Shelves

There's something very satisfying about putting up shelves. We have moved a few shelf racks from the old house, carefully considering rooms sizes and layouts and deciding where they go. Two are still outside but their destiny is more or less sealed. 

Within the house there are several places where adjustable shelf racks have been installed. Two metal strips run up and down each side of the space, and they even have numbers on each square hole in them so you can make sure the shelves are level. It's usually impossible to see the numbers, unless you're at exactly the right angle, but it's a nice idea. 

During our extensive planning of the the house, we both wanted fixed shelves, but for different reasons. For my wife, fixed shelves mean that you don't have to look at the metal strips or the pegs they hold, and they are more aesthetically pleasing. For me, fixed shelves mean that you cannot adjust them, which is a good thing, because you will never have to adjust them.

So we got movable shelves, and I've spent hours now moving them up and down, standing back, getting a second opinion finding they are not quite the right size for what we want to put on them, and then moving them up or down a little.

And having a marvellous time doing it. 

Eco Babble - Talking to the Alps

The Alps Language Service Association invited me to talk to them, which I used as an opportunity to spout Eco Babble.

Here are brief contents of the talk, which veered seemlessly between Physics lesson, ecological call to arms, and rant about the woeful state of Japanese building. It seemed to engage and captivate the audience of a dozen or so Japanese men and women in varying stages of middle age.

The talk was on Boxing day, the day after Christmas day, in case you didn't know, and they asked me about that first. I told them that for me Christmas was not at all Christian, and asked them what fir trees and reindeer had to do with Israel. Also I told them how it wasn't even Jesus's birthday; that had just been a ploy by the Christian church to suppress and subsume pagan worship of the winter solstice, and celebration of the sun coming back. This actually began to get onto the topic. 

Eco logical or nomic

The bigger TV you get, the more eco points you get. It should be the other way round!

Stick "ECO" on something, and people will pay more for it, and you'll make more money.

Exponential growth of fossil fuel consumption

The vicious circle of increased efficiency, leading to increased consumption, leading to more money coming in, leading to improvements in efficiency. This is counter intuitive, but the record with coal is that improvements in efficiency, rather than reducing consumption, exponentially increase it. Has our economics moved on?

Engineering

Among my studies were electronics, thermodynamics and finite element analysis. Not particularly useful in language teaching, but they have been very helpful in building my house. 

Traditional Japanese building

Much better than modern Japanese building at stopping overheating in the summer. But what about winter?

I talked about a new paradigm in building

We need to stop using fossil fuels

Insulation materials are available

Ventilation systems are available

Better window technology is available

At this point I had to persuade them that the standards in Japan are very low, and though there may be some houses with some insulation now, it is not a lot. 

Common confusions

I talked about heat and temperature. Outside it was five below freezing, but there was a lot of heat, as it was still over 200 degrees above absolute zero. 

Energy efficiency or energy use. I told them about my car, which is one of the most environmentally friendly cars in town as I hardly ever use it. It has terrible mileage though

"It's good for the environment"

Almost nothing humans do is good for the environment. Some things are just less bad. 

Insulation.

People often think that things either insulate or don't. In fact some things just insulate better. 

Passive house

This is an answer and a goal in building a house. It constitutes: 

Very high insulation, including windows;

Very airtight, so it needs a  ventilation system;

A heat exchange ventilation system, so you don't loose all the heat in the exhaust air;

Maximised solar gain, so the windows are on the south

In Japanese this is often called「無暖房住宅」(mudan-jutaku: non-heating house)

The idea in Europe was that with these criteria met, central heating is not necessary, as the appliances and bodies int the house are enough, or the incoming air can be given extra heat within the ventilation system. Central heating has been standard in Europe, although they are now trying to get away from it. In Japan, on the other hand, it is a recent development that progressive builders and up-market buyers are installing.

Good insulator

Thicker is better

No gaps!

I showed them the pictures of the heat sink and the part of the window frame. Most of them guessed which was which, but it was quite difficult, which was my point. 

I asked what the best insulator in the room was. One of them correctly identified that it was air. I found out later he had a PhD in biophysics. 

Eco points!

The house did get lots of Eco points, it was 200% of their low energy standard, at 0.92 W/m²K (watts per square metre of floor space per degree difference with the outside temperature). A figure which I need to check.

To translate this into terms that they could easily relate to, I told them yesterday morning it had been -8°C outside, and it was 14°C inside, and the underfloor heating is not working yet. My old house would have been the same temperature with the heating on.

LEDs

The advantages are: low energy, they don't radiate heat, they're small, long lasting and don't attract insects. They asked why, so I explained that LEDs produce light in the spectrum visible to us, whereas insects are really only interested in animal blood, so they want to see warm bodies with lower frequency infrared vision.

The problems with LEDs are: they can't dim, they have limited colours and they're expensive. Actually the first two are not correct, and the last one will be less and less so, as costs are going down exponentially. 

Solar Power

The advantages are: no fuel, no pollution, no noise, long lasting. The problems are: cost, area and unreliability due to clouds.

Power democracy

I put it in terms of a model of individual ownership of the means of power production, rather then governments and big businesses, who will build a nuclear power station North of Tokyo, and go on holiday in the resorts South of Tokyo. 

I left them with these questions:

Would you live under an oil power station?

Would you live under a hydroelectric power station?

Would you live under a windmill?

Would you live under a solar power station?

NOTE: Units for Q value edited on 20th January. It did say "kWh/m2a" - kilowatt hours per square metre of floor space per year, which is a building performance measurement used by Passive House Institute that depends on the climate, It now says, I hope correctly, W/m2K - watts per square metre of floor space per degree Kelvin, which is a measure of the thermal performance of a building.

Don't even have to dream of one.

Christmas Day, 2011. 

It seems like every Christmas I've spent in Matsumoto has been white.

I'm dreaming of a working internet connection though. Also I keep thinking that we haven't really moved into a warm house and that I'm going to wake up sometime.

We're in!

We moved in on Friday. There is still some stuff left in the last house, and plenty of cleaning and tidying to do there, but we have everything we need in the new house--it's just a case of getting it out of the right box. Since we did the big move on Friday with some help from our friends, and a three-ton removal van and the professionals, we've been back three or four times to get more stuff. I forgot to get the kettle twice times. 

