Description
Passive solar heating and passive cooling—approaches known as natural conditioning—provide comfort throughout the year by reducing, or eliminating, the need for fossil fuel. Yet while heat from sunlight and ventilation from breezes is free for the taking, few modern architects or builders really understand the principles involved.

Now Dan Chiras, author of the popular book “The Natural House,” brings those principles up to date for a new generation of solar enthusiasts.

In “The Solar House,” Chiras sets the record straight on the vast potential for passive heating and cooling. Acknowledging the good intentions of misguided solar designers in the past, he highlights certain egregious erros and shows how to avoid them. More importantly, Chiras explains in methodical detail how today’s home builders can succeed with solar designs.

Readers will learn:
- How to select a cost-effective, energy-efficient, and environmentally friendly backup heating system.
- how to preserve indoor air quality in an airtight, energy-efficient home.
- ways of employing green building materials in a naturally conditioned home.

The Solar House: Passive Heating and Cooling

This article came from: The Solar House: Passive Heating and Cooling at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.

We lived in Mexico for several years recently and we experienced a number of power outages. They usually lasted a few minutes or even a few hours, but occasionally  they went for more than 24 hours. So here are my tips:

1. If there is any room to spare in your refrigerator, keep it full by having plastic containers or glass jars of water in it. We keep all the beer that’s in the house in our fridge — it looks like we are ready for a party, but it’s just how we do it. Also, on the bottom shelf, the one just above the produce section, we keep a couple of squarish plastic containers filled with water. We do something similar in the freezing compartment of the refrigerator. This gives us extra time when outages occur, not to mention that it probably saves us a tiny bit on our power bills. Also, open the refrigerator as little as possible when the power is out. We’ve never lost any food to spoilage but do be aware of that risk.

2. Speaking of food and water, be sure you have some on hand. If your kitchen stove is electric, you might want to have a way to heat food that doesn’t rely on electricity, like a camp stove.

3. Depending on the weather when the power goes out, you may need to be able to keep warm or to stay cool. If you have a wood stove or fireplace, keep wood and matches on hand even if you aren’t regularly having fires. In cold weather, put on more layers of clothing, and in warm weather, wear less and keep cool by drinking more water or other beverages. Patting your face and arms with a damp washcloth is a surprisingly effective way to stay cool.

4. When the power is out, a battery-powered radio is handy to check on the news, provided you have batteries. That reminds me — have one or more flashlights with batteries. There are solar-powered ones too. Candles can be handy too.

5. Without electricity, a lot of what you ordinarily do can’t be done. You can’t use your television or the internet. It can get a little boring. If you have children, think of games and crafts that they can get involved in. Adults can enjoy this kind of thing too! I have a happy memory of roasting marshmallows over candles with my mom and sister during a hurricane when I was about ten.

These tips should help with the relatively ordinary, run-of-the mill power outages that can happen. Of course, having solar panels can help too. One Saturday night, we had friends over for dinner in the earthbag house we built in Colorado. We ate and talked for hours. Eventually one of the guests had to go to the bathroom. She came back into the kitchen and said that the power was out in the bathroom. Well, it turned out that the power had been out in most of the house and all over town for a couple of hours. We hadn’t even known it because the lights in our kitchen and living room were solar powered.

This article came from: When the Power Goes Out at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.

There is a real art to living in small homes and part of that is to be well organized. Here’s a good book on remodeling small spaces: Not So Big Remodeling: Tailoring Your Home for the Way You Really Live — Zana

Studio Living-Storage Ideas

By Michael Russell

A basic interior design concept for small studio apartments is to fit storage on the walls as far as possible in order to free floor space for general living. Wall systems ranging from pockets and adjustable shelves to peg-boards, brackets and butcher’s hooks can be fitted onto any available wall space using appropriate fixings. Vertical Wall-hung letter or magazine racks are practical and space-saving and can be fixed at any height, in any area of the room. For maximum interior design flexibility look for adjustable, wall-hung shelving units. The range of materials in which these systems are available in, or that can be fabricated from are almost limitless. Natural Maplewood to create that soft earth look or high-tech stainless steel or aluminium are just some of the choices to make your shelving decorative and practical at the same time.

