I was fortunate to have the opportunity to speak recently to members of Balance Whanganui – a peer support group for mental health and addiction. They were an excellent, engaged group during the nearly two-hour presentation on eco-thrifty renovation. It was particularly enjoyable for me because they laughed at all of my jokes.

It was also enjoyable because I had the opportunity to draw parallels between healing a home and healing a mind. At its core, we have transformed a fragile and vulnerable structure into a robust and resilient one. This is, from my understanding, an aim of mental health treatment. “Life,” some say, “is less about what happens and more about how you respond to it.”

Homes and people are both subjected to external forces beyond their control. A home is subjected to wind, rain, earthquake, rates rises, electrical rate rises, and burglary. A person is subject to the pressures of social situations, financial stress, mood swings, rugby results, unexpected repair bills, family pressures, and the weather. In both cases, steps can be taken to build resiliency.

With the help of Building Control, we have made our home more resilient to wind, rain, and earthquake by following the New Zealand Building Code. We have made it resilient to rising electrical rates by investing in energy efficiency and solar energy. We have made it resilient to burglary by installing a home security system, but there is not much we can do about rates rises, which, along with electricity rates, outpace wage rises.

In the process of making our home more resilient, I have also improved my mental health. Like some other people, the sources of stress in my life are worries about: increasing energy and food prices, environmental degradation, financial uncertainty, Richie McCaw’s ankle, and social inequity. Through the process of renovating and living in our old villa and planting gardens, I have been able to address my concerns about rising energy and food prices, and in the process, financial uncertainty – to a certain extent. I also feel that I am doing my part to help the environment and to help low-income families and pensioners learn about easy, low-cost / high performance energy saving strategies.

A resilient home helps cultivate a resilient mind. In other words, I am more at ease because my home can better resist rising food and energy prices, and increasing severe weather events. (The conversation in the States right now is about how ‘resilient’ New York City was, is, and will be to extreme weather events such as Hurricane Sandy.) But I’m afraid Richie’s ankle will continue to linger on my mind.

I believe one of the great strengths of McCaw and the All Blacks is mental toughness. In sport, mental toughness is an expression of mental resilience: overcoming adversity be it injury, penalties, earlier mental mistakes, or the pressure to maintain a winning side.

Sport is often used as a metaphor for life, and now I’m putting forward the idea that making a home is also a metaphor for life. Energy wasting homes put the occupiers at the mercy of power companies while energy efficient homes help the occupiers take control.

The metaphor can be extended to the community level, as our city collectively faces many of the same worries as individuals. If each home in Wanganui saved just $10 per month on their power bill – quite easily accomplished – an additional $2 million dollars would be retained in our community each year rather than being sent to power companies in Wellington, Auckland and Christchurch. Additionally, warm, dry, low-energy homes have health benefits that would improve certain respiratory illnesses. And, as indicated by the positive feedback I received from the members of Balance Whanganui, I believe many residents would feel empowered by gaining a certain level of control over their power bill.

With all of this in mind, it only increases my sense of bewilderment as to why the Wanganui District Council would turn down an application to Community Contracts to bring home energy saving education to every suburb in the city. The application had the support of six community groups, but was turned down as the idea of providing easy to understand, practical advice and education to residents was not well aligned with the 10-year plan. With power bills tracking toward doubling in the next ten years, I wonder why it’s not.

Peace, Estwing

Design is one of the most powerful forces in the universe. But like any powerful force, it can be used for good or for evil. It can even be ignored, but, I would argue, at our own peril. Put another way, to fail to design is to design to fail.

Mind you, I didn’t used to think this way. I didn’t think about design or its power at all. Designers, in my mind, were stereotypes of effeminate fashionistas or flamboyant interior decorators I’d seen in movies. 

All that changed the day I heard William McDonough speak at Dartmouth College (USA) about 15 years ago.

“Design is the first signal of human intention. As designers, we promote a positive vision of the future, based upon the belief that many of the environmental problems we face are, at root, design challenges.” – William McDonough

Not only was McDonough one of the best speakers I’ve ever had the pleasure to hear, but, in my opinion he is also one of the best thinkers alive today. (And he wears a bowtie!) 

If you are familiar with TED Talks, you can look up McDonough’s TED Talk on the internet and get an idea of what I mean.

Already a McDonough groupie, I was thrilled with the publication of his book, with German chemist Michael Braungart, in 2002, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things.Cradle to Cradle emphasizes McDonough’s mantra “waste equals food,” but also makes an important distinction that serves as a quantum leap for the sustainability movement: the difference between eco-efficient and eco-effective.