There are still plenty of boxes everywhere, but we're determined to get everything out of them. Rather than rummaging through to find things, we're trying to take things out and put them away as we go along. Now that we have a new home, we're also trying to find a home for all the little things that live in it. The storage space should be ample, but seems to be very quickly filling up.

Already it feels more comfortable than the old house, even though the underfloor heating isn't working yet. They're coming to fix that today, so it should be a couple of degrees warmer. It's now somewhere in the mid teens, which is fine if you're moving around, and we  have an electric carpet under the dining table, and put the air conditioner on. 

When the removal men were in the house, they opened one door on the north side and one on the south side, which very effectively got a through draft of biting winter air. Even then, as soon as you went upstairs it was much warmer. 

There is still a little more work to do on the house, and a few hundred things to write about. 

Lots of bits of paper

I've been chased by a seemingly endless paper train this week.

On Monday, I changed my address to the new house. This is essential to get the electricity connected and claim the grant for adding the solar panels, and to go into a contract with the electricity company to sell them the electricity. 

The system in Japan is such that your address is registered with the local city, town or village authority, so they know where you live, and everyone is kept in their place. Changing your address means a trip to the city hall. The staff there have improved a great deal in the past ten years. They used to treat the citizens as scum who are coming begging to the castle for permission to breathe. Now they call you "o-kyaku-sama", which means customer, and smile and say "o-tsukaresama-deshita", which is a way of saying thank you to someone of a higher status.

 

I only really needed to change my own address, but while I was about it, I changed the address of the whole family. This took a few minutes longer and had the immediate effect of changing Joe, my older son's, school. The new house is only a couple of hundred metres away, but it's in the catchment area for a different school. From the new house the new school is twice the distance of the school he as at now, several of the kids in the immediate neighbourhood go to the nearer school, and it doesn't seem like a good idea to change schools when it's not really necessary. 

To get this common sense to prevail I had to go to the School Education Department of the City Hall, which is in another building, just in front of the castle. I got there on Tuesday, and it only took about half an hour.

When I got back home on Tuesday, I found out how many other papers and which variety I needed, not just for the electricity and application for the solar grant, but also for getting the house in my name, which needs to be done before the bank will start the mortgage. I needed a four Juminhyo (certificates of residence) and three inkan shomeisho (certificates of registration of seal - and I mean a stamp with my name on rather than the aquatic mammal with a ball on its nose). To further complicate things, as I'm not Japanese, they won't give me a Juminhyo but a certificate of alien registration. "Ju" means reside, which I do, "hyo" means chart, which it is, so it must be that I'm not a "min". 

I have a card for my inkan shomeisho, and there is a machine at the City Hall which I learnt will also print out Juminhyo (or their alien equivalent). I got all these papers on Wednesday morning, and handed them to the appropriate people.

Everything is set for them to hand over the keys this evening. At home there is still an alarming number of empty boxes, still flat in piles and not yet box-shaped, and a lot of crap is still on shelves and in cupboards.

We've got to move

The removal man came around yesterday for an estimate. As we're close we'll try and do some of it ourselves, with a little help from our friends, but it's going to be much easier to leave the big stuff to the professionals. Like many things in Japan there is a well-developed system for moving that will run smoothly and painlessly. The man was young and polite, wearing a suit and tie and holding a clipboard and calculator. He went around the house looking at what we've got and then totted it up on his check sheet. He gave us a 40-page A4 brochure that is both a showcase of their service, with reassuring pictures of their smiling, uniformed staff, shoes off and socks clean, and a manual for the mover. On the back it says "We care you", but I don't want to point out their omission. Prepositions have nothing to do with moving house. 

When he left he gave us fifty boxes. Small ones for heavy things and big ones for light things. They have special boxes for wardrobes with hangers in, but we'll do the clothes ourselves and don't need any of those. Each box has a label where you can write the contents, and circle where the box is coming from in the old house and where it is going to in the new house, not just the floor and the room, but which part of the room. There is red tape to put on boxes of fragile things, and yellow tape for others. In the booklet there is a page of numbered and coloured stickers to put on the video and stereo cables and sockets, and presumably they will put everything in place and plug it in for you if you ask nicely. 

After a few minutes going through the checksheet with his calculator, we came to the negotiation. He said we'd get away with a short two-ton truck for just taking the essential big things--the fridge, washing machine, desks, table and chairs. If we wanted to get everything in one truck we'd need a four tonner. We decided on a three-ton truck, and will start first thing in the morning moving stuff ourselves, and may well have some left over until the following day.

It's not that any of us are particularly acquisitive, but we've accumulated a fair amount of crap over the past eleven years living in this house. Now's the chance to look through and get rid of what we don't need, but also we're not very good at throwing things out. Maybe that's part of not being acquisitive. With clothes I partly blame it on being a second child with a close older brother, and only ever getting hand-me-downs. The only time I can remember getting new clothes is when we were all dressed up in the same outfits. Perhaps it's the other way round, and the cause is my own sartorial ambivalence, but I'm not interested in clothes and don't like to wear new things, and feel obliged to keep everything. 

This may also be inherited from parents who were brought up during the war and rationing, when everything was precious and valuable and needed looking after. In these times of profligate consumerism, mountains of garbage and energy crises, it's difficult to argue with respecting anything for the intrinsic value of its resources and the time and energy that have gone into making it and bringing into your home.

And perhaps my Yorkshire roots have something to do with this. I'll not say that people from Yorkshire are mean, but they have a word, "thoil", that means to be able to financially afford something but not able to justify spending money on it. So it's going to be a busy week as I can neither thoil getting all our stuff moved by the professionals, nor throwing out anything that there's even a slim chance we'll use some time.  

So what does it look like?

A lot of people have been asking, for the past year or two, what the house is going to look like. And they're talking about the colour and finish of the exterior walls.

Now we're in the lucky position of being able to tell them. To be honest, it hasn't been my highest concern, and I've usually just said "white", then added "ish".

Structurally speaking, the outside of the wall is made up of strips of wood, covered with a layer of tar sheet, then chicken mesh, then some kind of cement, then another piece of state-of-the-art mesh that will inhibit cracks, and then plaster on top. Sorry for all the technical terms and trade names.

The choice with the top layer was between painters and plasterers. The painters use spray guns and are cheaper, while the plasters do it by hand and cost a little more. We were all set to get the painters with their spray guns, but in the end they were all very busy, so we were lucky enough to get plasterers. 

