The Home Crowd

An environmentally conscious effort by two Michigan companies has taken old residential asphalt shingles, and given them new life as roads and parking lots.

(Press Photo/Lori Niedenfuer Cool)

Reduce, Recycle, Re-use is all great and I doubt you’d find anyone brave enough to slam anyone trying to save petroleum-based shingles from sitting in their landfill when they’d be better suited as new roads.  The largest factor for this niche in recycling, however, is based on economic factors.

From mlive.com,

For shingles, the key ingredient is petroleum. An average house of 2,000 square feet with two layers of roofing will have five tons of recyclable shingles. That equates to 10 barrels of new oil not needed in the asphalt mix

Wow, what’s the going rate on barrels of oil nowadays?  125-130$???  From five tons of shingles?  And according to mlive’s article, each of their trucks hauls off with 26 tons.  I’m not so good with math, but I’m glad to see someone (other than big oil) is seeing a positive side to this oil debacle.

If you’re interested in recycling construction materials from your home, I’d suggest looking up your state’s department of environmental quality, here in California, there’s the integrated waste management board with a searchable index of construction materials by county. - (CIWMB)

Sometimes, I sit here and think “Ya know, I’d spend more time under the bed if not for the fact that it’s so hard to read any sort of books or magazines under there…”

Actually this image and the rest of the images of various furniture backlit by LED lighting here at Lifehacker are kind of enticing. If nothing else but for the fact that tomorrow I could drop by target or any other various electronic store and pick up a LED rope light strand. I spotted this one at amazon for about 60 bucks for 50 feet.

The smaller projects shown in the article use much less and manage to ‘pimp’ their furniture with roughly 20 linear feet of LED rope lights.

“Why don’t more people put lights under their beds?” you ask?  Well, fires quite simply.  Trying to light up the underside of your bed with traditional incandescent lights can be quite hot and dangerous when near combustibles.  And if you’re hooking up Fluorescent tube lights under your bed or desk, then you’re up for the hall of fame of geekdom.  LED lights are not nearly as hot, but instead warm to the touch, and while these may resemble your Christmas light knot-ball in the garage, they’re actually more dependable and much more energy efficient.

Well, not necessarily stickers like your kids deface your home with, but large solar panels perfect for flat-roofing applications. The Lumeta Power-ply 380 by DRI companies has released such a sticker, and quite a bit one at that.

Oh, and the kicker, they’re installed in less time than you take for your lunch hour.

- From Wired,

While the panels are lighter and easier to install than traditional tilt-it systems, the downside is that by sticking flat on the roof, they lose the optimal angle to the sun. Torres says that costs his company’s panels about five percent of their power production. As is, the panels claim peak power generation of 380 watts (pdf) in a “typical installation.”

Their promotional video also shows two installers putting together a six-panel grid in 34 minutes. They place the solar mat, plug in and ta-da! The panels have a low-profile slope to prevent pooling of rainwater.

No word on pricing yet, but with the current push of solar power technology, it seems only natural that the prices, will also follow suit and come down in time. Those guys in the video set down a grid of 6 panels that seemed to plug in without any trouble. Perhaps, with the easy connectivity, you may be able to get a starter pack of a few panels, then later on buy additional panels. That might bring solar power within reach to many.

Of course, most of us don’t have flat roofs, but perhaps in the future they’ll develop products which fit in seamlessly with the standard asphalt shingle roof. Yeah, of course you still have several black rectangles on your roof, but it’s still an improvement of the current generation of blocky panels elevated off your roof by some sort of erector set.

(From Wired)

Who likes the idea of having their own solar power grid powering their home? Everyone. Yeah, not to be dependent on some faceless corporation, not to have the idea of some coal or nuclear plant slow-choking the planet? Oh yeah, sign me up!

Who likes the idea of dropping 50K into that solar power system? Not quite everyone. Maybe you catch some of the more affluent crowd, those socially conscious to energy-efficiency, and bona-fide treehuggers. I wouldn’t even necessarily count on Prius owners. Had I known that the early buyers of hybrid vehicles would be exempt from California carpool rules, I’d have been there, outside the dealership, waiting for the first truckload.

Many of those in urban and suburban areas who do have a solar grid complementing their power usage are still juiced into the power grid, thus able to sell-back unused energy when they’re off to work, or just using less power than they’re producing. The upside is that they’re able to draw from the power grid at night, or during the latest tropical/ice storm that’s blocked out the sun for a week.

photo credit: Mike Weston

What about storing that energy with batteries? Of course, there are applications available to those who wish or need the power they created from the sweat of their grid’s brow. That is, you sit inside with the A/C on, your grid sits on the roof sweating. These batteries and storage systems can often cost as much as your solar array, which is of course is the price point separating “I’m saving the planet” from “I’m doing my part”. News now from the daily green (article here) is that Sharp Corp., in conjunction with Daiwa House Industry Co. and Dai Nippon Printing are ramping up to make commercially available, a battery system for those seeking to go “off-the-grid”, or remain connected, yet more self-sufficient.

