and superinsulation to our home. All in all, we reduced by approximately 70% the amount of energy that we will need to use in this home compared to standard construction. In working with an architect and tradesmen of all kinds, I learned the ins and outs of energy flows around and through a home, and in many ways they really didn't seem so different from the energy flows involved with land use (If you are interested, see my blog about that house here).
While working on both land use planning and home design, I was consulting innumerable sources, on forestry, farming, energy, architecture, and more. As written, each of these sources was aimed primarily at specialists in each field, those that wished to take part in these practices. What wasn't there, and that I yearned for, were some of the threads that tied all of these concepts and practices together. How did each of these fields relate to the human level, an individual, a family? Again, I could see that in each, a common theme of energy use was central to each of these endeavors. Sustainability and renewable energy are tightly intertwined, and I was learning enormous amounts about how these systems worked, and could see a place for sharing this knowledge with others.
Herein lies the heart of this story. I have explored the intersection of energy and land use at a human level, and want to share that story. This story is an investigation of energy, renewable energy, a single source to walk through the basics of energy use and energy production in a home and on the land. I want to tackle such questions as; How do different uses of solar energy actually compare? How do they measure up to fossil fuels or nuclear energy? How much land do we actually need to support people sustainably? If we tried to go to an all renewable, all sustainable economy, could we do it while maintaining our current standard of living?
The lens I use to examine all of these questions is our forested farm, looking at the question of what we have already done and what we could do in the future. Hopefully, by looking at these different choices on a small scale, in human terms, ideas about energy will click for some people who have never really understood, or perhaps never thought about, the energy that we use each and every day.
A few disclaimers are needed, just to get things started with clarity. First of all, with a story like this, comparing different forms of land use, different types of energy storage and conversion, a lot of numbers are going to be needed. Comparing land use in terms of energy requires a lot of calculations based on the sorts of products one could produce. At the same time, these things are complicated, and so it is extremely difficult to pin down those numbers precisely, there is always a range. I try to simplify everything down to rough estimates, to get a feel for the landscape without trying to get get complete precision. Second, the economics of all of these choices are mostly left out - the incomes that could be generated are important, and references to them are made, but energy is the focus here, not dollars. In order to keep it manageable, this is not meant to at all be a how-to manual for any of the topics in it; materials like that are the sorts of sources that I used to put together this story. Instead, it is meant to broadly educate about energy and land use, to draw attention to the some of the considerations we ought to be focusing on, and realign the discussion about sustainability to issues of energy - how we produce it, use it, and how we can continue to have a high standard of living without destroying the world.
Though the numbers are important, there is a story to be told that doesn't depend on those numbers. Through all of the sections I put a less technical discussion at the beginning, and follow it up with a more in-depth numbers-based investigation.
Next up: What is energy?
I always wanted to own property in the countryside. I loved the hiking, fishing, canoeing, and other related outdoor pursuits. But there is something different when one is the owner, the land manager, and if done right, the steward. When we relocated to Ottawa, the Canadian capital, finding a place outside the city to call our own was something that was at the top of the list. Within a year of our arrival, we found our perfect spot - nearly one hundred and fifty acres of field, forest, and wetland, spread across rolling hills and nestled alongside a river. It felt quite wild to me, but they called it a farm. It was little like the flat open farmland that I was used to seeing throughout my childhood in the Midwest, where fields run together and the only trees are often those just adjacent to farmsteads and along fencelines. On this property, there was no barn or silo, but rather a few modest hilly hayfields, and a forest where trees were cut occasionally for lumber or firewood. When my wife and I had begun looking for our countryside escape, we thought about what we wanted mostly in terms of lifestyle and recreation. But it is a farm, and we had become farmers.
