The use of salvaged wood is just one of many impressive features of this timber home in British Columbia. Designed by Architect Scott M. Kemp, the home serves as a residence for him and his family and has achieved a LEED Platinum rating from the Canadian Green Building Council. Salvaged wood, geothermal heating and cooling, green materials and an energy efficient solar passive design set the home apart.
Located on the banks of the Fraser River near the village of Ladner, this eco residence takes full advantage of its river site for views as well as the relatively constant temperature of the water. A closed loop geothermal system hanging in the river below the dock works in tandem with a heat pump to provide hot water and radiant floor heating and cooling for the home. Solar passive design and high performance glazing reduce energy use along with a tight thermal envelope made from SIPs.
No trees were cut down for the home as the sustainable timber was sourced from salvaged logs harvested from an elk reserve on Vancouver Island. The trees were knocked down in strong storms and were presenting a fire hazard while also blocking the elks’ regular migratory path. The logs were milled and graded locally for use in the home as dimensional lumber, which was assembled into engineered beams to give the impression of large timber sections.
Additionally the home makes use of a roof with a high albedo to reflect the sun’s heat and an HRV (heat recovery ventilation) system improves energy efficiency. Floors are made from water-based, stained concrete, salvaged wood and natural wool carpeting and all the finishes are low VOC. Rainwater is harvested from the roof and used for irrigation of the riparian zone of native plants along the river’s edge. Construction of the home took 11 months and the owner was both the architect and contractor.
Disconnect that garden hose from your faucet! We’ve found a much more eco-friendly alternative that harnesses the power of the sun and the gift of rain to store life-giving water for your plants. RainPerfect is a solar-powered pump system that collects seasonal rainwater in a barrel and then pumps it using a NiMH battery that’s charged by a 3.5 kW solar p
anel. With 15 feet of wire, the solar panel can soak up the sun on a nearby wall or fence or on the ground, and each charge has the potential to draw up to 100 gallons with a maximum pressure of 13 pounds per square inch.
The RainPerfect pump and solar panel install easily and provide plenty of pressure to run water through a garden hose. The pump provides enough pressure to
run most low pressure sprinklers, wash a car or water just about anything around your home.
A convenient solar panel captures natural energy from the sun eliminating the need for electrical power to charge the battery. This makes the RainPerfect pump ready to go anywhere, anytime and involves no additional utility cost for you.
Model No.: RB280-100
Provides pressurized pumping through a garden hose (13 PSI)
Runs on a solar rechargeable (NiMH) battery for operation anytime, day or night
Connects to all standard garden hoses
Easy operation and installation
Adaptable to most style rain barrels
Pumps up to 100 gallons of water on a single charge
The Tata Group has signed a deal with the founder of SunCatalytix, MIT scientist Daniel Nocera, who has discovered how to generate energy water. Although the terms of their agreement have not yet been disclosed, this breakthrough technology could bring power to as many as three billion people worldwide. What’s more, Nocera’s technology generates energy more efficiently than solar panels, according to the folks at Fast Company.
One and a half bottles of water, including wastewater, can power a small house, and a swimming pool filled with water refreshed once a day will generate enough energy to run a plant. Although in preliminary testing stages, Nocera and TATA envision that this technology could improve the standard of living for billions of people. One small caveat from us: often places that are short on electricity are also short on water. Being just 45 days old, the TATA/MIT team still has a ways to go to get this incredible technology off the ground.
For all you South By attendees, an opportunity to give back to our beautiful city:
Keep Austin Beautiful is rallying help for its 26th Annual Clean Sweep, which it’s dubbed South by South Mess.
The nonprofit that spearheads cleaning and environmental efforts year-round expects more than 4,000 volunteers to join the citywide cleanup on April 9. Volunteers will be treated to a party at Waterloo Park after.
“The record crowds of [South by Southwest] have left town and they left a lot of litter too,” Keep Austin Beautiful said in an announcement.
This year’s projects include street, creek and park cleanups, on-the-water cleanups and butterfly gardens and restoration projects. More projects are being added.
The free volunteer party at Waterloo Park will feature live music powered by Austin Energy’s solar stage, free lunch, door prizes and kid’s environmental activities and exhibits.
If you’re a regular Austinite, your weekly trash sorting process probably has 3 basic components:
Blue Bin – plastic, paper, cardboard, glass, and metal cans
Gray Bin – rotten, smelly, wet, bio-hazard, leftovers/refrigerator science experiments, etc. (Extra credit for composting.)
Overflowing box in the garage – random assortment of dead batteries, light bulbs, fluorescent tubes, extra paint, plastic shopping bags full of more plastic shopping bags full of more plastic shopping bags, black and white Nokia brick from the ’90s, empty print cartridges, any computer monitor that takes more than 1 person to lift, old dusty VHS cassettes, and the list goes on…
Recycling doesn't stop at the Big Blue Bin!
