Great product for you fashionistas looking to make a couture statement about the environment. Love the product, love the story, love the idea: noonsolar
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From the category archives:
Sustainable Living
I checked my inverter about midday today and saw that the solar PVC panels were generating 2067 volts. Not too shabby for the Sunset District of San Francisco (if you are reading this from Minnesota and do not know, the Sunset district is infamous for being a foggy mess in the summer, a detail not wholly grounded in reality) I am guessing the panels will produce at least 15 kilowatt hours today, so my eco pride is flowing. How apropos that this weekend is in fact Pride Weekend in the city.
I did visit the Pacific Coast Builders Conference in downtown San Francisco last week. PCBC is the premier trade show of conventional builders on the west coast, complete with vendors hawking their wares at a modern and far more “civilized” closed air bazaar, workshops, keynotes, little plastic badges and a crew of dancers from the gold club handing out coupons. I guess the recession is hitting everyone.
The floor was grim to say the last, it looked like half the number of sellers from last year, and for every regular guy like me walking around there seemed to be 20 people with listless eyes staring out from their respective booths. Whirlpool was jumping, they have Martin Yan every year doing cooking demos, but even he only had about 20 or so bodies when I passed by. The dye is looking a bit orange in his hair, they should have pinched better lighting from one of the LED booths nearby.
Toto had a new to me marketing push called “Totology” they are using to push their water saving line of fixtures, toilets and the like. Props to them, I bought 3 new Aquia Dual flushes this week for some bathrooms I am doing. Lots of the vendors were pushing their Sustainable Credentials with FSC labels, I like that. I met a guy from the Sustainable Forrestry Initiative. Rob Worthington, who was spinning his group’s angle as being a more local/North American oriented type of FSC group. They were originally an industry sponsored group, though he claims they have spun off to be 100% independent. Frankly I do not believe that, any industry group that claims to be “independent” instantly strikes me as bullshit, but I am going to keep my eye on them and see what I see, who knows, maybe they really are trying to do the right thing and balance our lust for wood with responsible forest management.
In general I thought most people were green-washing their products as opposed to really giving a crap about the environment and sustainable building. This is no west coast green to be sure, but even green-washing is to a degree progress. It is just that we need more.
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I was reading the paper the other day about home pools, a household icon of the 50’s that still plagues neighborhoods today. Don’t get me wrong, I like to swim, and lounging by the pool, partaking in the occasional ogle, isn’t the worst way to spend a hot afternoon. No, I am talking more about the home pool, the chemical filled holes in the backyard that are used not nearly as much as people thought they might, like a nice pair of Manolo shoes or an Armani suit.
There are 958,000 public and private pools in the state of California. If a tiny pool uses 30,000 gallons to fill, that is at least 285,000,000,000 gallons of water at any given moment, and that is a low number since many many pools are bigger than thirty thousand gallons. How many millions of gallons of chemicals to keep that water “clean”? How many of those pools are left to fester and become breeding grounds for mosquitoes? Now in some places, where it is oppressively hot I can see why you might want one – but wanting isn’t a good enough reason when talking about sustainable living. The environmental costs for private pools are huge. Pools no longer add to a home’s value like they may have 30 + years ago. With so many other options, like beautiful new public pools, the home pool just doesn’t make sense for sustainable builders. How do you justify the costs in terms of water use and pollution? I just do not see it.
And on to fireplaces. Another fixture of the modern home, who doesn’t love a nice fireplace? Well, me for one. Honestly, ask yourself when was the last time you actually used the thing? I think people like the idea of a fireplace far more than the actual fireplace itself. Maybe its the primal nature of the thing, maybe it reminds us of some distant past when we needed a fireplace to cook and keep us warm, maybe its nostalgia…
But hey, it is an item whose time has past. Given the efficiencies available in modern HVAC systems, coupled with the really excellent insulation options now available, fireplaces are just very last century. I am not going to even go down the whole “Burning things is bad” argument – rather I am going to just talk about the space itself. If you are doing a remodel, ask yourself if you need that space? Oftentimes the fireplace dictates how a room flows, restricts how you arrange your furniture, how you use a room, and for what? The one or two times a year you might take a match to the palace, if even that much? I find fireplaces to be a waste of space. They unbalance a living room, dictate focal points that don’t need to be there and limit your flexibility, all of which runs counterproductive to the most efficient use of a space, which is one of the keys to sustainable living. So if your doing a remodel, here is a radical idea, ask yourself if you really need a fireplace, does it really add value to the home, or are you better off without it? The planet is, of that I am certain.
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Interesting juxtaposition between 2 different concepts of large scale developments – massive mono tonal sprawling tracks, or brand new small towns. I am a city dweller, so neither appeals to me personally, but if I were looking for new construction and a sense of community now defined by strip malls and cars, the whole new urbanism thing doesn’t seem so bad.
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One of our readers, Kumiko, messaged me last night with a great tip from the Vancouver Convention Centre, an extremely cool new sustainable commercial building in the Northlands. It reminds me a bit of the new California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.
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