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.

interview

Students in the Broadcast Media program of FIU's School of Communication + Journalism came to tin box a few weeks ago to shoot footage for a class project on renewable energy. Their finished project is pretty good. Forgive the small video - Blogger restricts file sizes, so the video here is a little small.

The two students leading the project–Erica Santiago and Diana Guarnizo–are also producing a longer video that explores larger questions of social and ecological sustainability at tin box. We look forward to posting that later this spring!

lust for lights

We've been doing a lot of shopping for light fixtures over the last two days, with a series of unsuccessful hunts for simple cord sets (literally a cord and socket with which to make a pendant lamp) leading to interesting discoveries of LED exterior lights and other things we'd had trouble finding. One of today's trips netted four lights for our bathroom vanities, sort of. We found a 20" long LED fixture by George Kovacs (left) that will be perfect in three of the bathrooms. However, the factory has a backlog of 6,000 orders to fill before we'll get our lights (we were promised mid-June) which we read as an exciting indication that energy-efficient lighting has come of age as a first choice for homeowners. This is a very good sign, not least because it suggests the economy is rebounding, but especially because companies are making, and customers are choosing, energy-efficient options. We found a similar dilemma with dual-flush toilets. A very promising sign indeed.

buried

Last week's septic tank and drainage field excavations also gave us a chance to bury electrical power and data lines running to the house from the nearest utility pole. These conduits need to be buried 30" below the surface to protect them from inadvertent damage, whereas (strangely) the main water supply line only needs to be 12" below grade. The water line, which was laid weeks ago, is the white PVC pipe hanging in the air in this photo. It will be packed in clean (rock-free) fill to protect it from punctures after the electrical conduits are backfilled.

Why four conduits? Two are for power lines, one is for a telephone line and the fourth is for cable/internet service. Most likely, we won't use the telephone line, but it will be good to have the conduit in place, just in case. What else is buried outside tin box?

utilities and services

Earlier this week, our photovoltaic (solar-electric) installer connected the wires for the p/v panels through the holes we'd carefully drilled through the steel trim at the top of the upper roof. These wires will be concealed beneath, and protected by, the final piece of trim that gets installed as a cap over the top edges of the roof's standing seams. Once the cap trim is in place, the roof will be finished.

solar power, installation details

Some detail photos of the solar panels, up close.

These are peel-and-stick, amorphous silicon, thin film panels that arrive rolled up with a plastic backer sheet. The installers washed the roof and made chalk lines to align the panels down the center of each roof panel, laid out the p/v panels one at a time, rolled them back up and peeled the backer off as they laid them down permanently. The whole process looked like they were installing giant bumper stickers.

solar power, continued

And just like that, the 40 photovoltaic panels were set in place today. Jordan, Jorge and the crew from Electron Solar set the p/v panels in pairs in between the standing seams. Each photovoltaic panel is 15.5 inches wide; they're designed to sit within the 16-inch spacing of standard standing seam metal roofing, but our panels are 42" wide, which allows us to mount two p/v panels side by side between the roof's seams.

solar power

Just when we thought we'd spend the next few days writing about the fantastic door and window installation at tin box, the crew from Electron Solar Energy arrived to install the flexible Uni-solar photovoltaic electrical panels we purchased from the Energy Store. Here's a photo of the first panel going up this morning.

progress

The shell of the house is nearing completion. We needed to have several exterior wall panels remade, and they are being installed this week. The windows and doors should start going in Monday, and some bathroom fixture might start going in Tuesday.

In the meantime, here are some progress photos of the house. The view of the house from the park gives you a sense of how the color and scale of the building work with the vegetation and topography. This week's rain made the park especially lush (note the thick carpet of resurrection ferns on the limbs of the live oak to the right). We're eager to see the effect of planting the low roofs of the house with flowering plants and vines, though that part of the project will have to wait for at least a year.

