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Showing posts from September, 2014

Bringing Nicole Foss to Seymour

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Principle 8: Integrate rather than segrgate While we have set ourselves up quite nicely on our small block, it's not enough. There's a lot that you can do to prepare for change, to reduce your overheads and provide for more of your own needs where you live, but if times really do get tough, what happens to everyone else? There's only so many pieces in my pie. What goes down must grow up. Illustration used with permission from Michael Leuing I've been following the work of Nicole Foss on her blog The Automatic Earth for a few years. She's helped me get my head around why another economic crisis is on the way and what we need to do to prepare for it. Realising the scale of change that we confront and the speed at which it will affect us has helped motivate me to raise this awareness in my local community. On hearing of her latest tour I met with the new BEAM committee ( I stepped down as president last month ) to put forward a proposed event. With BEAM'...

Bathroom with a view (to the blue greenhouse) Part 2

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Principle 2: Catch and Store Energy This project has been one of the ongoing ones, that just took a giant leap forward - after some gentle nudging from Peter Lockyer, the builder architect who I worked with. Nothing like a deadline to work to, and the deadline is the 2014 Sustainable House Day - on this weekend. Some more about the progression of the greenhouse can be seen in the Bathroom with a view post . Since moving in there has been many competing priorities on what to do first. The greenhouse kept getting put on the back burner and it was Peter who kept moving me along, beginning with the adding of the flashing on the timber frame back in October 2011.  Since then the project stalled until I asked Peter if he was interested in running tours with me for this years Sustainable House Day. "Maybe you should finish off that greenhouse" - um, okay. Wow, no wonder I put it off for so long, it ended up being a BIG job. Flashing the blue greenhouse Peter begins to ...