Category Archives: Efficiency
House update – Jan 2012
So Teresa and I have been shopping for a truck. There is one that I want to buy and I think we’re ready to do so but she needs a bit more convincing because of the width of the beast. We’ve also made a few design tweaks in the past few weeks so I wanted to post a a shot of the new design. In the new design (if you’ve been following along) you’ll see that we got a bit wider. In our effort to be more efficient we took a page from Dan Phillip’s book and created a design that will fit the code without us needing to double up headers, cut short our other materials and so on.
By making the structure wider we’ve been able to rearrange some things and can actually put in a second bedroom on the main floor. This will also allow us to slide the washer and dryer over closer to our bedroom and to vent the dryer out beyond the master bathroom or to keep that moist warm air inside in the winter.
One other major change that we’ve made to the design is that we’re not going to berm the north wall (the top of the picture). To do so we’d need to use a large amount of concrete and insulation on that side of the building. It’ll be more cost effective and environmentally friendly to not berm and build a porch to meet the sidewalk. Then we can also build wattle fencing under the porch, add a door, and store things like gardening equipment under the porch. The porch and the greenhouse (for the back of the house) are not included in the above image but they are very much a part of the plan so don’t worry – we didn’t forget them!
Overall – aside from adjustments that an engineer or architect might make to ensure code compliance this is basically the design we want to go with! There is room for us to have a kid (or two), room for office space in the loft, and the yard space will give us enough room to grow (with luck) 80% or more of our own food. I was even reading today about how to grow wheat and other grain crops in small spaces and am confident that we could be mostly self-sufficient in just a few years.
One minor change that we might make (to this design) is to do a combined sink/toilet that would look something like this:
This would save on space in the second bathroom and allow us to put a small closet in that bedroom. The water from the sink would be used to flush the toilet and any excess would flow down the toilet drain. The tank would be accessible from behind the sink but when not needed you could put all the stuff that women tend to fill a sink-top with right on top of it (just keep the lid closed if you plan to do so).
As always be sure to let us know what you think of the plans or if you’re interested in helping out and as always thanks for reading!
Cob House Number Crunching
This will be the first in an ongoing series of posts about the cost and material volume of our planned cob house. As our plans are fluid you might find a lot that these numbers don’t match up down but we’ll explain what they mean each time so that should help anyone who is using the info we are putting together for their own project or to try to figure out how to do a similar project.
Right now the ideas center around a mostly round structure with a reciprocal roof sitting on two city lots near the crest of a south-facing hill. The picture on the left shows some of the design idea which is two floor, open, and will feature passive solar designs.
Architects & Structural Engineers & Inspectors! OH MY!
First things first – let’s talk about people that we’re sure to encounter (since we’re building in the city). We have yet to hire an architect or structural engineer which is almost certainly going to have to happen. For those that are unfamiliar with what an architect will do or those that think all they do is draw pictures of houses or building you should know they also provide a list of materials and estimated costs of those materials (if they don’t you should probably not be paying them what you’re paying them) in addition to reviewing and/or reworking your plans. Architects are (usually) really cool people and you should not look at them (or at engineers or inspectors) as evil people that you need to pay a toll to. They should be viewed as collaborators – find someone you like, respect, and want to work with. We’re looking for just that right now.
Structural engineers are people who love to test stuff and look at data. Don’t think of them as a hurdle – think of them as not only making sure what you’re doing is safe but as providing you with solid information that will inform your process. Again – find someone who you like and that is fun to work with. An engaged structural engineer should be excited to test your materials, not standoffish, and they should be interested in the process you’re undertaking. We’re looking forward to finding such people.
You can’t choose your inspectors (well you can by choosing where you build) but for us – since we really really want to stay in Pittsburgh and to build here we kind of can’t. Though we can make sure they are at least comfortable with what we plan to do and we can build consensus and excitement in the community (which we are doing). This way even if the inspectors are not hot on the idea we will have a large support group that we can turn to in order to help influence their final decisions.
Cob by Numbers
So we have begun to think that including pumice is the way to go. Pittsburgh is not known for it’s wealth of volcanic material so we sadly will need to look outside of the area to find pumice and will have to pay for it’s transportation but it will make the walls stronger, lighter, and provide a higher R value as the pumice is more insulating. Since we’ve yet to order any materials we don’t know what the final mix will be but we aim to start with 30% clay, 30% pumice, and 40% sand Then we’ll test different amounts of straw to find a good mix of compressive strength and tensile strength. The straw decreases compressive strength but adds tensile strength.