This is a good thing, by all accounts, as plaster is more resistant to cracks and lasts longer. And we seem to have got the best plasters in the area.

As well as the state-of-the-art mesh just under the top layer of plaster, this was the first time they had worked on top of plastic brackets. There is 100 mm of insulation outside the structural frame of the house, and the insulator wanted to use plastic brackets to keep the insulation in place and mount the wooden frame for the external wall. Being a lot smaller than any kind of wooden structure, the plastic brackets improve the thermal performance. Hopefully they were all put on correctly and will be strong enough so it all holds in place! 

The other choice to all this is ready-made sidings, which I can't help feeling would have been cheaper and quicker. If we had used highly insulating sidings, it may have contributed to the thermal performance of the house, and possibly saved some headaches or costs somewhere else. Also sidings would presumably be relatively easy to replace after they have absorbed a few years of weather.

Also, I'm sure there is some way of having double wall layers, with an air gap in the middle fitted into the ventilation circuit in some way. The idea is a little vague though.

Anyway, now you can see what the house looks like from the outside, and it's white. ish.

It's been snowing

As I mentioned before there was a fair bit of discussion about what paint we were going to use, and how it was going to be applied. I think the most likely choices were Clay Paint and Chaff Wall. Both are eco products, whatever exactly that means. Clay Paint is imported from Europe, and made from natural ingredients, whatever exactly that means.

Chaff Wall is made in Japan, from scallop shells. I've always loved scallops, although I don't think that was too major a factor in our decision. In the end they used a spray gun rather than rollers, which ends up using more paint, although takes less time, so I think made no difference to the price. I can steel feel the smell of the paint in my nostrils, and a lot of the windows in the house were covered in condensation from it, but it was a bit like walking around just after it has snowed, when everything is pristine and beautiful. The electrician can start putting the fittings in now, and hot and cold water pipes can all be connected, and we should be in at the end of next week.

Skirting boards and tiles

The floors are all in now, except the genkan and the bit outside the front door. Not sure when they're doing that.

Downstairs is all tiled, which looks great. 

A while ago we noticed, quite by chance, that they were going to use tiles at the bottom of the walls rather than wooden skirting boards. Tiles going up the walls is a good idea in a bathroom or outside, where water is being used, but it's not really necessary or aesthetically pleasing for a living room, where wooden skirting boards seem to me obvious. We managed to fix that.

Also we realised, in time, that they had been planning to put the kitchen units in first, then tile around them, as if they were laying a carpet. We managed to fix this problem too, so the whole floor is tiled, except under the pieces of furniture that look like pieces of furniture on the west wall, and under the back of the tatami room. At least if we, or whoever, wants to move the kitchen around in a few years time, they won't need to re-tile the whole floor. 

We also noticed that the skirting boards went on first, and the tiles went down after them. It seemed to me more logical to put the tiles down first, then use the skirting boards to cover up the gap and any unevenness along the edge between tile and wall, but apparently they don't do that here. To me, and perhaps also practitioners of western building, that is the function of the skirting board. The site foreman told me that the problem with doing that is that the skirting boards shrink, so if you put them on top of the tiles, a gap will form underneath them. The skirting board, apparently, is to protect the wall from being damaged when you're using the vacuum cleaner. 

Of course if we hadn't noticed that they were going to use tiles until later, and we had been able to stop them in time, we may have ended up with wooden skirting boards going on later.

 

I don't wish to say that one view is right and the other is wrong, but it's interesting to see these different perspectives, and a good idea to be aware of these issues when building between cultures.

A composition

Composting seems to be a good idea in general. My dad was always a keen composter and we grew up with a couple of the classic square frame designs made from interlocking planks that would grow up as we emptied lawn mowings and things into it, and the other one would shrink as compost was used around the garden. We were all trained, so that if ever we ate melon, we had to cut up the skins into small peices so they would break down more quickly. We took turns taking out the compost bin from the kitchen.  

At one point I was going to do an A-level project harnessing the energy of compost to make hot water. I think it was going to use a heat pump, although I ended up dropping that A-level in favour of more academic ones so I could get into a university engineering degree. A tragedy.

If you're living in an apartment it may not be very practical to compost your kitchen waste, but with a garden, producing it's own variety of foliage and requiring fertilization, composting seems like a good idea in our specific case too. Although over seven different kinds of rubbish are collected here, and burnable rubbish is used at an efficient incinerator that heats a swimming pool and spa, composting seems more sensible than putting garden waste into plastic bags to be driven away by a truck.

The garden behind the new house was getting a bit overgrown with weeds, so it seemed like a good idea to start composting now, so that when we start our garden in earnest next spring we'll have something to help our plants grow.

The first composter I made was an old bin with a broken bottom. I sawed the bottom off, and drilled holes every ten centimetres or so up the sides. This filled up very quickly and the pile of weeds next to it began to grow, so a larger scale solution was necessary.

I decided on a hexagonal version of the classic interlocking plank design. I'm sure there were many reasons for this, but I'm not entirely sure of a good reason. Perhaps you can think of one.

The hexagon has a slightly larger ratio of area to circumference than a square. This means that for a given amount of materials, you get a larger volume of compost. Nature's solution--the circle--has the highest possible ratio, which is why so many things are cylindrical or spherical. As well as being the most efficient use of materials, the corresponding lower surface area to volume means that round things end up with lower heat loss. This may be a factor in compost heap design as the heat they generate speeds up the work of the bacteria.

The difference between squares and hexagons is pretty tiny, barely significant in fact, at less than 10%. 

Ignoring the widths of the walls, the ratio of unit area to circumference for a square is 1/4, or 0.25; 

for a hexagon it is 1/2√(2√3), around 0.27;

for a circle it is  1/2√pi, around 0.28.

And all the materials I used were offcuts and discarded packaging materials from the house, so didn't cost me anything. The only materials I did buy, in fact, were screws, and the hexagon uses more of these than the square. Also the hexagon involves more work as each layer has six, rather than four components, each needing work on each end. The work itself is also more complicated for the hexagon, involving angles of 60 degrees rather than right angles.

So the hexagon, while theoretical a more efficient shape in terms of material use, in fact cost more in terms of materials, and took more work of a more complicated nature to make. 

But time is free if you're having fun. 

