by William | Aug 19, 2020 | Healthy Living, Small Footprint
Admittedly, this blog is for William and I’s own justification of our impending financial commitment in this home, as well as it is for all funders who look at us and say we are nuts. We are. And we hope that this breakdown of some essential building materials and their worth (financially and environmentally) will convince your financial institutions to join us in the insanity and fund our venture in sustainable living.
The home or building you may or may not be currently sitting in as you read this blog, was hopefully built to, and still meets, ‘code.’ When an architect says ‘building to code,’ they are referring to the minimum required building standards set by the International Building Council (IBC). The intentions of ‘codes’ are to create a safety, health, and energy efficiency standard for homes and buildings. The IBC creates a variety of codes that cover all aspects of constructions regarding commercial and residential buildings which can be adopted by local governments. For the purpose of this article, we will be talking about the IBC’s International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) which sets minimum R-values and other measures according to a home or building’s climate zone.
William and I don’t want to build our home to just meet code. We want to thoroughly exceed it. We want to build to Passive House (PHIUS) standards, meet air quality set by RESET, be net positive, and maybe even meet Living Building Challenge standards. We want this home to be bonkers efficient and holistically healthy~ for our family, our builders, and our environment.
by William | Aug 12, 2020 | Healthy Living, Net Zero, Passive House, Prefabrication, Small Footprint
Dear Readers,
Welcome to our fifth Home Building Curiosity….Go Home! A division of Go Logic, Go Home is a design/build prefab Passive House enthusiast leading the way in energy efficient design and the continuation of learning.
Maine based, Go Homes are inspired by their local region’s natural landscape, as well as by its history, people, and culture.
All of their Go Homes meet Passive House (PHIUS) standards, and are prefabricated through a honed panelization process.
Passive House
An advocate for building homes that have the earth and future generations in mind, Go Home makes all their homes go passive. Achieving Passive House certification means that homes will use less energy, thereby paving the road to being net zero, or even net positive. A house requiring less energy to function, means less energy is needed in the first place.
Their homes’ air-tightness “meets or exceeds” Passive House (PHIUS) standards at .6 air changes per hour at 50 pascals (.6 ACH @ 50 Pa). And their homes are all crazy well insulated, as you shall read in the ‘prefabricated’ section.
They offer heat-recovery and energy-recovery ventilation systems with all of their homes. Three pane, high quality, windows are also utilized and placed accordingly to maximize heat gains from solar energy.
Go Home’s commitment to making not only their homes, but the world, Passive, can be admirably summed up in their last paragraph on their “Passive House” page:
by William | Jul 29, 2020 | Healthy Living, Net Zero, Small Footprint
William and I have been on the property hunt lately, and we have had the opportunity to walk quite a few. We are looking for a wooded piece of land here in our rural county in Central Pennsylvania. Growing up here, we know some of the more productive places to look: certain southern facing properties on mountain ranges, down by certain creeks, away from certain roads. One hard reality that we are witnessing is that many of these properties have either already been logged, or they are old growth forests with trees preemptively marked to be logged.
As I have expressed in “Is CLT Sustainable?”, wood is a beautiful, sustainable resource which has many beneficial uses. We intend to use an incredible amount of it in our own home. However, we should be harvesting our woods in a way that does not have a greater negative impact on forests’ health. Some of the properties William and I have witnessed were devastating. You could tell that ‘low environmental impact’ and ‘sustainable harvesting and regeneration of trees’ was not in the plan when these certain forests were torn through.
After witnessing these properties, it was of even greater discomfort to walk through old growth forests (where there are tons of really big trees), and see all of the spray paint markings on trees to be taken down. Many property sellers do this as a courtesy for potential buyers. The prospective buyers can see what money making trees will help them recuperate some of their economic loss after paying for the property itself. This is a common path many rural land buyers pursue, especially when land is expensive and incomes are low. When over 70% of Pennsylvania forests are privately owned, the treatment of those forests becomes highly significant.
by William | Jul 15, 2020 | Healthy Living, Small Footprint
Dear Readers,
While William and I are getting pretty good at designing and constructing this home of ours in our heads, we do eventually need to actually build it on a real piece of land.
Hence, the looking.
It began with searching on Zillow. Then it proceeded to simply driving around our rural county looking for “For Sale” signs on either entirely untouched pieces of property, or on properties with dilapidated homes disintegrating into the earth.
No luck, not really.
