PerpetualPlanet

As we planned where to place our driveway and parking area we realized there might be some fire equipment access requirements to be met. The Tualitin Valley Fire and Rescue Department is who responds to emergencies in our area. We are protection code B8. Their closest station is about 2 miles from our house at 185th and Highway 26. There is a document authored by the Oregon Fire Code Metro Code Committee here that describes the requirements. Our contact at TVF&R is Drew DuBois at 503-356-4700. Relief from these requirements is possible if we install an approved automatic fire sprinkler system in accordance with the provisions of ORS 455.610(5)). I’ve never seen a house with one but perhaps there is some merit to looking into this both to simplify the site and also to better protect the house.

A fire truck needs to be able to get within 150′ of any portion of the structure. Since we are more than 150 feet from the road and a dead end, we must supply a turnaround. This could be a T, Y or cul-d-sac of adquate dimensions.

The road size is important. A vertical clearance of 13.5 feet is required. We have a couple of vertical and horizontal bottlenecks that can be opened by doing some pruning. The code calls for a width of 20 feet, but “when serving two or less dwelling units and accessory buildings (does two houses and a barn fit?), the driving surface may be reduced to 12 feet, although the unobstructed width shall be 20 feet. Turning radii for curves and turnarounds on reduced width roads shall be not less than 28 feet and 48 feet respectively, measured from the same enter point.”

This last item is the trickiest. We have a tight 90 degree turn upon coming on to the property. To make make it less sharp will require removing a forsythia and probably some rare black bamboo and/or moving our fence back. An alternative may be to get a wider easement from our neighbor or running the road out back of our current house.

Update from 8/9/07. Our fire marshall came to see the property and provided some excellent information.

If the we do the house as a renovation and the combined square footage of all living areas exceeds 3600 square feet, a residential sprinkler system will be required. We are confident of staying under this minimum but putting in a sprinkler sprinkler system still looks attractive for safety and may reduce the constraints for access including the need to run a driveway up to the house.  Note that a completely separate structure that is more than 15 feet from the current house would be counted as separate square footage. This poses the question of how far the new building could be from the existing one and still be considered a renovation.

Sprinklers are much less expensive when installed in new construction — about $1.50/sq ft.  They can reduce insurance costs and are much more effective at saving a structure from an internal fire.  The marshall noted most rural houses are an automatic loss in a fire. The department’s efforts go to preventing the fire from spreading.

There are lots of myths about sprinkers all going off when there is no fire or bursting.  However the heads trigger individually and not from kitchen smoke but from 165 degree heat. Breakage occurs in 1 of 16 million systems.

Systems should conform to NFPA 13D sprinkler standards.

What are you doing on Triple-Seven? Our family will be in Canada. Perhaps you’ll be on vacation too. On this particular day we’ll be checking out the LiveEarth music and activities in Quebec City and talking about what we’re doing about climate change.

If you haven’t checked out LiveEarth, get the details here at http://www.liveearth.org/event.php. The gist is a 24-hour concert series around the globe that many hope will be the tipping point for winning hearts and minds in the war on warming. Three hours of prime-time TV and round-the-clock radio and web broadcasts are planned along with live attendance at the 100 concerts.

If the estimates of 2 billion viewers prove accurate, I wonder if the concert might be the largest common experience in the history of humanity. I know it’s hype and Hollywood but I’m for anything that unites the planet on this issue.

I remember 7/20/69, at the McKenzie River with my family, listening to the radio — the day Armstrong set foot on the moon. Do you remember that day? It seemed that focused as we were then there was nothing we could not accomplish. I want my kid to have a memory like that as the challenges to come unfold.

The refrigerator in the house we will remodel is starting to whine and make other noises. It seems like a possible opportunity to get a head start on appliances for the new place, assuming we can predict the proper size and color we will want.

I found a good buyer’s guide in Home Power.

It seems you can save a big chunk of kwh/day with a well-made unit. Sun Frost leads the brands in efficiency. Super insulation and putting the compressor and coils on the top are the big reasons. The RF-16 looks like the best fit for our needs. But ouch, the cost delivered is about $3000! The most efficient conventional models are about $1000 for similar capacity. The Sun Frost uses about .48 kwh/day and the conventional uses about 1.25 kwh/day.

Sun Frost needs some competition!

What’s needed according to our architect is topographical survey of our house site. The result should show one-foot countours 150 from each edge of the house and well as the driveway and existing septic field. Large trees locations and the relationship of the survey area to the lot location should be noted.

One big question remains that affects the area to be surveyed and that is whether the existing drive to the home site will accomodate fire department trucks. The lane needs to be 20 feet wide and have adequate turning radius. I’m trying to schedule a visit by a fire department building inspector to evaluate options.

A search of the local providers yielded these links:

Alpha - Community Development - They have done work for the City of Portland and for Orenco Village.

Andy Paris & Associates - Recommended on Angie’s List.

Heritage Surveying - Angie’s List. No web site. (503) 255-6558.

Tetsuka - Helped at Max and Hildy’s Nursery.

Olson Engineering

Weddell Surveying - Angie’s List. No web site. (503) 292-8083

ZTEC Engineers - Recommended by architect. No web site. 3737 Se 8th Ave, Portland, OR 97202 - (503) 235-8795

It turns out that LIDAR imaging, if available, might satisfy the requirement for having 1 foot contour mapping. LIDAR mapping is performed from aircraft over large metro areas for the purpose of mapping flood plains, fault zones etc. The USGS pays for much of it and the data are then available to other government bodies. The GIS experts at Oregon’s Department of Geology and Minerals (DOGAMI) told me that data from recent flights over our area would be available in August 2007 from METRO, our regional government.