The hexagon may be a little more stable than the square, and there's something aesthetically pleasing about the hexagonal shape. 

You can see how each part was constructed below. One of the major revelations for me was the power of power tools. I started off with a hand saw, and a hammer and nails. The carpenter let me borrow his power saw at one point, which he set to cut fixed lengths with ends at 60 degrees. This was quicker and easier. In view of the strange angle at the ends, the nails were not working so well, and on the carpenter's advice I started using screws. I also used my electric drill with a screwdriver bit. I've never done any serious amounts of woodwork, and only ever used a regular screwdriver, but the difference in speed was amazing.  

The place looks like a building site!

Building a house is something that everyone thinks they can do. And in fact everyone can do, if they can get their hands on enough materials, time and money. Shelter has been part of the human thing for tens of thousands of years. It may be that part of the problem is the fact that anybody can do it, which means that standards are not so high.

People have the idea of our distant ancestors having lived in caves, but most of them probably never did. We just think of them as cavemen because a lot of their bones and artifacts were found in caves. They ended up there and were preserved, while the ones in the forest or on the plains were not. Ancient cave paintings survive because the sunlight has not dimmed them. That doesn't mean people didn't paint on animal skins or bits of wood, or on the walls outside caves.

They have been making structures to keep the rain or sun off for at least half a million years. The oldest yet discovered was in Japan. Older, in fact than modern humans.

Although stone buildings have been popular in the UK since Tudor times, when they started using all the trees to make ships for the navy, most people for most of the human condition have made shelters of wood and mud. These structures, although we should call them permanent, have probably been somewhere in the process of being constructed or falling to pieces throughout most of their lives. We are very aware of the consumerist age and the abundance of stuff, but I'm sure dwellings have always been partially filled with things that need throwing away or that people shouldn't have acquired in the first place. Although I suspect there have always been a few people who live in permanent tidiness, I think they are, and have always been a minority. Our idea of normality is somewhat fictitious. The snapshots that make up our picture of the world are only taken when we feel it's worth getting the camera out.

There are different extents to which structures are windproof, waterproof, winterproof and summerproof. Windproofing and waterproofing seem the most basic, although our old house fairly rattles around when the wind is blowing outside, and for a while rain was pouring in through the kitchen wall. In terms of summerproof, this old house is better than many modern Japanese houses, with extended eaves and opening windows towards the prevailing wind. 

For a long time winterproofing has meant the ability to build a fire inside, and airtightness has been a decidedly bad idea. I think zero-carbon buildings in temperate climates have a very short history as window technology is critical. 

This really is the beginning of a new age. 

And now, in colour

We're going through the magical experience of seeing the plans really turning into a house. The black and white two-dimensional drawings had appeared in three dimensions, and now the drab colours of raw wood and plasterboard are being transformed by paint and wallpaper.

The choices have been involved and traumatic, but the results so far look great. We have now chosen every wall and every door, except the ones for the cupboards in the bedroom. We need to give a final answer on those tomorrow. 

Most of the walls are going to use a material called "Chaff Wall" which is made from scallop shells. Another option was a product from Europe called "Clay Paint". Both are Eco products which contain natural products, allow the wall to breathe, and absorb rather than emit harmful and unpleasant odours. Chaff wall also absorbs and releases moisture, helping to stabilise humidity within the house, and apparently works as an insulator, although this may be negligible compared to the 230 millimetres of insulation beyond it. 

The most important considerations are probably to allow any formaldehyde in the wood or other materials to escape, and to let moisture pass in or out of the wall, so that we don't get any condensation build up anywhere. 

Of course colour and texture are also important, and at first I was keen to get off-white, although none of the off-whites looked very nice, so we just went for White. Chaff wall looked nicer than Clay paint, and being a local product, it is used more widely so the painters will handle it. If we'd chosen Clay paint, the builders would have had to buy the paint, then get painters to use it, and they'd be lumbered with any left over.

Another choice we had to make was whether the paint should be applied by roller or spray gun. At first we were told that spray guns use about 50,000 yen more paint, so will cost us more. We began trying to choose from tiny samples, on which the spray finish looked much better than the rougher roller finish.  Once we ordered a colour, the painters made bigger samples for us, around 50 cm square, and the roller-finished one looked really good. We then spoke to the painter, who was also impressed by how good the samples looked and how difficult it would be to make the wall look like that as the roller needs to leave the wall at some point, where there will be some kind of a line. Small bits of wall would probably be no problem, although the ceiling, 10 metres across, may be more of a challenge, and he seemed to much prefer the idea of a spray gun. He was encouraged to tell his boss this, so that we won't have to pay too much extra for the paint, in view of the fact that we're making the job easier.

So when it comes to cupboards in the bedroom, which cover the bottom part of the west wall and the north wall, beyond which is the closet, I'm inclined to go for something dark, as there will be several metres of white wall above them, and on the whole of the east side of the room. We'll have to wait for tomorrow to see what the decision is.

A door that opens

Here's another little tale in the saga of the imported windows.

Actually it's a door, but I think as far as the construction goes it's a window, and anyway we got all our external doors and windows from the same place. This is the entrance to the upstairs room and we were hoping, actually expecting, that it would be able to open to about 90 degrees. 

Once again, it's difficult for me to decide whose fault it was, so I hold everyone responsible.

In terms of construction, the door has a strip of wood sticking out around 5 centimetres on the outside across the bottom. This seems like a great idea for keeping rain off the bottom of the door. Unfortunately, when the door opens, the strip of wood is in line with the edge of the door frame. This looks fine at first, but normally, the outer finish of the wall overlaps the door frame, to stop weather getting in through the edge. 

It looked fine at first, opening to 90 degrees, but when the wooden finish went around the edge of the door frame, the door stopped opening beyond around 60 degrees. Not ideal. 

I was most annoyed with the architect, who has been scornful of these windows since we suggested using something from outside Japan, and has been trying hard to find fault with them, and rubbing his hands with glee every time something has gone wrong. The windows arrived a year ago, and were installed into the house four months ago, and he only noticed this problem last week, when the carpenter pointed it out.

It would have been possible to change the wall construction and finish, for example putting the indent diagonally, but clearly the window was not suitable for normal construction, in which the wall finish overlaps the window frame to cover the gap.

