Strawbale House

Looking from dining to bedroom

ensuite

In the wet areas and as thermal mass, it was decided to use timbercrete: waste sawdust, cement and sand which is formed into blocks/bricks and air dried. The beauty of this product is that it can be nailed into and cut  like wood, it is lighter weight than similar sized masonary. I went for the larger block as I have lived with brick feature walls in our last house for 13 years and was over it. The other option was mudbrick. I feel the benefit of mudbrick is if you make it yourself and thereby save money and fuel miles not having it delivered, but if I have to have them delivered from afar then I can’t see the point! We wanted the house finished in our lifetime so we chose the timbercrete. As you can see the hexagonal windows did prove to be a bit of a challenge to the bricklayer, Mike Pascoe but nothing he can’t handle – awesome bloke! The local carpenter, Johan, was finding the framing for the straw bales very challenging. He kept muttering the word – difficult. So as a sign of mercy and peace of mind for myself, I let him go. Instead we now have “it’s not a train crash” Nick and Roger of www.strawbalehouse.com.au who specialise in straw bale building.  Nick and Roger believe that they can get the timber frame up before Christmas. We’re hoping to do a wall raising one weekend soon so stay tuned! I’ll try to remember the video camera for that one. Rosalba

We now have a slab with rods sticking our where the bales will go.  Next week (from 9/11/09) we are going to start putting the frame up with the assistance of a  local carpenter, Johan.

Timbercrete blocks (for wet areas and feature walls) have arrived and need a little longer to dry out before being laid. Timbercrete is waste timber shavings mixed with cement to create building blocks. You can saw them and you can nail into them! To get the full details of these amazing blocks check out www.timbercrete.com.au . Why didn’t we do the whole house with them?- price!

Timber should arrive this week from Cypress supplies in Caboolture. It seems we were lucky to get the cypress pine that we did get second hand – it is very rare and not that much cheaper than new. This cypress is farmed sustainably and grows in Queensland. Roofing iron arrived today from North Coast Demolitions. It is new roofing iron, just left overs and job lot returns. Mark and I spent last Saturday morning sorting out which bits we wanted. Local transport guy, Rick was able to deliver it all today.

Stay tuned, it’s only getting more exciting!

We are trying to keep our impact on the environment as low as possible, so we are constantly on the lookout for second hand items. Ebay has been great for the doors, windows, pavers (heaps) and some timber.

Some items I thought we were stuck with buying new i.e. the spa. Fortunately for us, one of my acupuncture clients turned out to be the owner of the Reno Barn in Tarragindi. So Mark and I, plans in hand, investigated the place one Monday afternoon.

Wow, what a treasure house! Beautiful stained glass from old pubs and demolished government buildings, kitchens, lighting, fireplaces, furniture, windows and  doors (sizes on them), timber (already denailed) plus some really cute memorabilia is on display, all neatly stacked and catalogued. Nuccia was awesome in helping us find what we needed: recycled cypress pine (didn’t know you could get it), hardwood posts, spa with working motor, laundry tubs, toilet suites, and best of all windows with stained glass for the servery.

e’d been looking for months for the servery windows on Ebay and they were always the wrong size or they were sold before we could put a bid in. So we were delighted with the find. Plus they delivered – hooray! Nuccia is still keeping an eye out for any more recycled cypress for us.

So I can highly recommend the Reno Barn – www.therenobarn.com at 526 Tarragindi Road, Salisbury QLD 4107 (Evans Road End)
Phone Number: (07) 3274 5663 (Yep, shameless plug but they deserve it, just check out the pics)

Up until now I have left publishing on the blog to Mark, and I am sure you will agree that he has done an awesome job. I have had a nagging question/quandary regarding alternatives to PVC and Mark suggested I put it up on the blog to see what suggestions people may have. Poly vinyl chloride (PVC) is a very useful substance but virtually unrecyclable, despite its labelling, (please correct me if I’m wrong) and its manufacture is a health hazard for the environment as well as the people who have to work with it. For more info on this see www.bluevinyl.org , it’s a real eye-opener!

