How is our house different from a "normal" house? And how is it the same? Our design criteria were to build something low maintenance, with zero heating and cooling costs and as autonomous as possible without resorting to technologies which might not be available or easily maintained into the future. It must be comfortable and robust: able to cope with the more extreme climate which may develop over the next few years and decades. And it must be as cheap to build as possible fitting the criteria already outlined.
The obvious way to heat a house is using the sun and the house I built in the 1970's was what is called a passive solar design — the sun shone in on a tiled concrete floor in winter and heated it up, thus moderating the temperature during the night as well. I wasn't a great builder and had very tight finances, so it didn't work as well as it could have but with the mild climate at Waratah North, close to the sea, it was better than nothing and certainly better than the house I grew up in only a few miles away in Toora.
But the Waratah North house was weatherboard and had fairly skimpy insulation (none under the wooden floor) and lots of single-pane glass, plus it had no ventilation other than through opening windows. Also the sun coming in faded the furniture and any other thing it fell on, so you had to be careful what you put in the room. The glare could be hard to bear at times as well. And the room which didn't get the direct sun got mouldy and musty.
The new house has a much more sophisticated solar heating (and cooling) system. While the sun can come into one bedroom and a corner of the living room directly, most of the heating will be via a solar air heater on the roof from which air will be blown by a fan down under the concrete slab floor and through a rock pile heat store, which being fairly massive (around one hundred tonnes) will hold the heat and release it slowly up through the concrete slab. A second, separate solar heater will draw stale air from the house via a system of ducts such as you would find in large commercial buildings and before venting it outside it will pass through a heat exchanger where it will heat incoming fresh air. The house will have lots of interior thermal mass, well insulated from the outside, and double glazed windows throughout.
In summer the same solar powered air extractor will draw air up through the rock pile (which will cool the hot exterior air on very hot days). There will also be a solar hot water heater. The toilet will be a composting type so we can recycle waste into the garden and cut down on water usage and disposal. All our water will be collected from the roof of the house and carport/workshop and stored in a large 90,000 litre concrete tank which we've just had constructed. We had a similar setup at Waratah North and the water from our concrete tanks there was like champagne! The water will be pumped to a small header tank on a stand via a small solar powered electric pump — no noisy pressure pump which stops running if the power goes off leaving you with no water.
The advantage of this heating/cooling setup is I can build it and maintain it all myself. There are no microprocessors involved and the highest tech items will be some fans and an electric pump.
As for the construction of the house, it will have a series of flat roofs made of the kind of material developed for big commercial buildings using insulation glued between two metal sheets. It can span a large distance which cuts down on most of the carpentry needed for roof framing. The outside walls will be corrugated colourbond mostly, fixed to treated prefabricated stud walls and heavily insulated, with a couple of timber finished walls in the courtyard to cut down the harshness of the finish. The colourbond is low maintenance and cheap, plus a good material for our fire vulnerable site on the edge of town.
The floors will be concrete slabs for thermal mass and silence! We are planning for rammed earth interior walls for thermal mass as well.
No windows on the east or west walls and only one glazed entrance facing west in the courtyard under a roof overhang. All windows are well under eaves (we're starting to get more frequent large hailstone events). No lawn! The north facing windows (which are all on the ground floor) are protected by stone courtyard walls from any possible fire. I've got to figure out how to glaze the solar heat collector with strong enough, long lived material at a reasonable cost.
It's not a simple house at all, but hopefully by limiting the amount of plumbing and not going stupid with the kitchen (fortunately I can build all this!) we won't shoot ourselves down financially.
Showing posts with label architecture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label architecture. Show all posts
Monday, March 8, 2010
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Fire and the future
We had an anxious weekend waiting to hear how a friend of my wife's had fared in the fires. The area where she lived, not far from here, had at least ten deaths and her place was in dense bush. Yesterday my wife spoke to her. She and her husband were OK but had lost everything except her business, which fortunately was in a big neighboring town untouched by the fires.
When the first Europeans explored the coast of this continent they remarked on the columns of smoke rising everywhere which seemed to be a feature of the landscape. The aboriginal people's fire-stick management of their country was a characteristic of their culture and produced a certain form of vegetation, which in heavily treed areas meant a thinner undergrowth as the easily combustible fuel on the forest floor was removed regularly.
