Too much information! This is one of many photos my surgeon gave me after my operation. I mean - yikes.

This whole interface with the medical/industrial complex has really made me think about health and the environment.  Going to the hospital is not a very green activity.  What is the carbon footprint of all these large buildings and tests.  Treatment involves countless one-time-only disposable products.  It your need them, you don’t get too picky at the moment your are there, but why do we need so much “care”?

According to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, health care is the largest industry in the American economy.  Shouldn’t that make us a really healthy country?  Apparently not. My most recent reading on this topic, Forks over Knives: The Plant-based Way to Health, most Americans are sick an inevitably on their way to the hospital.  This book is a companion to the film of the same name.  It’s an excellent introduction to the way food affects our health.

The book states that in the U.S.:

• One person is killed by heart disease every minute.
• 1,500 people die from cancer every day.
• The Centers for Disease Control estimate 7 out of 10 deaths are from chronic diseases.

And chronic diseases are on the rise.  Between 1996 and 2005, the number of Americans with three or more chronic diseases increased by 86 percent, and in the past decade the incidence of diabetes has grown 90 percent.

Sometimes we have to go to the hospital and take advantage of the miracles of modern medicine.  I am very grateful for the technology that has saved me from a more dire diagnosis down the road.

I understand this is a baconator combo with what appears to be a pretzel salad. (photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/erratik/5118142369/

Most of our hospital trips are for conditions that we can control. Look at photos and films from about the time of World War 2 and before.  How much thinner everyone was then!    We can buck the trend to sedentary existence and sickening, processed food.

Just imagine a country full of people with the vigor that comes from a fit body AND the aforementioned “miracles of modern medicine”!  We understand a lot more about nutrition and biology than we did just decades ago.  If we apply this knowledge to our daily lives and make healthy choices, we will be vastly better for it — and so will the environment.

I’m sure you can think of at least a dozen ways of the top of your head in which being fit would lower your carbon footprint – improve your experience of life and make for a more sustainable human population on the planet.  It’s win-win.

Having a brush with a serious health threat has inspired me to redouble my efforts to be as vital as I can be, and I hope my experience will give you the opportunity to re-evaluate your daily patterns.  Small changes can have significant impact on your life and those around you.

Here is a simple graphic from Harvard School of Public Health that covers everything we need to maximize our health and minimize our time in hospitals.

Is there some aspect of your life that you know you ought to change for better health, but you haven’t gotten around to it?  Start today!  None of us know how much time we have.  How much of your life do you want to spend less vital than you could be?

Please comment and share what’s holding you back and what you can do about it.

In our new house, we intend to maximize our use of solar energy with both a comprehensive passive solar design and an array of four solar hot water panels installed in the back yard.  A couple of months ago we migrated away from a deep sand bed design under the house, even though that would be one possible way to store every BTU of solar energy collected, (see Denise’s post Why We Are Not Using a Sand Bed to Store Thermal Heat )   because such a  system is not easy to control. We are now learning that this lack of fine-tuned heating control in radiant floor heat will still be problematic with the 2- and 4-inch thick concrete slabs we will have in our new house.

Comfortably and efficiently capturing the heat of the sun within four walls takes careful planning. (photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/soloflight/3474350801/)

In our Wisconsin winters it’s not cost effective to use solar energy to do the entire job of heating a house.  I supposed you could design for the depths of winter using a huge array of collectors and a massive storage tank, but what would you do with all that heat the rest of the year?  Like most installed systems, we are going to design for the shoulder seasons and supplement (in our case with propane) as needed.

With the goal of making the best use of our solar collectors, we now have a revised plan which has brought us to a new choice between two fundamentally different approaches to solar-based hydronic heating systems.

It can be tricky to make the most of your solar panels.

1. a slow response system that  provides relatively even heat 24/7.
2. a rapid response system that allows you to dial back the temperature when you are not using certain rooms.

Heat that is provided only through the slab will be a slow response system.  That means that you will be heating rooms when you don’t need to.  If you want your bathroom to be warm while you use it in the morning – no can do.  You will have to chose between a cool room while you take your morning  shower or an unnecessarily-warm room for many hours a day.

