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.

Native gardening

A couple of years ago we began covering half of our back lawn with leaves and wood chips and planting a woodlands area with mostly native Michigan species. This year we have seen the fruits of our labors. It has been a show all summer, and we have never watered once. Now, I'll admit that it has been a pretty wet year, but even so, or annuals still need watering. But not our native area! I can honestly say it has been maintenance-free. I know I can say that because I hold a special attraction for mosquitos, so I don't even go out to weed after early July.

The picture below shows the border between my 'traditional' perennial bed on the left and the rain garden on the right. I don't know if you can see it from the photo, but the rain garden plants are about 2-3 feet taller than the traditional ones. Our milkweed plants must be 7 ft this year. We're loving the rain!

Wall-E and the watch

Can I tell you a story from my honeymoon? I promise, it will relate to Wall-E and the watch. 30 years ago, right about this time of the year, my husband and I were motoring down to Florida for our honeymoon. He had just purchased his first new car - a Dodge Omni - and he decided that he wanted to see what kind of mileage he could get if he left the air conditioning off. Which was fine until we entered the 'hot' states of Georgia and Florida. No pleading from his new wife could dissuade him from testing his new vehicle. Why, oh, why, I thought, did I marry an engineer? And a stubborn Irish one at that.

Fast-forward 30 years. Improbably as it may seem after that story, we are still married. The Dodge Omni and the mileage experiment are gone, but, in its place, is a new project: adapting to a greener lifestyle. It may not surprise you that he is going full guns, and I am limping along, sometimes begrudgingly. I don't mind experiments and changes, but if they impact my lifestyle, not so much. So I'm hoping I sound like the typical consumer, and you can relate.

Anyway, here's where the watch comes in. I have had the same $39 Fossil watch for many, many years. The leather band has broken twice (worn through), and both times when I suggest that I can just throw it away and get a new one, Tom has said, 'No problem! We can take it to the watch repair shop and get the band replaced.' Which we have done. Now, however, I have noticed that the little number 9 on my watch has dislodged and is resting next to the '12'. Uh-oh! Time for a replacement! When I made the mistake of mentioning this to the stubborn engineer, he of course said, 'No problem...' and you know the rest. This time, though, I thought he had gone too far. We are not impoverished! We can afford a new $39 Fossil watch!

Then we went to see Wall-E, a movie about the a trash-compacting robot alone on a desolate earth (except for one cockroach) in the year 2700. Humans have been evacuated to a temporary space station, because the earth is covered with trash and the skies are so polluted they cannot sustain life. Watching the movie, I thought of all the landfills I have passed that are the size of small mountains. I though of the phrase: There is no 'away.' And I thought that the movie may not be all that presumptuous in its premise.

So we're heading to the watch repair shop - again. The dump doesn't need another piece of electronics, and maybe the watch repair man could use the business. The engineer was right again. But just don't push me too far.

Gasoline crack of history

It recently occurred to me that my husband and I have been sharing a car for the past 2 months. It also occurred to me that it hasn't been much of a problem. When our son came home from college this spring, we told him he could use our second car for work, and we would borrow it from him when it was needed. And, aside from moving our daughters into a new place, we haven't had to borrow it. I find that kind of interesting. We have discussed going down to one car before - after all, we are 'retired' (in the loosest sense of that term). But it has never been seriously considered. Now I'm beginning to think about it.

How are we getting by with one car? Bikes and buses. If we can bike anywhere, we usually do. Today Tom biked a couple of miles to Big Beaver, where he picked up a bus heading downtown (to United Way in Detroit). He puts his bike on the front of the bus and uses it while downtown. I biked to exercise and back. We have been doing this for a couple of years now, and now it just seems natural to get out and bike places -- and we're always looking for another way to get in some exercise.

This past week we also celebrated our 30th anniversary, and instead of taking another long-distance trip (last year we went to Wales), we decided to stay local and do things we enjoy. Who knew it would be so much fun to tour the DIA, have tea at Greenfield Village's Cotswold Cottage, see Manhattan Transfer at the Power Center in Ann Arbor, or enjoy a beautiful morning eating breakfast outdoors at Zola's? We agreed that it was just as much fun as traveling, and without some of the hassle. We do enjoy seeing new places and visiting different countries, but we were surprised at how much fun a local vacation was.

So with all this lifestyle adaptation we are just beginning, I read something yesterday that really struck me. I was finishing up the book, Second Nature - A Gardener's Education by Michael Pollan (really excellent by the way), and I came across this quote by a man named J.L. Hudson (no, not our J.L. Hudson): "We have only a brief moment in history when fossil fuels will continue to allow us rapid worldwide travel. Let us use this time wisely." He refers to a quote from a man named William Burroughs: "Migrants of ape in gasoline crack of history." Is this true? Do we live in a 'gasoline crack of history'? Is life as we know it quite fleeting, and will the age of easy global exploration one day be a thing of the past? It reminded me of a discussion we heard while on the above-mentioned trip to Wales, all about peak oil. Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum production is reached, after which the rate of production enters terminal decline. No one really know when peak oil will be reached - some say it has already come - but the main point was that if we want to do research on other sources of energy, doing it before peak oil, when we are still flush with money, makes sense.

So anyway, all of this is swimming around in my mind when I hopped off my bike this morning and entered the community center to exercise. I almost passed an elderly woman who looked at me and spoke in a thick accent, saying: "Good for you." I wasn't quite sure what to say, but soon it occurred to me that she might have seen me get off my bike, so I said thank you. Then she said: "If everyone did what you're doing, we wouldn't have so so much pollution in the air. I used to ride everywhere, but here they don't want me to." Given her age and the fact that our city isn't the most bike-friendly, I understand what she was saying. But what a shame. I have a feeling that if she were to be born 100 years later, she might receive a different message.