We estimate that we will need approx 120 cubic yards of material for the external walls not including the urbaite that we plan to build the stem walls out of. Urbanite is recycled unreinforced concrete. Click on the link for more info.
What does 120 cubic yards look like?
An American football field is 100 yards plus 10 yards for each goal area – totaling 120 yards (flat). Set two fields next to each other (include sideline room) and stack 3 feet of material on top of them or stack 6 feet a material on top of one of them plus their sidelines and you’ve got the amount of raw material we’re going to need to use to build the exterior walls of our home.
Estimated costs of Sand & Pumice
We assume we’ll buy that much sand and pumice and dig up that much clay even though we’ll be adding significant volumes of straw to the mix since we’ll also be building interior walls out of cob. Sand costs anywhere from $25 to $40 a ton. With 120 cubic yards as our estimated starting figure and 30% of that being sand we’ll calculate that out to about 64.8 tons of sand which should cost between $1,500 and $2,600. Pumice is lighter so the tonnage should be less but we have not done the conversion or found prices yet. Even if it is equal to or slightly greater – 70% of our (non-straw) cost should not exceed $6000.
Estimated Cost of Clay & Straw
Since the clay will be harvested onsite (with the help of a small front loader) or if need be can be bought at a cost of less than $12 per ton. We plan to harvest a lot of the clay, if not all, onsite but needing as much as or more than 36 cubic yards could result in needing to buy some. A 36 cubic yard hole that is 6 feet deep must be 54 feet by 54 feet long. If it’s 9 feet deep we would need to dig a hole that is 27 feet wide by 54 feet long. 9 feet deep is deep. That’s the deep end of a swimming pool.
The good news is that clay is significantly denser than sand the tonnage should be much less though we have yet to do an accurate conversion or find a supplier to know the cost. Assuming the 36 cubic yards of clay is moderately dry there should be 8 1/3rd cubic yards per ton so we’d need less than 5 tons. Even paying $30/ton and buying the full supply that is only $150. I’ve seen bulk clay sold for less than $12 per ton but not in the US. It is literally dirt cheap so finding someone who sells it is difficult (since the prices are so low).
Straw is cheap too – it’s a waste product of farming. Straw (not to be confused with hay) has zero nutritional value and is similar in organic makeup to wood. It costs anywhere from $0 to $10 or even $15 per bale. We won’t know how many bales we’ll need until we test our mix but assuming 300 bales at $5 each – that’s $1,500
This brings our total estimated material cost (not including roofing) to $7,650. We plan to buy the land from the city and we hope that it will not cost more than $5,000. All told that will bring the cost to somewhere under $15,000. We plan to buy used windows, doors, and as many fixtures and things as possible. Our goal is to spend less than another $10,000 on those items and the installation of electric, gas, and water. All told (if we add a cistern and some other materials) we should be able to build the house for under $30k and hope to control costs and bring the total closer to $18,000 but that might be difficult. With both floors we plan to have approx 1,600 square feet of space. That would means our cost should fall between $11.25 and 18.75 per square foot. Even on the high end that is less than a 1/4 of the cost of a conventional home build in the US in 2011.
If you’d like more information or are interested in helping drop me a line on the contact form or leave a comment. We’re dedicated to helping anyone in the Pittsburgh area to build their own home this way that helps us to build ours!
Underground Living
I’m a big admirer of interesting architecture. As a photographer I love to photograph buildings and as a designer I really appreciate well designed spaces. I’m also a fairly practical person so I like clean useful design. Pittsburgh, like most cities in the eastern US is full of different kinds of architecture from classic and somewhat boring homes to modern very odd looking abodes. I’ve looked at a lot of them both inside and out and have a good idea of what I like and what I don’t.
When it comes to owning my own place my wife and I have looked in the past and even went as far as putting a deposit down on a place a few years ago that didn’t pass inspection so for now we are still renting while we pay off our credit cards and save up a bit. Lots of things have stopped us from buying our own home it seemed that no matter where we’ve looked we’ve never found a place that really had everything we want. Where we’ve rented we’ve always had issues with noise, temperature changes, energy costs, allergens, and most recently hellish neighbors. These neighbors have gotten us thinking and talking about what we want in a house.