From the time we purchased the property, my mind was overflowing with the possibilities of what we could do there. Of course, much of my attention was on all of the recreation that our family would be doing, a broad swath of sports, including snowshoeing and cross country skiing all winter, hiking and fishing the rest of the year, a bit of deer and grouse hunting thrown in during the fall. But it was never just about recreation, it was also about stewardship and sustainability, taking proper care of a space, using it in the present, but preserving it for the future. As much as possible, we also wanted to live lightly on our new property, preserving the full range of flora and fauna that are found there. A primary reason for choosing this particular property was the natural aesthetic of the place, which we wished to preserve. Since I was a young child, I had dreamed of living out in the wilderness, of living off the land. But as I grew to adulthood, I realized that the sort of rugged independence where I would build a house by hand and grow all my own food was not the dream that I was pursuing. I have no desire to be fully independent from the rest of the world; people are social beings, and productive societies always exist by allowing everyone to specialize, each to his own talents and predilections, and then cooperate so that each person has their needs met. We all need and want those goods and services that allow us to survive and thrive. But we all share the same world, and we need to make sure that we, combined, live in a way that is sustainable so that our children and their children will be able to continue to prosper as we do today.
Real sustainability isn't the same as simply conservation, and leaving all natural places alone. While true nature refuges are critically important, people also need to produce many goods from the land to support themselves. I felt that part of my responsibility was to continue to keep this land productive, to help provide for human needs as well as to be a wild and natural place. A question kept coming back to me: Was our farm, in this rocky and hilly Canadian forest, even capable of being productive enough to support my family and our needs? As I began to work through all of the possibilities, I considered how it was possible to compare them; Should we grow trees or corn? One way to answer these questions was to simply ask which one would yield the highest dollar returns. This is certainly the typical way that farmers make their land-use decisions. While we wished to make a few bucks, concerns of sustainability stayed at the fore, and our main incomes will always be off the farm. I then had an epiphany about our land use planning. It wasn't the most original, but it is one that is key to land management, and I'll share it with you: All farming and most sustainable land use is the farming of sunlight, capturing some of those rays and using the energy contained in them. One takes sunlight, and converts it into maple trees or wheat, chickens or deer. So my realization meant that the question that I was asking about providing for my family was really a question about energy. I started to come around to thinking about sustainable land use more broadly as being about energy; how much energy could we capture and use? Was a farm like ours capable of producing enough to support the energy-intensive modern lifestyle of my family? How much energy does it really take to support a family anyway?
At the same time as we were purchasing our property, we were also busy with starting to design a house that we would build on a hilltop overlooking the river. For years I had also been interested in architecture, particularly green building practices and energy efficiency, and so we decided to design from the start a place that would be incredibly energy efficient. We received an extra push for efficiency from the fact that our building site was so far from the nearest powerlines that it would have cost a small fortune to run power to our new home. Solar photovoltaics were going to be the only reasonable way to provide electricity. Going with off-grid solar almost automatically puts one in an energy conservation mind-set, because for every extra light or computer you want to power, you need to pony up more cash upfront to install more panels and batteries. Energy of all kinds was going to be at a premium at this location, so we made decisions to reduce use and keep all appliances and mechanical systems efficient. To reduce heating needs, we took inspiration from several different green design movements to incorporate passive solar design and superinsulation to our home. All in all, we reduced by approximately 70% the amount of energy that we will need to use in this home compared to standard construction. In working with an architect and tradesmen of all kinds, I learned the ins and outs of energy flows around and through a home, and in many ways they really didn't seem so different from the energy flows involved with land use (If you are interested, see my blog about that house here).
While working on both land use planning and home design, I was consulting innumerable sources, on forestry, farming, energy, architecture, and more. As written, each of these sources was aimed primarily at specialists in each field, those that wished to take part in these practices. What wasn't there, and that I yearned for, were some of the threads that tied all of these concepts and practices together. How did each of these fields relate to the human level, an individual, a family? Again, I could see that in each, a common theme of energy use was central to each of these endeavors. Sustainability and renewable energy are tightly intertwined, and I was learning enormous amounts about how these systems worked, and could see a place for sharing this knowledge with others.
Herein lies the heart of this story. I have explored the intersection of energy and land use at a human level, and want to share that story. This story is an investigation of energy, renewable energy, a single source to walk through the basics of energy use and energy production in a home and on the land. I want to tackle such questions as; How do different uses of solar energy actually compare? How do they measure up to fossil fuels or nuclear energy? How much land do we actually need to support people sustainably? If we tried to go to an all renewable, all sustainable economy, could we do it while maintaining our current standard of living?