The early European colonists lived in the cities of the coast and in small towns or on farms where the first task was the removal of as much native vegetation as possible to make way for pasture. There were people who did live in the bush — timber cutters being the most numerous. The dispossession of land from the aboriginals meant their cultural practice of regular burning no longer happened and another pattern of landscape and vegetation emerged, where dense growth took place, burned at longer intervals by much larger fires.
Despite this change, fire has not been a serious impediment to settlement in this country until recently. Fires when they occurred could be devastating for those directly affected but these were usually farmers and other rural dwellers in thinly populated areas. The fires of 1939 were a turning point though, because it was realised that isolated timber harvesting settlements in the dense forest were just too vulnerable and that way of settling the landscape came to an end.
But here we are seventy years later, with the most sophisticated fire fighting organisations and equipment which have ever been devised and yet we have suffered terrible loss of life and property. Is it climate change? Too many arsonists? Or as some creepy religious types allege, God's punishment for abortion law reform?
One thing that has changed noticeably over the past few decades, principally since 1970, is that very large numbers of people have built houses in rural settings, often surrounded by trees. It has become a widespread ideal of the Australian way of life. I was one of the early settlers of this type, and I remember looking at a forested block in the hill country behind Ulladulla on the New South Wales south coast back in the early seventies when not many houses were being built outside of towns on bush blocks, before finally building on ten acres near Waratah Bay in southern Victoria in the late seventies, by which time there was what amounted to a boom in small acreages all over the country.
Very few of the houses built on these bush blocks took the risk of fire into account. I know the place I built at Waratah North certainly didn't, and not until we had a fire emergency of our own there (caused by my three-year-old son setting fire to 120 bales of hay stacked in the carport next to the house!) did I do anything about it. I rushed out after that and bought a Honda fire pump which lived in its own enclosure on the north side of the house yard, with a hose long enough to reach any building on the property, all fed from a dam at the top of the block. And I ran it every day in summer to water the garden, so at least I knew it would work when needed.
Our house was some distance from any dense stands of trees and was relatively easily defendable (once I had the Honda pump!) against the grass fires which were our greatest threat. I hardly know how one would cope in a bush setting. Perhaps if the bush is not too dense, the house is well designed and all rubbish and leaves are removed to stop sources of ignition, you're relatively fit and confident and have fire-fighting gear on hand, then you can sleep peacefully over summer.
Why has this new pattern of settlement grown up in the past thirty years and become all-pervasive? Because it could! Once car ownership had become near-universal in the nineteen-sixties, and the suburbs which had been the pinnacle of the Australian dream for an earlier generation had become dull, ugly, conventional and constraining for their children, the stage was set for an explosion of rural living. And so we have a vast section of the population now hostage to fear of fire every summer. It is obvious that this problem is not going to go away quickly or easily.
The recriminations have begun. The hunt for the arsonists who are no doubt responsible for a lot of the fires is on. Much learned pontification will fill the airwaves explaining the psychology and motivation of these people. The call for more severe punishment has gone out. But even if arsonists were to be publicly hung, I doubt if that would solve the problem. My own feeling, purely subjective, is that the young men mainly responsible for these crimes are not types who think too deeply about future consequences. And in any case young men tend to wear risk lightly, which is why they make such good soldiers. And what about lightning strikes? They also cause many fires and are not particularly amenable to draconian legislation either.
Three years ago we sold our dream property overlooking Wilsons Promontory and Waratah Bay and moved into Foster town. Not because of the fire risk, but because we were paying a fortune in traveling costs and it was a sellers market with prices at an all-time high. As for my wife's friend, I very much doubt if she and her husband will return to build on the site of their burnt-out home. No doubt there will be many others rethinking their lifestyle choices. Slowly our culture will change and fall in line with the imperatives imposed on it by the nature of this country and by the declining availability of fossil fuels, which in the past have have made thinly-spread patterns of settlement possible and a matter of somewhat casual and careless choice.
When the first Europeans explored the coast of this continent they remarked on the columns of smoke rising everywhere which seemed to be a feature of the landscape. The aboriginal people's fire-stick management of their country was a characteristic of their culture and produced a certain form of vegetation, which in heavily treed areas meant a thinner undergrowth as the easily combustible fuel on the forest floor was removed regularly.