Underground & In-ground Homes
While talking about these things I stumbled upon a few really cool designs like this “Hobbit House” in Wales and this Swiss Mountain getaway. Both of them are greener than the average house because they are either earth bermed or are built mostly underground. This lowers energy costs, cuts down on noise, and has loads of other benefits like lower risk of damage from natural disasters and lower allergy issues. There are a few different ways to build underground and while we’d love to do so in as cheap and as low impact as we can we recognize the need to offset costs enough to make it affordable and we’re in favor of longevity which means building with concrete and not wood. If we do use wood we plan to use as little chemically treated lumber as it’s treated with toxins such as arsenic.
We’ve found a few places that do monolithic poured concrete homes – that is reinforced concrete shells that are pored once, not pieced together with joints that could leak or that are not set at different times. With that in mind we’ve began planning and looking for possible places to build. We’d love to stay in the city of Pittsburgh but we also want to find a south-facing hillside that we can build into. I won’t say where we’ve found for fear that someone else will buy it in the mean time but I will share some of our design ideas with you.
Passive Solar
We want to find a south-facing hillside because we want to maximize the sunlight that will strike the face of the house that is not in ground. Our design calls for 3 sides and the top being underground as you can see from the picture on the left (click on the picture for a larger view).
The design calls for the house to sit back from the road (at the end of an alleyway in this design) will house a two-car garage, will have space for 3 bedrooms and will have a terraced lawns on the top of the house and behind (though also above). These lawns will not just be wasted on grass. Though not pictured here there will be vertical containers for gardening. The area behind the house will be higher than the area on the top by 5 to 6 feet and will be even with the sidewalk on the street behind it. This area will house trees that root deep and not wide. We’d like to use fruit or nut trees if possible but that will depend on the root system of the tree. To the east of the house we’ll only have 3 1/2 to 6 feet of space. 3 feet of it will be taken up with an exterior staircase that will lead to the terraces and will be gated to the sidewalk above. The space we’re looking at would be about 50 feet deep and 100 feet along the front.
As you can see in the photo there is another staircase near our property. If you’re familiar with Pittsburgh you know that these are actually considered streets and they were built for the mill workers to travel between the mills along the river and their homes at the top of or along the hills. These staircases often cover ground that is too steep to build a road on so we most likely couldn’t build a driveway down from the main street to the alley that we are looking to front the property along. That’s fine with us as it will allow us to live in the city but have some seclusion.
Planning to live underground
The people that we’ve talked to about our idea don’t always “get it”. My business partner Dave keeps talking about my wish to live in a hobbit house but honestly if you look at the example of the “hobbit house”above you’ll see that my design and our goals are very different. While we hope to build a house that will not scar the land as badly as a traditional home can we simply can’t build a cob house or earthen walled home that will have any real longevity. Plus Pittsburgh is termite and carpenter bee territory whereas Wales is termite free so you can build with untreated woods there. Here there would be stability issues and we’d need to rebuild in 10-20 years when we were in our 50s. While building a house ourselves in our 30s sounds fun it might not be so much fun when we’re 20 years older.
The hobbit house also doesn’t have much of an earth-covered roof. It’s a living roof but it’s only thinly covered. While the roof design is reciprocal and very low-impact we’d rather have a monolithic poured concrete shell which will not only keep out water and be resistant to insects and other pests but will also last hundreds of years (if not longer).
What do you think?
Would you like to live underground and save 70-80% of energy costs? Would you like to have more outdoor space (on the top of your home)? Would you like to live in the city but have much less noise? Would you like to live in the city and green it at the same time? Reducing the carbon foot-print of you, your home, your neighborhood, and your city?
Leave a comment and let us know what you think. Check back in the future for more info and to keep an eye on our progress. If you’d like to see us progress faster by donating to our project please use the contact form to ask how!
QR Codes
QR Codes are hot!
I’ve been watching my Google Analytics and I’ve seen a huge spike in traffic from folks searching for information on QR codes. I’m happy to see so many people interested in using QR codes in graphic design applications, on business cards, and on products (like they are doing on plants at Home Depot now). The reason that QR codes are so cool is because we can store so much information in those links plus we can save so much paper as an added bonus.