The solution was to cut the corner off the wooden strip, so it now opens pretty close to 90 degrees. The wooden strip is not structural (I hope!) so this should not be be a problem. It may even be painted to match the rest of the door, or get a rubber stopper on as that is what hits the frame now when the door opens

So, will it have been worth it?

So you're sitting there, in your old house, knowing the paint is going to be dry in the new one pretty soon, so it doesn't matter that it's getting colder and that the guy who filled up the kerosene cans didn't put the lid on properly, and it spilt on the floor of the car, because soon you're never going to need any more kerosene.

You've already let the kids switch on the electric toilet seat warmer, and if it gets much colder you may actually plug it in. It's not going to be on for long though.

Then you read this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/pooran-desai-interview-green-buildings

And you start to wonder, again, whether the extra mile was worth the few inches more of energy efficiency. The point of the article is that the difference between a high energy performance and very high energy performance building is not so great, but lifestyles will make a huge difference. So if you're eating strawberries flown in from India, your eco house isn't really going to be so eco. Riding a bicycle to work may not help your carbon credentials if your burning fat from an avocado from Mexico.

So what does the design of buildings actually do to change the way people live?  

Or maybe this is just the nature of the media to find different opinions, and highly energy efficient buildings really are worth it; there are just other things to worry about too.

I still wonder how much the new house is just going to be a very stable environment, immune to the massive temperature swings outside, and what we're getting is comfort, rather than ecology. I worry that the lifetime carbon costs have been spent and then some in the construction.

There certainly are several fronts to fight on when we're trying to come to terms with a population doubling in a couple of decades.

So, going to back to the idea of a house that doesn't consume energy, at least symbolically this is a challenge to the consumerist aesthetic.

You can't make an omelette without using a few hundred kilojoules of thermal energy.  

19th December

We have a completion date, and the good news is that it's before Christmas. Also, looking on the bright side, as it's a few pay days later than expected, and all being well I'll be getting a bonus this year, I can reduce the amount I need to borrow from the bank. I won't dwell on the fact that we were expecting to be in the new house last Christmas, and I'll try not to worry too much if this date slips a bit. 

I got a copy of the building schedule, and it's very exciting. As of 23rd November, the tiler has started tiling away, planned to finish at the end of the month. The kitchen is going in on the last two days of November. The wallpapering is finished, and the door frames all have at least undercoats on, but the wall painting will start from 1st December, until 8th. Not every room has tiles, so I'm sure the painters and tilers would have been able to work simultaneously. Perhaps they don't get on with each other.

Also, it seems the building trade in Matsumoto is incredibly busy at the moment and it's been difficult to get all the subcontractors lined up. This is probably a combination of projects delayed when the earthquake hit up north back in March, that are now all going ahead, and rebuilding work from the earthquake that hit Matsumoto in June and dislodged a lot of tiles. This is what it did to a wall in our house, although I don't think the landlord has added it to anybody's list of things to do.

When the paint is up on 8th December, the electricians and plumbers come in. Actually, the schedule says it's possible for the electricians and plumbers to work any time from 24th November, but they better be careful not to upset the tiler as he doesn't seem to like people walking around on his tiles.

They take down the inside scaffolding on 10th December. They put it up a couple of weeks ago for no obvious reason, then took it down a couple of days ago so the tilers can tile the ground floor. The heating engineers are coming to fix up the heat pump and the underfloor heating.

The bannister rail is going on the stairs on 15th December, then they can start cleaning inside the house. The tatami mats are going down in our Japanese room on 19th December.

This is the plan inside the house. 

Simultaneously to the tiles going down and the paint going up inside, the external wall is being clad. When we were planning the house, the options for the external finish were ready-made sidings, or a constructed and mortared wall. Apparently sidings can be much cheaper, however quality and durability are issues. I'm amused every time I see a house with red-brick imitation sidings, coming as I do from an area where brick houses are liable to be stone clad. I was assured that by the time you find sidings that look nice, the cost is about the same as building the wall, although it seems to be a very involved process. First there are gara ita, strips of wood on top of the ventilation gap. Then goes a waterproof sheet of asphalt, on top of this goes chicken mesh, then the wall finish is pasted onto that, undercoat, middle coat and then overcoat. The gara ita have been up for a month or two in most places, although the problem areas have just been fixed and fitted. The rest of it has been given until 10th December.  They could have it all finished in a couple of days, or they could be working right up to the end. If it were ready-made sidings, I imagine the whole process could have have taken a couple of days. There may also be advantages with ready-made sidings, for example in insulation performance. I imagine if they are weathered and worn, it's easy to replace them.

When I talk about the choice having been between sidings or a constructed wall, the choice wasn't really ours. As usual, the architect told us what he thought we should do, which was what he wanted to do, and he poured disdain and mistrust upon the sidings.

Next on the schedule, on 12th, the ventilation and insulation engineers come back to fix the vents on the outside. They may fix the inside vents too, which are currently holes in the wall, and there are a couple of places where the ducts run through a painted room, so they need fixing in place. Hopefully they'll be insulated the exhaust duct inside the house too.

Not sure when the final airtightness test is going to be, but that's the same people.

The shutters are to be fitted on 12th December, which should be interesting. These are for the upstairs south facing windows, to keep some of that summer sun out. They're electric. The shutters have a wire coming out of the back, which should go through the wall into the house, where the switches are. The walls need to be airtight, and the wires need to be sealed from the outside, which of course will be covered by the shutters when they are installed. This is another one of those riddles that builders must answer.

They're going to rearrange the outside scaffolding on 14th December, as most of the external work will have finished. The balcony will start going up on 15th, at least if we have decided how it is going to be made. It'll be painted and railing added to it on 17th, then the scaffolding for that will come down 19th. The screen doors will also be fitted on that last day, although to be honest I don't think we're going to be needing them until next summer. They're doing the drainpipes then, too.

The prospect of moving, a spectre that has haunted us for a while, is rapidly moving in. We have over a decade of crap in the house to sort through, and conflicting interests of not buying anything new that we don't need, and getting rid of what we can rather than bringing it into the new house. 

Things I may always look at and just shake my head. Part one.

Doctors bury their mistakes, gardeners dig them up, and architects plasterers wait for the painters to come and paint them over. But if you're building a house, then you're going to live in your mistakes, or with them, or looking at them every day.