These are NOT the radiators you struggled with in your first apartment.

We are opting for rapid response, wall-mounted, low-mass  radiant wall panels in rooms where heating needs are intermittent.  (See the Select line of Myson radiators.)   These will be powered by a propane boiler rather than the sun and will primarily be used on cloudy days in areas of the house the wood stove won’t heat effectively.

We’ll put all of the solar heat into the concrete slabs, but won’t supplement the slabs with any propane at all.

Yes, the low mass radiators will be fueled by non-renewable propane, but even with the slab-only heating option, propane would typically supplement solar to keep the floors warm when the sun isn’t shining. We expect our rapid-response radiators will sip propane moment by moment and room by room, rather than gulping propane to continually heat the entire slab.

Each radiator will have a simple dial control and will provide heat within ten minutes of turning them on.  Our plan is to walk into the room, turn on the light, turn on the radiator.  When we leave -  turn off the radiator and turn off the lights.  It will be a visceral reminder of our use of non-renewable energy, and will give us the opportunity to minimize the minutes of propane usage.

Yes, this tank is ugly -- as it ought to be.

We got the idea for high efficiency radiators from project engineer Andy DeRocher at Full Spectrum Solar,  who is designing our solar hot water system. We like this approach better than the relatively constant warm temperatures that would inevitably be chosen if the slab were our only heat source – temperatures that would exceed what is really necessary in the parts of the house we are not using.

It seems intuitively right to be able to manage our non-renewable energy use closely.  To have the tangible reminder through our fingertips when we are burning propane, and the satisfaction of stopping that use whenever and wherever we can.  We will still be soaking up every last BTU from the sun into our concrete floors and other thermal storage (more on those later), but we won’t be wasting propane to heat empty rooms.

Because our world runs on business, Clean Tech is looking for those businesses where creativity is being applied to the standard business model with an eye to addressing urgent energy, environmental and economic challenges we are facing.  The Clean Tech Open works to select and support businesses that are trying to make a difference as well as a profit.

I suspect there is a certain amount of hot air and hoopla in any organization such as this, but it is good to see corporations joining together to promote environmental awareness.  They hold a competition every year since since 2006 and provide mentoring, business training and other services to growing green businesses.

Anything that gives green business a leg up sounds good to me.

Whole Treesplaced first in the green building category “for a business model that incentivizes proper and profitable forest management.”  That’s a mouthful that basically means using whole tree timbers culled from the woods that create both a green building and a healthier woodlot in the process.

whole Tree house, Tussen Tak, under construction

According to World Architecture News.com  Roald Gundersen has “developed a new use for managed forest thinnings as an affordable, renewable building material for agricultural, residential and commercial applications. For the past 16 years, Roald has been empirically testing the feasibility of using whole tree technology to construct beautiful, strong, economical and extremely green buildings.”

When asked what is the biggest thing an architect can do to stabilize the environment, Roald said, “We should be designing buildings which produce more renewable energy than they consume, recycle their own wastes, and sequester more CO2 than they produce. They should also enhance the local community, economy and environment in their production and operation. That’s a tall order. We know that biologically active buildings, like the solar greenhouses we build, and whole tree structures offer some real solutions to these challenges.

Interior of Kara Woods, a Whole Tree house.

“Whole trees require less than a 10% the energy of milling and 2% that of recycled steel to produce and transport. Our whole tree buildings sequester over ten metric ton of CO2 for every hundred square meters of building (more than what four Americans produce in a year).

“If you look at a project’s resulting forest management stimulated by the building, the long-term effects could be twenty or even thirty tons of CO2 per ten square meters. If you displace the use of imported steel and/or concrete that number could double again. Our reliance on industrial-age materials relies heavily on material and energy mining from around the globe making it vulnerable to fluctuating global commodity prices, and all the political, social and environmental problems mining brings.

Roald Gundersen

“As with food, by localizing and using highly abundant and renewable materials for the primary stuff of our buildings we can overdesign the structures, create high-mass solar passive interiors requiring little heating or cooling while sequestering billions of tons of CO2. We invest in local jobs in forest gardening and whole tree bio-facturing and construction. Our projects recycle 70-80% of project dollars back into local paychecks, which is nearly twice the industry standard.”