So with so much interest in QR codes I thought I’d post some links to sites where you can create your own QR codes:
- QR Stuff – this is the site that I use to create codes – it’s a great site with lots of options.
- QR Code Generator – I’ve used this site one or twice, no real opinion either way on it.
- Kerem Erkan’s Generator – I’ve never used this but the reviews are really good.
- Good Survey’s Generator – Good site with free tracking and analytics built-in.
- BeQrious – interesting product that give you some options to control the look of the QR code.
- Paperlinks – Allows you to create 1 free QR code but they are much more customizable and can be branded which may make paying for the extras worth it.
So there you have it -there are a billion more QR code generating sites out there if you Google them. For the most part you probably will get everything you need out of one of the generators listed above but if you have a special need you can find many more QR code generators out there on the web.
Square Up Credit Card Payments
Tell us how you really feel Don
I’ve told people over at Facebook about Square but I’ve got to post a blog about it because it’s just freaking awesome. Before you get into the bulk of the post please note that I am not being paid to post this. I’ve got to say it up front because I’ve read through what I wrote and some of it sounds like it was written by a paid spokesperson. I promise you that I genuinely LOVE this idea and their execution and that I am not in any way being compensated for writing this.
What is Square
If you have not heard about it Square is a credit card payment acceptance system. There are a few other systems out there – Intuit (the people who make Turbo Tax and Quicken) have a similar app and doggle for your smart phone but I’ve not tried it. Mostly I didn’t try it because at first it only worked with iPhones and I’m an Android user.
I keep seeing them advertise their version but I’m honestly not even interested in checking other options (beyond looking at the price points) because I really like Square so much. That’s not to say that I’m not a fan of Intuit. I use a lot of their products and like them a lot. I know there are a few more out there too and I’m sure PayPal will likely get into the game soon but as long as the price is right I’ll stick with Square and since they are already cheaper than PayPal I’m saying good bye to them.
Where did you hear about Square?
So I still have not seen any ads for Square but I heard a report about it on NPR which prompted me to look into it and I keep hearing about it via word-of-mouth. To me both of those are much better than an annoying TV ad any day. When I heard the report on NPR and then found out that it was cheaper than PayPal I signed up.
It was really easy, they do the micro-deposits to verify your checking account and they send you a free card reader that plugs into your headphone jack on the phone. That means that it works with any smart-phone that can have the app installed on it. You can accept cards without the reader too (it just costs a bit more) which is cool because when getting ready for a shoot I am usually focused on packing gear for the shoot, not on remembering a hardware plug-in for my phone.
Why is Square different?
I still get a lot of checks so accepting credit cards was something that I’ve always been a bit hesitant of (due to cost and volume). Most of the time companies charge you a monthly fee on top of taking a cut on each transaction. Square doesn’t do that. It was made with small businesses in mind – photographers, landscapers, and so on (per the report on NPR) so they don’t charge a monthly fee since the people it’s made for may only accept one credit card payment a month. I’m in that boat and since it still costs me money per transaction I’d prefer to keep taking checks as much as possible. That being said when a customer would rather pay by card I don’t need to send them to my website to use PayPal or to write down all of their info and then double shred it when I’m done.
Why wait until today to tell everyone?
I decided to say something today because I got this email from them that made me like them even more than I already do:
Hi WDO,
Starting today, Square has dropped the 15¢ fixed fee on payments you accept using your Square card reader. Now you’ll simply pay 2.75% per transaction, no matter what you sell.
Why are we simplifying our pricing? Learn more.
How freaking cool are these people! They’re making their service cheaper! That is just awesome.
Check them out and sign up to accept credit cards on your smart phone cheaper than any other service that I know of right: here.
Search optimization for your mail box
Efficiency Fetish
It’s no secret that I’m a bit of a geek but what you might not know about me is that I have a serious efficiency fetish. That doesn’t sound right exactly but what I mean is I really need things to work efficiently. I can’t stand extra steps and time wasting. When a client or a friend asks me to email them something that I’ve already sent I find it very annoying. It’s especially bothersome when they want something I sent them within the last few days – stop that.
Did you even try to find it?
