The Straw House Blog

Extreme Cold

With temperatures dipping down to -30C (-22F) at night (colder with the windchill), we’ve had a pretty frigid couple of weeks. It’s cold enough that the dog’s paws hurt when we go for walks, cold enough that the oil froze in the pipe between my neighbour’s oil tank and his furnace, and cold enough that one of the hoses in our generator froze solid; one of eight the shop had seen that week with the same problem.

So how does the house behave when it’s his cold? Pretty well I’m pleased to report. If the sun is out the front part of the house will get up to 25C (77F) during the day and will hold most of that heat until we go to bed. Of course with the quantity of glass we have across the front of the house we do bleed heat, and the colder it is the faster that heat goes.

If there is no sun though the floor works pretty well. It can hold the house comfortably around 20C-21C (68F-70F), trying to go any higher seems a waste of propane, we just wear sweaters. Because the way radiant floor systems work it’s a ‘slow heat’. The slab is heated to a certain temperature and from there it just radiates (obviously). But we have a huge interior volume of air, much greater than most houses of the same size because we have such high ceilings. At its lowest point our ceiling is over ten feet high, at it’s highest it’s around seventeen. The floor just cannot react fast enough to compensate when the sun goes down. As a result we’ve moved a fireplace up to near top spot on the wish-list. We built a re-enforced pad into the floor to carry the weight of a masonry fireplace but have decided that what we need is actually just an airtight insert or a good woodstove. We need something that can heat the air quickly, but can also stop relatively quickly. The last thing we want is to light a fire on a cloudy morning in a masonry heater, than have the sun come out and have the stove radiating heat all day long. We’d cook ourselves out of the house!

I’ve been running around with the caulking gun sealing cracks and hunting for drafts, and there have been lots. At this point I have gone through more than three dozen tubes of caulking and I have one piece of advice for those building a house: the expensive caulk is worth it! Buy the best stuff you can find, we’ve used various grades around the house and we’ve had all sorts of failures wherever we used cheaper caulk. It might cost more up front but it’s worth it to save the aggravation and cost of having to do the same job twice.

     

Posted by: Glen

January, 19, 2004

The House in Pictures

I’ve put together an overview in pictures of the house from the day we broke ground (August 2002) to when we moved in (May 2003).

     

Posted by: Glen

January, 22, 2004

Positioning Solar Panels in Northern Climates

This isn’t a post about solar panel azimuth or anything so technical. It’s far more practical advice I’m offering today: if you live in an area that gets a great deal of snow (currently we have between 2 and 3 feet), and you are going to be putting your panels up on your roof, make sure that you have a easy, safe method of clearing snow off of them. Yes the snow will eventually melt off, but I hate losing a full day of sun waiting. Clearing the snow off our panels is a chore that I do not enjoy, climbing the ladder onto the very slippery steel roof and clearing the panels is bad enough, but getting back off the roof and onto the ladder is NOT FUN. The only consolation is that if I fall it will be into four foot deep drifts and onto Gator, who will be trying to catch the falling snow, and will instead get me.

If I were doing it again I would build in a dedicated rest for the top of the ladder that prevented it from sliding sideways. Then I would build a metal catwalk with some angle irons and metal mesh - neither of which is an expensive material. For the sake of a couple of hundred bucks I’d be able to walk around the panels in confidence.

Better yet, if your site allows it, mount the panels on the ground.

     

Posted by: Glen

January, 29, 2004

Pre-Spring Thaw

We’ve had our first hit of warm weather and the driveway is a mess. If you do not have 4-wheel drive you cannot come and visit. The propane guys tried to come in yesterday, unannounced, I’d have warned them off, and judging by the gouges in the driveway he’s lucky he got back out. I don’t even know how he got in as far as he did, which was only about 100 metres. The benefit is that the worst has passed, most of the snow is off the fields and it can only get better.

On that note I’m also pleased to report that we managed to get in another two equalizes last week due to a full day of both wind and sun. So over the last six months we’ve equalized four times, which from what I can gather is pretty darn good.

Fixing the driveway has now jumped right up to the top of the list, since we don’t want to relive this mess every year. The only way that I can see doing it is to ditch the north (uphill) side of the drive and drop in two or three culverts. That way the melting snow will pass harmlessly under the driveway rather than over it. Then we need to build up the weak spots with another 6-10 inches of gravel. It’s times like these that I’m glad we have our own pit.

Of course none of this can happen until the frost leaves the ground and it is thoroughly dry, which won’t be for another couple of months. Another benefit to the ditching strategy is that the top soil removed by ditching can be spread around the house to build up the landscaping, which also needs to be done this year. Don’t think we’ll be doing any gardening anyway.

     

Posted by: Glen

March, 06, 2004

Stats - December 2003 - February 2004

Things definitely improved as we progressed through the winter.