It’s not too hard to see how Whole Trees snagged first place in its category at the Cleantech Open last November.

My dad laying a simple, but amazingly lasting foundation for his first house -that is still occupied, though now in the middle, rather than the edge of Monticello IL.

His father and uncle helped him, and they did every bit of the work themselves.

That's my grandpa with the pipe. The smell of his cheap, cherry tobacco smoke is blended into all my childhood memories of his farm.

Doug and I are not building our new home by ourselves.  We are working with many different specialists: architects, cement shapers, timber framers, carpenters, straw-balers, plasterers, stone masons, excavationists, electricians, plumbers, people who sell wood burning stoves, and solar heating systems, people who etch concrete and make cabinets and millers.

Many of these people are willing to let us work with them as enthusiastic assistants.  That’s what feels right to us.  We will hopefully end up in a house that, while we didn’t do everything ourselves, we will understand every step and have a hand in as many of the building processes as possible.

We started the project with some elm that the timberframer who built the barn left for us, but it wasn't enough.

This fall and winter, our major job has been completing the floor in the loft of the barn so that we can move most of the things that have made their home on the barn floor up and out of the way.  The barn floor will become the timber framers’ workshop.  Our builder wants to start shaping timber frames this January.

Flooring the loft, which looked reasonably simple before starting, turned out to be a complex and labor intensive project, (see my post Salvaging Old timbers for a New Barn Floor

We finished securing the last batch of 2-inch thick planks into place on New Year’s Eve day.

The next step was to get a railing up.  I don’t want anyone to tumble from our newly completed loft to the concrete below.  My imagination is too vivid for my own good.  All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty ….

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall....

Originally we were planning to make the railing out of some interesting saplings we have been collecting, but that would have taken a lot of time – and time is in short supply at the moment.  So we settled for a more conventional  railing design.

We treated the fresh pine with a linseed oil and minteral spirits solution, using up some old cans from our paint supplies. That made it feel less raw than all the weathered wood around it.

We were able to get pine “2×4”s for the railing from the Ridgeway Lumber Company, in the little town of 660 souls a mile north of our land.  It isn’t locally sourced wood, like the wood in the house will be, but we did support a local business that is run by very friendly and helpful people.

How much does all this stuff weigh? I'll soon find out.

I wish I could end this with a photo of our clean, and empty barn floor, but it doesn’t exist yet.

Our next task is to pick a major fight with gravity, and lug all the stuff that has accumulated on the main floor up to the new loft for the duration of the building project.

Shaping the timber frame can then begin!

It was so exciting to walk among the timbers in late December with our architect and builder and decide which forked timbers will be used where in the house.  (See my post Turning Trees into Unmilled Timbers. ) I’m going to be following my favorite trees all the way through the process.

But the word is spreading, and staw bale buildings are becoming a more common sight around the world.  What to take a little tour?

JAPAN
Learn about a straw bale building has been incorporated into the Slow Living movement in Japan at this blog, then check out the blog of Kyle Holzhueter who works as a straw bale builder and translator in Japan.  He has a PhD in Bioresource Sciences from Nihon University where he researched the hygrothermal environment of straw bale walls in Japan

Photo courtesy of David Fortin

KENYA 

Learn how David Fortin, architecture professor at Montana state University, and his student Michael Spencer researched solutions to a housing shortage in Kenya for three years.  This past summer, they worked on building straw bale structures in the east-African country.

“Straw-bale construction in Kenya is sustainable and makes economic and sociologic sense,” Spencer said. “There is already a long waiting list of people interested in straw-bale structures.”

ENGLAND

Straw bale building really seems to be taking off in England, and a lot of them look like something out of a fairy tale.  But not all of them..

Here is an interesting design by Brian Waite, an engineer who is focused on low cost, low energy building with a minimal carbon foot print and a lot of style.

University of Bath project.

Here is house with an ultra modern look built by researchers from the BRE Centre for Innovative Construction materials at the Univeristy of Bath built of prefabricated straw and hemp panels.

