thrifty green - priscilla short

[...]... learned about south-facing windows, sun angles, and insulation early on, and the term R-value entered my vocabulary before the age of ten R-Value The R-value of a substance measures its thermal resistance To state it differently, in the building industry, a material's R-value measures how efficient an insulator it is When dreaming of a second home in Taos, I researched the most far-out ideas I could... course with bamboo or rebar According to the New Mexico state building code, you must build a post-and-beam structure to bear the weight of the roof (because the bales tend to settle) and use straw bales only as infill But they make dandy wall material and deep-set windowsills characteristic of southwestern-style architecture, and you can finish them however you like My house does not have central heating,... build a greenhouse so the fruits and vegetables can thrive in a rabbit-proof setting It will be a passive solar structure with water catchment to provide a replenishable water source and enough sun for tropical plants My idea of heaven is being able to grow my own avocados There will be a garage to house my car during snow-storms, perhaps with extra sleeping quarters on top This may have a south-facing... houses in Mexico, where he spent two years building low-cost housing and learning while doing so, and where he met his wife, Judit Eventually he and Judit landed in Taos to start a family They live in an off-grid, straw bale house outside town that Charlie built himself using techniques the state of New Mexico considers “experimental,” such as load-bearing straw bale walls When I asked if he could use... foundation and floor material Joaquin used several cost-saving methods such as this when designing the house Since I didn't require a basement, I could have a slab foundation, which could easily be stained an attractive color and used as the floor During the summer, when the sun barely penetrated the south-facing windows, the concrete floor stayed bliss-fully cool under my bare feet In the depths of winter,... about because we had a baby We do orders of magnitude more laundry these days than I ever did living solo off the grid We also use disposable diapers, a decision we made after much conscience-wrenching back-and-forthing The decisions are all connected and sometimes contradictory, although we like to think that we conserve more than the average American household On the one hand, we use more water by... still subject to supply-and-demand laws and may wind up diminished to the point of annihilation When I refer to resources in this book, I am talking about all of these— renewable, nonrenewable, clean (e.g., sunshine), and dirty (e.g., coal) They are all necessary to our way of life and are thus all precious 2 Heat Don't fight forces, use them —R Buckminster Fuller ONE FRIGID JANUARY SHORTLY AFTER building... my attitude again There was no way I was going to match my off-grid ecological footprint when living in a conventional house, so I decided to conserve where I reasonably could to balance out the more wasteful aspects of my life on-grid I also decided the conservation habits I learned in Taos could be painlessly applied with decent results on-grid To start, I take advantage of solar gain for free heat... hundreds of feet for water I chose water catchment because it cost less, and a cheap streak runs in my family Water catchment is simple: my water supply is caught on the roof and drained off into a three-thousand-gallon plastic cistern for storage and future use My house has a slightly angled aluminum composite roof that drains into gutters that attach to a PVC pipe leading underground to the cistern It is... material's R-value measures how efficient an insulator it is When dreaming of a second home in Taos, I researched the most far-out ideas I could find: straw bale construction, passive solar design, off-the-grid living, and selfsufficient renewable resources using a photovoltaic system and water catchment The concepts were new and exciting, the perfect antidote to the bland sameness that characterized . of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Short, Priscilla, 196 9- Thrifty green : ease up on energy, food, water, trash, transit, stuff and everybody wins / Priscilla Short. p. cm. Includes. advice, Thrifty Green represents the next step in sustainable thinking—and it couldn't come at a better time.” —Vanessa Farquharson, author of Sleeping Naked Is Green “The motivating voice of Thrifty.