First cut at a floor plan

Well, the first try at the floor plan is done, made a lot of cuts of neat ideas, and the footprint increased to 1600 square feet.

Details and specifics to come over the next few weeks.

Inside doors – frosted glass sliders

I stayed in a great hotel on Clearwater Beach last January, and loved the frosted glass door on the bathroom.

Here is a photo very close to what I want to build.

I am not sure if I like the wood valance, or if I want exposed track and hardware like in this picture from specialtyglassdoors.com

Either way, the door will be the same. Ambiencedoors.com came up in a quick search, $251per 36″x80″ door.

Earthwool: glasswool loft insulation made with a concentration on sustainable materials

I am hoping to use SIPS panels to build my house, and shouldn’t need any loft insulation, but this product was cool enough to spark my interest.

Earthwool is a glass wool insulation product which is made and sold in England. Glass wool, as far as I can tell, is what they call fiberglass in England.

So this is  a product just like the typical pink insulation rolls in every house in America, except it is brown and made with some recycled glass.

From their website:

Earthwool is a high perfomance glasswool made with recycled bottles with higher thermal performance compared to other loft insulation.

It is shipped in very tight, compressed rolls, which would be a plus when trying to fit through the typical attic trap door.

An Old-Fashioned Front Porch

I hope to have a nice, old-fashioned front porch on my house, where we can sit out of an evening, talk, and maybe even whittle a bit.

I see it running the length of the entire house, about 10 foot deep, at the same height as the front door, with a railing running around the 3 sides. The roof should extend completely over it. A large single step out about 10 foot wide. I assume I need to build it like a real deck, rather than placing it on a slab or something. How low can it be built? (how much dirt will need to be removed under it? What does local zoning say? What does sanity say?

I like the idea of Trex for the decking, and hopefully the rails. I like the way it is made, and I love the way it weathers, having watched it for the last few years on my neighbor’s deck. I also hope the railings can be of Trex, removing the issues of splitting and splintering we have on our current wood decks. The only real question is cost.

Trex (is a) a wood-polymer lumber product manufactured from reclaimed/recycled grocery bags and stretch film(40%-50%) and furniture factory and/or waste pallet sawdust (50%-60%). It will not crack, splinter, check, shrink or rot. — pathnet.org

The decking is held in place by special screws made just for the Trex product, and are installed with a screwdriver.

If I require a frame under the decking, I think an option like Wolmanized Residential Outdoor Wood from Arch seems like a good option to the standard pressure-treated wood available at Home Depot. Again, though, what is the cost difference?

Also from the Pathnet site:

The preservative used in this product is copper azole, providing long-term protection from rot, decay, and termite attack. It contains none of the EPA listed hazardous compounds and scraps can be disposed of safely in landfills. The copper in the preservative is derived from recycled products and the treating process is a closed system that releases no air pollutants or wastewater.

That sounds like a good thing.

So decking, railing, and framing have been addressed. The main questions left are lighting and whether an outside ceiling fan make sense. Those questions I will leave for another day.

Floor to ceiling library shelving

One whole wall of the living room is intended to be book shelving. Floor to ceiling, requiring the ubiquitous rolling library shelf, and storing lots of books.

(Kleid Design Group)

That is an awful lot of wood.

Are there better alternatives? Every shelf I’ve ever seen which was not high-quality solid wood ended up with a huge sag in the middle. Not good. And there are always the VOC to worry about.

One option that appeared promising was Isobord, which was an engineered strawboard. Unfortunately, Dow bought it, then killed it, so it looks like it is no longer an option.

Are there other choices, like osb or mdf or hardboard that can bear the load? Can they be laminated with real wood for beauty, or just painted? Are there other options? Is bamboo an alternative, like the way they make the bamboo flooring? Is actual flooring an option? Or should I just bite that bullet, and use real wood planks? If so, what kind?

Arggh. Maybe getting rid of the books is an easier solution.

Sustainable Building alphabet soup

 The number and breadth of acronyms which have confused me so far is truly impressive.

(And this comes from a person who spent 10 years in the defense industry)

Here are some of the acronyms I have met so far, and I will continue to add to this glossary as needed.

• ADPSR — Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility
• AECB Gold Standard — Association for Environment Conscious Building
  
• ASES — American Solar Energy Association
• ASHP — air source heat pump
• BREEAM
• CEPHEUS — Cost Efficient Passive Houses as European Standards
• CERES — Centre for Education and Research in Environmental Strategies
  
• CPV — Concentrating Photovoltaic
• DOE — Department of Energy
• FSEC — Florida Solar Energy Center
• GSHP — ground source heat pump
• HVAC — Heating, ventilation and cooling
• IBACOS
• iiSBE
• LBNL — Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
• LEED — Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design
  
• MINERGIE-P
• NREL — National Renewable Energy Laboratory
• Passivhaus — German Passive House
• PVC — polyvinyl chloride
• R-2000 –
• USGBC — United States Green Building Council
• VOC — volatile organic compound
• ZEB — zero energy building

Earth Heating Tubes

One of my goals for this house is to use as much renewable energy as possible.

Earth tubes, or earth heating tubes are a great way to do that.

Using inexpensive PVC pipes buried beneath the frost zone,

The earth tube pulls fresh air from outside, runs it underground and into the building. This process heats the air in the winter and cools in the summer while providing clean, fresh air all year long.

They are often part of the Passive House standard, and are a nice piece of the ZEB puzzle.

The Natural Home Building Source website has a good article on how exactly to install it.

Some of the installations are complex, requiring multiple Ts and joints. I would rather have a very simple single run of pipe, with 45s instead of 90s, wrapped around the site. One of the ideas I have read is to bring the entry point into the utility closet right next the the heat exchanger.

Another is to run a cord through the entire tube, and attaching a cloth to the cord, along with another cord that will reach the entire way, allowing easy cleaning of the entire tube.

I am looking into math to calculate the possible heat exchange for my location and pipe width, to see how long a tube I will need to install. Hopefully less than 1000 feet.

Helix Wind Turbine

The Helix Wind Turbine is a 2kw grid tie or off grid power system.

Unfortunately, their website is coming “real soon now”.

The Helix Wind website is up .

No details on pricing, but slick video.

CIGS solar panels slower to market than expected

Getting CIGS solar panels to market is turning out to be a little tougher than expected.
New solar technology hits snags (cNet)