The early European colonists lived in the cities of the coast and in small towns or on farms where the first task was the removal of as much native vegetation as possible to make way for pasture. There were people who did live in the bush — timber cutters being the most numerous. The dispossession of land from the aboriginals meant their cultural practice of regular burning no longer happened and another pattern of landscape and vegetation emerged, where dense growth took place, burned at longer intervals by much larger fires.
Despite this change, fire has not been a serious impediment to settlement in this country until recently. Fires when they occurred could be devastating for those directly affected but these were usually farmers and other rural dwellers in thinly populated areas. The fires of 1939 were a turning point though, because it was realised that isolated timber harvesting settlements in the dense forest were just too vulnerable and that way of settling the landscape came to an end.
But here we are seventy years later, with the most sophisticated fire fighting organisations and equipment which have ever been devised and yet we have suffered terrible loss of life and property. Is it climate change? Too many arsonists? Or as some creepy religious types allege, God's punishment for abortion law reform?
One thing that has changed noticeably over the past few decades, principally since 1970, is that very large numbers of people have built houses in rural settings, often surrounded by trees. It has become a widespread ideal of the Australian way of life. I was one of the early settlers of this type, and I remember looking at a forested block in the hill country behind Ulladulla on the New South Wales south coast back in the early seventies when not many houses were being built outside of towns on bush blocks, before finally building on ten acres near Waratah Bay in southern Victoria in the late seventies, by which time there was what amounted to a boom in small acreages all over the country.
Very few of the houses built on these bush blocks took the risk of fire into account. I know the place I built at Waratah North certainly didn't, and not until we had a fire emergency of our own there (caused by my three-year-old son setting fire to 120 bales of hay stacked in the carport next to the house!) did I do anything about it. I rushed out after that and bought a Honda fire pump which lived in its own enclosure on the north side of the house yard, with a hose long enough to reach any building on the property, all fed from a dam at the top of the block. And I ran it every day in summer to water the garden, so at least I knew it would work when needed.
Our house was some distance from any dense stands of trees and was relatively easily defendable (once I had the Honda pump!) against the grass fires which were our greatest threat. I hardly know how one would cope in a bush setting. Perhaps if the bush is not too dense, the house is well designed and all rubbish and leaves are removed to stop sources of ignition, you're relatively fit and confident and have fire-fighting gear on hand, then you can sleep peacefully over summer.
Why has this new pattern of settlement grown up in the past thirty years and become all-pervasive? Because it could! Once car ownership had become near-universal in the nineteen-sixties, and the suburbs which had been the pinnacle of the Australian dream for an earlier generation had become dull, ugly, conventional and constraining for their children, the stage was set for an explosion of rural living. And so we have a vast section of the population now hostage to fear of fire every summer. It is obvious that this problem is not going to go away quickly or easily.
The recriminations have begun. The hunt for the arsonists who are no doubt responsible for a lot of the fires is on. Much learned pontification will fill the airwaves explaining the psychology and motivation of these people. The call for more severe punishment has gone out. But even if arsonists were to be publicly hung, I doubt if that would solve the problem. My own feeling, purely subjective, is that the young men mainly responsible for these crimes are not types who think too deeply about future consequences. And in any case young men tend to wear risk lightly, which is why they make such good soldiers. And what about lightning strikes? They also cause many fires and are not particularly amenable to draconian legislation either.
Three years ago we sold our dream property overlooking Wilsons Promontory and Waratah Bay and moved into Foster town. Not because of the fire risk, but because we were paying a fortune in traveling costs and it was a sellers market with prices at an all-time high. As for my wife's friend, I very much doubt if she and her husband will return to build on the site of their burnt-out home. No doubt there will be many others rethinking their lifestyle choices. Slowly our culture will change and fall in line with the imperatives imposed on it by the nature of this country and by the declining availability of fossil fuels, which in the past have have made thinly-spread patterns of settlement possible and a matter of somewhat casual and careless choice.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Care
How much of our world do we really care about? What could be gone tomorrow without causing us any pain (putting aside anything that we currently depend on to make a living). I drove through Melbourne yesterday, and had to make a big arc from the inner suburbs through the arid north-west along the Western Ring Road, then to a few stops in West Footscray, then to Spotswood on the banks of the river, then to Yarraville and into the city along New Footscray Road and Docklands, and then to Dandenong and Lynbrook in the far south-east before the two hour drive back to Foster.