The lens I use to examine all of these questions is our forested farm, looking at the question of what we have already done and what we could do in the future. Hopefully, by looking at these different choices on a small scale, in human terms, ideas about energy will click for some people who have never really understood, or perhaps never thought about, the energy that we use each and every day.
A few disclaimers are needed, just to get things started with clarity. First of all, with a story like this, comparing different forms of land use, different types of energy storage and conversion, a lot of numbers are going to be needed. Comparing land use in terms of energy requires a lot of calculations based on the sorts of products one could produce. At the same time, these things are complicated, and so it is extremely difficult to pin down those numbers precisely, there is always a range. I try to simplify everything down to rough estimates, to get a feel for the landscape without trying to get get complete precision. Second, the economics of all of these choices are mostly left out - the incomes that could be generated are important, and references to them are made, but energy is the focus here, not dollars. In order to keep it manageable, this is not meant to at all be a how-to manual for any of the topics in it; materials like that are the sorts of sources that I used to put together this story. Instead, it is meant to broadly educate about energy and land use, to draw attention to the some of the considerations we ought to be focusing on, and realign the discussion about sustainability to issues of energy - how we produce it, use it, and how we can continue to have a high standard of living without destroying the world.
Though the numbers are important, there is a story to be told that doesn't depend on those numbers. Through all of the sections I put a less technical discussion at the beginning, and follow it up with a more in-depth numbers-based investigation.
Next up: What is energy?
Wednesday, 12 October 2016
Algonquin College presentation
This post is a part of the Manitou Hills Project series.
I recently gave a talk about our off-grid house in conjunction with our architect Anthony Mach. This was a presentation of our house as an example of what can be done with Passive House inspired building principles as well as off grid energy systems.
My slides can be found here, and contains information mostly shown in the blog posts, as well as containing a few new pictures.
Anthony's slides can be found here, and is similar to another set of slides from a past passive house presentation that Anthony gave, found in another blog post.
I recently gave a talk about our off-grid house in conjunction with our architect Anthony Mach. This was a presentation of our house as an example of what can be done with Passive House inspired building principles as well as off grid energy systems.
My slides can be found here, and contains information mostly shown in the blog posts, as well as containing a few new pictures.
Anthony's slides can be found here, and is similar to another set of slides from a past passive house presentation that Anthony gave, found in another blog post.
Friday, 8 April 2016
Some thoughts on architectural and interior design
This post is a part of the Manitou Hills Project series.
From the very beginning of our house building project, I had a lot of ideas about what I wanted to accomplish with the architectural style as well as the interior layout and design. While I think that I would have ended up with mostly good choices by working it out by myself, the assistance of our architect Anthony Mach was invaluable. Even though I had a much clearer notion than many people do going into the early phases, I still often needed that access to an expert opinion about what is doable and how to make all of the parts fit together. And don't even get me started on the process of turning the rough sketches into final blueprints, I still don't have anywhere near the knowledge to be able to put together those technical details.
For any of you who are considering building a custom home, I would recommend that you start by doing what we did, and make a list of things that you require, those that you would like, and those that you just don't want to do. Also take the time to look at lots of pictures, as it always helped us to figure out if something would work by finding a good example. My digital scrapbook of inspiration eventually made it to several hundred pictures. And be prepared to revise that list in the face of budget, practicalities, or even your own changing understanding. Our starting list as of the time that we first met with Anthony was the following:
Open concept living
We, along with a lot of others buying and building houses today, wanted an open concept design, with a single great room containing the kitchen, dining, and living spaces. I have heard and read quite a number of things about the growing popularity of the open concept, and it seems that there are two major drivers. The first is a greater desire for families to spend time together. With parents working more hours, kids doing more activities, families want to spend the few hours where everyone is at home together. The other trend is for increasingly casual living arrangements. People no longer want to hide away the mess of the kitchen and to eat in a formal dining room. This fits just about right with our own decision about building this way; this was always intended to be a place for the family to be together. Opening up the living and cooking spaces to each other solve all of these issues, putting everyone all in one space. We ended up with a room of 18'x38' (680 ft 2), which has been fantastic for family time and groups up to about 15 people. We often are cooking and doing cleanup at the same time as we entertain or keep an eye on our young children.