I have often regretted my words, and in fact I've also regretted my silence a few times. The upstairs ceiling is a case of both. Part of the plan for being able to breathe in the house while maintaining high thermal efficiency is the ventilation system. Air comes in at the top of the middle of the East wall, goes through the heat exchanger and is sent through ducts around the house. It returns through another set of ducts, goes back through the heat exchanger to ensure that the we're not losing too much heat in the winter, or gaining too much in the summer, then air leaves the house on the high north wall. It took a lot of time and mental gymnastics to work out where these ducts should all go, to ensure all parts of the house would have suitable amounts of air flowing through, and we wouldn't have ducts in the way to trip over or bang our heads on. The final plan had two ducts running across the upstairs south ceiling, from the machine room at the east to the west wall in the master bedroom. The south ceiling has two beams running east-west, one a third of the way up, above the edge of the corridor and the south edge of the master bedroom, another two thirds of the way up, in the middle of the master bedroom and above the stairs. The ducts were to go above the higher beam, covered by a bit of ceiling coming horizontally away from the sloping ceiling, then heading up vertically to meet it again. 

Two ducts were necessary along this bit of ceiling, one delivering fresh air to the master bedroom and to the downstairs room, and the other extracting old air from the kids' room, the loft in the back of the master bedroom and the geta bako (shoe cupboard) in the genkan. So, this bit of ceiling seemed like it would be rather large.

I had the idea of leaving one of the ducts along the higher beam, but sending the other duct along the lower beam. This would have had a more balanced effect on the ceiling, so that rather than one boxy protrusion around half a metre wide, and another beam-sized protrusion a quarter of that, there would be two protrusions, both around 30 cm wide, rather like wide beams. I discussed this a little with the site foreman and architect, and then made the mistake of suggesting it directly to the man in charge of the ducting. The result was that, rather than one of the ducts ending up along the lower beam, it moved to the other side of the higher beam. 

"You don't want it to go along that beam. It'll look strange." They said. 

And I believed them.

They probably just thought that it was too much trouble changing it, or perhaps wondered what on earth was I doing putting these stupid ducts in the house anyway, rather than allowing in real fresh air, bracing or stifling depending on the season. And if I did want these ducts, then surely I'd be happy for them to create a massive ripple on the ceiling. Or perhaps they were more concerned about the other hundred items on the list of things to do.

So now we have something that is likely to make people think, "What the f..." And I'll have to explain that the ventilation ducts are behind there, or tell them the tale I have just told, or pretend the reason is to accommodate the down-light, because we can't put anything through the vapour barrier just under the plaster board on the ceiling, or I'll have to make up a more elaborate story.

Or perhaps they won't notice. I mean, nobody looks at ceilings, do they?

Or perhaps they will just politely say nothing, and I will have no opportunity for elaborate story making.

But I will notice. And I may always wonder why I didn't dig my feet in and tell them what I wanted. 

Of course it may look better when the paint is on. 

Or it may look worse. 

Spot the deliberate mistake.

Here is our heat exchange ventilation system. Can you spot the deliberate mistake? Just to help you work out what's going on, the four ducts coming out of the top are, from the right, clean air supply from outside, return air from the house, clean air supply to the house, exhaust air going outside. Can you see what's strange?

The supply air splits straight after leaving the heat exchanger, then goes through two soundproofers. This should make the house a bit quieter. The clean air supply duct is insulated. That's why it's thicker.

The exhaust air duct is not insulated. That is the problem.

I know it makes some kind of sense to insulate the pipe coming in, because that's bringing in cold air from outside, but as it's a heat exchanger, the heat from the return air is largely transferred to the supply air, so by the time it goes out through the exhaust air duct, it's going to be close to the temperature of clean air supply from outside, and close to the actual outside temperature. So it needs insulation every bit as much as the insulated duct does. Perhaps there is some rational reason why there is no insulation there.

Not too late for the punctual thermal bridge - The North side revisited

One good thing about having a 12 month delay in a building project is that it gives you plenty of opportunities to reconsider previous decisions. You spend hours, days and weeks thinking about things, then come back to them months later with a fresh opinion. Then you try to remember why and how you came to the decision in the first place. 

There are always many ways of doing things, and often there is something radical that you've never seen in a house before. There is usually a good reason why it has never been seen, either that there is a flaw in the idea, or the conservative nature of builders and architects. Materials and science have moved a great deal in the past few decades, but building sensibility still goes back hundreds of years. A lot of dimensions can be calculated, rather than guessed by eye or by rules of thumb, and this could reveal extra possibilities, or if the architect doing the calculations is semi-numerate, it could further restrict the possibilities.

Let me digress into a couple of examples from aeronautics. In the 1940s when Howard Hughes made his eight-engined Spruce Goose, the largest flying boat ever, about the same length as a 747, but with twice the wing area, the science of aerodynamics was young and aircraft design was more of a craft. The wings, scaled up from smaller working designs, were so big you could walk down the inside. A little bit earlier, in the 1920s when airships seemed the only logical alternative to crossing the atlantic by sea, and R100 airship was being designed, they needed to calculate the stresses on each beam and wire of the massive frame that kept the balloon full of hydrogen. They used a computer for this, which at the time was a person with a slide rule and a pad of paper. If they found that any of the wires had negative tension, they would send it all back the designer. 

Back to our little world, at the end of the day, you just have to make a decision, and then stick with that decision, and convince yourself it is the correct one. Then move on, as there are plenty more decisions to make. 

Of course, when the house is built and you start living in it, and those decisions become solid objects, you find out whether you did the right thing or not, and if you want to find out whether it was the right decision, then keep reading. When we do move in, though, after the investment of time and money, there's a high chance that I'm going to consider the house to be close to perfect, and I'll look around, through or away from any problems that there are, and do my best to enjoy the good bits. Human beings are, after all, very flexible animals when it comes to living environments.

It has been very tempting, whenever part of the building comes up that we have not been entirely sure about, to take the full opportunity offered by the questions "are you sure?" or "do you really want to do this?" or "what, exactly, are we supposed to do here?" that the builder asks the architect, luckily in our presence.

I suspect that, had we not started to get heavily involved with the builder, insisting that we are involved in any meetings with architect, and if I hadn't been visiting the building site, with a camera, pretty much every day, things would have been very different. For a start, we probably would have moved in a few months ago. All the questions that we see being asked, as the builders scratch their heads over the architect's drawings, would have been worked out in some haphazard fashion, filled with builders guessing what the architect meant and hoping for the best, and the architect demanding constructions based on his own prejudices, either forbidding materials that he doesn't like, or using them indiscriminately because we had the nerve to ask him to use them. A lot of the time, I suspect the architect would have just presented it as a concept in pencil on paper, and left it to them to work out how to make it. Almost none of the time would he have been thinking about what we really want.