When space is limited, modular stacking units provide a neat solution to storage problems. Whether you opt for the simple method of piling matching boxes, baskets, tins, or crates on top of each other, or invest in a customised unit to suit your interior design plan or space requirements, stacking systems provide one of the most efficient ways of fitting the maximum amount of storage into even the most restricted space. Plastic storage units are the most lightweight and least expensive in modular stacking or mobile trolley storage systems available on the market. Units can be added on as required. If your interior design scheme is more natural and homely, then wicker baskets are the ideal storage system to use.

Hanging wardrobes are just one of the wide and ingenious range of storage containers made from cotton or canvas. Many of these products are ideal for small-space living: they are inexpensive, adaptable in their use and they can be fitted into odd corners. Fabric wall pockets and hanging ’shelves’ are particularly useful for storing small items in an organised way. Some of the latest interior design ideas are made from canvas or cotton, full length, zippered wardrobes. Using a lightweight steel frame, canvas is fitted and zips on the sides to open and close your wardrobe.

For a more permanent storage facility built-in storage can be used. To be successful, built-in storage should merge unobtrusively into the structure of the interior. The first interior design task is to locate all unused spaces. If the room has high ceilings, consider constructing a false, suspended ceiling that will provide a large ‘attic’ space; in the same way, useful under-floor storage can be created by raising the floor level. False walls, lined with shelving and cupboards, can hold a vast amount of storage, especially if teamed with pullout fittings.

Remember, that ’stackability’ is the guiding principle when looking for storage containers. You may choose units in a style and finish appropriate to your interior design schemes, but space is still the number one determining factor. Salvaging sturdy, second-hand cabinets from offices and shops is an excellent way to cut costs. As far as possible use ‘dead’ and wasted space. Clutter in any home is always a problem even more so in studio living – a well thought out storage plan will go along way in making your small spaced studio environment a comfortable and pleasant existence.

Michael Russell

Your Independent guide to Interior Design

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Michael_Russell

http://EzineArticles.com/?Studio-Living-Storage-Ideas&id=416145

Here’s the book I mentioned at the top of the article:

This article came from: Storage Ideas for Small Dwellings at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.

Description

It’s easier than you think to clean your home in a nontoxic, environmentally responsible way! Conceptualized and designed by legendary publishing visionary Joost Elffers—the force behind such bestsellers as Play With Your Food and The 48 Laws of Power—this wonderful guide will help get your house shipshape without hurting the environment or your health. Inspirational cleaning guru Michael de Jong writes with humor and a Zen-like spirit as he presents five safe, all-natural products that take care of just about anything:

• Baking Soda,
• Borax,
• Lemon,
• Salt, and
• White Vinegar.

Each one gets a chapter featuring dozens of clever tips, while a handy alphabetized directory, organized by category, makes it easy to locate the information you need. With its graphically stunning and easy-to-use design, Clean helps you find your spic-and-span center.

Clean: The Humble Art of Zen-Cleansing

This article came from: Clean: The Humble Art of Zen-Cleansing at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.

Saving Water in the Bathroom

Keep a small bucket in the bathroom. When you start the water running for a shower, put the bucket underneath where the cold, clean water comes out. This water can be used for pets’ drinking water, for watering house plants, and for numerous uses out of doors.

Make that shower shorter. You can even turn off the water while you wash your hair, depending on how cold your bathroom is!

Use an energy efficient shower head.

Shower less often and if needed do sponge baths in between.

Flush the toilet less often, even in public restrooms.

Turn off the water while you are brushing your teeth. (A taxi driver in Guadalajara told me once that his young son learned this tip at school and passed it on to him.) This also applies to washing your hands while you are lathering up.

Saving Water in the Kitchen

When letting the water run to get hot before doing dishes, save this water in a container and use it as rinse water.

When washing dishes by hand, don’t let the water run while you are washing. Turn it off and on, or if you have a double sink you can rinse in one side.

Soak dirty pots and pans before washing them, for less scraping and water use, not to mention less grumbling.

Keep a jug of drinking water in the refrigerator. This saves your running the tap for the water to get colder.

General Water Saving Tips

Fix leaks as soon as you can, or get someone to fix them. It is amazing how much water can be lost from a leak.

Be a little less picky about how often you wash your clothes. Make sure they fail the smell test or have dirt on them before tossing them in the laundry basket.