Screen porch
A screen porch was another thing that was at the very top of our list of desired features. In our climate it may only be porch weather for four months of the year, but during that time it is the best place in the house. It turns out that screen porches aren't all that popular here in eastern Canada, and I actually have no idea why. In Minnesota, where I grew up, basically every cabin, and many homes, have screen porches. Granted, the mosquitos are the size of sparrows there, but there isn't exactly a shortage of biting insects here in the region around Ottawa. The bug season makes enclosed spaces awfully appealing for outdoor living throughout the wet northern temperate climates. In a lot of the modern architecture photos and articles that I've looked at, I often see whole walls that open to make indoor/outdoor spaces, and decks and porches seldom seem to have any bug protection. This may work in California, but that sort of design certainly does not fit well in a place where the biting insect season almost completely overlaps the warm months.
Upside-down design
Most multi-story homes have the main living areas on the main floor, with bedrooms above. In a great many cases this really does make the most sense. One can enter the house and go straight into the more public spaces, with the bedrooms tucked away up a staircase. However, it isn't so great if your home has a view that you would like to take advantage of, as those views generally improve the higher one goes, and I don't think that a lot of people spend hours in their bedrooms admiring the views.
In our case, we had a perfect setup to flip the house upside down. We planned from the beginning to have a walkout basement lower level, and we had tremendous views that we wanted to be able to appreciate. Pushing the house into the side of the hill also meant that it was only five steps up from the driveway to the upper level. So while I don't think that it is for everyone, I wouldn't do it any other way if we were building again at this site. The advantages are that we are able to really appreciate the views that our hilltop site affords, the space is much brighter, and it tends to be warmer upstairs which is a boon most of the time (and conversely, the bedrooms stay cooler at all times of the year which I appreciate when I sleep). All that said, there is one significant drawback - even with some insulation to deaden the footfalls, it can be difficult to stay asleep downstairs when there is a 3 year old running wind sprints back and forth above your head at 6:00 in the morning.
The downstairs
Our downstairs is then taken up by three bedrooms, one full bath, and mechanicals/storage space. We kept the bedrooms to a relatively modest size, each at about 12'x12'. This is big enough to have a full set of bedroom furniture but leaves relatively little room to spare. Some people now put in massive bedroom suites, but it seems to me that bedrooms are mostly just for sleeping and not for hanging out. And just to show that I'm not entirely self-consistent, I've included a picture below of the windows that we put into the master bedroom. I couldn't resist taking advantage of the view even if we don't spend that much time in there appreciating it.
Contemporary style
There are dozens of popular styles for homes, such as Prairie, Tudor, Craftsman, and many others. Though there are some cultural and climatic reasons for choosing one style over another, the better part of the decision making comes down to aesthetic choices. Through all phases of the design process, I spent a good deal of time looking at architectural and design websites, articles, magazines, and photos. I was particularly drawn to aspects of the contemporary style, and so making the decision really came down to that appeal. To really dig into the sort of places that I found inspirational, I found even more tightly defined terms like "modern rustic" or "mountain contemporary". These styles really have become quite popular with those who build nice houses out in the woods, fields, and mountains. Staying within a given style lends a sense of continuity to a home, from the inside to the outside, and from room to room, though there are certainly some eclectic homes that stand the test of time as well. If you search around for terms like these in architectural magazines and websites, you'll find no shortage of examples that have a similar feel to our own place, relatively modern looking with lots of natural wood, stone, and big windows to take in the views. I just hope that in 20 or 30 years time that our choices don't look as dated as all of the 70's lime green, orange, and dark faux wood paneling that my parents installed when they built their own cottage back in the day.