So, anyway, when it came to the roof over the front door, we were able to change the plan. 

The plan had been to have a sloping, transparent roof over the two doors on the north side of the house. The front door is to the west of the north wall, then there are seven steps up to the entrance to the este room. With the doors being at different heights and there being windows and glass doors, it seemed like a good idea to have a transparent roof, at an angle.

It seemed to me a very bad idea to puncture the thermal envelope, but according to the architect, this was just too difficult to do without puncturing the wall with beams, although in a couple of days the carpenter seems to have managed to remove the protruding beams, and construct a new roof. Evidently moving hammers, saws and three-metre lengths of wood is more difficult than moving pencils, erasers and the computer mouse.

It had always seemed to me a good idea to have a transparent roof, as this will let in more light, but when it came to it, the architect had no idea how this was going to be done, and the ideas he had all sounded like they would look terrible. One big issue with the roof is that it is likely, at some point, to be subjected to falling bits of ice from the roof above. These could actually be quite large and serious as the roof is highly insulated, so the heat escaping from the house is not going to have a very good melting effect. Also there is a bit of wall sticking up from the north roof to the higher south roof, so the top part of the roof will be in permanent shade for half the year. And the north roof has quite a shallow slope, so snow is likely to stay there for a while, going through a melting-freezing cycle and getting harder and harder. Anything transparent is not going to be as strong as a solid roof, and liable to be damaged by such falling ice. Then there are fire regulations, which need a whole new post to cover both their simplicity and the extent to which they are interpreted and ignored.

Picasa ate my albums - Blogger beware

I've been using Picasa to store my thousands of photos of the house and put them into scores of albums, and it did something rather annoying the other day.

I moved my computer from its summer residence in the cool north room of the house, to it's winter residence at the desk in the dining room, which is much more pleasant and cheaper to heat as the north room plummets through chilly to frigid. This was a move I had hoped not to have to make, but I digress.

I keep my photos on a terabyte external hard drive connected by USB to my antique laptop. The USB connection was a little bit loose, and I think for this reason, and because I was running Picasa while it was connecting and disconnecting, it removed a whole load of photos from a whole load of albums. I assume it was connected to the disconnection, although it may have been due to some other Picasan quirk. The original photos are kept in a series of folders on the hard drive. I start to make a new folder after about three or four thousand photos, because it just gets too unwieldy for my antique computer to handle. Of course the photos should all be in one folder, and I should be using tags with them, but that's another story. In fact that's what I really got Picasa to do, because it can add tags to the photos, such as captions and locations, and it can put them in any number of albums, easily including the same photo in several albums, which the old file and directory system can't do so well, without either cluttering up the disk with duplicate photos, or causing the trouble of having to add links.

The other thing Picasa can do is to upload and sync the albums on your computer to your webalbums. This is really useful except for two things. First is that the sync only goes one way. If you change albums on your computer, the changes will be reflected online. However, if you change albums online, the next time you switch on your computer bound Picasa, it will revert all the changes to the version there. Because of this, if or when it starts eating the photos from your computer albums, it fairly soon starts to eat the same photos from your web albums. It did this until I realised and switched Picasa off line.

Curiously, Picasa didn't take all my photos out of the albums; it left photos from the most recent folder (August 2011 to present) and just ignored photos from the older albums (8th June to August 2011, and up to 8th June). The only rationale for choosing to ignore these albums could be that I had set it to always look for photos in the most recent album, but only look for photos once in the older albums. This seemed logical as the older albums were not going to change, and Picasa had no need to keep scanning them, but with hindsight, and if you use Picasa be warned, and if you develop Picasa, pull your finger out: Either set the album to scan always or never. Setting Picasa to scan a folder once is a foolish option, and may mark the path to misery.

If only we knew the results of our actions before we took them!

So with reference to the speedy and helpful Picasa help forum, www.google.com/support/forum/p/Picasa and one piece of sound advice that didn't work, and a piece of less sound advice that did work, the problem was kind of solved.

The first piece of advice led me to the folder where Picasa keeps its album info, in files called "PAL". No pal of mine though. There were several folders with dates from each backup, so it was straightforward enough to copy the full albums from an older backup into the latest folder, and hope that Picasa would use these, and put my photos back in my albums.

Picasa did not, though. Trying all the different combinations and reboots, and even changing the database id number in each file were to no avail. I took the more drastic advice of another writer on the help forum, and deleted the database, so Picasa had to build a new one. When I then resurrected the album data from an older folder, all the albums came back in their former glory. Everything was fine except, and I was worried this would happen, Picasa now ignored all the albums it had made online before, and proceeded to make another 86 webalbums, with identical names, and usually the same collection of photos. Of course the URLs for them are different, so now I have the old albums full of partial collections of photos that are pointed to by my blog, and the new albums to which I will be able to continue adding new photos of the house, containing forthcoming details such as paint, wallpaper and floors.

So instead of writing about it, I should really be going through the albums and blog posts, and fixing all the dead links, so that normal service may resume.

South side, revisited

To the south of the house, we have a lovely terrace. Actually, it's a slab of concrete covered in scaffolding and deteriorating kenaf board at the moment, but it will soon be a lovely, tiled, terrace, where we can sit out in the sun, or snow.

We need some shade for the downstairs windows, and we need a bit of a balcony upstairs, to hang out washing or futons, or clean windows, so the plan is for a balcony running the whole length of the south wall, sticking about 60 cm out from the house. With some care, it should be possible to get this the right height so there is around 45 degrees from the edge of the balcony to the top of the window, and it will let in every drop of direct winter sunlight until the end of February, and around 60 degrees from the edge of the balcony to the bottom of the window, so it will keep out all the summer sun from the end of April. Upstairs we have shutters that will allow some variation.

This is basic passive solar design, and not really rocket science.
We also would rather not have pillars sticking up in the middle of the terrace, which is in front of the middle window and the kitchen window. This means that some kind of beam needs to cross a span of around 5 metres, with minimal thickness. The idea in the final plan was to put up six pillars around the terrace, one in each corner, and one in the middle next to the bit of wall between the two windows, and another opposite that on the south side of the terrace.