So naturally I started looking at alternatives. ABS plastic which is recyclable and as easy to work with as PVC, does not have all the required fittings here in Australia. It is used mainly in the US. HDPE is recyclable but triple the cost of PVC and adds 60% to the labour cost as it is harder to install. It is also not approved for use where it is exposed to sunlight. For the rainwater collection we’re using zinc-allum/colorbond so that is not an issue. It’s just the waste water. Should any of you have a suggestion or solution that is cost-effective, I’d love to hear. Thanks.

Rosalba and I have recently purchased a wood stove, a Crown No 7. When we got it, it had a few cracks which we got our neighbour, Pancho, to fix for us. We have now installed the stove in our shed temporarily, until the house is finished.

We have now had the stove for about a month and have used it at least once a week. It is a slower way of cocking, but every meal Rosalba has cooked on the wood stove so far has turned out great. The first meal was an omelette for breakfast, which turned out just awesome. I actually believe that that omelette was the best omelette I have ever had.

Best omelette ever, cooked on a woodstove

Rosalba standing in the kitchen

We have got our plans approved and we have now started building.

We have found a great concreter and block layer (Mike Pascoe from Witta) that is doing the foundations work for us. Once Mike set out where the concrete pad will go we realised that the one retaining block wall we have would have been 2 meters tall. So we decided to dig into the hill by about one meter. This will mean a bit more earthworks but on the positive side, that concrete pad will be on a very strong foundation of bed rock.

Maniac with a chainsaw

While all of the foundations are done, I have been busy cutting down some trees that we have now found would be too close to the house. One of them was a large spotted gum of which we have kept the straighter and larger branches to use as hand rails on the veranda and the steps.

We have also kept the staight part of the trunk in the hope that we’ll find someone with a portable sawmill who would make step treads out of it.

James Howard Kunstler, prominently featured in the peak oil documentary “The End of Suburbia“, has written a frank and chilling assessment of where the world is at for “The Daily Reckoning“.

Unfortunately it is not all rosy, but as usual it’s all in how we look at things. Even though there seem to be many, many challenges ahead of us, James reckons that many good things will come out of the challenges we face, and I indeed concur with James in that. Our world needs to change for humans to survive and peak oil may actually force us to change towards using more sustainable practices in all we do.

The article by James Howard Kunstler is is titled: The Bottom of This Society’s Ability to Process Reality

According to news.com.au reporting about the Australian federal budget for 2009, Australia will be spending up to $1.5 billion over the next nine years to build up to 4 massive solar power plants. Plans for these solar power plants are on a scale the world has never seen before.

These massive solar power plants could produce up to 1000 megawatts of electricity. These solar power plants my be either photo voltaic plants or solar thermal power plants.

Finally the K. Rudd government seems to be honouring one of their election promises by supporting clean energy production.

Disappointingly up to $2 billion will be spent on building conventional coal power plants incorporating “Clean Coal” technology that doesn’t yet exist. NeeravBhatt has given a nice analogy for the term “Clean Coal” in one of his updates on Twitter by highlighting that “Clean Coal” is a bit like “Friendly Murder”.

Rosalba and I have recently been interviewed by a very nice lady that writes for The Ottawa Herald. The interview has now been published and I’ll re-create it here linking to the article at The Ottawa Herald would not be very productive. The Ottawa Herald seems to remove articles from their public website after 4 – 6 weeks.

Following are the questions and our answers for the interview.

1.  Tell us a bit about yourselves.

I am in my early fortys working in the web hosting industry and I like long walks on the beach… well, ok the beach bit is not true
I’ve grown up in Switzerland which would explain my insatiable appetite for good chocolate, I was basically raised on chocolate. I have worked in one to the large Swiss banks as a programmer. During that time I went for day trips on my motor bike throughout the Swiss Alpes in summer. I never really enjoyed the snow in winter so I looked for another place to live and decided that sunny Queensland in Australia would be nice and moved to Brisbane in 1995 where I have met my lovely wife, Rosalba.
Rosalba was in IT when we met, but decided to apply her analytical skills to a far more worthy cause – people’s health. She has been a practitioner of Chinese medicine now for over 10 years.