These are just a few to get you started. I’ll do an article like this for the yard next spring. I didn’t get into gray water at all here, as reusing it is generally more complex than simply reducing the amount of clean water you use.

Readers, please share your favorite tips for in-the-house water savings.

This article came from: Save Water at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.

Now that many businesses have jumped on the green bandwagon, it is possible to get more ecological versions of food, clothing, vehicles, building materials, and other things. This is to the good. It’s also the case that a lot of the things being touted as green aren’t very. But leaving that point aside for now, the fact is that just buying green is nowhere near enough to keep our environment from being horribly polluted.

I’ve seen television shows where an existing house is made over to be more green, and this consists of things like replacing kitchen appliances and adding more insulation so the house requires less heat. I have never heard a moment of consideration about whether keeping the older refrigerator might be the more ecological choice. (The answer can be yes, in cases where it’s not a truly antique power hog. If you don’t use every square inch inside the fridge, put containers of water inside to help hold the cold by acting as thermal mass.)

Our society is based on the importance of buying things. For example, people want the economy to “grow” so the economic downturn will be over. It is so implicit in our culture that it’s very, very hard for the thinking to get beyond it. If the growth causes pollution somewhere, well, that’s a detail.

Gradually, this emphasis on buying is beginning to change. When I am in store now, looking for a particular item, I find I am more resistant to other impulse purchases than I used to be. I don’t just decide based on what I can afford, but also on what the planet can afford. I am not alone in this.

A major change in consciousness is daunting to contemplate. Is it going to happen? Dunno. What would it look like if it did? Dunno. But I have some clues, and they go back to the wisdom expressed in every religion and spiritual tradition: Love your neighbor as yourself. I take this to mean. Love the people everywhere in the world who are suffering from the environmental degradation caused by industrialism. Love our earth and our environment enough to live more simply.

This article came from: Buying Green Isn’t Enough at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.

I read this one because a friend of ours, Owen Geiger, has an article in it titled Low-cost Multipurpose Minibuilding Made with Earthbags. The article mentions that more could be found on their website, and here is the link to that article: http://www.motherearthnews.com/Do-It-Yourself/Earthbag-Building-Garden-Shed.aspx

But the whole  Mother Earth News website amazed and delighted me. It seems that all of the current issue is there, and in some cases, the articles are longer.

I highly recommend this site for browsing! Here are just a few of the things I read or skimmed:

• A query with a lot of replies: What Disposable or Single-use Products Have You Given Up?
  
• A list of the blogs on the site (which at present has a special offer of $10 for a year’s subscription to the print edition, if you pay with a credit card and sign up for automatic renewal — that’s a great deal but I have resisted so far, since I can read it online!)
• An article on urban homesteading called The harvest begins

Take a look, but not when you are in a big hurry to do something else!

This article came from: Good Ol’ Mother Earth News at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.

I pretty much missed the macmansioning of America.

Sure, I would see the big castles when driving around the US, but in the last couple of decades I’ve lived mainly in an old neighborhood of a city (Olympia, Washington), in an unusual small town in rural Colorado (Crestone, home of numerous spritual centers of all faiths), and in Mexico.

So I didn’t realize till reading this book the extent to which huge, un-sustainable homes with no ecological features were sprouting up. Now, as Wasik discusses, the mortgages, huge utility bills, high property taxes, and often long commutes that owners of these places must endure are taking their toll. Most Americans probably realize this more than I did in Mexico!

Can these homes be venues for simple green living? It is probably rare now, but there are things that can be done.  Many of them have yards that can have gardens. Their designer kitchens would probably lend themselves well to growing sprouts on the vast countertops. Even if zoning calls for single family living, I would imagine that quite a few people living in them will take in housemates or even quietly remodel to form duplexes.

Things like solar panels require more money and still have a relatively long payback period, so they may not be the best choices at present. But greater insulation, even just insulating curtains on a small section of the house which is heated more than the rest of the place, are quite possible.

If you live in a MacMansion, or know people who do, do you have ideas for how they can be greened?

And click on the image to find out more about the book:

This article came from: The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome, by John Wasik at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.

Our friend Owen Geiger has been designing small houses, Kelly has recently been putting some of the plans up on his ecological house plans website, and Owen’s plans have already begun to sell. Links are at the end of this article.

