Lucas’ words were ringing in my ears as the second cement truck finished unloading. When asked what materials his Danish eco village tries to avoid, the number one item is poured concrete because of it’s high embodied energy and the fact that you can’t really recycle it. Discarded concrete just
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The advice and support of all the incredible people in Hermosa Beach’s Planning and Public Work’s Departments makes the impossible possible.
Last night the Hermosa Beach City Council voted to support a reduction of the conditional use permit fee so the Green Idea House could test the viability of residential rooftop wind generation systems and report back to the city.
Obviously, we do not have the “Saudi Arabia of wind” like western
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Everyone knows that burning natural gas is less harmful than other fossil fuels, but the process of shale gas drilling is certainly not natural and certainly not less harmful. Watch this 60 minutes piece to understand how the push to extract it from the ground is contaminating drinking water and
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We all know fresh water is a precious commodity in So. California. Hearing what the TreePeople are doing to harvest rainwater and manage the overflow on site to replenish the aquifer sounds like a good idea. This benefits the ocean water quality by keeping that storm from running into the
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We are tackling the site work on our project while we wait for our plan set revisions from the city to go back through our engineers and draftsman. The site work includes undergrounding the utilities. By code we have to underground the electrical, cable and phone to
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As we approach out fall start date, it is time to think about undergrounding our utilities. This is mandatory as we are doing a more than 50% renovation. In meeting with our local Edison Service Planner, Ryan, he had some great ideas for saving money. One of them was to
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As a direct result of Congresswoman Harman’s briefing at our house in October, Scott Gobble and the rest of the Edison team mobilized to make Hermosa Beach a beta site for Smart Meters!
Even though we are in a temperate climate (zone 6), understanding the climactic conditions is the first step to getting to net zero.
Dry Bulb Temperatures
C1Psychrometric Chart (CZ6)
Wind Speed and Direction
Passive Heating & Cooling via Proper Eave Depth
This is the first massing model we created of our house. We built it with a free program called Sketchup. we started designing the project with a massing model we created in Sketchup, a free drawing program from google that does
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Typical Energy Consumption Profiles
Knowing when and how appliances are used helps us understand how to minimize their impact
Interesting day yesterday, spent the morning with our terrific mechanical engineers redoing the systems. We all want to make sure they work in terms of efficiency and affordability.
The afternoon was with some great people in the Emerging Technologies Group at Edison. They have the interesting job of searching out the
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Without cheap energy ancient people had to understand the arc of the sun and thermal mass to be comfortable. The oldest inhabited caves face south to maximize the benefits of the sun. We’ve simply forgotten.
Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde, Colorado
2pm June 17, 2008
We don’t inherit the land from our
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Net zero energy means harvesting as much energy as you use on an annualized basis. It is our key objective because there a lot of prescriptive standards our there, but most are not performance based. Net zero energy gives us a verifiable target that tells us how the building
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Zero carbon is another key benchmark because fine black soot particles are the residue of burning carbon. We don’t know if you have the same particles that quickly accumulate where you live, but it is known to cause cancer, lung and heart disease. The first two photos are
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Solar Heat Gain through the Glazing can either help us or hurt us in getting to net zero. Different awning and glazing solutions are dependent on the orientation in relation to the arc of the sun.
Solar Heat Gain through the Glazing can either help us or hurt us in getting to net zero. Different awning and glazing solutions are dependent on the orientation in relation to the arc of the sun.
The Useful Daylight Index helps us keep the lights off when the sun is
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Why Partner with Edison? Aren’t they the Enemy?
California’s Public Utilities Commission:
Decoupled energy sales and energy savings in their profit model
Set guidelines that ALL new residential construction will be net zero energy by 2020, and ALL new commercial buildings will be net zero by 2030.
As a result, Southern
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Green Building Experts Present at HB City Council Meeting at 7pm Tonight. Charisse Bartholomew Dunn and Dan Thomsen, a couple of the experts who are working on our project, will be giving a short presentation to the City Council at the Mayor’s request.
Charisse and Dan are both instructors with
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Hermosa Beach Leads the Revolution (pun intended) as it took the bold step last week to be the first urban, small lot environment in the state to allow rooftop wind energy systems. Kudos to the City Council, Planning Commission, Planning Department and key advocates, like Dency Nelson, who all worked
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