2.  What stirred your interest in organic farming and products?

From my teenage years on I could never understand how the whole world could be running on continual growth. To me that never made sense as all our resources are finite. Also over the last few years Rosalba and I have purchased most of our fruit and vegetable at an Organic produce stall at the local market. Doing so, we have  both experienced the difference in taste of organic produce as opposed to mass market produce. To me buying organic means that we are actually paying much closer to the real cost to produce something, as organically grown fruit and vegetable takes into account the preservation of the soil
and environment. Contrast that with mass produced fruit and vegetable where the producers are sucking the land dry and then use synthetic fertilizer to keep their plants growing.
The other thing I started to understand is that most organic producers are actually people that care not only about the environment but also about their workers, which I believe means fairer working conditions. So by buying organic I feel that I also support the fair trade idea to
a degree.

3.  What are some of the challenges you will face in this venture?

Well, one of the first challenges is that we need to establish our fruit trees which is not made any easier by not actually living on the land yet where we intend to have our organic farm. We have already planted about 12 fruit trees and 12 chestnut trees. our goal is to have about 60 chestnut trees and maybe another 20-30 fruit tress of other varieties. One of the major challenges I see looming within the next 5 years is the arrival of peak oil which may make it a lot more
difficult to get diesel for our tractor to do any of the heavier work that always needs doing on a farm.
Other than that, our main challenge right now is lack of time. We generally manage about one weekend per month on our farm which is not quite enough.

4.  What are growing conditions like in your area?

Growing conditions are quite favourable. Our soil is fairly deficient in minerals and trace elements, which is normal for mostly anywhere in Australia. Luckily where we are we are getting good rain falls most of the time and most days it gets up to 20 degrees C at least (in winter). We do have some frosts in winter which is great for chestnut trees as they need a frost to flower and set fruit. On the other hand we haven’t been able to keep Mango trees alive yet. The two mango trees we have planted have both died due to frost bite.

5.  If you had unlimited funds and acreage, what would you do with it?

Combine a huge wind farm for electricity production with more organic farming. We already have committed half of our property to a local conservation program called “Land for Wildlife” which I would like to further contribute to as well.

I hope you have enjoyed this interview and have learnt a little bit more about us.

The more I think about the state of solar electricity generation and government support the more I understand that gross metered feed in tariffs are a really powerful means to increase the uptake of solar panels amongst the public.

The current scheme of RECS is severely flawed as it doesn’t really increase the uptake of solar power in Australia. Currently mostly people that are already interested in solar power generation are installing photo voltaic panels and using the RECS to help with the upfront cost. The problem with this is that the RECS embody all the environmental benefits for the next 15 years and once sold, the owner of the solar system really can not claim any environmental benefits for the system.

Basically by selling the RECS the owner has sold his benefit most likely to a coal or gas powered electricity provider and as such all the electricity produced by the solar system for the next 15 years carries all the green house gases and other environmental nasties (coal sludge anyone?) that the power station is off-setting when it purchased the RECS.

The current plan of the government to offer 5 times the amount of RECS form the middle of the year only makes this situation worse as any solar electricity system is still producing the same amount of clean energy but when selling the RECS the power stations actually get to claim 5 times the offset for  their nasties than is actually being offset.

Looking at it in this way, really the only one benefiting from the new scheme are the big power generators. The public and the environment will suffer as a result of the introduction of these “phantom” RECS.

A gross metered feed in tariff on the other hand measures the actual amount of clean energy being produced and by having a gross metered feed in tariff a whole new sector of clients will be attracted to solar electricity generation. A gross feed in tariff makes it a lot easier to look at solar electricity generation from an investment perspective as it is relatively easy to work out how long the pay back period would be and what return on investment would be possible.

So please, anyone caring about the enviroment and wishing to see a dramatic increasee in power generation from renewable sources should sign the petition at http://www.feedintariff.com.au/ to show the government that we do care and that we want them to fulfill on their election promise to look after the environment.