December Stats
Monthly Total: 607.1 AH
Daily Average: 19.5 AH
Best Day: 45.5 AH
Worst Day: .2 AH
Days Below 5 AH: 8

January Stats
Monthly Total: 654.1 AH
Daily Average: 21.1 AH
Best Day: 55.1 AH
Worst Day: 0 AH
Days Below 5 AH: 8

February Stats
Monthly Total: 868.8 AH
Daily Average: 31 AH
Best Day: 63.1 AH
Worst Day: 0 AH
Days Below 5 AH: 3

This doesn’t take into account the power from the wind generator. I still don’t have any method of measuring the output of the H80 over time. I can state that we have been generating much more power from the wind generator, we’ve had several days where I am certain that we made more than 100 AH from wind.

     

Posted by: Glen

March, 16, 2004

No More Comments

I’m sick of dealing with comment spam so I’ve turned comments off.

My email link is at the bottom of each page if you want to get in touch.

     

Posted by: Glen

March, 29, 2004

Making Maple Syrup

Many of our neighbours tap trees and make maple syrup. In our little area there are several good sized operations and one of our neighbours has even won a few ‘World Champion’ ribbons for his syrup (I add the quotes because maple syrup is only made in Ontario, Quebec and a few north-eastern states).

Our neighbour Allen invited us over today to watch them boiling off the sap to make syrup. Allen has quite the operation, he has a dedicated sugar shack with a large evaporator. He can boil off 500 gallons of sap at a time. The ratio of sap to syrup is 40 to 1. So 500 gallons of sap will boil down to about 12 gallons of syrup. Allen has 500 trees tapped, some people hang line from tap to tap ending at a 50 gallon drum. All of Allen’s trees are hung with taps and buckets. When the sap runs they go from tree to tree and empty each bucket to get the sap. They used to have around 1100 trees tapped but are scaling back the operation.

Tomorrow I’m going back to help with collecting the sap and more of the boiling. Allen gave us a sample to bring home and it is very good stuff. Sometime in the future I plan on tapping a bunch of my trees and making some of my own syrup. They sell small evaporators for the ‘hobbyist’.

Here’s a bunch of pictures with explanations.

     

Posted by: Glen

April, 08, 2004

Collecting Maple Sap

Dad and I went out today to help Allen collect sap from his two maple stands. All told he has about 500 trees tapped, this is down from 1100. We collected about 500 gallons of sap.

Here are the pictures.

     

Posted by: Glen

April, 10, 2004

2004 Ontario Strawbale Home Tour

The OSBBC Annual Straw Bale House Tour has been scheduled for October 2nd, 2004. We’ll be on the tour this year, last year Gil was just two weeks old and we just didn’t feel up to having dozens of people trooping through the house. If you’d like more info about the tour send me your contact info and I’ll forward it to the appropriate people - or you can go to their website.

As far as I know we’re the only off-grid house on the tour it will be interesting to see if that effects the number of people coming to see the house. OK, so it turns out there’s at least three other off-grid homes on the tour. Thanks to Tina for making me feel so much less unique.

     

Posted by: Glen

April, 26, 2004

Logging

As much as possible we have tried to use wood off our own land inside the house. The inside and outside walls of the bathroom are cedar milled from trees on our land, as are the maple window and door frames.

Before we started the house we marked 102 trees and sold them to a logger. They had a big machine that carried out the logs, and that could navigate nearly anywhere. Before the job was over we traded them an additional ten maple trees in exchange for taking down and cutting into 12’ sections 6000 board feet of white cedar. White cedar are difficult trees to drop because their branches come directly off the trunk and run from the ground up. They can be very dangerous when they fall. The trees are also problematic because, unlike most hardwoods you can’t tell if the tree is any good until you’ve dropped it. White cedar, like Poplar, tend to rot from the inside out. We were very lucky, it turned out that most of the trees they cut were very good. The boards we got from those cedars built a deck on the back of Dad’s house, and most of the walls of his garage. It was the leftovers that went into our bathroom.

Over time, walking around the land, we started finding sections of trees that had been left in the bush. Good trees, on the sides of hills, in gullies, even out in the open. We pulled eleven oak and maple sections, all solid, at least 18” in diameter, and about 12’ long, out of the north west corner a couple of years ago. We had them milled and have just come to the end of the maple.

Recently Dad and I have managed to pull out two pieces of black cherry, five really nice pieces of ash, and a bunch of oak from the south east corner of the property. The main section of ash was 22’ long and 18” in diameter and had fallen across a small gully with a creek in the bottom. There were tracks from the logger’s big machine but they couldn’t seem to get close enough to grab the logs. We pulled them up from the other direction, up a very steep hill using a pulley and my truck. While we were down there we found two more pieces of ash and several sections of oak. We’re also going to drop a couple of cedars from the same area.

In addition to this wood we’ve also cut up and dragged out two poplar trees that were solid, but had blown down in a wind storm. We’ve also been marking and dropping cedars from other parts of the land. The various hardwoods we’re going to cut up into 1” planks, possibly for use on our ceilings. The cedar we’re going to cut into 2” stock that will be used to build decks on the south and east sides of the house.

Four of the cedar trees that we took down were just below the house near where we park the cars. They were taller than any of the trees around them and spoiled the view to the south east. With them gone the whole view from the front door is greatly improved. How much? Well check the pictures and see for yourself.

     

Posted by: Glen

May, 17, 2004