Eco-efficiency, for McDonough, means doing things that are still damaging the planet’s life support system and consuming non-renewable resources, but doing so more slowly than before. He puts it rather bluntly:

“Being less bad is not being good.”

One of the reasons I admire McDonough is that he is pushing the envelope on design thinking but basing it all on the best available science and modeling his designs on how natural ecosystems function. When looking for models of eco-effectiveness we need only turn to a forest, a wetland or a coral reef. Time Magazine described his way of thinking this way:

“His utopianism is grounded in a unified philosophy that – in demonstrable and practical ways – is changing the design of the world.”

If you have been following the Eco-Thrifty Renovation column alongside this one each Saturday, you know I am a huge fan of ‘practical’ and ‘demonstrable’. In other words, I favor what works over what might theoretically work. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding, although I have absolutely no idea where the phrase came from. However, I do likes me some good pudding!

As an environmental science teacher, I used to pose the question to my students: Who has a better track record for making sustainable systems: humanity or nature? Oddly enough, I always got the same answer.

But eco-design thinking is not limited to the fields of architecture or manufacturing. Forty years ago, a pair of Australians, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, developed an eco-design system called permaculture to address sustainable food production. Since then, permaculture design has been expanded to cover economics, finance, transportation, energy, technology, and even health and spiritual wellbeing. Personally, I’ve just completed a four-year doctoral study applying permaculture design and practice to junior secondary science as a way to engage students in authentic, relevant science learning experiences. Eco-design thinking permeates the 400-page thesis from the theoretical framework through the methodology and curriculum design and even the data analysis, interpretation, results and conclusions.

Although it is likely that only four people on Earth will ever read the thesis –  my two supervisors and two examiners – the real value of writing is the thinking that goes into it. Over the last four years I have been amazed at the extent to which eco-design thinking can be pushed in education and in research. I realize that many readers may have little interest in either, but I use this example to show the breadth and depth of the potential application of eco-design thinking.

Think about your life or your job. Are there ways that design – “the first signal of human intention” – can be applied? What are your intentions anyway? Are you fulfilling them? How can thoughtful design help you do so? The possibilities are as endless as the interrelationships of a thriving native bush ecosystem…possums not included.

Peace, Estwing

The sun is amazing. It provides the energy for plants to grow. It provides a comfortable temperature for life on earth. It provides the energy to heat our home and to heat our water directly with its rays, and indirectly with the wood we burn in our Shacklock 501.

Rays from the sun and the energy from plants are referred to as ‘current sunlight’ energy. This term is used in contrast with ‘ancient sunlight’ energy, which refers to fossil fuels that formed from plants that lived (and got their energy from the sun) millions of years ago. Ancient sunlight energy includes oil, coal and natural gas.

Current sunlight includes our daily sunshine along with firewood, food, animal fodder, methane from anaerobic decomposition, etc. Current refers to a human time scale while ancient refers to a geological time scale. Current sunlight energy is generally considered renewable while ancient sunlight is non-renewable.

At our home in Castlecliff, on occasion, the sun also cooks our tea. I consider the solar cooker I bought in India six years ago (for about $NZ 120) one of my most valuable possessions. It traveled from India to the States with me, and from the States to here. (It was manufactured in Thailand.) By my calculations, it has nearly circumnavigated the globe.

Over the last half-decade, we have cooked nearly everything on our solar cooker: potatoes, kumara, pumpkin, rice, pasta, veges, cheese burgers, bacon, apple crumble, pizza, banana cake, sausages, and on one occasion, a leg of goat.

True story: One Sunday afternoon last October a goat leg was hung from our front door knob in a plastic shopping bag. We were out the back at the time, but we had no idea who left it. I asked our neighbours if they saw anyone drop by. One of them said, “A green van pulled up and a guy said, ‘Is this where Nelson lives?’.” That was the only clue we had until about six weeks later when a friend of a friend said to me at the Saturday market, “How’d you like the goat?”

Truth be told, it was good, even though we had never cooked goat before. Our only experience with goats before that was composting one that we found at the Castlecliff beach next to the swimming area. But that is another story. We asked around for advice on cooking goat and the best we got was “slowly.” As it turned out, four hours in a roasting pan on the solar cooker with olive oil, garlic, rosemary, spuds, onions and carrots was about perfect. Highly recommended.

Our solar cooker also serves as a valuable educational tool. While it is unrealistic to expect very many families in Wanganui to take up solar cooking, by dramatically demonstrating the power of the sun in this way, it opens up conversations about other uses of solar power like space heating, water heating, and electricity generation.