A few of the most influential architects and builders on our aesthetic choices are the following:
My wife and I both love natural wood finishes, and I am exceptionally fond of the bigger timbers used in timber framing. However, in the earlier part of our own design process, I learned why there are so few timber frames being built today. First, building with big timbers is expensive. The wood costs are significantly more, but so are the costs of cutting the traditional joinery (needed before the easy availability of strong metal nails and screws). Second, it is quite difficult to insulate a timber frame building. The most common way of doing so is to build the house twice; first build the timber frame, then build another full wall and roof assembly outside of that which can be insulated normally. At the same time, the timbers are beautiful. Many people generate a similar look with false beams or wrapping regular construction lumber in naturally finished boards, but just like what I mentioned about faux stone above, I find that many of these attempts can end up looking inauthentic or cheap.
With all this in mind, we found a few places in our home where big dimensional timbers made a bit more sense, using a building method commonly called a 'hybrid' timber frame. The first location was our screen porch. Here, there aren't any issues of insulation to deal with, as the whole structure is just a shell to keep out insects, with cedar floors, plexiglass lower panels to prevent anyone from falling through, and screen above. Second, we used big beams to hold the roof trusses on the big overhangs. We put 4' overhangs around the entire home, and though there are multiple ways to support this sort of detail, we did so with large douglas fir beams, on which all of the roof trusses rest (see the time lapse installation video here for a look at the work the fir beams do for the roof). Finally we used white pine beams for the floor joists and supporting beam for the second story. We were going to need to put in joists anyway, so we decided to use 4"x8" joists, and a 10"x12" supporting beam. This provides a beautiful ceiling for the entire downstairs level, and should be rock-solid for the lifetime of the house. So for the heavy beams that we included, they all serve very functional purposes, which felt like an important thing to me, that it was not simply decoration. For all of our timber work, we used simpler joints held together by screws rather than the traditional mortise and tenon joinery, which allowed all of the installation to go much more quickly.
Building for resilience:
Finally, I want to make some comments about building for the long-term. So many decisions in home building (and too many other domains as well) are made looking only at the short term. For builders, it usually makes the most sense to build the most inexpensive construction that they can get away with, and then invest more on those parts of a home that really catch the eye of the buyers, like the fancy kitchen, spa type bathroom, or big walk-in closets. People don't tend to be very good at evaluating what is behind the final finishes, nor are they good at imagining what the future maintenance, replacement, utility bills, or other costs will be for a home. Further, people only own a given home for an average of 13 years, so any feature that doesn't do well on the resale market is less likely to make it into the average home.
This is of course not a complete picture. The building code improves steadily, requiring constantly better insulation, air sealing, air quality and more. And there is a growing trend toward green building, emphasizing reduced energy use and healthier indoor air. Unfortunately, these are still relatively niche markets, and the average new home being built is far less than it could be.
For our own project, we built a place that we hope to never have to sell during a lifetime, and if things go really well, our kids will continue to use it even after we are gone. With those kind of goals in mind, it is much easier to think about a 50 year time frame, and to be able to justify the costs of doing things 'right' the first time around. If we've succeeded at this, we may have very little maintenance and renovation work to do on the house itself for decades to come. Only time will tell us if we succeeded. So rather than discuss all of the details individually, I just include a long list of the details that we included for the sake of long-lasting quality.
From the very beginning of our house building project, I had a lot of ideas about what I wanted to accomplish with the architectural style as well as the interior layout and design. While I think that I would have ended up with mostly good choices by working it out by myself, the assistance of our architect Anthony Mach was invaluable. Even though I had a much clearer notion than many people do going into the early phases, I still often needed that access to an expert opinion about what is doable and how to make all of the parts fit together. And don't even get me started on the process of turning the rough sketches into final blueprints, I still don't have anywhere near the knowledge to be able to put together those technical details.
