Our new net zero strawbale article is published

“Net Zero, Naturally” strawbale article

Our newest article on high-performance strawbale building is out in this month’s Home Power magazine!

The article is all about our recent strawbale project that achieved Net Zero Energy Building certification through the Living Building Challenge. This home will be part of the USGBC’s Green Homes Tour on Oct 21, 2018.

Here’s a link to the article:  https://www.homepower.com/articles/home-efficiency/design-construction/net-zero-naturally

They do require a subscription to view the content but it’s only $15 per year and Home Power are doing a lot to promote high-performance natural building.

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video from the Excellence in Energy Leadership award 2018

We were honored to receive an Excellence in Energy Leadership award from SDG&E in recognition of our recent Net Zero strawbale project, the Fallgren Home. As part of the award, they made this short video that promotes the project (as well as SDG&E).

There is plenty wrong with our current energy system and it’s easy to find fault with the utility providers, so it was a nice counterpoint for SDG&E to help promote high-performance natural building. Click on the image to watch the video on YouTube

 

Trying to building your dream natural home? Make your Guest House your Best House

The idea of living in a high-performance, natural home has been calling to you but you…

cozy straw bale artist's studio
An adorable strawbale studio

… haven’t found build-able land where you want to live.

… can’t cover the cost of buying land and building a house.

… don’t want the hassle and expense of selling and moving.

… can’t afford to live in one house while you build another.

… have concerns about the sustainability of developing land.

So what can you do?

If you own a conventional home but have been dreaming of a beautiful, non-toxic, super-insulated natural home, here’s a strategy we’d like you to consider: make your Guest House Your Best House!

Stay right where you are, have us design and build you an amazing natural guest house in your backyard while you live comfortably in your current home, then move into it! You can then legally rent out the old house for extra income or keep it as a guest space or future caregiver’s quarters.

Floor plan for a 1200 sq ft strawbale home, © Simple Construct 2018

You may have looked into building a guest house before and were discouraged by the limitations. But many of those regulations (and fees that went with them) were recently revised. The new state-wide Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) regulations that went into effect here in California in 2017 override local ordinances and allow most homeowners to build a detached “granny flat” ADU of up to 1,200 sq feet no matter how small the main house is. ADUs used to be limited to 50% of the size of the main house, so if you had an 800 sq ft house, the largest ADU you could have built was 400 sq ft. Not anymore! As long as you can meet the setbacks and other requirements, you can build an ADU as large as 1,200 sq ft in most jurisdictions. That’s not tiny,* that’s a 2 bedroom house with closets and enough room for a separate kitchen, dining table, and living room.

So if you own a home and like where you live but not what you live in, contact us to explore whether a high-performance natural ADU is right for your situation.

~ Rebecca & Mike, owners, Simple Construct Naturally Healthy Homes

* If you are interested in Tiny Houses, one aspect of this legislation that hasn’t gotten as much attention is the new minimum size allowed. Previous regulations governing the minimum size of rooms meant that the smallest you could legally build a house was between 400-600 sq ft, depending on interpretation. This new legislation drops that to a minimum of 150 sq ft for an ADU. That’s a Tiny House! A legal, rentable Tiny House.

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Can construction really be “regenerative”?

“The term regenerative development, on the other hand, carries within it a clear aim of regenerating the health and vitality of the nested, scale-linking systems we participate in. At a basic level regeneration also communicates not to use resources that cannot be regenerated, nor to use any resources faster than they can be regenerated.” Daniel Christian Wahl, “Beyond Sustainability? — We are living in the Century of Regeneration.”

At its most basic, construction requires taking a lot of stuff from somewhere and using it to build. It is an inherently destructive and consumptive process: no stuff = no building.

Because of this, it is has been hard to imagine truly regenerative construction: building in a way that not only does less harm to our ecosystems and environment but is actually a positive force, helping to repair some of the damage already done.

But now that we have started to explore the potential for strawbale and other biomass building materials to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and safely lock it up, the term ‘regenerative’ seems like less of a stretch. According to preliminary research done by the California Straw Building Association, a bale of straw locks up approximately 60 times as much carbon as was emitted making that bale. As long as that bale is used in a way that it will not break down — in a wall, for example — the carbon is safely stored. It’s a net positive way to sequester carbon that has the convenient side-effect of making beautiful, energy-efficient homes.

In addition to sequestering carbon above ground in the form of the visible plant, carbon is also ferried down into the soil by the roots. Research is just starting to scratch the surface of the potential for soil to sequester carbon. The next step is to question what role agriculture can play in helping (or harming) that process. Transitioning to bales made with perennial plants grown in a polyculture could increase the amount of carbon stored in the soil. Currently, it would be difficult — if not impossible– to find enough bales made this way to build a house, but it is an admirable goal.