I still find myself slightly astonished that so many people are now “getting it” about the need to live more in harmony with the earth. Yes, I know it’s also about the economic crisis, but for whatever complex mix of reasons, it’s heartening to see people beginning to change. The increased interest in small and ecological house plans is part of this.

Owen has been working on his house plans for years and now has put over 80 of them online. We used to live with Owen, in our earthbag house, and I grinned when I saw various details of that house filtered through Owen’s mind on the spiral house design (link in the list below). He’s designed for earthbags and for strawbale, and the designs can be modified.

Here’s a bit from Owen’s earthbag house plans site where he talks about the value of small houses:

As far as house size, I’ve tried to return to the sizes prevalent 50-100 years ago, when an 800 sq. ft. bungalow was perfectly satisfactory. People didn’t feel deprived or poor in these houses. In fact, 800 sq. ft. is spacious in comparison to many houses around the world. Our current attitude of larger is better needs to change to meet the reality of dwindling resources, lack of affordable housing and global climate change. Not only are small houses less expensive to build, they’re also easier to clean, and have lower utility and maintenance costs.

You can continue reading his thoughts on the details page of his earthbag plans site. He’s also got a strawbale house plans site – he’s got a lot of strawbale background.

Many of the plans are up on my husband’s site dreamgreenhomes.com. To find all of Owen’s small house plans there, go to http://www.dreamgreenhomes.com/aboutus/profiles.htm
and scroll down to Owen’s profile.

While I was there, I snitched the code and here are Owen’s small house plans on that site now. (There likely will be more in the future.)

Barn-style House
Beachcomber
Chalet
Chonburi
Cozy Cottage
Craftsman House
Crow Design
Duplex
Earth Lodge
Earthbag Arc House
Earthbag Beach House
Earthbag Cabin
Earthbag Office
Earthbag Studio
Earth-bermed Natural House
English Earthbag Cottage
Enviro Earthbag Dome
Farmhouse
Green House
Attached Greenhouse
L-Shaped House
Modern House
Mountain Cottage
Native Spirit
Peace Dome
Shop with Office
Solar Ranch House
Solar Santa Fe
Spiral Earthbag House
Square House
Subterranean Survival Shelter
Summer Breeze
10 meter Earthbag Roundhouse
2-Story Bungalow
2-Story Earthbag Roundhouse
U-Shaped Earthbag House
Wilderness Cabin.

Almost makes me want to build another little house! Almost.

This article came from: Small Houses at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.

The Cheap-Ass Curmudgeon’s Guide to Dirt: Hand-Building with Adobe, Papercrete, Paper-Adobe, and More, by Michael Van Hall, is a delight.

This downloadable ebook will take you through the steps to make your own simple dirt structure. He doesn’t go into all the details of how to build a house, as he points out that you can find that information everywhere. (I will add you can find that sort of thing at our natural building bookstore.)

This 100-page ebook focuses on… as you might guess from the cover… dirt. With close to 100 photographs and numerous drawings, the book is a relatively quick and very enjoyable read. It will motivate you even if you already are excited about natural building. And it will give you enough information to pile up the dirt with his special method.

(One quibble: he says you can also do this approach with papercrete and other materials. Kelly and I used papercrete as the exterior covering on our earthbag house in Colorado, and we have several friends who built all-papercrete homes. Don’t do it just before the rains come or during the rainy season, as it needs to really really dry or there can be mould problems. If you want to use papercrete, do a lot more homework on it specifically.)

Okay, back to this ebook. After an upbeat introduction with some history, there is an illustrated section on the traditional way to make adobe bricks, with comments on how much work it it – both to make them and to carry them to the building site. Not to mention the patience required to wait for them to be dry enough to use.

Much better, says Michael, is his Self-Locking Pour-in-Place System (trademarked.) Much of the book describes how to do this, and it looks like a lot of fun. Okay, any play with dirt is still going to be a lot of work, but this sounds like fun work!

I specially enjoyed the chapter where he did everything wrong… at least by traditional standards.

Michael’s website is fun too – click here to see what else the cheap-ass curmudgeon has to say, download some chapters of his ebook at no cost, and buy it if you want to.

This article came from: The Cheap-Ass Curmudgeon’s Guide to Dirt (Building, That Is) at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.