Which must come as great news to those in rural areas. Those without the benefit of a good community infrastructure, those with vacation cabins not wanting to listen to a nearby generator all day and night, or perhaps the creepy weirdos living in the wilderness living in their armaggedon shelters (I say that, in hope that they’re plenty far away from a wi-fi hotspot).

Whether or not your on board with solar power, the current energy crisis, and legislation currently in place and to come affects everyone, and will only be a bigger hot-button issue in years to come. Presently, here in California, the “Million solar roofs initiative”, Senate Bill #1 subsidizes consumer solar power purchases, and adds about 15$ annually to everyone’s power bill. This subsidy lasts until 2015, which hopefully by then, the cost of self-sufficiency will be within reach of more consumers.

Because after all, a power bill of a few hundred dollars vs. a personal energy system which costs more than the family SUV is a tough pill to swallow

(Battery article via The Daily Green)

Also, here’s the site for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy from the U.S. Dept. of Energy. There’s many great ideas here from small to large scale projects to help you be more efficient and save yourself a few bucks along the way.

In London, military-grade thermal imaging is currently being used to measure the heat loss in homes during a cold winter night. The thermal maps are then merged with traditional maps, and homes were given a color code, from red properties being the worst offenders of energy efficiency to blue properties which were more efficient.

(Interactive Haringey Heat-Loss Map)

Outside of comparing your heating bills to your neighbors who live in comparable homes, are there many useful tools to judge your home’s energy-efficiency? Seems like this would be a great wake-up call to the occupants of an inefficient home. Of course there are simple and inexpensive fixes such as weather-stripping and plugging the various leaks your home may have. And then there are major projects such as efficient door and window replacement and installing proper installation, however, they require a more robust budget. The intention of this such map however, is to “shame” the residents into undertaking home improvements.

-From the Times Online UK,

Making the information available to the public is intended to raise awareness of how much energy is being used needlessly, putting up bills and contributing to global warming.

It is hoped that homeowners with high wastage levels will be shamed into improving the property’s insulation.

Almost 60 per cent of a household’s heat is lost through uninsulated walls and lofts, according to the Energy Saving Trust (EST), costing the average home up to £380 each year.

Insulation is estimated to reduce each home’s carbon emissions by about two tonnes annually.

Hmm… Shame wouldn’t be the angle I would throw at the public. But saving money? There’s a global common denominator right there!

In London, of course, it’s common for heating to be the big issue, but here in the U.S., and most notably around summertime, cooling and the loss of conditioned air would be the big efficiency factor. I’m not sure the thermal imagine spy planes would work as the entire map might look more of a red blob, than any sort of distinguishing map.

However, maybe we can convince the good people from the Google fleet that have been photo-cataloging every street in the country to make a second pass with some sort of imaging photography that could point out our home’s trouble spots. Zero in on that window leak! Find a better weather seal for that entry door! Get the damn kids to quit leaving the refrigerator door open! Okay, that last one is a bit of a leap, but my father would’ve been the first to sign up for that.

For everyone who’s seen pictures of cargo ships and thought to themselves “Geez, I sure wish I could live in one of those shipping containers!”, well you’re in luck.  Developers are looking to build a seven-story condo project built from these containers in Salt Lake City.  “City Center Lofts” as it’s called, looks to take advantage of the sustainable qualities (i.e. recycling/re-use) of these used shipping containers which can cost 1000-3000 dollars each.

But “Lofts”, really?  We officially throw that word around too much.  When I see that giant steel shoebox with barn doors on one end, I don’t really think “Wow, that could be a great LOFT!”  ….. Maybe “Compartment”.  But then again, I guess we’re chunking at least 50K off each unit price when the project is called “City Center Compartments”.

I am however, intrigued by this idea.  The idea of using shipping containers as housing has been around for a long time, but hasn’t been much more than fixtures at travelling art installations.  Seeing this materialize may shape many views on sustainability.  The designer, Adam Kalkin, has built shipping container homes previously, but this project seems to have the largest scope of any of his listed works.

“Residential design using shipping containers. . .is still a novel approach anywhere in the country,” says Elizabeth Mitchell, director of the Utah chapter of the American Institute of Architects. “You’re re-using all the energy and raw materials that went into creating the shipping container rather than using new materials - it’s an element of sustainable design. But the architects who get into this are mostly intrigued, I think, by the aesthetic challenge of taking something industrial in appearance and transforming it into a place someone would want to call home.”

(From the Salt Lake Tribune via Grassroots Modern)

And here’s the link to the project page - City Center Lofts

Upsides     - Sustainability (Saving the world)/Being Hip, Trendy, and Modern

Downsides - You live in a storage container/The container is in Salt Lake City

And, you never know, it could spur a whole new surge in mobile homes..

photo credit: Spatial Mongrel