This straw bale building is part of a research project in collaboration with Modcell and several other industrial partners to develop commercial methods of adapting renewable building materials  for homes of the future.

AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND

Check out Ausbale, a website that promotes the art and science of straw bale building.  They have a wonderful collection of photos that show the breadth of styles and basic beauty that building with straw bale can create.

CHINA

Straw bales of waste rice straw are being used in northern China to build houses and public buildings where there is a desperate need for adequate housing.  Evidently straw bale works wonderfully there.  It’s earth quake country, and the straw bale structures  have withstood quake damage while providing great insulation.  Win win!

WASHINGTON D.C.  (Doesn’t it seem like a foreign country sometimes?)

Check out an interesting video about a demo straw bale house that was built in our capital.

Built for the eath quakes of Argentina

ARGENTINA

Learn about a straw bale house in South America.  This house was built of straw to address the extremely cold winters and hot summers.  Straw was the cheapest way to get the insulation needed.  It’s also earth quake country.  In a recent quake, a little plaster cracked.

SIBERIA   Here is a report about straw bale building in Siberia where the inexpensive material with super insulating qualities is perfect for a place with long, cold winters like the Altai mountains in Siberia.

I just learned about the Bioneers, and realized that is what I have been trying to be for many years.

Wagons, ho! (photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lara68/3762977930/ )

My grandparents were my pioneer role models.   In middle age, a country school teacher and a rural mailman moved from their house in town to an abandoned farm that took every penny they could command.  My grandparents used a spur of the moment yard sale to scrape together the last dollars for the down payment. They had to jetison much of what they owned to get to their destination.  How reminiscent of the posessions that pioneers had to jetison from their wagons to keep moving forward.

My grandpa and my dad with their horses. I remember riding Tony, his last horse.

Then my grandpa took the horses he had used to deliver the mail and hitched them to a plow to become a farmer.

They entered a new world when they took stewardship of 80 Illinois acres in the Sangamon River valley – half  fields and half woods bisected by a muddy creek.

They started out hard scrabble and lived sustainably.  There was no other way for small farmers in the 1930s.  They pinched every penny and wasted nothing.  As the world began to change around them, they stayed frugal and believed that small was beautiful.

I know my grandparents weren’t actual pioneers – it was their grandparents who moved to Illinois in a covered wagon.  My grandparents traveled to their land in one of Henry Ford’s early offerings. But I felt their pioneering spirit as I helped my grandma in the garden and rode with my grandpa on his John Deere tractor.

The horses were traded for horsepower. I know my grandpa and dad were excited and proud of their John Deere my dad is driving here, but was this progress?

I’ve always wanted to be a pioneer.

But now I have a new goal.  I want to be bioneer.

Bioneers don’t necessarily have to move out of town to take care of nature.

I learned about this concept while researching an article about the Health Equity Team of Madison/Dane County’s Public Health Department.  Two of its nurses, Kim Neuschel and Jessica Leclair,  were named Badger Bioneers by Sustain Dane, an organization in Dane County, Wisconsin that promotes sustainable choices.  They were selected because of their work in making a low-income, high-crime neighborhood of Madison more sustainable.

The term Bioneer  was coined by Kenny Ausubel in 1990 to describe what he called social and scientific innovators from all walks of life who are guided by natural principles such as kinship, cooperation, diversity, symbiosis and the cyclic pattern of natural processes.

Often Bioneers use these principles as general guides for organizing society.  I am also interested in their more literal application.  The Bioneer organization is a nonprofit educational organization that shines a light on individual efforts that are innovating more sustainable ways to live.

Their annual conference in San Rafael CA draws thousands of enthusiasts.  And many areas have formed local programs  like the Badger Bioneer program I stumbled upon.   You can listen to their award-winning, 13-part series of half-hour radio shows here.

LOOKING BACKWARD TO GO FORWARD

My grandparents and their extended family are gathered here to press and share cider from the apple orchard filled with tasty unnamed apples every year. Doesn't that incorporate kinship, cooperation, diversity, symbiosis and the cyclic pattern of natural processes nicely?

I want to find my way to a more sustainable life. I’m not even sure I or anyone else can define sustainable yet.  It’s a widely used, and often abused term today, but that is my quest.