Children are especially interested in the solar cooker when it is full of sausages for them to eat. Last year I was able to visit some Wanganui schools for a Solar Sausage Sizzle with funding provided through the Sustainable Whanganui Trust’s Sustainable Schools Programme funded by the Wanganui District Council. 

This year I have a limited amount of funding to do the same, so I would like to offer a contest for two primary classrooms and one intermediate classroom. Children should draw a picture of a solar home and label the important bits. The three winning entries will receive a lunchtime sausage sizzle during term 4. Post entries to The ECO School, 10 Arawa Place, Castlecliff, 4501. Entries close 29^th October.

Peace, Estwing

Last week I wrote about the north corner of our home, and its transformation from a dark toilet to light-filled breakfast nook. A large part of that transformation was installing aluminium exterior French doors featured in last week’s column and the only ‘store bought’ double-glazed window that I wrote about four weeks ago. Together, these fill our kitchen and meals nook with free light all year long, and with free heat in the winter.

I was recently asked if solar energy was a realistic option, to which I replied, “There is no reason that a new home built in Wanganui need rely on any heat source other than the sun and internal ‘waste heat.’ By waste heat, I mean the heat generated by electrical appliances inside the home such as refrigerators, computers, washers, etc. This heat usually comes from motors or fans. I do believe that some builders in Wanganui are doing just that. But I digress.

A feature of north-facing windows that I have not highlighted yet is free day lighting. There are stacks of studies showing that natural lighting improves worker productivity in factories and offices, and that it improves student performance in school and may even reduce disciplinary issues. Ah, Vitamin D!

We have drawn natural daylight deeper into our home by cutting French doors into the wall between the kitchen and lounge. While I normally provide ‘before’, ‘during’ and ‘after’ pictures, in this case the before picture is of a wall – not too exciting for the Lifestyle section of the Chron. However, from the two shots provided, you can get an idea of the transformation that the wall experienced and the resultant brightening of the previous dreary lounge. This type of work required consent when we did it, and now requires a licensed builder.

View from external French doors through a doorway cut through the wall.  

You may recall the before-during-after photos of the lounge that accompanied the article featuring the birth of our daughter, Verti, in that very lounge (Chronicle, 01-09-2012). While the curtains were closed during her birth at 3:30 am on the 29^th of August with an outdoor temperature of 3 degrees Celsius, the lounge windows get excellent winter morning sun when it decides to shine. But until we cut the French doors, that was the only sunlight the lounge received all day long from May through August. By afternoon, the lounge would be dark and growing colder by the minute.

Now, with the French doors, the lounge is light all day long, and even receives some direct rays of later afternoon winter sun that comes in over our kitchen bench, over the Shacklock coal range, through the open French doors and all the way to the southeast corner of the lounge: a distance of 10 metres.

View from external French doors through internal French doors.  

While the doors are usually open, there are times when closing them supports our eco-thrifty mandate of low-input / high-performance. For example, when I get up on particularly chilly mornings before sunrise to hunker down with a vat of coffee and my doctoral thesis, I stuff the firebox of the Shacklock with scraps of wood leftover from the renovation, shut the French doors to the lounge, and enjoy the dry heat radiating toward the breakfast nook. Closing doors and heating only certain rooms is common practice in New Zealand, but practically unheard of in the states where ‘central heating’ and ‘central air conditioning’ are the norm. While this practice is in no way unique to eco-thrifty renovation, it is one more piece in the puzzling challenge of how to live well, save money and help the planet.

From my recollection we paid about $350 for these second-hand rimu doors on an online auction. If you are the couple in Aramoho we bought them from, wacha reckon? Have they found a good home? I can’t imagine what the cost would be of having doors like this made these days. We feel it was money well spent. 

Peace, Estwing

Kia ora koutou,

Here is a comment that I received via email from someone who met two of my old friends and mentors in New Hampshire. 

I’ve enjoyed reading your posts at The Automatic Earth, and was surprised a few months ago when you described your former home on Ragged Mountain, as my family and I moved to New London 18 months ago.  I poked around on the internet, looking for Trollbakken, reading an article about you in the Concord Monitor, and so forth.  I mentioned you to my “peak oil” friend here, Larry Rupp, who said, “I know Nelson!”  Then yesterday I caught up on your blog and saw last month’s post about replacing the sill beam at Trollbakken and, looking at the pictures, thought “hey, that’s Rick Estes!” whom I’ve enjoyed talking with when he’s been at my house cleaning chimneys and installing a wood stove.  Not to mention my several Proctor acquaintances.  And that I attended one of Nicole Foss’ early talks when she first hit the road, at Rhinebeck, New York, back in April 2010, I think.  Just thought I’d share, to be filed in the “small world” category.

