garden, el niño edition

The massive El Niño event we're going through has produced enormous amounts of rain in Miami this winter. Normally this is our dry season, with lower humidity levels and very little  precipitation. The Winter 2015-16 season, however, has been very wet. Our cistern is full, which means all our drinking water needs are met, and our gardens are bursting with crops. The raised beds in front of our house are filled with greens...

Art Fallout 2013

On Saturday, October 5, we’re participating in Art Fallout 2013, an annual cultural event in Fort Lauderdale. We’ll present our ongoing thinking about the sustainable management of water resources in a talk, “Precipitating a Solution,” at Glavovic Studio. (If you’re not familiar with Margi Glavovic Nothard’s work, do yourself a favor and check out the remarkable housing, urban landscapes and cultural facilities she’s built.) We’ll be on a panel with John Sandell, a multifaceted architect who teaches at Florida Atlantic University. We’re going to talk about our experiences with tin box, and extrapolate outward to consider how cities and regions can approach water and waste more sustainably.

maintenance, water filter edition

In addition to the normal maintenance schedule for most houses - changing the batteries in the smoke detectors, cleaning out the gutters - tin box has a few other systems that need regular service. One of them is the group of filters we use to make rainwater potable. The three filters are mounted on a skid in the garage, close to the point where the supply line from the rainwater cistern enters the house. The pump (lower right) draws water from the cistern whenever we turn on a tap or appliance; the water passes through a string filter (blue tube, far right), an ultraviolet lamp (silver cylinder, center) and a charcoal filter (left). These three items need to be replaced annually.

certified

On Thursday, we received our Florida Water Star and Florida Friendly Landscape certifications from our rater, Lorna Bravo. We earned Florida Water Star's highest certification, Gold, for our water conservation measures, and the Florida Friendly Landscaping certification recognizes our sustainable landscape practices. Lorna, a brilliant sustainable construction consultant and master gardener, guided us through the certification processes, and James Jiler, the landscape designer about whom we've written before, is responsible for creating a native wildlife-sustaining habitat and food forest that does not require irrigation.

cistern

The rainwater cistern arrived today. We're using a 3,000-gallon polyethylene tank made by Norwesco, which was sourced by the company that designed and provided our rainwater filtration system, Rainwater Management Systems. The indoor components - a pump and three filters - have already been installed, and the next step is to connect the cistern to our gutters and to the filters.

The tank weighs 404 pounds empty (12 tons when full of water), so wrangling it around the side of the house took the efforts of three steel workers, two truck drivers and one surprisingly limber professor...

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?

on staying dry

The rain has been falling fairly steadily for a few hours in Miami, which made for a good day to check the interior of tin box for leaks. So far, it looks reassuringly dry inside. In fact, there's no sign of water inside the house, which means the roof, walls, windows, doors and vents are all working as intended. The strategies we've taken to ensure weather-tightness should help us avoid the considerable costs of repairs related to leaky roofs. These include:

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.

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.

water, too little

What if tap water was as expensive as gasoline? This was the premise of a report on WLRN radio this morning, and in the Miami Herald last week. Towns in South Florida face increasing difficulty drawing fresh water from the Biscayne Aquifer – the only source of drinking water for four and a half million of us in Dade, Broward and parts of Palm Beach Counties – which is suffering from increasing intrusion of salt water from the bay and ocean. (And it's far worse in Texas, where the drought is killing crops and helping the spread of wildfires.) The problem grows from a confluence of issues:

mold

Maybe it was Anthony Bourdain's lament for a life without stinky cheese, or maybe it's the sad thought of so many friends with flooded basements in the wake of Hurricane Irene, but we've been thinking about mold a lot these last few days. You might remember that the existing house on our site was filled with mold (and termites), and anyone visiting our temporary home passes a mold-covered buttress before reaching the front door (left). In short, we need to be vigilant in preventing mold growth at tin box.