We're also psyched about the transparency of the living/dining room. In this photo, you can see through that wing of the house, into the courtyard. And the courtyard is looking good, too...

rethinking the grid

Spending the last few days of 2011 in Southern California has been a wonderful opportunity to see how far the state and its cities have progressed in their efforts to repair and protect a fragile ecology. Los Angeles still suffers from a layer of brown smog that hangs over the region, but the air here is much clearer than it was in the past. Policies aimed at reducing fossil fuel combustion are working - incentives for buying fuel-efficient cars have led to consumers and taxi fleets adopting hybrids in extraordinary numbers (Priuses are ubiquitous here) and programs meant to increase renewable energy generation have made this the leading state for rooftop photovoltaic installations. The best part of this progress is how visible it is.

unintended irony, parking meter edition

It's great to see how seriously California and its cities are working to increase the state's sustainably generated electricity capacity, and to establish an infrastructure for charging electric cars. But you still see stuff like this: p/v-equipped parking meters with their panels pointed east (huh?), shading each other. Oy.

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.

unintended irony, golf cart edition

photo by Adam Feinstein

Kudos to FIU for investing in golf carts with solar panels on the roof. Self-powering vehicles are an ingenious idea, especially in a sunny place like Miami. It will work more efficiently, though, when the drivers stop parking in the shade.

Our pursuit of more sustainable practices sometimes requires rethinking pretty good habits. Generally speaking, it's a good idea to park in the shade in Miami. Our black bicycle saddles reach osso-bucco-braising temperatures after just a minute in the sun, and the Prius gets hotter than an EasyBake oven if you leave it in the sunlight. It's probably hard to break these habits when you sit behind the wheel of an electric golf cart. And there are probably much bigger paradigms we need to change as we retool our civilization to prevent catastrophic climate change.

lighting

Consumer Reports has a great article on light bulbs, which includes some of the most extensive testing yet of light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs, a few weeks after a good comparative essay on bulbs in the New York Times. The good news is that commercially available LED bulbs are both reliably durable and pleasant to the eye. We suspect that, like compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs), LEDs are going to quickly become popular with consumers (except for a small segment of tin-foil hat types who associate LEDs with a government plot to take away their guns, bibles and/or medications), and that their price will drop markedly. We are planning to use LED replacement bulbs in conventional track lighting fixtures in the kitchen, and living and dining rooms. We still haven't settled on a strategy for lighting the dining table, but friend of tin box Cathy Bell reminds us of these compelling beauties from Plumen.

redefine performance

mpg or mph?

Monitoring performance seems to be an important aspect of sustainability. Measuring resource consumption helps promote conservation, both because we use less when we can monitor it, and because good performance data in existing buildings is essential to improving the design of future buildings.

But how do we measure performance?

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.

solar decathlon

Models of the 20 finalists in the Department of Energy's Solar Decathlon competition are on view online at Jetson Green, a pretty good blog about sustainable construction.

A promising sign for Florida is that two entries come from the Sunshine State. Our favorite is the FIU entry. Check out their blog, or, better yet, stop by the site (one the main campus, just of SW 8th Street) before the house relocates to Washington in late September.

lightning

Tropical Storm Emily dissipated over Hispaniola yesterday, and we’ll probably see nothing worse than extra rain this weekend (in contrast to the terrible flooding in Haiti and the Dominican Republic). But the drastic summer weather raises another question about tin box: how do we protect a steel building from lightning?

wind turbines

We'll post at greater length about the awesomeness of Danish wind turbines, about how they generate between a fifth and a quarter of the nation's electricity, about how Denmark became the world leader in wind turbine manufacturing, about how the island of Samsø used wind and biomass to become carbon negative for an investment of around 10,000 euros per resident... but for now, we just want to revel in how pretty they look since, unlike photovoltaics (the pandas of the sustainability world), they move:

 

Check out our other videos on the new tin box channel at YouTube.

choking on growth

Chinese cargo ships are everywhere. In Miami, we're used to seeing large container ships coming into port loaded with finished goods headed for American warehouses and big box stores. But in the Baltic, we saw a lot of bulk cargo ships carrying coal, scrap steel and other raw materials. This ship in Riga seemed to be taking on the mountains of Estonian coal piled on the docks (though we're not sure what the rail cars with the Russian writing were doing there). At the same time, we saw Chinese ships offloading coal at the Polish port of Gdynia. That's a whole lot of fossil fuels moving around there. Are we sure there isn't a healthier way to power our iPods?

Two articles in today's New York Times relate to this cycle of unsustainable energy generation.