Like the pioneers, whose fortitude and stamina I admire, I want to explore the world that we are moving into in this new year of 2012.  With the environment and economy both bumping up against limits and entering new territory, the future is as uncharted as the wild west that our ancestors confronted.

I want to be a bioneer.  I want to move forward with my eyes open, scouting for ways to not only survive but to help the environment around me maintain or regain some balance.

Out on the edge of Business As Usual, the wagons are being packed and setting off.

How are you planning to travel through 2012?

My favorite part has always been the resolutions.  A fresh start.  Another chance.  Here are a couple of suggestions to improve the odds for 2012 and save some money along the way.

Have you heard of the term buycotting?  It’s the opposite of boycotting.  Instead of refusing to buy something you disapprove of, be sure to vote with your dollars and spend wisely to support green business where ever you can.  With the economy in the toilet, and the government doing precious little to boost sustainable business, wouldn’t it be great if in 2012 the greenest parts of the economy begins to boom because consumers see their value and support them.  In many cases you can get it cheaper from China, but where is that leading us?

1.  Fair Indigo  I first found out about this company when I got assigned to write an article about them a couple of years ago.  This is a clothing store attempting to change the sweat shop horrors of the apparel industry.  Their motto is Look Good, Feel good, Do Good. So when you are thinking about a new outfit, check out their website first.  You may find just what you want assembled under Fair Trade conditions, or make of organic material, or reused material – or all three.  Read what the NYT had to say about them here.

 2.  ReUseIt   It takes very little time to reuse containers and stop leaving a trail of plastic bags and bottles, but it’s even easier if you set yourself up with some well-designed re-usable storage tools.  A really good place to find what you need is ReUseIt – a company dedicated to replacing disposables.  They are having a post holiday sale right now too.  (Who isn’t?)

3.  Learn to Love Lentils!  If you want to save some money and save the planet at the same time, walk past the meat counter, the next time you grocery shop.  I just read this week in Forks over Knives: The Plant-based Way to Health that, according to a 1997 report by the Senate Agriculture Committee, animals raised for slaughter produce 130 times as much waste as the entire human population.

A 2006 University of Chicago study found that the average American gets 47% of their calories from animal products.  That creates 2.52 tons of CO@ emissions per person per year.  If the average American meat eater were to reduce his or her intake of animal produce to 25%, he or she would shave a ton off their carbon footprint!

Truth in advertising – I’m a vegetarian, but many different sources all agree that every burger you bypass is good for your health and slows environmental degradation.

Food for thought.

4.  Recyclebank   I just learned about this organization while perusing The Kitchn.   Danny Seo says Recyclebank is a new, free online community that rewards eco-conscious behavior with coupons.  I had kind of given up on coupons, because they tend to be for cake mixes and prepared foods that I don’t find appealing.

But an assortment of variably green  companies are  offering  the thrill of the coupon chase to their products.

5.  What would you add to this list?  Sound off!  Let us hear from you.  Have you got any green resolutions?

Happy New Year!

Thursday we had been clearing and burning the tops and side branches of the pine trees that had been harvested over the last two weeks for use as un-milled rafters and joists as well as milled roof decking boards.  Overnight,  the moisture had been squeezed out of the air to form a fantastic coating of hoar frost on every pine needle and tree branch.  It continued to form as we watched, even forming crystals in our boot prints made only minutes earlier into fresh-fallen snow.

closeup of ice crystals on one of our timbers

The magical feeling was fitting because we were meeting with our architect, Della Hansmann and our construction manager, Brian Dalstrom to look at the tree trunks that have been selected, felled and dragged out of the woods and organized on the ground around the barn site.

Della, Doug and Brian confir

We were gathered on this crisp 20 degree morning to look at this arrangement of harvested trees and mentally organize them into the specific pillars destined for each spot that will hold up our house.

An example of forked timbers in another Whole Trees house, Tussen Tak.

Whole Tree Architecture and Construction   works with un-milled, often branching timbers. See my post The First 100 Trees for our House.

It was an exciting morning as we moved from tree trunk to tree trunk listening to Della and Brian  discuss how to fit these wild, natural shapes into the orderly structure of a human habitation.

