Strawbale House

As most of you are probably aware our current economy is driven by constant growth and that the success of any commercial venture is always measured by continued growth of sales, earnings, and market share. Since I have realised this myself quite a few years back I have always wondered how such continued growth can be sustained, not just in an environmental perspective.

I have recently come across this site called “The Story of Stuff” which kind of explained how the current economy works and that we can’t keep on expecting relentless, continuing growth.

The site features a 20 minute movie where Annie Leonard explains how our economy currently works and how this needs to be changed to enable a sustainable economy which in turn even helps the environment.

One scary fact that I always suspected but thought was a bit of a conspiracy theory is that world economies have been deliberately set-up for more and more consumerism in order to keep the earnings of the big corporations growing.

I do highly recomend taking 20 minutes to watch the movie on the “The Story of Stuff” website to anyone interested in sustainabilty.

Also, please share your thoughts on what Annie Leonard presents in the movie in the comments section of this article. I’d also like to hear about any ideas this movie might have inspired.

For ourselves, Rosalba and I are most likely to move our superannuation money into an super account that invests more into sustainable companies. We are currently looking at Australian Ethical Supperannuation as we believe that ethical investment includes investment into companies with sustainable practices.

So again, please share your thoughts in the comments section. Remeber every civilised and intelligent comment until the end of August 2008 goes in the draw to win the Book of House Plans.

On Wednesday we met our Architect, Andrew, again to discuss the fist draft version of the floor plan for our new home. I have included a scanned copy of the draft that was drawn by Steve (the Building Designer working together with Andrew) below for your enjoyment. (Click on the plan for a larger version of it.)

As is usually the case, Rosalba and I have identified some areas where we would like to see some change. I’d also like to see any changes we requested as (hopefully) valuable feedback for Andrew and Steve.

First of all we’d like to change the bathroom and toilet to be an ensuite instead of separate. The toilet should still have it’s own door to allow for proper reflection even when another person is using the bathroom. Having the bathroom and toilet become an ensuite starts making sense once I tell you that what is marked on this plan as “Bedroom 2″ is actually going to be my office.

We don’t intend to have many visitors staying overnight in our new home but instead we are also planning to build a separate little granny flat or guest house at a later date to make overnight visitors more comfortable.

We have also asked for a second toilet to be included on the plan next to the back door. The main reason for this being that we’d like to be able to get to a toilet without tramping through the whole house, if we are working outside.

We are quite happy for the laundry to become significantly smaller to free up some space for the second toilet, as both Rosalba and I can’t see that we are going to spend a lot of time in the Laundry. In our current house we have an undercover outdoor laundry that works quite well for us.

The outside walls are designed to be made of strawbales. Looking at the plan the walls look not quite as thick as I would have expected because Andrew and Steve designed them be built with the strawbales stacked on-end instead of laying flat as I expected.

The advantage of building the walls with strawbales on-end is that this makes the walls stronger according to Andrew. The disadvantages are that it makes it harder for the render to stick to the strawbales and that building some alcoves into the walls is quite a bit harder as well.
Rosalba and I feel that we’d rather make the render stick better as the walls should still be quite sturdy with the strawbales stacked flat.

Rosalba has also asked for more bench space in the kitchen and the inclusion of space for a wall oven instead of an oven underneath the stove.

All in all, Rosalba and I are quite happy with this first draft of the floor plan. It is very close to what we imagined without any big or nasty surprises.

Also according to Steve with the plan as presented our new home would have a 9½ star rating. This compares to a standard brick veneer home having about a star rating of 4½ stars. Both Steve and Andrew believe that we would not need to heat or cool our home at all and the fireplace would be used more for aesthetics than heating.

So what do you think?

As prize in our first ever competition, we are giving away the book of house plans by Peter Lees (pictured on the left). This book contains a large number design sketches but does not contain finished plans. Nevertheless there is enough information to help you work out what you’d like or not in your house, though.

The competition starts now and runs until the end of August. To be in the draw to win this book of house plans, all you need to do is leave a comment anywhere on this site.