These were all made of wood, and there seemed to be a lot of it. Although I've been demanding a 45 degree line to demarcate no-building zone up and away from the window, the actual results from the Passive House software on how obstacles will reduce incoming sunlight are more subtle.

The best estimate at the moment is that all the windows in the house will lose 2,400 kWh per annum, but they will gain 5,400 kWh in solar gain, so the windows are bringing in 3,000 kWh net, over the winter heating period. In very rough financial terms, we could call this 30,000 yen per annum, if we budget 10 yen for each kWh. This is the thermal output of the windows if we look at them as a heater. Of course windows in Japanese houses usually only work as heaters in the summer, and in the winter they are very effective coolers. They also work as dehumidifiers, turning humidity into condensation on the inside of the glass, and on the frames.

Of course we also got the windows to provide natural light, and to give us a view. Looking at the simple cost benefit of insulation, it would make a lot more sense to have no windows, and use electric light inside, but we don't want to live in a cave.

The house next door to the south, that I've estimated to be five metres tall and 16 metres away, will apparently reduce the amount of heat coming in by almost 300 kWh per annum.  So the house next door has already taken away 10% of this total. 3000 yen per annum.

The amount of heat coming in changes with each adjustment of the windows in or out of the wall, and depending on what we do to each side, above, and to a greater extent in front of them. The passive house software estimates 5% of heat will be lost because the windows are not clean all the time.

I'm assuming that above the ground floor windows, there is a balcony 600 mm higher, sticking out 600 mm. If this comes down by 10 mm, we lose 16 kWh per annum. If, instead, it sticks out another 10 mm from the house, we lose 42 kWh per annum. Only 160 yen or 420 yen per year.

A bigger problem is that the horizontal part of the frame on the south side of the terrace was going to obstruct the sun's rays coming into the house. Around 80 kWh for a 120 mm beam, and 160 kWh for a 240 mm beam. That's 1,600 yen per annum. Over 5%.

So, we're getting rid of the pillars at the south of the terrace, and the wooden frame, and I was thinking about putting a frame of square-section steel on top of six wooden pillars. If it's steel, it should be able to span the five metres above the terrace without needing to be too thick. I was trying to work out the deflection, and it looks like a 150x150 mm beam will only move about a centimetre if I stand in the middle (one Mark is about 125 Newtons). As there are going to be two beams, the frame will move a bit less than this, and should feel solid enough. And anyway, the main job is to provide shade in the summer, and being able to walk along it is a bit of a bonus.
This sounds to be a non-starter though. A steel frame is going to be really heavy, and would need a crane to get it in place. Now that there's a house next door, that would probably mean a big crane to lift it over the whole building. Steel is a lot more expensive than wood, too.
After a little discussion it seems possible to loose the south side pillars and use a bracket from the pillar in the middle of the north side so we don't need a pillar in the middle of the terrace. The beam at the south may be a little thicker, but the effect on solar gain is at least five times less than the beams and pillars at the south sides. It should also cost less.
Another compounding issue is that we want to be able to get some shade over the terrace, probably for most of the summer. If we have some kind of permanent frame, it would be easy to hook up some fabric shading over it. If there is just a balcony, we could get some something like a shop awning that could be extended and retracted more freely, although this could be more expensive and may put a lot of torque on the balcony.

Also, I was wondering about growing vines up the frame, maybe kiwi fruit, which would produce shady leaves in the summer, and just leave branches in the winter. Of course the bare branches would still reduce the thermal gain, and this seems to contradict everything I've said above.
I do like kiwi fruit though. Apparently they have six times the vitamin C of oranges.

Security

It always seems to be a very safe country. Bicycle locks here would not last five minutes in the UK, but this is ridiculous. Not only does this guy seem to be using an extension lead for a bicycle lock, he isn't even using it!

Or maybe it's an electric bicycle with the motor built into the bottom bracket and batteries within the frames, and the extension is used to charge it.

I'm not sure to what extent the safety of Japan is a myth and a cliche, but we frequently leave the door of our old house unlocked, and even if it were locked, anyone who wanted to could very easily get in. In over ten years I don't think anyone ever has. The new house, with continental European technology on doors and windows is, by comparison, a fortress. We noticed a wire sticking out of the frame of the front door, and knowing it had something to do with remote unlocking were wondering whether we could hook it up to the door bell. It took us a long time to work out that this was not actually affecting the lock at all; just undoing the plate on the wall so the door could open when it's on the latch. European front doors generally open inwards, and usually have no handle on the outide, just a keyhole. Our door opens outwards, and has a handle, so triggering the plate on the wall to open is not going to help us a great deal, unless we have a visitor who doesn't know how a door handle works.

A random assortment of websites

I've been a bit busy recently, so here is a rather feeble post made up of a selection of links to other low energy houses, that you may be interested in. If not, don't click the links!

Zero energy house

http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201106110161.html

A passive house in the US, and some tips that apply to all buildings, new or rennovated.

http://www.proudgreenhome.com/article/184246/Lessons-from-a-passive-house

Here's a self-build passive house in Wicklow, Ireland. Yes, you can do it on your own! They have some problems with suppliers and contractors too though!

http://passivebuild.blogspot.com/2011/02/progress-update-7-feb.html

Here's a blog about passive house building in the pacific North West.

http://www.rootdesignbuild.com/blog/

Net zero energy house

http://www.proudgreenhome.com/article/181951/Building-an-affordable-net-zero-energy-home

This is an interesting repository of building parts and designs. It gives scores for different options like this:

Thermal Control	4
Durability	3
Buildability	2
Cost	3
Material Use	3
Total	15

http://www.buildingscience.com

Info on low energy and new low energy standards in Japan

http://www.house-support.net/seinou/kaikou-dann.htm

Somebody else in Japan getting a container of Pazen windows:

http://ta-k.blog.ocn.ne.jp/blog/2011/05/post_593c.html

And now for something completely different:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2039719/Simon-Dale-How-I-built-hobbit-house-Wales-just-3-000.html

Looks great and low budget, low impact during building, but a couple of obvious questions are:
What impact is there on the environment from people leaving cities and going to live in the woods?
Where's the toilet and bathroom?
This is certainly part of the solution though, and good luck to the lad!