The natural and beautiful variability of the tree trunks and branches require a lot of “out-of-the-box” thinking to place them where they will provide the most support and also highlight their powerful grace.   Each Whole Trees structure develops an individual character, and I am thrilled at the prospect of watching our house’s character emerge.

We are working with the same sort of computer-generated architectural plans in general use, but these paper plans will evolve as the trees are fitted together.  I feel like we are partnering with these trees rather than just using them.

Over the course of the next few months, these trees will be shaped  into custom-joined timbers and readied for putting in place once the concrete foundation is poured.

I know many of these trees personally.  We considered each one of them carefully before deciding which trees to harvest, and yet leave the woods in better ecological balance after their removal.  I remember standing beside each of them and marking them with a numbered aluminum tag.  I will still remember when I am standing next to them in my kitchen, office and bedroom.

All the joists, rafter, posts and beams for our house were carefully culled from the woods – chosen because they were the right dimensions for a part of the house and because they needed to be thinned for the health of the woods.

It’s been an exciting process to watch, and the most dramatic part was saved until last –  the felling of a stand of pines growing to the south of the house site.  Planted by the previous owner about 20 years ago, they were destined for some pulp mill, but instead they will make up the rafters and decking boards of our house roof.

This pine stand was the first shelter we had when we first started coming out to our land.  It provided shade and minimal rain protection.  We kept our on-land tools out of sight in its depths.  But we knew from the time we identified the building site, that they would have to come down before the house went up.  It was a necessary step if we were going to be able to take advantage of an otherwise-beautiful exposure to the southern sky for both passive and active solar gain.

The harvest date for the pine stand was last Friday.  We arrived just in time to see them falling, gracefully, one after another.

It was a bittersweet moment.

I had to keep reminding myself that felling them gives us the greenest possible roofing structure and the sunlight which we will put to good use in our  passive solar design, solar hot water and heating and ultimately photovoltaic power.

What we didn’t think about before the pines started coming down was how much tree is left when we have taken the first 20 feet of the trunk.  In some cases, another 20 feet of increasingly feathery branches towered up there, and was now piled on the ground.

Where the trees were felled in the woods, their tops have been made into piles that will provide wildlife habitat as they slowly go back to the earth, but in the house site, Doug and I have undertaken to clear the area by burning them.

Sunday we dragged pine tops and branches into a burn pile and feeder piles.  Then we burned all day Tuesday and Thursday.

Feeding a fire is an exhausting job, lopping and sawing these young kings of the plant world into branches we can drag and logs we can take between us and toss onto the top of the bonfire.  I’m not thrilled about the carbon that has been released back into the atmosphere, but hopefully it will balance out when we are able to heat with only a tiny fraction of the fossil fuel normally required to survive a Wisconsin winter.  In any event, whatever alternate commercial felling and milling process we might have substituted for this approach would surely have also involved a lot of carbon release.

before

Now the space is open for a portable mill to cut the roof decking boards and for construction equipment to get to the house site.

after

And for the first time, we can see the prospect down to the pond and across the small ravine that has been opened up in front of our house site.  It’s a thrilling step on the path to building our new home.

Hope you had a Soulful Solstice and Wishing you a Merry Perihelion.

When we first started thinking about designing a new house some eight years ago, I said I wanted a passive solar design and a house that was so well insulated that we could heat it with a candle.

Years of study have taught me that while a passive solar greenhouse may be possible in Wisconsin, the nights and cloudy days would be too chilly for living spaces.  But we have come up with a plan that we hope will offset 50%  to perhaps 70% of our heating needs through a combination  of passive solar design and the addition of solar hot water panels, along with heat storage in concrete and flagstone floors and an interior rock wall to collect and store the heat that we generate  And of course, some good insulation.

For the periods of cold, cloudy weather, we will have backup heat from a small wood-burning stove on the main floor and propane to add heat when necessary to the radiant floor heat system.

SAND BED HEAT STORAGE?