Congratulations on your baby and best of luck with your many projects.

Thanks for the kind words. We enjoy looking at Google Analytics and seeing where in the world people are reading the blog. I also recently received via email a list of questions from a fellow Frenchman. I answered some of those questions last week, and I’ll continue to answer some of them today.

All photos taken this morning. Please note the picture formatting on Blogger is acting wonky today. Sorry. 

A large part of eco-design is harnessing free, natural energy flows. Energy comes in many forms, but the most abundant and obvious free energy source to tap into is the sun. With the passing of the spring equinox and the return of longer days than nights, I’ll write one last time about passive solar design before putting it on hold until late next autumn. In the weeks to come I’ll write about some interior eco-thrifty renovations like our $2,500 kitchen and $2,000 bathroom.

This old villa was moved to its current location sometime in the 1980s, and was set down with the toilet in the northernmost corner. While this was not a particular selling point for us, we saw the potential for shuffling the toilet, laundry and kitchen around, and adding north-facing glazing.

The other potential we saw was the sunny north end of the section, which is also the back of the section. While we are not advocates of roofing iron fences that are common in our neighborhood, we did want a little privacy. We also wanted easy access from the new kitchen to vegetable gardens and the outdoor pizza oven that we would place out-the-back. With some wind protection, we’ve been able to plant dozens of fruit trees, berry bushes and grape vines alongside our annual gardens. But I digress. Back to the poorly placed toilet.

Potty Training 

With little fanfare, but ample photo-documentation and much laughter (from my wife, Dani), I removed the toilet from the sunniest spot in our home. The next morning I commenced ripping a large hole in the wall. We had consent and followed the Building Code during this process, but be aware that the code has recently changed. Such work now requires a licensed builder.

 Let the Sun Shine In

We had French doors made by a local manufacturer, and installed them on the western side of the north corner. This gives us ample winter sun from 11 am onwards, and also provides views and access to our Eden-out-the-back.

While the low angle winter sun penetrates deep into the kitchen, the high angle summer sun bare enters. However, because the glass doors are northwest facing, we get a little too much late afternoon sun in the ‘shoulder seasons’ like right now and in March. This problem is easily remedied by drawing our curtains during the later hours of sunny days. While this excludes the sun from our kitchen, we remain content in the knowledge that it is still doing its job heating the water on our roof, and powering the plants and trees in our gardens.

After 

Spring is an exciting time of year, and I love the indoor / outdoor flow provided by the French doors. If I had it to do over again I would have them made even bigger!

Peace, Estwing

Eco-design is holistic, cooperative and adaptive. But still, sometimes emails go missing. Somehow the ‘After’ shots of our section got lost in cyberspace last week somewhere between our home in Castlecliff and the Chronicle offices in the city. (Darn you, Gonville!)

Yet despite the ‘Before’ pictures of weeds and rubbish that accompanied last Saturday’s column, we still had about 40 people turn up for garden tours on the weekend. They must have been really amazed to find over 80 fruit trees and berry bushes in the ground along with extensive annual vege garden beds. Ross and I have saved the rest of you the trip by including before and after pictures this week, but I’ll fill in some of the highlights of what makes an eco-thrifty foodscape.

The elements that determine our decision-making are: sun, wind, water, soil, materials and time. Of these, sun and time are the non-negotiables. In other words, wind can be tempered, water can be managed, soil can be amended and materials can be changed or replaced. By materials I mean garden infrastructure like edging, posts, fences, irrigation, etc.

 This transformation took 12 months.

But the sun only follows certain paths in the sky and time waits for no man, woman or child. We cannot change them, so we have to design around them. The sun shines on certain parts of our section at certain times of year. Understanding solar patterns, and summer and winter sun angles have allowed us to achieve both a warm, dry, low-energy home, and a compact productive foodscape.

For example, in one corner of our back yard we have what I call ‘stadium seating’ facing northeast. At ground level we have a large strawberry bed and annual vege garden. Behind and above those are five blueberry bushes, and then four dwarf apples and a plum. Behind and above those – trained on galvanized wire along the fence – are three grapevines and four raspberry canes. 

And in the corner is a red guava that is just loving its sun trap: fruiting three weeks earlier than my friend in Hamilton’s guava of the same variety! All this is in an area of about 15 square metres.

Strawberries in the foreground, grapes and raspberries on the fence. You’ll have to have good eyes to pick out the apple and plum in this shot. The guava is in the corner in front of the post.  