For any of you who are considering building a custom home, I would recommend that you start by doing what we did, and make a list of things that you require, those that you would like, and those that you just don't want to do. Also take the time to look at lots of pictures, as it always helped us to figure out if something would work by finding a good example. My digital scrapbook of inspiration eventually made it to several hundred pictures. And be prepared to revise that list in the face of budget, practicalities, or even your own changing understanding. Our starting list as of the time that we first met with Anthony was the following:
- 3 bedroom, 2 bath house
- Nice screen porch facing the river
- Upside-down design, with living spaces on the upper level, and the bedrooms on the lower level
- Passive solar orientation (discussed here and here) with plenty of big windows
- As compact as possible given what we are trying to fit in, both for energy efficiency as well as to contain costs
- Superinsulated (discussed here)
- Timber framed, or otherwise using lots of natural wood
- Contemporary design with a single pitched shed style roof
- Resilient design, using well-chosen design details and high quality components, so that house will age well over decades
- Big stone fireplace with a high efficiency stove insert
Open concept living
We, along with a lot of others buying and building houses today, wanted an open concept design, with a single great room containing the kitchen, dining, and living spaces. I have heard and read quite a number of things about the growing popularity of the open concept, and it seems that there are two major drivers. The first is a greater desire for families to spend time together. With parents working more hours, kids doing more activities, families want to spend the few hours where everyone is at home together. The other trend is for increasingly casual living arrangements. People no longer want to hide away the mess of the kitchen and to eat in a formal dining room. This fits just about right with our own decision about building this way; this was always intended to be a place for the family to be together. Opening up the living and cooking spaces to each other solve all of these issues, putting everyone all in one space. We ended up with a room of 18'x38' (680 ft 2), which has been fantastic for family time and groups up to about 15 people. We often are cooking and doing cleanup at the same time as we entertain or keep an eye on our young children.
Screen porch
A screen porch was another thing that was at the very top of our list of desired features. In our climate it may only be porch weather for four months of the year, but during that time it is the best place in the house. It turns out that screen porches aren't all that popular here in eastern Canada, and I actually have no idea why. In Minnesota, where I grew up, basically every cabin, and many homes, have screen porches. Granted, the mosquitos are the size of sparrows there, but there isn't exactly a shortage of biting insects here in the region around Ottawa. The bug season makes enclosed spaces awfully appealing for outdoor living throughout the wet northern temperate climates. In a lot of the modern architecture photos and articles that I've looked at, I often see whole walls that open to make indoor/outdoor spaces, and decks and porches seldom seem to have any bug protection. This may work in California, but that sort of design certainly does not fit well in a place where the biting insect season almost completely overlaps the warm months.
Upside-down design
Most multi-story homes have the main living areas on the main floor, with bedrooms above. In a great many cases this really does make the most sense. One can enter the house and go straight into the more public spaces, with the bedrooms tucked away up a staircase. However, it isn't so great if your home has a view that you would like to take advantage of, as those views generally improve the higher one goes, and I don't think that a lot of people spend hours in their bedrooms admiring the views.
In our case, we had a perfect setup to flip the house upside down. We planned from the beginning to have a walkout basement lower level, and we had tremendous views that we wanted to be able to appreciate. Pushing the house into the side of the hill also meant that it was only five steps up from the driveway to the upper level. So while I don't think that it is for everyone, I wouldn't do it any other way if we were building again at this site. The advantages are that we are able to really appreciate the views that our hilltop site affords, the space is much brighter, and it tends to be warmer upstairs which is a boon most of the time (and conversely, the bedrooms stay cooler at all times of the year which I appreciate when I sleep). All that said, there is one significant drawback - even with some insulation to deaden the footfalls, it can be difficult to stay asleep downstairs when there is a 3 year old running wind sprints back and forth above your head at 6:00 in the morning.
The downstairs
Our downstairs is then taken up by three bedrooms, one full bath, and mechanicals/storage space. We kept the bedrooms to a relatively modest size, each at about 12'x12'. This is big enough to have a full set of bedroom furniture but leaves relatively little room to spare. Some people now put in massive bedroom suites, but it seems to me that bedrooms are mostly just for sleeping and not for hanging out. And just to show that I'm not entirely self-consistent, I've included a picture below of the windows that we put into the master bedroom. I couldn't resist taking advantage of the view even if we don't spend that much time in there appreciating it.
