Final house plans - they exist!

The last week or so has been pretty exciting for us. The house plans got finalized (true story!), printed, and handed off to the builder. Here's what it will look like. Eventually.

                                 South side                                                                                                              West side

Main energy-efficient and green features, thanks to our Passive-house-certified designer (Garth Hood, from Thoughtful Dwellings, Fredericton, NB):
1) Lots of (but not too many) windows on the south side, for good lighting throughout the day, and passive solar heating (sun heating the interior through the windows) in the winter
2) Minimal glazing on the north (single, 2'x3' window in the bathroom) and west (single window in the kitchen), to reduce heat escape from the north side and avoid the hot afternoon sun from the west.
3) Crazy efficient windows (see below)
4) Crazy efficient heat recovery ventilation (HRV) system (see below)
5) A hydronic wood gasification stove (see below)
6) Solar panels + batteries
7) Composting toilet
8) Insulated Concrete Form (ICF) construction - makes for a very air-tight house

The windows we're getting are super fancy - not only are they triple-glazed (and we get to choose the solar heat gain coefficients, which differ for south and north sides), but they also have insulated frames. The overall effect is that the inside surface is warm to the touch even in the winter, they have a huge effect on total house insulation, and make fantastic window seats. Since they're extra-fancy, they also open in two different directions:

Fancy windows (left) and the outcome of having insulated windows and tight thermal envelope (right)

The HRV is a Zehnder ComfoAir 200, which will be installed with an earth tube. The earth tube is as it sounds - a pipe buried underground. This pipe provides the intake air for the HRV system. Since it's underground, the incoming air is at a much more stable temperature (being heated up by the Earth's mass). Below is a graph of outside air temp (blue) and intake air temp (red). This should allow us to save a fair bit on energy to heat the incoming air to house-temperature.

              

<-- Earth tube during installation      ^ Comparison of outside air temperature with                                                                        after-tube temperature

Ahhh, the wood gasification stove. The world's least sexy name for one of the coolest things I've ever seen. In short - it has two chambers; the top one burns wood, like any normal wood stove. The lower chamber burns the exhaust from the upper chamber, which allows for higher efficiency and cleaner exhaust. In addition to heating the house directly, the stove also connects to a huge (1000 L) tank and heats the water inside it. The tank acts as storage, which can be used either for in-floor heating or heating up domestic water when the batteries are running low. Made by a German company, with distributors in Canada and US. Here's the video, skip to 2:10 past the overly-perfect German family to see the magic...

Ze majestik vood stove

Solar panels + batteries are pretty self-explanatory. Plus, we don't have the plans for those yet, so can't include any cool pictures. The work will be done locally, by Treefrog Ventures. The battery bank was calculated to give us about 5 days of regular-use power under overcast conditions. Between this and the wood stove, we're hoping to not need much of a generator use throughout the year. We'll see how it pans out. Part of the process is learning the systems and probably changing some bad habits.

Composting toilet - while I've already written about it, I thought I'd reiterate. Flushing toilets make no sense. There is a Russian expression that goes "if you add a teaspoon of jam to a barrel of crap, you get a barrel of crap. If you add a teaspoon of crap to a barrel of jam, you still get a barrel of crap". Flushing toilets do exactly that - 13 L per flush until the 1990s and almost 5 L per flush since. That makes for a very, very large barrel of crap, where there is absolutely no need for it in the first place.

Last, but not least, is ICF construction. The idea is that the insulation (rigid foam) is a part of the wall right off the bat, instead of an add-on during the construction process. Once the ICF blocks are installed, the concrete is poured, and - voilà - you have reinforced, well-insulated concrete walls. Since the insulation is already there during the wall formation, the insulating envelope is tight, and the thermal performance of the house ends up being higher than with many other forms of insulation.

ICF construction, pre-concrete pour.  

Now that these things are in place, we're just waiting for the well digger to dig our well, and the house construction can begin!

It's not waste, it's an opportunity!

Let's talk about toilets. We sit on the throne, do our business, wipe, pull on a lever, and feel all clean and sparkly, never having to deal with our own waste. This process requires copious amounts of water, crazy piping systems, and large-scale effluent treatment (can you say wasteful, expensive, and complicated?). It leads to a whole variety of problems, ranging from clogged pipes, pest infestation, the occasional overflowing during floods, etc... (I omitted links to pictures and sites, I'm sure you'll understand). In the rural areas, where urban sewage is not an option, septic tanks are usually required, coming with the added bonus of occasional tank pumping, tank backup, and septic failure ("Most septic systems will fail sometime" - what?? I didn't actually know that).

In the meantime, the process does not need to be gross or complicated. Poop is basically future earth, it just needs to be reminded of it :-) By composting the waste (also lovingly called humanure), you can avoid creating a smelly health hazard and instead create compost, the stuff happy food grows in. If you think about it, animal manure has been used for soil amendment for as long as humans farmed. We're just as good at producing the stuff, why not use it properly?

Is it gross? No, it shouldn't be. Here's a good and humorous list of the reasons why a flush toilet is actually way, way grosser. We just don't think about it, because flush toilets are the current mainstream paradigm (= because that's how we currently do things).

So there we had it, hippie-mode Sima meets urban, kinda squeamish Josh (wasn't there a TV show about that?). There were several mildly heated discussions, one moment where Josh asked hopefully "well, can put one regular toilet in the house, just in case?", but I stood my ground, and we have a winner! Looks like we'll be getting one of these slick things:

Considering that you can use things like dry grass clippings and cedar wood shavings to "flush" your goods, that bathroom is going to smell awesome. At least, we sure do hope so!