Alternative Energy projects

[FatTire]

This is our spare bedroom. It juts off the side of the house, and was where I started with the bales. I got better at it and faster, but it is labor intensive. Barley is grown near here, so high quality bales are abundant. That tall frame wall was part of the original cabin, we stripped down to studs and most of the original cabin is enclosed within the footprint of the existing house now. We had someone come in and spray foam stud walls. That includes the gable end on that bedroom, where the tyvek is.

 

[Zerk]

Sounds like you have a great plan. One thing that may help with the internet is that Exede is launching a satellite (Viasat 2) soon which should enable them to dramatically increase their monthly data cap. We believe our 30 G/ month plan could go up to 75 or 100 /month. ht.

I only have 10GB cap, but my bill is half yours. I am able to get stuff on antenna. Though I have lived without antenna, I do like it.

 

[Zerk]

I realize straw was used by man for hundreds of years. How does it hold up? I am guessing if dry for a long time, but the change in temps I would think would be an issue, even with a good vapor barrier? Do you need to vent it extensively?

Do you screws or lags so you can open it back up?

You must have to seal that up real good for rodents.

 

[FatTire]

I only have 10GB cap, but my bill is half yours. I am able to get stuff on antenna. Though I have lived without antenna, I do like it.

We don't do any sat TV or antenna, so we stream netflix. That is what kills us. Are you on Exede or Hughs?

 

[Zerk]

Exede. $60 or 70. I would like to stream but to much data. I do netflix with DVDs. My TV is left off alot, though I like it at times too. I am lucky I get antenna at my house. I get one bad channel at my camp.


I wonder if the satellite industry will die out, since cell is portable. Though you need a tower. I have booster at camp, but would not be able to watch movies.

 

[FatTire]

I realize straw was used by man for hundreds of years. How does it hold up? I am guessing if dry for a long time, but the change in temps I would think would be an issue, even with a good vapor barrier? Do you need to vent it extensively?

Do you screws or lags so you can open it back up?

You must have to seal that up real good for rodents.

It holds up real well if you keep it dry. A lime/cement stucco (both sides) allows some vapor transmission. Chicken wire is attached to the bales with sod staples and then tacked to the support structure, inside and out,stretched real tight. At that stage in construction you can body slam a wall and the bales should not move even a fraction of an inch. After stucco they are very solid! Our interior walls are finished with colored clay so the stucco doesn't look bad. If you had to open an exterior wall for some reason, it would be a real mess, like opening an old plaster-lath wall. And yes, for bale construction an eye for detail is critical. There should be no openings for rodents! Four years and no mice (knock on wood.)

 

[FatTire]

Exede. $60 or 70. I would like to stream but to much data. I do netflix with DVDs. My TV is left off alot, though I like it at times too. I am lucky I get antenna at my house. I get one bad channel at my camp.


I wonder if the satellite industry will die out, since cell is portable. Though you need a tower. I have booster at camp, but would not be able to watch movies.

You can probably imagine us during the dark part of winter, those long evenings. "Do you wanna stream something? How long should we go?" On a Friday evening we might splurge and do a whole movie. We also rent the discs.

 

[piercedtiger]

See the recent How Much Dirt Have You Seen Moved by Hand thread..... Save money (turn the electronics off and cancel the gym memberships) - Put the kids to work digging !

JK - many of the practices listed in that thread (that toughened us up physically and mentally) would probably get parents jailed today.....

Rgds, D.

We have goats and chickens now so we have the kids help with that. Was quite a fight for a while until my wife finally sat down with them and had a talk a couple weeks ago. Now they're finally doing a few more things on their own (like bringing the garbage cans up from the road when they get off the bus instead of just walking past them). They help shovel out the barn stall, drop hay from the second floor when needed, and somewhat help stack it up there by hand when we get a whole wagon load. But they could certainly be more useful!

Sounds like you have a great plan. One thing that may help with the internet is that Exede is launching a satellite (Viasat 2) soon which should enable them to dramatically increase their monthly data cap. We believe our 30 G/ month plan could go up to 75 or 100 /month. These companies know their market share depends on overcoming the low data caps, with the current Viasat satellite speed is not horrible, but the data cap is a killer if you stream any video or work with graphics, etc. There is also a Viasat 3 in the pipeline. However, there is no cure for the latency issues, even with fast data rates there is a long delay.

