Patterns of Home: Refuge and Outlook (Pattern 8)

Living in a house w/ a loft is making me think about this “Design Pattern”…
LINK

Solar Pioneer: Dr. Harry Thomason

LINKS:

His “Solaris #1″ house is listed at wikipedia as one of the most important solar homes.

Long Interview

A list of his solar patents at builditsolar.com

Nice article from Solar Today 2003 about the Thomason trickle-collector building at the US/Canada border in Richford, VT

Cold Climate Heat Pumps

Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, and Daikin have been making cold-climate mini-split air-source heat pumps for years… check them out! Imagine cutting your electric heating bill in 3 or 4! The Fujitsu 9RLQ is the most efficient that I am aware of (if you have a superinsulated home w/ low heat needs and it’s big enough)

LINK

The Long Tail… Chillout Techno style…

So, this same exercise would work when listening to music on ANY radio station, but here’s what happens when I hear an especially cool track on SOMA.FM “Groove Salad” on my PC…

I type in something like this into google toolbar: site:amazon.com mp3 [artist] [title] and voila, I am suddenly at the page where I can buy the song for $0.99. Often the album is a few or many years old, not even in print any more, and (besides MP3) only available by 3rd party sellers for a LOT of money. So that artists/labels can sell old stuff via MP3 is pretty interesting.

I think there might be something similar right on their playlist page. And one could add a custom bookmarklet or add a custom “search engine” to the search engine toolbar in Firefox.

Anyway…

Prius Traction Control System (TSC) in snow…

The Prius TRAC system apparently cannot be turned off completely as can be with our Saab 9-5′s system.
In some conditions, the car stops completely! This has never happened to me while driving our Saab, but sometimes I need to turn it off for a moment to get unstuck on a slippery/snowy driveway.
LINK

A passive house / passivhaus in the USA

It’s in Illinois…
http://greenlineblog.com/smith-house-a-passive-house-in-illinois/

roof: 16 inch TJI * R-3.6 = R-57.6 exactly. And I think people often say it’s R-3.7 or R-3.8
wall: 12 inch TJI plus 2″ EPS rigid foam (R-12.5?) = approximately R-56 too.
slab: 14″ of EPS = 14 * 5 = R-70 roughly…

passivhaus in R-values we can understand in the USA

In the US we still use usually use miles, pounds, gallons and R-values instead of metric. Passivhaus standards are in metric and often say something like “low U-values, typically in the 0.10 to 0.15 W/(m².K) range”. OK, we know U = 1/R. And then we just need to convert from metric.

So… 1 K·m²/W ≈ 5.67446 ft²·°F·h/Btu.

So first 0.10 U is 10 R (in metric). Then convert to USA R-value is 10 * 5.67446 = 56.7.

So there you have it. Passivhaus should have R-56.7 on all 6-sides ideally.

This is a little diffferent than the recommended R-40 wall, R-60 roof, R-15 underslab that “Superinsulation”
experts like to have.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-value_(insulation)

Superinsulation Passivhaus Windows from Europe

Here’s how it’s done in Germany…
Windows from Germany

Oh, and insulated wood doors. Nice.

R40 house stayed at 60F during ice storm outages!

LINK

Can Cities Save the Planet?

Ummm…. yes…
Link