Fantasy home design

[lotsofplants]

As many of you (e.g. anyone who has spent more than 5 minutes with me in the last couple years) know, I really want a house. With a yard. Unfortunately, I live in a place where the housing market laughs at people who want house, yard, and short commute for under $750,000.

A misunderstanding in a completely unrelated conversation provoked the idea that I was considering building my own house (that is, with me doing the hammering and digging and such things.) As crazy/desperate people sometimes do, my imagination latched onto this and suggested that I do own a tent...it will be summer soon, so living in a tent would be okay...I could use the bike commuter showers at work...I could cook with my camp stove...I'm capable of doing most of the framing/wiring and possibly plumbing myself in the evenings after work...THAT COULD WORK!!!

Okay, really it couldn't. But I was thinking that if I did design and build my own house, I would like to include a number of resource-conserving measures, particularly considering the expected increases in cost for electricity, water, and heating/cooling needs due to global warming.

So I have a starter list, purely as an intellectual exercise. I am interested in comments, additions, and suggestions, since I know some of you are also into this sort of thing. These can include both retro-fit possibilities and options which would have to be built into the house.

• basic things like efficient appliances, on-demand water heater, programmable thermostat are assumed


• heated floors - I'm not sure how efficient they are, per se, but I like the idea of not having cold toes.


• green roof - reduces heating costs, reduces urban heat island effect, reduces impervious surface, possible source of some home-grown food or just pretty flowers (depending on planting type and accessibility)


• gray-water recycling system - reduces additional water needs for irrigation for yard/roof. It might be possible to have an initial filter to reuse fairly clean gray-water for additional in-home uses, but I'm not sure how feasible this really is.


• windows:
  ---insulated/double-pane windows - reduce heating/cooling costs
  ---lots of windows, particularly in high-use rooms - reduce day-time lighting needs
  ---orienting windows and window awnings to permit passive heating during winter - not sure if this is possible with the double-pane above


• trees! - shade in summer = reduced cooling costs. Fruits/nuts = extra food. If I install squirrel traps, anyway. No, I am not planning to eat the squirrels. Though I suppose I could...


• house-fan - my Dad discovered these in the south and installed one in the desert house I grew up in. A powerful fan in the ceiling which pulls air in through living space windows and exhausts into the attic crawl-space, forcing that (hot) air out through the vents. Can reduce a 10 degree difference between internal and external temperature to zero in five minutes. Amazingly nice when the house has heated up over a summer day. May not work well in a large heat-island.


• geographic orientation - aligning the structure to either encourage or avoid passive solar heating, depending on climate. I suspect that around here, encourage is a better bet. Particularly since I seem to be constantly slightly cold except for about 4 months in the summer.


• solar panels or passive solar water heating system - this may not be compatible with a green roof, and I've heard conflicting reports on how cost-effective solar panels really are, but either might reduce electrical costs


• Exercise bike wired to a generator - mostly because I'm a dork. Winter exercise not in the rain! Feeding power back into the grid! Fun design projects!


• other???

Yeah, you can tell I'm a botanist. Suggestions welcome.

Comments

[beaq.livejournal.com]

Composting toity.

A river and a moat and a tower and trees inside with hummingbirds and oops that's my house.

[neuro42.livejournal.com]

Yes, it can (http://www.hud.gov/offices/hsg/sfh/203k/203kabou.cfm) work.

[jinasphinx.livejournal.com]

Some friends of mine have been building a yurt out on Lopez island. Apparently there are some you can build with foundations and plumbing and good insulation, which makes them pretty decent for life in the northwest.

[neuro42.livejournal.com]

Google finds at least twenty (http://xrl.us/vohq) places within walking distance of your work for <$600k. A few of them are miscategorized condos but most aren't. You will have no trouble at all getting a loan and affording the payments. Just do it!

[beaq.livejournal.com]

Conservatory! To keep the toucans in and the squirrels out.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

A lot of places don't allow graywater reuse these days, although nothing's stopping you making a system that can later easily be reconfigured for graywater. But you probably won't get a permit with anything obviously intended for diversion.

Solar water heating is much more cost-effective than photovoltaics, unfortunately, and also unfortunately neither is particularly great unless your area has tax breaks/credits. (Many many places do.)

Whole-house fans only work as well as you can get the heat out of the attic. I put in a whole-house fan and it did very little because the attic space was 30-50F higher than the temp inside the house (no I'm not joking: I saw temps in excess of 130F up there on a regular basis.) It was fairly easy to put in a thermostat-controlled attic vent. That, coupled with the house fan, lowered the midsummer house temp by about 10F. The attic *should* be well-vented. But along with that goes serious heat loss out the whole-house fan during the winter. The one I have contains insulated doors on the top, that open when I turn the fan on.

I have double-pane throughout. The amount of heat that comes through (both winter and summer) is amazing. Definitely need shades in the summer: better yet, sunshades, like sails, that hook beneath the gutters and go down to the ground.

On-demand water heaters are problematic. They're *very* expensive to purchase, and use up a stunning amount of power while they're running. Granted, that's not often, but if you have to get new service and replace your main breaker panel to get them the 120 amps they often need, that gets pretty complicated and expensive. (The permit dudes won't let you skate with standard 200-amp house service and just promise to not use your clothes dryer or oven while the water heater's running.)

I'm still thinking about heated floors. The scary thing is when something springs a leak. They might go very well with solar-heated water, but when you want the heat, is the time of year where there's not so much sunlight. We need thermal batteries that last for six months.

Double-pane windows were the biggest and best improvement I made to the house, but also by far the most expensive. Really stunningly huge amounts of attic insulation were about 1/100 the price and also made a huge difference. I'm more worried about heat rejection than cold, so I put multilayer high-IR-reflective coating across my entire attic, and that helped immensely. What I'd like to do is put up IR-reflective material on movable frames, so in the summer they'd be perpendicular to the sun and in winter, parallel. Ditto fans tuned to indoor/outdoor temp differentials so they'd automatically act to do what I wanted -- cool the house in summer, warm in winter.

Lots, lots more thoughts on this. I'd love to talk to you about this more at some point.

[loree.livejournal.com]

My mother seriously considered earth berm building when she designed the house we built. She ultimately decided against it, because she couldn't afford a structural engineer. But that, plus your green roof, plus some solartube skylights for additional natural light, equals awesome.

P.S. - I think the previously-suggested-elsewhere idea of you and beaq sharing that house would also equals awesome.