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!

driving lessons

Last night, somewhere on I-75, the odometer on our 2007 Prius crossed the highly symbolic, yet utterly unimportant, 100,000 mile threshold. To mark the event, we’re listing the lessons learned from the car, and how they influenced the design of tin box...

infrastructure and inspiration

I passed through Madrid to change planes on the way to Milan, and found it striking that a number of passengers stopped to take photographs of the airport. I don’t blame them – it’s a beautiful airport, after all – but it occurred to me that I had never seen travelers take photos of any of my “home” airports in Miami, Philadelphia, Boston, or Newark. Why not?

LED lighting

One of the hardest pieces of the sustainability puzzle for us has been selecting good lighting for the house.  Compact fluorescent (CFL) bulbs are so common that it's easy to compare their visual quality and energy efficiency, but light-emitting diode (LED) lighting is still so novel that it's hard to find live displays to help us evaluate the different lighting options. It's particularly difficult to find lighting strips (as opposed to individual bulbs) installed as samples. So while everyone knows what a standard 60 watt incandescent bulb looks like, it's very hard to imagine how an 11 watt LED bulb performs, let alone a 5W/ft LED strip light.

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.

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, 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.

shade

The cheapest technology in the house is borrowing shade from existing trees. We deviated from the US Green Building Council's LEED standards when we included lots of glazing on walls that face east and west. LEED's concern is that the low sun in the morning and afternoon brings excessive heat into a building during the hot months. We recognized, however, that the existing trees in the park to the west would provide a lot of shade in the afternoon, while our east neighbor's trees would shade the house in the morning. The photo at left shows the living/dining room shaded by existing trees, even before we add the roof panels.

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?