Everyone wants to live in a strawbale house! A butterfly emerges from its chrysalis.

The green building movement started by focusing on making buildings use less energy (operational energy), then only recently moved into exploring building with materials that are made with less energy (embodied energy which translates into embodied carbon), and is now just starting to look at building with materials that absorb more carbon than they created (carbon sequestration). From this new viewpoint, a mindfully-designed, carefully-placed, skillfully-built bio-based building can truly earn the label “regenerative.”

 

 

 

More info:

“Beyond Sustainability? — We are living in the Century of Regeneration”   by Daniel Christian Wahl

“The New Carbon Architecture: Building to Cool the Planet,” by Bruce King and friends

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Embodied Carbon – the next frontier of sustainable building

Do you remember when few people understood what Net Zero meant? It wasn’t that long ago, but it’s certainly not the case anymore. Though there’s still some dispute about exactly how to define it, most people understand that a Net Zero building generates as much energy as it uses and a Net Positive building is one that generates more energy than it uses.

These metrics focus on the energy a building uses once it is built – known as operational energy – and have helped us decrease this energy use dramatically.

So now that we know how to make buildings that need much less operational energy, what’s next? How do we push the boundaries of sustainable building and save more energy?

How about considering the energy that goes into making the products that are used to build a building? This is known as embodied energy or embodied carbon, often referred to as the carbon footprint.

For an entertaining yet in-depth discussion of embodied carbon in construction and why it matters, I highly recommend “The New Carbon Architecture” by Bruce King and friends.

* Spoiler alert: buildings made of straw and wood have much lower embodied carbon and can even act as carbon sinks, making them Carbon Positive… or is that Carbon Negative…? I guess it will be a few years before we get these new terms sorted out!

 

 

Why don’t we use conventional stucco on our buildings?

Ever wondered why we don’t use conventional stucco on our buildings? Because modern Portland-based stucco is not vapor-permeable and it traps moisture. Natural plasters, such as clay and lime, are much more permeable.

Typical permeances of various plaster are:
6 mil poly vapor retarder .006” = <1 US perm
Cement-Sand stucco 1.5” = 1 US perm
Cement-Lime-Sand stucco 1.5” = 4-9 US perms
Lime-Sand plaster 2.0” = 9 US perms
Clay plaster 1.5” = 20 US perms!

For more, check out this article about the Stucco-Pocalypse!

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Law about choosing materials with smaller carbon footprints excludes cement

You would hope that one of the materials responsible for the emission of huge amounts of carbon dioxide (Portland cement) would be included in a law about choosing materials with smaller carbon footprints. Nope.

Portland cement, the major binding agent in concrete, is one of the single largest emitters of greenhouse gases. But thanks to lobbying by industry groups, you won’t find concrete in California’s new carbon legislation, the Buy Clean California Act.

Read more here

 

Fallgren Strawbale Home receives Net Zero Energy certification through Living Building Challenge

On Jan 3, 2018, the Fallgren Home in Campo, CA, became the second building in Southern California to be awarded “Net Zero Energy Building” status through the Living Building Challenge. This third-party certification is based on actual performance data and verifies that the building uses less energy than it produces annually, as well as meets the program’s criteria for sensitive development, beauty, and education.

California has set a goal that all new residential buildings will be Zero Energy by 2020. This house is one example of how we can meet that goal using carbon-sequestering, non-toxic materials that are better for people and the environment.

Super-insulation, thoughtful design and careful construction mean that this home stays a comfortable temperature year round in this extreme climate while using little energy. The smaller than the average photovoltaic solar array (4.1 kW) provides almost twice as much electricity as this home uses even though every system in the home is electric (no gas or propane).

“When it was cold this winter, the house stayed at about 70° without any heat. When it got hot this summer, the house stayed at about 74° without air conditioning. It’s a very comfortable house.” – Brian Fallgren, Homeowner

This home is one of only 27 in the world to achieve this certification through the International Living Future Institute, a nonprofit working to build an ecologically-minded, restorative world for all people. Using principles of social and environmental justice, ILFI seeks to counter climate change by pushing for an urban environment free of fossil fuels. ILFI runs the Living Building Challenge, which is the world’s most rigorous green building standard, as well as the Net Zero Energy Building Certification (now Zero Energy), the Living Product Challenge, and the Living Community Challenge. The ILFI NZEB certification draws from the Living Building Challenge and is a highly rigorous and regarded standard in its own right.

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Why are houses in San Diego so unaffordable?

On average in San Diego, it will cost about $500k for an existing house with land or about $200k for land plus $300k for a new house to be built on it: either way it’s a pretty steep climb for many of us.

Wondering why you can’t find an affordable home to buy in San Diego? This article explains many of the forces at play. There aren’t a lot of easy answers. I’m glad they touch on ADUs / Granny Flats as one part of the solution.