Straw bale works really well in our dry climate. I'd be nervous about it in PA. One risk is getting bales wet during construction before stucco. Our schedule was complicated, I was burning vacation to stack bales so I didn't have a lot of flexibility, and the stucco crew was late finishing their previous job, and then we got several days of heavy rain while waiting. I had tarps up to minimize damage, and then we had about two week of dry sun, but I did end up tearing out several sections of wall because I feared the bales were damp internally. I don't know how you'd ever get them dry enough in a humid climate, although I recognize there have been a number of successful projects in the northeast.

Another interesting alternative which can be thermally efficient if done right is cord wood. There are a few structures around here but I didn't see them build so I don't know about their R values. One of them used a lot of blue bottles for light in the wall, it looks pretty cool when the sun hits it. It looks like you can have a good combination of thermal mass and R value if you do it right.

We stream netflix and I need to remote into servers and workstations as well as attend VoIP meetings so speed is critical for me. I'm on a 35mbps down/6 up plan with TWC right now. One of our server engineers switched to Hughes in an attempt to avoid TWC, but it ended up being so slow he couldn't remote admin any servers. As I took it, the speed dropped after he hit his cap and he hit his cap in the first week or two. At that point he was better off just driving to the hospital to work. I'd rather not have to do that, especially since I gave up my desk a year ago and we want to move out of state.

Good call on the straw in the more humid climate. That's something I'm concerned about. It can be very humid here, rain for days on end, go from -20 in the winter to 100+ in the summer, get 3 feet of snow in a day, or 40-50 mph winds. Some of that all in the same week. So we need something stable and well insulated. One of the things she wanted to do was build into a hillside. We've seen one such house in the area, but have never been inside. I always thought that would be a good way to regulate temperature with minimal controls (and easier to defend ), but I don't know about digging it all out for that. And it requires the right topology on the property, unless we make our own hill by burying the house. If we could do that I'd like to do the same thing for the animals for those extreme temperatures.

I've seen the cordwood option as well. Assuming there are a lot of trees to clear at the new property that might be an easier option than filling earthbags. We had thought about using tires as well, but after stuffing a couple dozen for the backstop at my buddy's pistol range that seems like a real pain in the ***. He even had little rebar spreaders to help open them up so we could pack dirt in and it was still tough. I'm sure we didn't get them all 100% filled either. We live about 30 miles from Cornell University, and I thought someone from there was building an earthship house though I haven't heard anything of it recently. Or know where it is to go look or talk to anyone about it. I've seen tons of ideas on using shipping containers too which seems like an inexpensive way to go. Just need to figure out how much crane time would be needed and how much that costs.

 

[Zerk]

Why not just use real insulation and be done with it? Is it money thing or pride in doing it yourself? Both are cool.



Today crawled around my knees with a chainsaw. I could use a brush hog, and another tractor.

 

[FatTire]

Why not just use real insulation and be done with it? Is it money thing or pride in doing it yourself? Both are cool.



Today crawled around my knees with a chainsaw. I could use a brush hog, and another tractor.

That's a good question. The straw bale portions of our house has these advantages:

1) Natural materials that are locally sourced.
2) Eliminated a substantial amount of conventional lumber.
3) Quiet (18" thick walls)
4) Looks different in a good way -- nice wide window sills, curved surfaces on some interior walls***
5) Lower cost of materials (This assumes you can do substantial work yourself, otherwise this will be offset by increased labor costs).
6) Reduced flammability- This might be counter-intuitive, but densely packed straw bales don't easily carry flame. Imagine trying to burn a big phone book, the ratio of fuel to air is just no good. On the other hand, where we used spray foam insulation we had to have a 30 minute flame barrier to meet code.

Some interesting things happen when eliminate conventional stud walls. Wherever we used 2x4 or 2x6's we had to have stamped lumber, most of which came from Idaho, Oregon or Canada. But where we used big beams, we could source those from a local sawmill.

*** I should say "looks good to us". Everyone has different taste.