David Gulyas

Revised Blower Door Results!

Mark Jansen, of Energy Efficient Homes Midwest EEHM, who rated our Bloomington, IN LEED Platinum home about two years ago, originally gave us a 200cfm / 50 Pa for air infiltration.  Mark was convinced that the measurement was even tighter, but he didn't have a smaller reducer ring for the blower door.  He showed up today, with blower door and more rings!  Guess what?  Our house tested at ~155 cfm / 50 Pa!  A nice bit of news validating the conscientious construction of our SIPs panels house!  The meter shows 155 cfm / 49.6 Pa.  Close enough to 155...that's really TIGHT!

Big thanks to Marko Spiegel of Conservation Technologies International, CTI, for his detailed design, guidance, and creativity.  His mastery of advanced energy conservation techniques used in our design allowed us to get to a pretty spectacular level!

 

Aquaponics Greenhouse Design

Aquaponics coming to Bloomington, Indiana!  Here is a design rendering for the project.  We are currently finishing the foundation work on the 24' x 48' greenhouse, and the trusses are soon to arrive.  You can see the 900 gallon tanks in the back, and each is connected to six 4' x 8' hydroponic beds which will host a variety of greens.  Each row of six beds is connected to one tank, constituting a "node".  I haven't shown any plumbing to make a clearer image.  Each tank will grow about 1000 lbs of tilapia, ready for harvest after 7 - 9 months.  The fish effluent from the tanks will be piped to each bed, where bacteria in the gravel beds digests and oxygenates the ammonia and nitrite to nitrates, which is taken up by the plant ribosomes.  The water drains back to the tanks!  I'll be documenting the process with videos and images, so stay tuned!

From Green Building to Aquaponics

Depending on your point of view, the continued housing recession is either disappointment or a good thing. I have mixed feelings about all of it, but, if we are building fewer new homes, that is a good thing for reducing environmental problems associated with construction and development. The question is then, what do we folks in the residential building field do with ourselves?

I have been looking at the very interesting activity of urban agriculture and aquaponics. Aquaponics is the integration of hydroponics (growing plants in a nutrient filled water medium without soil) and aquaculture (raising fish for consumption). Aquaculture combines these systems and closes the loop by recirculating water through both systems.

The plants utilize nutrients from the fish effluent, and clean the water before it is returned to the fish tanks. Or, some aquaculture designs use hydroponic (plant) "rafting" on top of the fish tanks or ponds.  I look at this as a potentially sustainably built environment, closing the loop on resource depletion while adding value and food opportunity locally.  There are issues to be addressed in these systems, such as nutrient management, and the quality and type of feed for the fish.  My head is swimming!

Bloomington, Indiana house achieves LEED Platinum status

Hey! Great news, we achieved LEED Platinum certification for our Bloomington house! We are looking forward to debating, discussing, mobilizing the built sustainable environment, and hope that our project can resonate positively in that regard. But can't sit still! Currently, I have all CFLs in the house lighting, and would really like to install the low voltage cable lighting system I designed. The system will be able to accommodate LED lamping.

Evolution or Intelligent Design?

We've been in the house now since the beginning of August, and we're beginning to get the hang of it.  We incorporated both natural ventilation and and energy recovery ventilator (ERV) into the house, and therefore, we make conscious decisions on how and when to use them to achieve thermal comfort and good indoor air quality.  So, we use our brains to manage the systems: turning the heat pumps on to heat or cool, cranking up the ERV to exhaust pollutants, opening and closing windows for natural ventilation, turning on the ceiling fans to cool, or push warm air down.  I was thinking that all of this could be managed with a programmable system, in which the heat pumps, ERV, electrically operable windows and fans would communicate with each other to achieve optimal results without manually fussing with them.  I'm sure there are systems available now that can do this to a certain extent, esp commercial larger scale buildings.  Our zoned heat pumps have thermostats and set points, and our ERV has a CO2 sensor which kicks the ERV up when the CO2 elevates too high, so we have a certain level of programmability already.  But, in the future, through technological evolution, we'll probably have system management that will "learn" how we use the systems, as well as all of the energy usage and appliances, and will adapt and control them to achieve our preferences.  It's kind of like evolution...or is it intelligent design?  

Pure Air Quality: An Age-Old Concept

 
“To have pure air, your house must be so constructed as that the outer atmosphere shall find its way with ease to every corner of it. Badly constructed houses do for the healthy what badly constructed hospitals do for the sick.”
-Florence Nightingale, 1859

OK.  We finally moved in, and even with a temporary kitchen and one working bath, it's great to be in a house with ideal indoor air quality.  We achieved this by incorporating a very nice Energy Recovery Ventilation system, the UltimateAir  RecoupAerator

"The RecoupAerator® is a whole-house air filter and ventilator that circulates fresh air into an average-sized home every two hours. It serves as both ventilation and filtration, capturing virtually all pollens and mold spores." (from product website.) The air quality is unbelievable! 

I finished the concrete floor myself, with an acid stain, and wax finish.  I used a low VOC ceramic based paint over a zero VOC primer, and for dramatic effect, applied a Venetian plaster finish to the largest interior wall. Next steps are to finalize the kitchen design, trim, and interior doors, and figure out how to install all of it.

Energy Recovery Ventilator

Jason Wright of Thermostat Mechanical explains the Energy Recovery Ventilator (ERV) he installed in our Bloomington, Indiana high performance green home. In addition to the ERV, we have two small heat pumps for heating and cooling as necessary. The capacity of the house requires just about a ton of heating and cooling.

Raising the SIP Panels for High Performance House

Raising the South SIPs Walls in Early January!

Chris Sturbaum and crew of Golden Hands Construction are joined by Porter SIPs consultant, David Suutala, to install the SIP panels for the Gulyas house in Bloomington, Indiana. The walls are 12.38" thick, with wood integrated around the window openings and where structure is necessary. The SIPs are load bearing, comprised of expanded polystyrene (XPS) sandwiched between two layers of oriented strand board. The south elevation shown here, will capture radiant solar energy through the windows, and stored in the floor slab to heat the house in cold weather. The floor slab is thermally decoupled from the perimeter foundation and floating on 10.5" of extruded polystyrene insulation (EPS) reclaimed from decontructed commercial roofs!

Life Cycle Assessment

The Interior Design profession is just beginning to put its toe in the water in regard to Life Cycle Assessment.  It's really the fundamental foundation of thinking about material choices and how they affect the environment. 

I've developed an online course on Life Cycle Assessment and (drum roll) you can get a 30% discount on it by enrolling at EcoAchievers and entering the promotional code LCA09.  The class covers the basic principles of Life Cycle Assessment, how it affects design choices, and the three main Life Cycle Assessment methodologies.  It should take about an hour to take the course online.

David and Chris hoist the sails on foundation!