Like our next door neighbors, your overflowing box in the garage may have already forced one car out onto the driveway and may be threatening to take over the rest of your house and the whole neighborhood if it isn’t taken out soon!
Don’t despair! We tip our hats to you for being conscientious enough to set this stuff aside instead of letting environmentally hazardous items enter our landfills and eventually our soil and water supply. As part of your spring cleaning this year, let us help you get rid of that overflowing box and reclaim some garage space. Here’s how:
Visit My Recycling List, or download the Recycling List app to your iPhone or Droid.
Use this awesome tool to quickly find recycling locations nearby that accept all the items you add to your list.
Load that box and any overflowing recyclable items into your car and drop them off at the locations found on the My Recycling List website or smartphone app, with the fewest possible number of car trips! (Luckily for Austinites, there are recycling drop-off facilities all over town, which means even if you have every item on the list, you probably won’t have to visit more than 2 or 3 locations.
My Recycle List iPhone app screenshot
If you are a GreenTex client, just call Cameron or Cory and we will be happy to pick up and dispose of your overflowing box free of charge.
If you have any questionable item(s) not found on the My Recycling List website or app, just call GreenTex Builders at 512-827-7482 and we will help you find a responsible disposal method.
Happy spring cleaning and enjoy this gorgeous weather!
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have developed a method of geographically measuring solar insolation — the amount of solar radiation that hits a certain area at a certain time — that will help decision makers and the general public locate the best places for solar energy installations. The method takes into consideration the topography of a certain area as well as the amount of solar radiation that occurs over an average day to measure the potential solar electricity output at a certain location. This information could be critical in deciding how cost effective future solar installations will be over time.
This new type of solar mapping information, “can be used by policymakers, businesses, and the public to understand the magnitude of solar resources in a given region, which might aid consumers in selecting solar technologies, or policymakers in designing solar policies,” says David Wogan, who is graduate student in mechanical engineering and public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and the lead author of the research paper. The data is presented in a Geographic Information System which can be viewed as a map of a certain area which denotes — with colors or other indicators — which areas have high solar productivity levels.
In their paper the researchers used Texas as their example — the state is geographically diverse, making it a good test subject. “The framework is not limited to Texas and can be expanded to other states and countries to understand how renewable energy resources are distributed, both geographically and through time,” Wogan noted.
Check out Dan Phillips on TED talking about some of his projects, his process, and his philosophy. Dan’s construction company, Phoenix Commotion, builds durable, affordable, energy efficient custom homes using up to 80% salvaged and recycled materials in Huntsville, TX. His apprentice-based crews utilize a vast variety of donated and found materials, which include “mismatched bricks, shards of ceramic tiles, shattered mirrors, bottle butts, wine corks, old DVDs and even bones from nearby cattle yards.”Not usually mentioned among the nation’s “green” building meccas, Huntsville nevertheless has seen increasing demand for the unique aesthetics and sustainable construction techniques on exhibit in each of Dan’s homes. Most of Dan’s customers are low-income families who are asked to contribute “sweat-equity” during the construction process alongside Phoenix Commotion’s laborers. Dan says he tends to favor poor, single mothers because his own father abandoned him and his mother when he was 17, leaving them in a financial mess. Our hats off to Dan for putting his money where his mouth is and leading by example in his East Texas community.
The birthplace of modern electricity, as viewed from space
If you could see your breath indoors last week, you might have guessed that a political blood bath would ensue after rolling blackouts left thousands of Texans shivering in their unheated homes, offices, and schools, many for hours at a time. This unusually severe blast of winter weather has exposed several chinks in the armor of our power delivery industry here in the great state of Texas (the only contiguous state with its very own independent, deregulated power grid).
As this article in last Thursday’s Austin American Statesman explains, there is certainly no single cause for the failure of such a complex system. After all, the unforeseen nature of the recent weather conditions in Texas revealed weaknesses up and down the chain, from fragile generating capacity at the power plant level to poor communication between local utilities and their customers. Ostensibly indignant politicians from the State Senate, the Lieutenant Governor’s office, and local city councils (including Austin’s) nevertheless feel obligated to identify a culprit to take the fall.
UPDATE: The Dallas Morning News ran this piece over the weekend, offering more details into last week’s break-down in Texas’ energy supply chain.
But while the the regulators and politicians duke it out over what needs to change on the supply side of the energy equation, a local consortium of public and private interests called The Pecan Street Project has already begun to tackle demand. Their organizational model and current progress are impressive. One of our favorite columnists neatly encapsulates the vision behind the Pecan Street Project:
Now that the smart grid is in place, though, we can control demand. Because either the utility or the customer is able to optimize when power is used, so many more people automatically run things later at night when rates are cheapest and fewer things in the daytime when they are more expensive. The Energy Internet has become so smart about when you want to use power or when it would have to sell you power or when it could buy power off your car battery or home solar system that the load has become much more constant 365 days of the year. The “flatter” that any utility grid can make its load profile throughout the day for all its customers – so that its peaks are not very high or are eliminated altogether – the fewer backup power plants it needs to build or operate. It is, in effect, substituting energy efficiency for new power generation.