Mold grows easily in South Florida. Our humid and warm atmosphere nurtures the stuff. Many buildings - like our house and a lot of buildings at FIU - provide a hospitable growing medium for mold by allowing rain water to run over their porous stucco surfaces, where it soaks into the material and promotes mold growth. This is especially acute on the north sides of buildings, out of direct sunlight.

rain, continued

We've posted a bit on rain and lightning already, but today's thunderstorm is just too good to pass up. Here's twenty seconds of a Miami summer, amplified a bit by the remnants of Tropical Depression Emily. Within twenty minutes, the deluge was over and the skies were calm again. The major design question is how to deal with these sudden, short-lived downpours, both from a practical standpoint (how do you handle that much water in such a brief span of time) and from an aesthetic vantage.

Bonus footage: water pouring out of the drainage scuppers, and bubbling up out of the second floor balcony drains, at the Sunset Place Mall in South Miami.

rain

It rains almost every day in the summer, the subtropical wet season. For thirty minutes or so, water pours from the sky in thick, intense waves, often accompanied by lightning and thunder displays like nothing we’ve ever seen. And then the skies clear, the brilliant sunlight returns, and it’s time to hunt rainbows. The weather is as alien as the flora and fauna, and just as compelling to us as designers.

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.

productive landscapes

The intoxicating, thick scent of rotting mangos in the back yard is triggering more thoughts about food in the domestic landscape. One question we’ve been grappling with at tin box is the extent to which we’ll use fruits, vegetables, herbs and spices in our mix of plant species.

A site visit with plumbers

Last week our green plumber, Ross Terrano attended an international meeting of Green Plumbers in Palm Beach. On Saturday, he brought Ronald Lunt of Green Plumbers Australia and Jon Cruz from Green Plumbers USA, Sacramento California, two of the attendees down to our site so they could see his work and the other technologies and strategies we are using here. We had a very interesting meeting, sharing our perspectives, sources and experience. Australia's history with drought, including the last one beginning in 2003, the worst on record has greatly influenced the mindset on water usage there. People have become very thrifty. The design of our Caroma toilets responded to the resulting water restrictions. But Australians go beyond that, Ronald told us that often people will take the wash water directly out of the washer to water trees on their property. Even with the recent flooding and easing of the drought conditions, citizens want to keep the water restrictions in place and continue their thrifty habits since drought is part of the environmental cycle there. This led us to a more general discussion on drought, floods and other natural disasters and the need to produce a large quantity of housing quickly, efficiently and economically. Certainly, we added to that the opportunity and responsibility to also make them sustainable and environmentally friendly. Ecosteel would be an appropriate building system since it can be quickly designed and delivered prefabricated to the site. Jon and Ronald suggested an insulation product from Hemp Technologies that would also be of great use. Its a carbon dioxide collector, a natural desiccant as it expands and contracts according to the humidity, mold resistant and is an ultra efficient and economical material to grow and process.

smells like... victory

Victory is ours!

Back in April, we got to attend a gala for Dream in Green, a Miami-area sustainability initiative, thanks in part to the generosity of Greg Hamra. The event featured a silent auction which included, among the usual vacation packages and whatnot, an awesome dual-flush toilet by Caroma. We just found out that team tin box prevailed. Actually, we're not sure anyone else bid on this beauty. No accounting for taste.

Caroma is an Australian company that has spent years developing plumbing fixtures that use water sparingly. Their local distributor, Alterna, is also a good source for other sustainable construction materials, like bamboo plywood and recycled paper countertops.

infrastructure and abundance

Rome has the world’s most picturesque plumbing. The constant flow of water from the city’s numerous fountains celebrates the surplus reaching the city from distant points through the region’s extraordinary system of aqueducts. Like religious offerings, these prolific fountains celebrate abundance by sacrificing a portion of the surplus publicly. These excessive displays are literally displays of excess.

the third shoe falls

Big plumbing stuff keeps arriving, unexpectedly. This time, it is the graywater filtration tank, which is made by Brac Systems, in Montréal. The tank wasn't supposed to get here until the garage was ready. But then again, the same was true of our rainwater filtration equipment. Our living room is getting crowded.

The item we needed from Brac, was the sump pump (see photo after the break).

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...