In early September I will draw a a random entry from all comments left on this site. So to have a chance of winning all you need to do is leave one intelligent and civil comment. Multiple comments do count as multiple entries so if you are really keen, feel free to leave multiple intelligent and civil comment.

Also, please remember that if you win I will need to be able to contact you so make sure that you enter a valid email address at which you can be reached with your comment in the “Mail” field.

So go ahead and leave lots of happy comments. Good luck.

Your email will not be published, is only accessible by myself and will only be used for the purpose of this competition.
Rosalba and I reserve the right to judge what constitutes an intelligent and civil comment.
Our decisions are final and no correspondence regarding them will be entered into.

Installing a solar power systems is not cheap as most people interested in the idea are already aware of. Solar power systems, especially grid connected systems, pay for themselves over time, but a relatively large up-front investment is needed to reap the benefits of a solar power system.

An article on TreeHugger published today talks about a different way of financing a solar power system by using a service model instead of an asset or ownership model. This service model means that a service provider installs, owns, and maintains the solar power system on your house and you buy the electricity generated from the service provider.

Major benefits, as I see them, are:

• No large up-front installation cost which makes solar power a feasible option for many more people.
• No worries about maintenance as your service provider looks after the system for you.
• You are not dependant on government handouts rebates to be able to afford solar power.

The article on TreeHugger seems to apply mainly to the USA as it does not contain any information about any such service outside the US of A. Nevertheless the idea described in the article is interesting and merits further thought and hopefully duplication in Australia.

Please leave a comment if you have any information or links to alternative ways of obtaining a solar power system that apply to Australia as this sounds very interesting to me.  I am sure such alternate ways of financing a solar power system would increase the up-take of solar power in Australia again after the damper the Australian government has dealt with the introduction of the means testing for the solar rebate.

For more reading check out the article on TreeHugger.

Rosalba and I have joined the Alternative Technology Association (ATA) a couple of months ago because we thought that this would help us decide on what alternative energy system we will incorporate into our new home.

The ATA have published a Solar Panel Buyers Guide in their October-December 2007 ReNew print publication. The really nice thing is that the ATA have now made this article available for free and in full on their website at http://www.ata.org.au/renew/renew-101-solar-panel-buyers-guide.

A few of the things that were mentioned in the article that I found interesting or helpful are:

• All solar panels currently available will produce more energy than they use over their lifetime including initial production.
• Some solar panels come with up to 25 years of manufacturer’s warranty
• Currently BP Solar, Conergy and PV Solar Energy manufacture their solar panels in Australia.

If you are currently thinking about installing solar panels on your home this Solar Panel Buyers Guide is well worth a read.

Additionally if you are interested in alternative technologies you might be interested in some other articles on the ATA website, so go have a look.

With our decision not to connect our future home to the electricity grid I have started thinking about ways of making the most of the electricity that we will collect with our solar panels. Unfortunately I currently have a number of computers that that are acting as various servers and are therefore constantly on which is obviously consuming a bit of electrical.

Also I do believe in building in redundancy where ever you can, especially with computers and hard drive storage. Over the years I have had too many hard drives fail to trust a single hard drive with my data. So until recently I had a large computer acting as a file server utilising 4 hard drives in a redundant set-up (RAID 5 for those that are interested). This computer was using 80W on average or 0.35A when switched on.

As this computer has started to fail (video card is no longer working) a few weeks ago, I had to decide what to do about fixing it. There where a number of options that went through my head with the seemingly easiest being to just replace the video card. Due to the age of the computer I haven’t been able to find a fitting video card.

While trying to decide how to progress I realised that it was the right time to look at less energy intensive options that still give me all the functionality I wanted. There are a number of network attached external hard drive (also known as NAS) available with most of the cheaper units only providing a single hard drive.

Nevertheless I found a model made by Western Digital (WD) called the “MyBook World Edition II” that was less than $500 and included two 500GB hard drives that can be set-up in a redundant manner. That by itself almost made my decision but what really pushed me over the line was that the box itself actually runs of 12V supplied by a power pack.