So much of Melbourne, new Melbourne, built since nineteen-fifty and especially since nineteen-ninety is just plain awful. Docklands is a miserably ugly and pathetic joke and its apartment buildings monuments to greed, social isolation and a culture that needs to spend as much time as possible looking at entertainment on screens to avoid seeing where and how it actually lives. The new and incredibly expensive ferris wheel there has all the aesthetic appeal of a safety cover on a drain, only on a grotesque scale. It gives its riders a wonderful view of what can only be described as the most inhuman unlovely semi-industrial landscape that the devil himself could have devised in co-operation with Australia's finest property developers, civil engineers, thuggish politicians, ethics-free architects, planners and an army of concretors, scaffolders, crane drivers and plumbers whose last aesthetic impulses had been beaten out of them at primary school or through a steady diet of crap TV and junk food. And it's all cost an absolutely staggering amount of money: ie lifetimes of work and natural resources. And how many people give a damn about any of it, would feel it carries great spiritual meaning for them? Not too many I would be sure. And how much will be of any utility at all without lashings of cheap fuel? Hah!
Many parts of Melbourne, generally those built before eighteen-ninety, are beautiful. And people feel strongly about them and will fight to preserve them. Yes I know there were lots of unlovely inner suburbs which might be full of madly-renovating young professionals now, but which were pretty much unloved until the seventies. Tastes change. But who will give a damn now or in the future if Jeff's Shed, or Dockland Stadium, or the Bolte Bridge, or any of the huge retail complexes in the City, or the nightmarish ones at Southland or Chadstone, Knox or Northland were to be demolished.
I see pretty much eye-to-eye with Jim Kunstler when it comes to modern architecture and the tragedy of suburban sprawl. None of us will care enough to save it when its hour comes, and that hour is soon. Then the best that will be said about it is that it will serve as a convenient mine of building materials for the generations, much diminished I fear from our present swollen numbers, who will come after us.
So much of Melbourne, new Melbourne, built since nineteen-fifty and especially since nineteen-ninety is just plain awful. Docklands is a miserably ugly and pathetic joke and its apartment buildings monuments to greed, social isolation and a culture that needs to spend as much time as possible looking at entertainment on screens to avoid seeing where and how it actually lives. The new and incredibly expensive ferris wheel there has all the aesthetic appeal of a safety cover on a drain, only on a grotesque scale. It gives its riders a wonderful view of what can only be described as the most inhuman unlovely semi-industrial landscape that the devil himself could have devised in co-operation with Australia's finest property developers, civil engineers, thuggish politicians, ethics-free architects, planners and an army of concretors, scaffolders, crane drivers and plumbers whose last aesthetic impulses had been beaten out of them at primary school or through a steady diet of crap TV and junk food. And it's all cost an absolutely staggering amount of money: ie lifetimes of work and natural resources. And how many people give a damn about any of it, would feel it carries great spiritual meaning for them? Not too many I would be sure. And how much will be of any utility at all without lashings of cheap fuel? Hah!
Many parts of Melbourne, generally those built before eighteen-ninety, are beautiful. And people feel strongly about them and will fight to preserve them. Yes I know there were lots of unlovely inner suburbs which might be full of madly-renovating young professionals now, but which were pretty much unloved until the seventies. Tastes change. But who will give a damn now or in the future if Jeff's Shed, or Dockland Stadium, or the Bolte Bridge, or any of the huge retail complexes in the City, or the nightmarish ones at Southland or Chadstone, Knox or Northland were to be demolished.
I see pretty much eye-to-eye with Jim Kunstler when it comes to modern architecture and the tragedy of suburban sprawl. None of us will care enough to save it when its hour comes, and that hour is soon. Then the best that will be said about it is that it will serve as a convenient mine of building materials for the generations, much diminished I fear from our present swollen numbers, who will come after us.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
