Nice article on tips and appliances to push your home electronics and entertainment in an environmental / green direction:
The article includes advice on Best Options for Streaming Media and Finding a Green(ish) Projector.
Tag Archives: ideas
Watch out for the fire
“I do not recommend wood burning stoves in a building as efficient as a
Passivhaus because of the dangers of overheating, but clients are quite often
insistent and these may be more controllable.”
– taken from http://www.building.co.uk/technical/sustainability/passivhaus/incentives-key-for-passivhaus-in-uk/5019141.article
So it seems that I’m not alone in wanting a wood or multi fuel burning stove in a Passivhaus.
I guess this means it’ll be key to pick a smaller than you’d normally go for “wood burner” so that it can get up to operational temperature, but not cause the house to over heat.
Rainwater collector turns into a green wall
OK, the article is about a prototype for a rainwater collector for the urban environment. But why not adapt / progress the idea ?
Full article at http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/05/urban-rainwater-collector-saves-water-in-the-city-turns-into-a-green-wall.php?campaign=daily_nl
3D House Modelling Software
Despite some great initial success with free Sweet Home 3D, that quickly gave some great mock ups, I found from quite a look about that most cheap or free packages are:
- Very USA based in terms of the look and feel / standard furniture options etc.
- Limited on what you can and can’t do.
This matched the answer given on http://www.homebuilding.co.uk/community/ask-the-expert/Which-DIY-software-package-should-we-use-design-our-new-home pretty much matches this:
“Perhaps the best CAD package is Arcon’s 3D Architect (around £200) which is quite intuitive and more sophisticated than the others, although quite expensive. In truth, the packages – such as Ideal Home 3D Home Design – retailing at around £30 tend to be much of a muchness.”
So I’ve on-line purchased (£180) and downloaded Arcon 3D Architect and we’ll see how that goes !
In the end, the architects I chose, ARCO2 used Sketchup, so I had their generated Sketchup file for the house. Which was amazing.