What Friedman describes is, in a nutshell, the electricity delivery system of the very near future. People call it the Energy Internet, or the Smart Grid. If this all sounds like something from Back to the Future II, you’ll be excited to know that the Pecan Street Project is already busy turning Austin into a smart grid prototype for the rest of the world to watch and learn from. From pecanstreetproject.org:
Headquartered at the University of Texas at Austin, Pecan Street Project Inc. is a 501 (c) (3) smart grid and clean energy research and development organization. Incorporated in 2009, the organization’s board includes representatives from The University of Texas, Austin Energy, Environmental Defense Fund, the Austin Technology Incubator, the City of Austin and the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce.
In September 2009, it received funding from the University of Texas and a grant from the Capital Area Council of Governments through an award from the Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration. In November 2009, the organization received a U.S. Department of Energy stimulus grant for a Smart Grid Demonstration Project at Austin’s Mueller community.
This is not just an exercise in academic curiosity either folks; hover boards notwithstanding, the future is NOW. Last week the Pecan Street Project announced that it has already gone live with the first phase of Austin’s smart grid deployment. Very soon customers throughout Austin will for the first time be able to monitor and manage their home or office energy consumption, down to the individual appliance level, with a swipe and a tap on their iPhone/iPad or other smart mobile device. Living and working in more efficient homes and buildings, and armed with greater awareness and control of our own usage patterns, we as electron consumers will be able to greatly improve the stability of our electric grid and minimize the impact of severe weather events like we saw last week.
In the meantime, you don’t have to wait for your fancy new smart meter to arrive to get a head start transitioning your family or workplace onto the smart grid. You may be relieved to find out that, contrary to popular opinion, getting a handle on your energy use doesn’t require a $20k solar panel installation.
Let’s make it easy: just post a comment or shoot us an email, and we’ll put together a free personalized plan of attack to eliminate the energy wasters in your home and/or office. No strings attached, no spam. Just Austinites helping Austinites.
GreenTex Builders nears completion on the design of a New Construction Project that is projected to break ground in February of 2011. The home is a 2 story contemporary home that is located on the corner of South 3rd and Oltorf.
We are removing the existing home and building a very efficient home that will last decades. GreenTex Builders and Nick Mehl Architects are seeking a 4-Star or possibly 5-Star rating with The Austin Energy Green Building Program. We are focused on building a tight home with quality insulation and durable materials. The home will be mainly stucco and will need to be built with extra precautions for our hot & humid climate.
We are using a commercial roofing application called Duro-Last, single ply roofing materials that are flexible sheets of compounded synthetic materials manufactured in one of our four factories nationwide to strict control requirements. Our client is a distributor of Duro-Last and several other commercial roofing products, Cool Construction, and we are very excited to work with it for the first time. We will keep you posted on the progress with future blogs. Thanks for taking a look!
Please feel free to contact us for a hardhat tour of the project later in the Spring. A special thanks to Scott Kuryak over at House+Earth for referring us to the owners of this house.
While on a Congolese mission with Doctors Without Borders, Thierry Perrocheau began working on the mechanical design for a portable, natural brick pressing machine. Now the CEO of Meco’concept, Perrocheau and his small team have designed a hydraulic press that transforms ordinary mud into structural building blocks. Since 2008 the team has distributed the Meco’press in France and Belgium, and they have recently seen an overwhelming interest from organizations looking to build in developing nations. The ingenious press offers a green building material solution that can function within the constraints of devastated areas.
Perrocheau told Inhabitat that one of his goals is to have the presses operational in Haiti in the near future. Concerns about portability and global shipment are addressed in the lightweight design of the Meco’Press. Because it can be operated with very little training, is easy to maintain, and uses mostly materials from the building site, testing has found that it can be used throughout 80% of the earth. The small percent left out is due to the lack of clay content in the soil.
Using only mud mixed with a binder material, the hydraulic press creates a LEGO-shaped brick in under 30 seconds. Lime is the suggested binder material, as it is completely natural and it stabilizes the moisture in the brick – eliminating swelling, shrinking, or cracking from excessive dryness. After the press is filled with the mud and lime mixture, 30 tons of hydraulic pressure turn it into a BTC (une brique en terre compressée). BTC’s can be use used for structures up to two stories tall, making them perfect for international aid or for eco-minded builders around the globe.
The use of salvaged wood is just one of many impressive features of this timber home in British Columbia. Designed by Architect Scott M. Kemp, the home serves as a residence for him and his family and has achieved a LEED Platinum rating from the Canadian Green Building Council. Salvaged wood, geothermal heating and cooling, green materials and an energy efficient solar passive design set the home apart.
My Recycle List iPhone app screenshot
GreenTex Builders 