Small town, big news

The South Miami City Commission voted Tuesday evening to require all new houses (and existing houses undergoing significant renovations) to install photovoltaic panels. The measure puts our small city in rare company; only three cities in California have similar measures. While the new law will only affect a few houses every year, it will probably have far-reaching consequences across the Sunshine State.

plumbing, continued

The city's plumbing inspector signed off on our rough plumbing this morning. Everything looks good - our plumber, Ross Terrano, has tested all the lines to make sure they connections are good, and we can now proceed with installing drywall, cabinetry, tile and all the plumbing fixtures. The PEX supply lines are working, and the inspector seemed pretty happy with the graywater and rainwater lines.

At left, Ross and one of his crew installing the supply lines for the kitchen sink.

thinking of Nigel Tufnel

Well, if you're going to crank your amps to 11, you're going to need some electricity. Our electrician, Celestino, has started roughing in the flexible blue conduit (Electrical Nonmetallic Tubing, or ENT) that will carry the power and control lines through the interior partitions. We've been reviewing the locations of the outlets and tweaking the electrical plan to make sure our outlets are located where they're most needed - near dressers or tables, for example - while also meeting the code requirements that there always be an outlet within six feet of a door, and then spaced no more than twelve feet apart after that.

water, too much

Paul Manogue, Somerset, NJ, August 28, 2011

While writing about how to protect the house from mold, we started thinking about the eaves of our house, which, at two feet deep, are meant to keep water away from the walls in order to prevent mold growth on the outdoors surfaces of the building. Eave is one of those architectural terms that has broad metaphorical and legal implications. We still use “eavesdropping” to describe furtive acts of listening in, for example. And in legal terms, stillicidium – the word Vitruvius used to denote the edge of the roof which casts rain water away from the building below – is also a legal principle dating to ancient Rome that states a landowner can only build in such a way that his house (or other buildings) do not shed rain water on his neighbor’s property, thereby maintaining the utility and value of the neighbor’s land.

termites

source: Google Maps

Besides mold and hurricanes, the other natural threat to buildings in Miami is termites. We frequently see tents draped over houses here - like our neighbor's house, seen in a GoogleMaps street view at left - so that they can be fumigated. The idea of fleeing our house for a few days so that it can be pumped full of poison is somewhat unappealing. What's more, the treatments often only work temporarily; the same neighbor already has termites attacking his house again. So what can we do to avoid this?

embodied energy and energy use

“Statistics are merciless things.” Le Corbusier, The City of To-morrow and its Planning, 126.

The Department of Energy has posted a lot of useful data on energy use in the United States, which helps identify the low hanging fruit for big gains in energy efficiency. Some of the key take-aways: Americans consume one fifth of the world’s energy. Two-fifths of that energy is consumed in and by buildings, with 22% going into our houses. 91% of that energy produces carbon or radiation. And, most depressingly, nearly half our energy is lost in transmission and distribution.

graywater guerrillas on the radio

Via Greg Hamra, friend of tin box, comes word of this fun radio segment about graywater use in California. Our graywater system is more high-tech (it uses a filtration tank) and supplies both toilet and irrigation water, but it's great to hear stories about grassroots activism on sustainable building systems, especially when they don't make people like us sound like lunatics.

site visits

One thing we like about the LEED process is its emphasis on education. The USGBC knows as well as anyone that sustainable building practices need to be widely known in order to be widely used. Clients, designers and builders need to know about alternatives in order for us to change decades of habits, customs and traditions. And thus was born this blog.

But we also see tin box as an opportunity to exceed LEED’s education requirements.

Catching Up on Construction: vapor barrier

Our vapor barrier went down easily. It laps up the sides of the slab to help protect us from termites and moisture. While plastic may be a material we would like to have avoided using, in this condition, its negative characteristics will be quite helpful. Hopefully, others will have an alternative to use down the road.

The rebar and wire mesh create a marvelous texture that will be hidden in the slab but we get to record it here in photos.

red, white, blue and purple (plumbing, p.4)

A closer look at the rough plumbing. A normal house would have one set of big PVC pipes for waste, and two sets of smaller copper pipes for hot and cold water. What's different here? A few things...

plumbing in

We have passed the rough plumbing inspection this morning and will start backfilling with clean fill tomorrow. Next, HVAC and electrical will lay their under slab conduits and hopefully we will have a concrete slab next week.

purple (plumbing, p.2)

As we noted the other day, there are two sets of drain lines in the house. The regular waste lines leading to the septic system are white PVC. The drain lines leading from the bathtubs and showers to the graywater tank are PVC painted purple, which, apparently, is now the international color code for graywater.

young green professionals

The Miami Dade County Office of Sustainability maintains a web site with a lot of valuable resources. They also have a program – called Young Green Professionals – for undergraduate and graduate students who are interested in building analysis and benchmarking. [link to follow]

building codes

Yesterday's earthquake off the shores of Honshu is one of the most powerful in Japan's history, and yet the death toll is remarkably small compared to that caused by smaller quakes in China and Haiti. The same is true of the recent earthquakes in New Zealand and Chile, which, though quite deadly, were not nearly as devastating as comparable events in the developing world. The key difference between these contexts - the difference between life and death - is each country's preparation for natural disasters. A big part of that preparation is effective building codes and inspections.

Building codes are registers of tragedy translated into empirical figures.