Sustainability and ecological friendliness have always been interests of mine. In High School I wanted to be an architect who designed passive solar homes as a career. Now in my late fifties my family and I are learning to live more fully while minimizing our impact to the planet.
This blog documents that journey, in particular the thinking going into building our country home in the Catskills and the research leading up to it. This introductory post acts as a guide to the blog journey!
It all started with buying a 2017 BMW i3 Electric Hybrid in the summer of 2020 during the pandemic, my first car since 1987. That gave us the freedom to look for property. outside of NYC.
In the fall of 2020 we found an 11 acre undeveloped lot in Sullivan County, NY and closed on the property at the beginning of the New Year of 2021. Code requirements are a major constraint of design so I have set up a blog post to summarize them.
Our original inspiration for the country home was the Daylesford Longhouse (revisited here) which led to a lot of research on prefabricated buildings.
I also have decided to design the house using Passive House principles as promoted by the Passive House Institute US (PHIUS). These principles rely on super-insulating the building, creating an air-tight envelope, and providing mechanical ventilation with ERVs or HRVs. The end result is a building that is so energy efficient that it takes very little to heat or cool it.
Eventually it became clear that a prefabricated metal building approach similar to the Longhouse had a lot of drawbacks in our climate and was contradictory in many ways to the PHIUS objectives so I started looking at Structural Insulated Panels, which are pre-fab panels with structural insulation sandwiched between OSB sheathing and can be used for tilt-up walls, roofs and even floors.
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