Measuring the energy consumption of my new “MyBook” has confirmed that when plugged into a 240V power socket the power consumption is only one fifth (16W) of the old computer and according to my measurement with the box turned of the power pack consuming 9w or nearly half, I am hoping that the MyBook would consume less than 10W plugged directly into 12V solar system.

Now the change of the computer to this external hard drive is only one step towards saving energy but it’s the first opportunity since we have made our decision to build our new home and included an off-grid solar installation. I am sure there will be changes that we will make over the next 2 years to help us save some more electricity and I am happy to keep you all posted on any further changes we are making.

I am also aware that this is probably quite a dry post for most of my normal readers and I promise there won’t be to many of these to come, but please do let me know if this post was actually interesting to at least some of you.

About a week ago Journeyer has tagged me for a six word memoir. I thought initially that’s going to be easy… I know better now.

Well, here it goes:

“Playing, Working, Searching, Moving, Marrying, Sustainability”

Then again, I’m not so sure about the above. Maybe try the next one instead?

“Computer Games, Computer Job, Sustainable Future”

Well this one is more what I seem to have focused on throughout my life. Well you get to pick which one you like better, and please do let me know in the comments.

As part of writing this six word memoir I get to tag the five bloggers below (in no particular order) to write their six word memoirs.

• Ben Barden
• Lightening at Lightening Online
• Jess at Sustainable Suburbia
• Snoskred at Life in the Country
• Neerav at Rambling Thoughts Blog

Rosalba picked the book titled “Built Like A Woman” by Sandra Broman when we were looking at books to get more information about building a house. I have to admit that at first I thought that this book would not be very interesting for me.

Having just finished reading it now I have to say though that I would highly recommend this book to anyone (man or woman) that is thinking of building at least parts of a house themselves and has never done so before.

Sandra Broman’s style of writing is very easy to read and feels very personal. Almost as if Sandra was just sitting with you and talking over a cup of tea.

In “Built Like A Woman” Sandra Broman tells you about her own experience of renovating and building houses. Sandra confesses that before she started doing all this type of work she would wait for her husband to come home from work to drill any holes necessary and that she has gone from SEDI (Someone Else Does It) to proper DIY.

The book gives you a positive feeling about building your own house, that it’s not actually that hard, and that most people can do a fair bit themselves. Sandra Broman also included a chapter where she rates most major tasks during the building of a house from “Easy” to “Don’t mess with it”. This chapter gives you a quick primer what you could attempt to do yourself and what you should definitely leave for a professional tradesman.

This book is by no means a reference book but it nevertheless gives you a rough idea what you are getting yourself into when building your own home and at an affordable price of around $30 it is a great book to have.

The Channel 7 Sunrise team have started another petition to stop the means testing of the solar rebate in Australia. The Sunrise petition already has over 30,000 signatures so it looks like this petition will make an impression.

If you would like the means test for the solar rebate to be scrapped, please sign the Channel 7 Sunrise petition. I believe you should sign this petition even if you have already signed a previous petition for this purpose.

The Sunrise petition can be found at http://sunrisefamily.com.au/current/petition/

Also please do tell your friends about the Sunrise petition and get them to sign it as well, if the feel the means testing should be scraped.

We just got the most current ReNew magazine issued by the Alternative Technology Association which contained a number of interesting articles. One that I found most interesting was about “Solar Guerrillas“.

Solar Guerrillas are people that install small grid connected solar systems without approval by the utilities or respective government or council. The Solar Guerrillas reason that every little bit helps and that the monopolisation on the production and distribution of energy threatens the health of our environment and the very life of our planet.

I personally wouldn’t go quite that far but certainly agree that the monopolisation of energy production and distribution is not the best way it could be done. When we initially looked into getting electricity connected to our shed on our country block of land, the prices quoted by the local electricity provider did seem like highway robbery.

I am tempted to try my own solar grid connected system where we are now, but doing it legally is just to expensive at this time. On the other hand I don’t really feel like breaking the law which I think these solar guerrillas end up doing.

The one admirable thing about these solar Guerrillas is that they are quite happy to share the energy they feed into the grid with their neighbours without regard for financial compensation.

What do you think? Are these Solar Guerrillas doing something worthwhile or are they just some uncontrolled freaks?