Contemporary style
There are dozens of popular styles for homes, such as Prairie, Tudor, Craftsman, and many others. Though there are some cultural and climatic reasons for choosing one style over another, the better part of the decision making comes down to aesthetic choices. Through all phases of the design process, I spent a good deal of time looking at architectural and design websites, articles, magazines, and photos. I was particularly drawn to aspects of the contemporary style, and so making the decision really came down to that appeal. To really dig into the sort of places that I found inspirational, I found even more tightly defined terms like "modern rustic" or "mountain contemporary". These styles really have become quite popular with those who build nice houses out in the woods, fields, and mountains. Staying within a given style lends a sense of continuity to a home, from the inside to the outside, and from room to room, though there are certainly some eclectic homes that stand the test of time as well. If you search around for terms like these in architectural magazines and websites, you'll find no shortage of examples that have a similar feel to our own place, relatively modern looking with lots of natural wood, stone, and big windows to take in the views. I just hope that in 20 or 30 years time that our choices don't look as dated as all of the 70's lime green, orange, and dark faux wood paneling that my parents installed when they built their own cottage back in the day.
A few of the most influential architects and builders on our aesthetic choices are the following:
- Finne Architects. Extremely high end custom contemporary homes. They are absolutely beautiful, but I don't even want to know what the costs are. Nils Finne and his team make a large amount of built ins, custom furniture, and unique designs for each and every project.
- Method Homes. A prefabricated home builder. Some of their home styles are quite architecturally similar to our own final design.
- Go Logic, particularly this passive house they built.
My wife and I both love natural wood finishes, and I am exceptionally fond of the bigger timbers used in timber framing. However, in the earlier part of our own design process, I learned why there are so few timber frames being built today. First, building with big timbers is expensive. The wood costs are significantly more, but so are the costs of cutting the traditional joinery (needed before the easy availability of strong metal nails and screws). Second, it is quite difficult to insulate a timber frame building. The most common way of doing so is to build the house twice; first build the timber frame, then build another full wall and roof assembly outside of that which can be insulated normally. At the same time, the timbers are beautiful. Many people generate a similar look with false beams or wrapping regular construction lumber in naturally finished boards, but just like what I mentioned about faux stone above, I find that many of these attempts can end up looking inauthentic or cheap.
With all this in mind, we found a few places in our home where big dimensional timbers made a bit more sense, using a building method commonly called a 'hybrid' timber frame. The first location was our screen porch. Here, there aren't any issues of insulation to deal with, as the whole structure is just a shell to keep out insects, with cedar floors, plexiglass lower panels to prevent anyone from falling through, and screen above. Second, we used big beams to hold the roof trusses on the big overhangs. We put 4' overhangs around the entire home, and though there are multiple ways to support this sort of detail, we did so with large douglas fir beams, on which all of the roof trusses rest (see the time lapse installation video here for a look at the work the fir beams do for the roof). Finally we used white pine beams for the floor joists and supporting beam for the second story. We were going to need to put in joists anyway, so we decided to use 4"x8" joists, and a 10"x12" supporting beam. This provides a beautiful ceiling for the entire downstairs level, and should be rock-solid for the lifetime of the house. So for the heavy beams that we included, they all serve very functional purposes, which felt like an important thing to me, that it was not simply decoration. For all of our timber work, we used simpler joints held together by screws rather than the traditional mortise and tenon joinery, which allowed all of the installation to go much more quickly.
Building for resilience:
Finally, I want to make some comments about building for the long-term. So many decisions in home building (and too many other domains as well) are made looking only at the short term. For builders, it usually makes the most sense to build the most inexpensive construction that they can get away with, and then invest more on those parts of a home that really catch the eye of the buyers, like the fancy kitchen, spa type bathroom, or big walk-in closets. People don't tend to be very good at evaluating what is behind the final finishes, nor are they good at imagining what the future maintenance, replacement, utility bills, or other costs will be for a home. Further, people only own a given home for an average of 13 years, so any feature that doesn't do well on the resale market is less likely to make it into the average home.
This is of course not a complete picture. The building code improves steadily, requiring constantly better insulation, air sealing, air quality and more. And there is a growing trend toward green building, emphasizing reduced energy use and healthier indoor air. Unfortunately, these are still relatively niche markets, and the average new home being built is far less than it could be.