After some time using Radio Userland I’ve made a move to WordPress. Radio worked well enough but it seemed to have lost traction in the market. For blogging software, I wanted to go with something getting used (and improved) by a larger community. Also, my hosting service, SetupSite, recently began support of WordPress. They even installed it for me free.

It appears I have a lot of plugins, tools, tips and tricks to learn.

Want to clean green? Simple ingredients blend to make cheap and safe cleaners. Borax is the one item to keep out of little hands. Stock the following under your sink instead of more expensive products.

The mixture for glass cleaner above beat all store products tested by Consumer Reports in 1992.

Maybe hoping for the transcendence of reason is not blindly optimistic…

http://www.dallasnews.com/s/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/020506dnedibryce.bee3e.html

Robert Bryce writes on Feb 5, 2005:

President Bush has a simple policy regarding energy: Produce more of it.

The former oilman has packed his administration with veterans of the oil and coal industries. And for most of the first Bush term, his energy policy and his foreign policy were joined at the hip. Since the administration believed that controlling the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf was critically important to the U.S. economy, the invasion of Iraq seemed to serve both the president’s energy goals and his foreign policy ones.

But a curious transformation is occurring in Washington: a split of foreign policy and energy policy. Many of the leading neoconservatives who pushed hard for the Iraq war are going green.

James Woolsey, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and a staunch backer of the Iraq war, now drives a 58-miles-per-gallon Toyota Prius and has two more hybrid vehicles on order. Frank Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy and another neocon who championed the war, has been speaking regularly in Washington about fuel efficiency and plant-based fuels.

The alliance of hawks and environmentalists is new but not entirely surprising. The environmentalists are worried about global warming and air pollution. But Mr. Woolsey and Mr. Gaffney – both members of the Project for the New American Century, which began advocating military action against Saddam Hussein back in 1998 – are going green for geopolitical reasons, not environmental ones. They seek to reduce the flow of American dollars to oil-rich Islamic theocracies, Saudi Arabia in particular.

They say oil dollars have made Saudi Arabia too rich a source of terrorist funding and Islamic radicals. Mr. Gaffney recently pointed out that America has become dependent on oil imported from countries that “by and large are hostile to us.” This fact, he said, makes reducing oil imports “a national security imperative.”

Neocons and greens first hitched up in the fall, when they jointly backed a proposal by the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a Washington-based think tank that tracks energy and security issues. The plan proposes that the federal government invest $12 billion to encourage automakers to build more efficient cars and consumers to buy them; develop industrial facilities to produce plant-based fuels such as ethanol; and promote fuel cells for commercial use.

The plan is keen on “plug-in hybrid vehicles,” which use internal combustion engines along with electric motors charged by standard electric outlets.

Environmental groups, who have been in the weeds ever since George W. Bush moved in to 1600 Pennsylvania, are happy for any help they can get. “It’s a wonderful confluence. We agree on the same goals, even if it’s for different reasons,” says Deron Lovaas, the National Resources Defense Council’s point man on auto issues.

For Mr. Woolsey and Mr. Gaffney, the fact that energy efficiency and conservation might help the environment is an unintended side benefit. They want to weaken the Saudis, the Iranians and the Syrians while also strengthening the Israelis. Whether these ends are achieved with M-16s or hybrid automobiles doesn’t seem to matter to them.

They aren’t the only Iraq hawks who have joined the cause. Among others, the Committee on the Present Danger is about to join the Prius-and-ethanol crowd. A driving force for America’s military buildup since the ’50s now reconstituted as an anti-terror group, the committee will issue a paper in the next few months endorsing much of the IAGS plan.

Despite the setbacks in Iraq, the green neocons believe they can persuade Congress and the White House to adopt their program. If they can persuade Congress and the White House

The means to heat and cool your home cheaply is outside in the dirt. Heat pumps provide a home with comfort without emissions and at substantial cost reductions from oil, gas or electric systems. The only requirement is digging and the space to do so. This heat pump technology is variously called ground-source, earth-coupled or geothermal. I’ve written primer which can be found here.

If you’ve been to the Oregon coast at any time between September to August, you know it’s very wet and cloudy. Yes, I do mean September to August! So you would have to be very skeptical if someone told you that there is a residence there that produces as much energy as it owners consumes However, that home is a reality and an inspiration to others like us, looking to build net zero homes outside of the sunbelt.

Designed by Nathan Good, the Cannon Beach Residence uses solar water heating, a 6kw PV array and a ground-source heat pump system to provide for its energy needs. It is expertly insulated, oriented and all electrical loads have been limited to the most efficient devices available.

We took an excellent class in Ecological Architecture at Portland Community College this spring which proved very instructive and introduced us to a talented local green building evangelist and architect. Candace Gossen, the instructor, is working on her PhD dissertation while practicing architecture and teaching new designers like ourselves. On her web site, www.solar783.com, you’ll find a collection of work she admires as well as the syllabus for our course.

The main topics covered were:

• Introduction to alternative materials
• Solar profiles and site analysis
• Solar water heating and hydronic space heating
• Photovoltaics and renewable energy design
• Biological wastewater systems (compost toilets, vermiculture, and living machines)
• Rainwater catchment

During the classes, students worked on their own designs for these components with an eye towards use in their own projects.