Riches to Straw

Below are some pictures of a local strawbale house (during the building process) constructed by builder Andy Holyoke. The house is in Yellow Springs and it's beautiful; Jamie and I got to visit it last year. The stained concrete floor looks really nice and the natural earth-color of the walls also adds some great substance to the building as well.

Panasonic announced a new model of whole-house batteries, which will become available in 2011. The new lithium-ion storage cell should power up a whole house in 2011 when it could be available to the general public. This is exciting to anyone who is willing to invest into solar power, which obviously falls short to deliver on cloudy days. :)

According to president Furnio Otsubo "the new battery should offer sufficient electricity for about one week of use. That’s certainly something I could get used to although I bet the new battery concept is not going to be that affordable."

You can read more about this announcement here.

Duke student Ken Ilgunas has decided that the $30,000 a year cost of college dorms is too high, so he's decided to rough it up and live in his van:

Ilgunas, 26, is shacking up in a 1994 Ford Econoline as a means of getting through his liberal studies graduate program without debt. Parked in a lot on the edge of campus, he cooks with camping equipment and subsists largely on peanut butter.

This is a really interesting story to me for both the financial aspects of it but also because of what Ken was quoted saying at the end of this article:

"I felt there was something vapid about the suburban lifestyle...People work 40 hours a week and come home and watch TV. There's no beauty or poetry or adventure in that sort of life. I recognized I wasn't getting something out of that lifestyle."

You can read the entire article here.

I have been trying to think of economical ways to heat a smaller house and a guy I work with has been talking a lot about "pellet stoves" - apparently there is a large following on this kind of heating method, where saw dust, leaves, grass clippings and other organic stuff is being turned into small pellets which can be burned into specialized stoves. The pros and cons of pellet stoves have been discussed for many years, but to me this seems to be a no brainer, especially if you are in a situation where you are not ready to invest $15K into a geothermal solution and you need a good heating answer for your home while you are saving money for something better.

A good quality pellet stove can cost anywhere from $2,500 to $3,500; they make stoves which are dual-fuel, able to also burn corn, and with the low prices of corn today, you could heat your entire house very cheaply. My coworker even purchased his own pellet press and he is able to make his own pellets out of discarded wood and grass chips!

The downside is that these stoves need electricity to operate a small feeding auger and the exhaust fan, so you would need a backup power source if you are in a remote area.

Does anyone else have any experience with pellet/corn stoves? Any advice or words of wisdom?
Technorati Tags: heating

Website mint.com has a very interesting post on how debt is actually making people physically sick. Some interesting advice - strangely, I don't see GET OUT OF DEBT on the list:

So, how can you keep your health in check during these tough times? Quoting Shakespeare, “Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” says Kathy Caprino, founder and president of Ellia Communications, Inc., a work-life coaching and consulting company. Caprino, a trained psychotherapist, says, “Debt will wreak havoc on your physical and emotional health if you continue to beat yourself up over it.” Her advice is “mind over money (matters)..."

If a driveway counts as "breaking ground" then we broke ground this weekend. Our friend Brad who owns a host of heavy machinery pulled out a large number of stumps and carved out a nice rough driveway for us so that we can actually drive half way through the property. We don't have it covered with gravel yet, but that will come soon.

This is a pretty big deal for us as it's reminding us how real the project is and mostly how we can actually get it all done WITHOUT BORROWING ANY MONEY from anyone, which is the most important thing for us!

Pictures are below starting from the entrance on the road, where 24 feet of culvert was installed under gravel - remember this is only half of the driveway as the rest will be done once the a larger culvert will go in for the stream splitting the property:



















Also, my heart dropped when I saw accidental damage done to one of the trees. I don't know if the tree will die as a result, but I may have to cut it down:

During a July 14th test at Japan’s Hyogo Earthquake Engineering Research Center, researchers used an E-Defense shake table, the largest shake table in the world, to simulate an earthquake measuring 7.5 on the Richter scale. The seven-story, million-pound wood condominium that was placed on the table remained standing, only suffering some minor cosmetic damage (see pictures here).

Researchers say that to get the building to withstand a whole lotta shaking, they changed the condo’s nail distribution to better distribute stiffness among the different floors, taking into account changes in structural pressure that occur during an earthquake. Designers also used 63 anchor tie-down systems from Simpson Strong Tie, steel rods that run from the foundation to the roof and prevent the building from rocking.

Strawtec has a fascinating article on what is now apparently one of the world's largest strawbale building, the Wildlife Warriors Animal Hospital in Beerwah, Queensland. The building is about 1,300 square meters and was designed by Andrew Webb from WD Architects; it has all the features one would expect from a sustainable structure... "(external) strawbale walls, (internal) rammed earth walls, flooring made from recycled materials, water recycling, solar power, natural paints and finishes and much more."





There are tons of pictures of the building, which turned out beautiful in my opinion. Check it out and let me know what you think! Commercial strawbale structures are rare and unusual; I am only aware of one public library in the U.S. and the Wegerzyn Gardens strawbale house here in Dayton which are public or commercial structures.
Technorati Tags: strawbale

Fortunately this happened at the end of the day, so I didn't mind it too much; it still was frustrating because I hate leaving tools like this out in the woods; I had to unmount the chainsaw from the bar and leave it all behind, stuck in this tree. Anyways, the weight of the tree was such that the bar of the saw got stuck and for the life of me I could not get it out. I had to buy a spare bar today and I will probably go back to cut out the old one.

Also, the Stihl store guy gave me a plastic wedge to use in situations like this one, he says it helps a lot with preventing a tree from pinching your bar.

Our property, where we are planning to build the house, is literally overrun by millions of mosquitoes. The tall weeds and brush, and the standing water in the nearby ditch create an environment that is just perfect for larvae to grow. Worse yet, it's five acres...you can't really "spray" for anything, plus we don't want to create a toxic environment after we kill the mosquitoes.

I have been researching natural ways to control mosquitoes, and last night the answer literally fell in my hand. As I was cutting down a very large dead walnut tree, after the tree fell down I noticed a small black animal crawling on the ground. It was a very cute bat; I couldn't tell if he was hurt by the tree collapsing, but I took a few pictures and put him to safety in an unused culvert pipe. Here is the little guy as he was trying to gnaw at my leather glove:



The answer is one or two bat houses; a bat supposedly eats about 1,000 mosquitoes each hour, up to half of its body weight each night. They do not require care or maintenance and they do a great job at keeping down pests and all kinds of insects, not just mosquitoes. There is really no downside to this at all, so I am kind of excited to put it in place. Also, by the time the house will be done in a few years, the bat house(s) will be populated and active.

I will attempt to build this bat house (PDF file), which can hold up to 100 bats; depending on how difficult the project will be, I may build another one to place at the other end of the property.

Have you had mosquito problems on your own property, and if so, how did you deal with it?