Now I understand that a lot of people are very busy and that they get a ton of email and I can even look past the fact that some folks maintain somewhat disorganized inboxes. That being said sometime I want to scream, “did you even seriously try to look for it?!?!”
What I’m really asking is did they bother to use the search function in their mail client? Did you even know that Microsoft Outlook has a search function? It does as does every free web-based email service.
Why don’t people search?
It may be because on the rare occasion that one does run a search most of the time they don’t find what they are looking for. Why is this?
I assume that it is because most people don’t create email messages that are meant to be searched for. That is that they are not formatted to be easily retrieved by a search engine. Clearly Google’s search technology is not the reason that one can’t find a message sent to their gmail account. The reason they can’t find it probably has more to do with the fact that the sender wrote a poor subject and the content is likely to be equally poor in it’s ability to be searched.
How can we fix this?
The Wrong Way:
I think the wrong way is to outsource the problem. There is an entire industry that has grown up around the idea of creating easier to search email archives. That is an industry that is trying to devise a more accurate search but the problem is so rarely the search algorithms or even the search parameters.
My opposition to this goes back to my hatred of inefficiency. Here we have people capitalizing on a problem rather than solving it. I’m in no way opposed to people making money – I’m opposed to people doing so without providing a truly valuable service.
My Observations
The problem, as I see it, is that we send email willy-nilly without so much as a thought about it being found later. Email, like their younger cousin the tweet, are put out and forgot about, in abundance. In fact more and more of them are being put out without any thought.
For several years now there has been a small dedicated, (some would say crazy), group of people that have pushed for some sort of formal guide to email writing. They want people to think about what they are writing and to only send emails that are necessary. Some go as far as to say – unless you’d send it in a postal letter don’t send it in an email. I’m not behind that idea, in fact I prefer email to phone calls, (for business), because you have a written record of the conversation. It also saves me time because if I’m on the phone I’ve got to write down what they are saying anyhow.
Teach Our Children
Here is a thought – when I was in school we were taught how to properly format and write business letters and the difference between them and less formal letters. Why not teach kids how to write a proper email? I’m sure that in some more progressive school districts this has already begun but I’m just as sure that they are not teaching searchability. If we learned how to write searchable emails we’ll end up with more thoughtful, better structured, and more worthwhile communications. The best part is we’ll also be able to search through our inbox or archive and find what we are looking for.
What about the old people?
When one is trained to work at an office they are asked if they know MS Office and how to use a multi-line phone why not ask if they know how to write a searchable email? If they don’t train them. If you’ve got to train someone to use your system why not make searchable email part of your system?
SEO and SEOM
Subject Matters
Searchable mail is just as simple as the searchable web – create an informative subject that matches the content. If your content is time specific, say it’s about an event, place the date of the event in the subject. A good example of this is when I book a photo job I send an email with the date of the job in the subject.
The Content
What you put in the body should always be informative too. As a gmail user I have conversation threads, that is emails that are back and forth replies about the same subject. Google groups these for me and that’s one of the functions I love the most about gmail. Even when email clients don’t do this they usually append previous messages to the body of an email (gmail does both) which means you have a continual record with the latest additions on the top. The benefit of this is that by adding content you’re creating more stuff that can be searched which is great because you end up with a more searchable file most of the time. The downside is that if someone changes the subject but not the thread you end up with conflicting data and less searchability.
So when writing an email we should all be aware that if we’re changing the subject we should create a new email to address that subject.
Ambiguity is ugly
Just because you anticipate a long thread with lots of back and forth, there is still no excuse for ambiguity in emails. If you just physically talked to a coworker about a subject that doesn’t mean that you should ever send an email that doesn’t address what you were talking about or that refers to discussion without putting into the body of the email what was said. Is that a pain in the ass? Sure but what happens in 3 months or 4 years when you don’t remember what was said and are trying to piece together what an email means? All of a sudden your minor pain in the ass is a huge problem either because of a he-said-she-said situation of because your memory has failed and you don’t remember if it your coworker told you it was the red wire that needs cut or the black one.
Give Searchability a Try
So now that you are aware of the issue will you try to make your emails more searchable? I’m sure that if you do you’ll find you get fewer requests for you to resend the same email you sent the day before. Give it a try, spread the word, and let’s make the world a better, (more searchable), place.
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