For our own project, we built a place that we hope to never have to sell during a lifetime, and if things go really well, our kids will continue to use it even after we are gone. With those kind of goals in mind, it is much easier to think about a 50 year time frame, and to be able to justify the costs of doing things 'right' the first time around. If we've succeeded at this, we may have very little maintenance and renovation work to do on the house itself for decades to come. Only time will tell us if we succeeded. So rather than discuss all of the details individually, I just include a long list of the details that we included for the sake of long-lasting quality.
- Steel through fastened roof. Should last in excess of 50 years
- 4' overhangs on all sides of the building. Reduces the exposure of the siding and base of the house to sun, rain, and snow, which should extend the lifetime of the siding.
- Great drainage and waterproofing around the house. Should keep all water away from the foundation indefinitely
- Poured concrete foundation rather than cement block. Much longer lasting, and much more resistant to the elements
- Low maintenance landscaping and plantings, should require little to no watering or fertilizer.
- Cement board siding. Though after learning more, I would likely go with steel siding for the entire building. Steel has the same pros of fire and pest resistance, but has lower embodied energy, lasts longer and is more easily recycled
- Real wood (white pine and sugar maple) for the trim, flooring, staircase and wooden interior doors. These should last much longer than hollow or fiberboard materials and can easily be refurbished rather than replaced if they receive any abuse
- Low and zero volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in all of the paints and other finishes. These allow for much improved air quality, and I expect to see indoor air quality standards to become much more strict than they are today
- Superinsulated, most insulation being mineral wool (Roxul)
Saturday, 2 April 2016
My go-to list of Resources on building practices and renewable energy
In thinking and researching issues of energy, green building practices, architecture, and more, I find that there are a number of sites that I find myself visiting very regularly. I thought that I would share that set here, for anyone else who is exploring similar paths.
Renewable energy, developments and analysis:
Renewable energy, developments and analysis:
- Cleantechnica. This is a renewable energy news posting site, putting up perhaps a dozen stories a day on solar, wind, batteries, and electric vehicles, both at the consumer and utility scale.
- Ramez Naam's blog. This blog is not limited to only energy issues, but there are a series of excellent blog posts about the past and future of wind, solar and battery technologies. Of particular interest to me are the estimates that he makes for future price decreases for these renewable energy technologies.
- Dwell. This is a magazine and website dedicated to modern and contemporary home design. Though they discuss green building some, I mostly look at this site for design inspiration and the eye candy of photo spreads of interesting homes.
- Ecohome. A local (to me) organization that tries to increase the use of a variety of green building practices. Some of the guys from Ecohome also did our LEED certification.
- Green Building Advisor. Green building design articles and forums. Very comprehensive and this site is frequented by many green building professionals. This site features many excellent articles, though some of their best material is behind a paywall.
- Houzz. This site has perhaps the most extensive database of photos of homes, inside and out, in just about every style. I used this site extensively in the planning phases of our home in order to both find inspiration as well as to find photos that illustrate ideas that I thought of.
- Inhabitat. A website that features all manner of sustainable ideas, though I go there mostly for the architecture section. The articles are sometimes overly commercial and often too light on details, but it is a very good place to keep track of new developments in sustainable thinking.
- One Step Off the Grid. An Australian website about renewable energy, especially solar power. This is also one of the few sites that I have found with relatively extensive information about going off grid that is fully up to date with upcoming new technologies. In case you weren't aware, Australia has turned into a hotbed for solar and even off-grid adoption largely due to the twin facts of great climate for solar (high sun, moderate temperatures) and high utility power costs.
- Clean Disruption, by Tony Seba. This book is a forecast of the time from around 2014 to roughly 2030, suggesting that renewable energy will displace fossil fuels faster than most would imagine. Well researched and very thought provoking.
- The Renewable Energy Handbook: The Updated Comprehensive Guide to Renewable Energy and Independent Living, by William Kemp.
- Canadian Passive House Institute. The Canadian branch of the original European PassiveHaus Institute. Of course there is also the American version, and there has even been been a schism in the Canadian organization, as there is also CanPHI West.
- LEED Canada for Homes. Run by the Canada Green Building Council, this is the only certification that we actually pursued, as it was the best fit for our build, and relatively inexpensive. On top of that, we ended up getting a very comprehensive energy usage analysis out of the process.
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