A cool roof

This past June we (the Brennans) decided to do something about the heat that causes our second story to heat up so much in the summer. Often we have experienced a 10-degree difference between our upper and lower levels, which makes for uncomfortable sleeping and causes us to use the air conditioner. Tom did a bit of research and found something interesting: radiant barriers for the attic. A radiant barrier for an attic is simply a tarp-like material made of a modified form of aluminum foil that reflects the heat back up and out of the house. It seemed so simple in concept...we had to try it!

There are a couple of ways you can install this layer, and Tom chose to use the technique where the foil is placed over the insulation. So we ordered about 250 feet of Super R Supreme Material from a company called Innovative Insulation Inc and hired Dunbar Construction to install it. The material cost $150 plus shipping.

The results have really been amazing. We have not felt that temp differential while climbing the stairs in the late afternoon and evening. We have been completely comfortable at night. So we give this simple change a big thumbs up!

For additional detail and more pictures, see our Cool Roofs page.

A gray water system in Birmingham

Yesterday a group of us met at the home of Roman Bukowinski in Birmingham to see his gray water system. Roman is a civil engineer and master plumber who moved here 6 years ago from Scotland. He owns a company called Tartan Plumbing, and is building this home in Birmingham that he hopes will become LEED certified. He spent 2 hours showing us some of its features.

In the basement we saw his elaborate gray water system, pictured. He had seen a similar system that cost thousands of dollars, but decided to save money and build his own. The system consists of 3 tiers of bins. The top tier is fed waste water from his showers and sinks. It gets filtered through sand and then is fed down to he next level, where it passes through another layer of sand, and finally through to the bottom layer. He has the system rigged so that the resultant clear water is sent to the toilets, then to holding tanks, and finally outside to water the lawn (through skinny tubes placed under the lawn) and the gardens. He also uses solar tubes (yes, tubes, not panels) on the roof to heat up the water. It really is an amazing feat of engineering. The house is currently under construction, and we want to return to see all of this in action.

Here is Roman describing a bit of his motivation for this project, a little about his radiant heat system, and an explanation of the sand filtering in his gray water system. It's worth seeing, if only to hear his wonderful Scottish burr.

All Creatures Great and Small

One of the changes I've made this summer is more frequent use of my clothesline (it extends from the garage wall to a nearby tree). It has helped that the weather has been so cooperative, but even on cloudy days I've been drying, for the most part, outside. I acquired an old metal table from my girls a month ago - one that my mother used to use to fold her clothes - and Tom put it outside for me so I had a place to fold and didn't have to bend down so much.


The other day I went outside and dumped a big pile of wet clothes on the table so I could hang them up, and I found this nice grasshopper in the middle of the table, apparently unperturbed by the wet mass next to him because he never moved. At first I thought he might be dead, but I bent down to introduce myself and his little antennae twitched. Hmm. Anyway, I continued making conversation and folding piles all around him, and the little bugger (sorry) simply stayed put.

I took a close-up of him in case any of you think I might be mistaken as to his species - I'm not an insect person. Let me know, because I believe in truth in blogs.

By the way, he did eventually leave after I did - no more of the stimulating conversation, I suppose. But isn't it nice to be able to do laundry on a beautiful day surrounded by flowers and friendly insects?

Failure

Alas, not all goes as smoothly as my previous post. We are on our 3rd year of a chemical-free lawn, and all is not well. We have weeds everywhere, including large sections of crabgrass and clover. Bummer. But we have no one to blame but ourselves. After receiving instruction from Dale at Uncle Luke's on an organic lawn program, we developed our own modified program which I'll call benign neglect. Over the past 3 years, we have put down only a couple of applications of corn gluten and a couple of chicken manure. And it worked for the last couple of years - the lawn looked beautiful.

Last summer, however, we experienced a drought, and here's where I think we went wrong. First, in order to conserve water, we watered only minimally. This produced the right conditions (dry lawn with bare patches) for weeds to grow. Second, we didn't follow the organic lawn program, so the weeds pretty much made themselves at home.

So now I have called in the Mounties - Mike at Mike's Tree Surgeons - and we are doing an intervention. He will need to use chemicals to restore the lawn up through next summer, and then we'll go on his organic program and see if we have better results. He also told us to water more frequently through August to build the lawn back up again. The majority of these weeds are in the front lawn, so he also suggested we put a tree in and develop a garden bed, so as to shade the lawn and minimize space we'll have to use chemicals. We'll put one in this fall.

I'm writing this because I think it's important that people realize that some things will work and some may not. Please remember that I'm not suggesting that an organic lawn care program won't work, but I can assure you that benign neglect will not be your answer.