Wind management means we planted fruit trees in the lee of the few native trees that were on the property or wind netting that we installed ourselves. Water and soil management go hand-in-glove, relying on a combination of purchased topsoil and generous amounts of compost. Since we are on sand, the silt and clay particles in the topsoil are better at binding both organic matter and water longer than sand alone. But instead of top dressing the entire property with topsoil, we concentrate it only around our food producing plants. This means all of our annual vege beds have 70 mm to 100 mm of topsoil, and perennial fruit-bearing plants are installed with 5 to 10 litres of topsoil in the hole around their roots. Although we have rainwater collection and mains, our primary water management tool is this targeted soil / compost mix.

In terms of materials, I’ve already mentioned wind netting, which we use liberally. In some cases I have attached it to both sides of posts for double protection. Other materials we use are concrete fence posts (free from the dump), reused garden edging (online auction) and bricks (various second hand sources). We chose these materials because we did not want to use treated timber for organic gardens, and we could not source inexpensive untreated, long-life timber.

Finally, although we cannot stop time or change it, we can design in four dimensions. Time is the fourth dimension. Designing in four dimensions means crop rotation in annual vege gardens, and may mean using nurse trees like tagasaste (tree lucerne) as companions for fruit trees. We also use timing with our chooks and ducks to mow our grass by ‘tractoring’ them in 2 m by 1.2 m wire mesh pens that we move every day.

In the examples above, we are working with nature not against it, to minimize inputs and maximize productivity. You can learn more from a pair of workshops coming up the weekend of the 6^th – 7^thOctober. 

6^th October, 1 – 4 pm: Low Input / High Productivity Gardening

Whanganui Environment Base, 256 Wicksteed St., Wanganui.

7^th October, 2 – 5 pm: The Practical Application of Permaculture

10 Arawa Place, Wanganui.

Registration: 022 635 0868 – theecoschool@gmail.com

Peace, Estwing

Until now this column has focused on the application of our seven design principles to the physical structure of our dwelling. Over the past 20 weeks I have explained how we have applied those principles: solar gain; thermal mass; insulation; draft-proofing; reduce; reuse; and, recycle.

But recently my attention has been drawn out of doors to our nearly complete landscaping efforts. Although the design principles do not fully apply to our yard and gardens, they have still guided us through the process of turning a section full of rubbish and weeds into an abundant foodscape. For example, the principles of solar gain and thermal mass helped us design and build a number of ‘sun traps’ and ‘heat sinks’ where we planted sub-tropicals such as banana, tamarillo, Tahitian lime and pepino. We are also very conscious of seasonal sun angles in relationship to our deciduous fruit trees like apples, peaches, apricots, and our evergreen fruit trees like feijoas, guavas and citrus. But most of all we are conscious of the wind and sea spray.

You may recall my praise of the New Zealand Building Code in previous columns for its high standard of weather-tightness and structural stability. In other words, the first step toward a sustainable building is one that does not leak or fall down. Along the same lines, the most sustainable fruit tree is the one that does not die from exposure or thirst. For those of us who live close to the coast that means wind protection. For those of us who live on sand that means soil and compost.

In our case, that increased the cost of our landscaping because we have to buy wind netting and topsoil. But without those investments, we might as well not even try growing fruit trees in Castlecliff. With those investments, we have planted 100 edible perennial fruit-bearing plants on our standard section. Along with the perennials, we have extensive annual gardens where we can apply the last three of our design principles constantly: reduce, reuse and recycle.

Like any adherent to common sense, we compost (ie, recycle) our food scraps and yard clippings. We reduce the use of artificial fertilizers and pesticides by managing a diverse, healthy polyculture of plants. In other words, we let nature do the fertilizing and pest control for us by using nitrogen-fixing legumes and beneficial insects. And we have reused heaps of concrete fence posts and edging to frame in our raised annual gardens.

As with the villa renovation, the eco-thrifty mandate in the yard and garden is low input and high performance. Additionally, in both cases the design is holistic and four-dimensional. Holistic means that we consider the interaction between different elements of the design. Four-dimensional means that we consider time – the fourth dimension – as we interact with our home by opening and closing curtains at different times of day, and interact with our gardens by rotating crops and staggering plantings and harvests.

If you are a keen gardener, interested in eco-design, or simply a fan of this column, you are invited to a garden tour to celebrate the spring equinox. We are offering the same tour both today and tomorrow afternoon. A koha is suggested to support the ongoing writing of this column by this unemployed graduate student with an infant child and wife on maternity leave.

Saturday, 22^nd September, 2:30-3:30 pm (This time corresponds with Saturday bus service in Castlecliff).

Sunday, 23^rd September, 2:30-3:30 pm. (Sorry, no Sunday bus service.)

10 Arawa Place, Castlecliff.

Peace, Estwing