After speaking with the matriarch and patriarch of the Aldrich Family, we discovered that they purchased their property by directly asking the owner if they were willing to sell.
Eureka!
Our hunt expanded ten fold as we began looking for beautiful pieces of untouched properties that weren’t for sale, but could be if we asked.
by William | Jul 1, 2020 | Healthy Living, Net Zero, Passive House, Prefabrication, Small Footprint, Uncategorized
Dear Readers,
Welcome to our third Home Building Curiosity, Ecocor! As with the first two Home Building Curiosities, Ecocor is not only a curiosity, but an inspiration in the field of sustainable building. Ecocor is exceptional in how it actually meets all five of William and I’s foundational principles in our mission. Based in Searsmont, Maine, Ecocor designs and manufactures prefabricated, Passive House (PHI) certified, net zero ready, small footprint, healthy living building components and homes.
Prefabricated
Ecocor is very proud of their wall panels, and they rightly should be! Their walls are prefabricated at their Searsmont location, allowing for a climate-controlled build of each panel. Every wall panel meets Passive House standards, and has a specific assembly structure that is even being patented.
The manufacturing of individual wall panels allows Ecocor, the architect, and the buyer to get creative, while still achieving a quickly and quality built home. They promote the motto of “If it can be drawn, we can build it.” Think of their walls as super insulated, airtight, lego blocks, that allow you to build your own unique passive home.
While their wall panels are prefabricated and allow custom builds, Ecocor does have a sector devoted to prefabricated, Passive House certified, modular homes. This branch is called Solsken, which means “sunshine” in Swedish. All of the homes in their Solsken Ecocor collection are named after flowers, which William and I love (because we were actually thinking of naming our potential pipe-dream homes after trees)!
by William | Jun 24, 2020 | Net Zero, Small Footprint
Dear Readers,
If you have read the “Our Waste Goes Where?” blog (and if you have, I applaud you..that was a rough one..) or are familiar with how wastewater treatment generally works, whether it be a septic tank or a treatment facility, you may be wondering how the Clivus Multrum composting toilet and greywater system is beneficially different. I know that I was certainly curious…I mean, the results are similar. Most of the solid and liquid waste, whether flushed or composted in a hole, eventually find their way back into the great world as either fertilizer or drainage. So, what makes the idea of not just specifically the Clivus Multrum system, but a composting toilet in general, so enticing?
Since William and I are looking to build The Seed in a rural area, I am going to directly compare a composting toilet and greywater system to what is most often offered to fellow rural inhabitants…a septic tank.
Composting Toilet
A composting toilet is, for us, preferable to a septic tank for three main reasons.
1) It makes the home, and encourages the inhabitants within it to be, holistically self-sustaining, or, our version of net-zero living. Utilizing a composting toilet allows the home to have a reduced reliance and impact on the physical site it is on.
There is no digging a sand mound, or installing deep in the earth a septic tank. The solid waste that settles in the tank does not need to be pumped out by a big truck, and then subsequently dropped off at a public wastewater treatment facility.
Rather, the solid and liquid waste that the inhabitants generate rest in separate bins until they can be returned to the earth as stable soil fertilizer. The owner or resident (William and I!) can do this themselves with a simple and common tool…a shovel.
A composting toilet also results in a reduction of the home’s overall water usage. If you opt for the standard composting toilet, then you use no water when contributing your waste to compost. None. Even if you choose the foam flush composting toilet, you only use 6 ounces of water per flush. If you are relying on a rainwater pillow for your water supply, this is a HUGE plus…as well as a beautiful help in achieving net-zero living.
The greywater garden for the greywater filtration and distribution would be the only alteration required to the land…and that is because we would physically be planting a garden which would aid in filtration and dispersal. Yay, plants!
Not only would a composting system aid the home in being holistically net-zero, but it would better enable the inhabitants to take account for their own waste. Before researching for the blog, “Our Waste Goes Where??”, I honestly had no idea what happened to my processed nutrients. I figured it went to our septic tank, which I knew had to be pumped once every couple years…but I had no idea that it eventually went to a wastewater treatment facility, and what that process looked like. Someone else took care of it. All I had to do was sit on the toilet, do my thing, and flush. Done. The mess was no longer mine. Because William and I intend to raise children in this crazy idealistic home of ours, we see the composting toilet as a great life lesson for them…in William’s (and a lil’ of Shelby’s words), it will be “teaching our children to not expect other people to clean up their nasty sh…enanigans.”
