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Our Sustainable Utopia
Sustainability and ecological friendliness have always been interests of mine. In High School I wanted to be an architect who designed...
John
Dec 31, 20212 min read
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Climate Data for Design
I am looking into the ways to get climate data to inform my design for a home in Sullivan County, NY. One simple source is this Bing...
John
Jun 13, 20211 min read
12 views
Greenhouse Design Principles
I am thinking again of moving closer to the design of the Daylesford Longhouse (see my blog post about it here) My concern is that a...
John
Apr 25, 20211 min read
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Electrical Power from the Sun
I found an interesting article on the variety of approaches to generating electrical power from the sun in ArchDaily. Here is a post on...
John
Apr 20, 20211 min read
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Hunter Hill PassiveHaus - the Basics
So I am going to use the current design for our Hunter Hill House country home as the basis for determining Passive House criteria....
John
Mar 29, 20211 min read
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Hunter Hill House - Checklist
I am starting in earnest to prepare for building our Sullivan Countly, NY country home in the Catskills. It is my intention to document...
John
Mar 28, 20214 min read
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Sustainability Incentives for NY
This post focuses on links for incentives that our family may be eligible for. We are not eligible for low-income incentives, and there...
John
Mar 10, 20212 min read
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Insulation
An important starting point for insulation is the energy code. The New York State 2020 Residential Code has adopted the 2018...
John
Jan 31, 20214 min read
20 views
Dry Stack Wall Construction
Dry Stack Wall Construction may be the DIYer's way to create a home with thermal mass. Apart from Standard CMU, the following are...
John
Nov 26, 20202 min read
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Passive Solar: Trombe Walls
Since I was a teenager I have been fascinated by the concept of passive solar Trombe walls. It seems such an elemental, obvious, low...
John
Oct 11, 20201 min read
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0 comments
Sustainable Building Information
General Green Building Advisor The Natural Home (includes passive solar, composting toilets, septic & greywater systems, & geotextile...
John
Sep 28, 20201 min read
5 views
1 comment
Does the Pope s#!t in the woods?
So we have found a property we love, but have limited funds to develop it. We were hoping the town would allow us to put in a septic...
John
Sep 22, 20204 min read
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The Long House: Inspiration for our new home
Our son has found a beautiful house for inspiration for our new home. It is the Daylesford Longhouse in Victoria, Australia. More great...
John
Aug 16, 20201 min read
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0 comments
Tips for EV Car Battery Life
I found this web page very informative for tips to keep an EV Car Battery in good shape. Stuff I may find in the manual when I read it...
John
Aug 11, 20201 min read
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Charging Up is not so easy
(see update dated 12 Sept 2020 below) So we are on Day 5 of owning our electric BMW i3 and love the car. However, we are Manhattan...
John
Aug 11, 20203 min read
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Use a Tesla Charger on your EV
So we could not afford a Tesla, but found a spunky BMW i3 that we love. In our neighborhood in Washington Heights, Manhattan, there are...
John
Aug 8, 20201 min read
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How the BMW i3 really works
We bought our 2017 BMW i3 with Range Extender yesterday! As city dwellers without our own garage where we can plug in at night, we got...
John
Aug 8, 20201 min read
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0 comments
Geothermal!
Starting to consider Geothermal heating/cooling in addition to passive solar for our future home. Some resources below:...
John
Aug 4, 20201 min read
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Car Process
This week we moved forward with purchasing a car. John is writing about that too. So I will add notes from my perspective. He was...
Britta
Aug 4, 20201 min read
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Car Car
I have prided myself on not owning a car since 1987, having been a city dweller all that time. Now we are looking into more freedom from...
John
Aug 4, 20201 min read
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