We all know how hot sand can get in the sun. (photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevephillips/242665348/ )

We were planning to supplement that heat storage with a sand bed under the house that could collect heat starting in late summer and release it slowly during the winter.  We got the idea from Mark Morgan  a couple of years ago, when we were working at a straw bale workshop he led, and it’s been part of our general plan ever since.  It seemed like an intrinsically good idea to store up heat ahead of time and use it like a battery to provide it later on when needed.  We planned to rest the roughly 900 square feet of our house that will sit on the ground on a two foot deep bed of sand, with a good layer of insulation at its base.

As with a lot of good ideas, the devil is in the details, and now that we have talked with five  area solar heating  installers, we are going to skip the sand bed.

WHY NOT?

Bob Ramlow is a well-known proponent of sand beds.  He has written a book, Solar Water Heating, with Benjamin Nusz. He also wrote an article for the magazine Solar Today, Nov-Dec 2007, Warm, Radiant Comfort in the Sand.  In that article he suggests putting a 2-foot deep bed of sand under your building.  He says, “In my Wisconsin climate the solar energy system begins to heat the sand bed in early to mid-August….It takes about a month to get the sand bed saturated with heat, and then the temperature inside the building is regulated by judicious opening and closing of windows.

Anyone who considers this should be aware of is that if this is the only form of  in-floor heat you will be able to use for that part of your house,  This is a good news/bad news scenario.  Sand beds are slow to collect their heat charge and give it off slowly and as the winter progresses, it will gradually loose its heat.  Then there is a cool mass under your floor.

Some people attempt to get around this with 2 loops of tubing.  One right under the floor to provide quicker heat, and one further down.  This is not a perfect solution because even the upper loop will radiate its heat both up and down.  It’s not like air convection where  heat rises and cold air falls.  Yes there is air in sand, but the idea is that you are trying to store heat by radiating it into the sand particles, so the depth of the bed will slow down the rate at which your room will warm up even from the upper loop.

A sand bed is exceptionally unresponsive.  You can’t crank up the thermostat and get more heat later today.  There will be a lag time of many days before the heat soaked up on a sunny day is available for use in the house.  It might take most of a week – or longer.  After all, it took a month or more to fully heat the sand bed during the time of year when days are long and sun is strong.

Pex Tubing - how that hot water moves through sand and concrete. (photo credit http://www.flickr.com/photos/moosicorn/4546866153/ PEX TUBING )

As we have talked to people who are aware of sand bed installations, most note  that there will be a string of days in the winter – maybe more than one string – that are cloudy and cold during which the heat in the sandbed will be almost fully discharged.  In the middle of the winter, you will not have enough sun to recharge it.  You are left either spending your heating energy reheating the sand bed or living with perpetually cold floors.  It seems like the deeper the bed – the worse this problem can be.  The cases we heard of where people thought two feet = good: four feet = better now have an even less responsive system.

If you want to try to keep a deep sand bed warm with solar panels, you will need a LOT of them.  Everything has its environmental cost, and building and transporting more panels than needed is part of the big picture.  You can’t use solar for the coldest, darkest part of the winter without a lot of waste in the system the rest of the year.

Want the nightmare scenario?  A hydronic heating installer friend told us of an uninsulated four foot deep sand bed under a house he knew of.  The radiative losses downward into the cool earth are immense, and the heat recharging possiblilites are virtually non-existent in the middle of winter – all done with the best of intentions.

So here’s  our proposed plan.  (The details are still being worked out with the solar installer.)

We will have in-floor heating, and we expect that the upstairs concrete slab and the lower level flagstones set in shallow sand will provide heat storage for a few days.  We will supplement with a wood stove for the main floor and a small propane burner that will heat the hot water tank when the sun can’t.

We have been told by several experienced installers that the only way to have any control over the temperature in the house is to keep the heat in the hot water tank and deploy it to a relatively  thin (2” – 5”), well insulated floor as needed.   Again, insulation is a key ingredient.  We’d like to put 4” of Styrofoam under the ground-level floors if we can afford to.  At the very least, we’ll put in 2” of insulation.

We think a well insulated, and not-too-deep concrete or flagstone-set-in-sand storage floor is the best solution.  We’ll update you on the actual solar panel array specifics with a later post, perhaps in January.