The 2018 blog post hiatus

​There has been some speculation that the recent lack of blog posts is evidence that low energy building is not happening. ​I'd like to take this opportunity to state that this is simply not true.

W​e do not yet know all the reasons for this hiatus in blog posts, but low energy buildings is certainly continuing. Also there is no doubt that low energy buildings are man-made.

It would be unwise to make any predictions about the exact return and future frequency of blog posts.

In the meantime, you can make full use of the labels or search function. If you're thinking of building your own house, you may want to start here:

Ten top tips if you're thinking of building a house

Who's going to build it?

Two-by-four or zairai koho?

Part 3.14159265... How much do you need to know?

Paying for it

What exactly do you need to know about heat?

Glossary of English and Japanese terms

Energy Thoughts and Surprises: How much electricty does the solar hot water panel pump use?

Here's someone else blogging about energy.

https://energy-surprises.blogspot.com/

I'm not the only sane person in the asylum after all!

What's in a name?

I've just changed the name of this blog from "Building a house" to "Low energy building". Hopefully this will more accurately describe the content, but it should more properly be "Stuff vaguely relating to low energy building, and anything else I feel like writing."

The name of this URL "minuszeroeco" has not changed. When I put that in, it wasn't the first choice, but I hope it conjures up something. I'm in perpetual apology for using "eco", which has been used with such variety that it has little meaning left. Most obviously it appears at the beginning of "economics".

"Minus zero" may have come from a Boomtown Rats song "Wind chill factor minus zero", from their seminal 1978 album the Fine Art of Surfacing. It seems to lack precision and I've never been completely sure what it means. If it's zero then it is neither plus nor minus, and if it's minus, then it's not really zero.

This may be something like 2+2=5 for large values of two. In other words, if each 2 is actually 2.4, then adding them together will get to 4.8, which rounds up to 5. So minus zero is somewhere under zero but not quite minus one. And I suppose that's what I was aiming for while building the house. I wasn't just trying to make a house that breaks even, or comes out with zero emissions. I wanted to make sure that it really did have less than zero emissions.

A dead link

Chronically aware of my lack of posts in the first half of 2015, I've been thinking about adding links to other interesting websites, in the interest of at least posting something.

Instead of that, here is a link that you may not want to visit. It pretends to recommend ideas for recycling and repurposing, and there are one or two interesting ideas, but a lot of them are fairly ridiculous. Some ideas are using things that are not really rubbish. For example they find various uses for bulldog clips. I have never seen cause for throwing bulldog clips away, since they have several uses. The only situation you'd want to throw one away is if it was broken or had a part missing, but in all the ideas here, they need to work properly. 

Some of these don't look like you would need or want them. Would you really want an old bicycle as a basin stand? 

One of them I have tried and tested: producing guitar picks from old credit cards. In the picture, they seem to use a very fancy pick cutter, which I imagine would cost a few hundred times more than a pick. I used a pair of scissors. 

The site calls this "upcycling", which wikipedia defines as "the process of converting waste materials or useless products into new materials or products of better quality or for better environmental value."

http://twistedsifter.com/2012/06/creative-ways-to-repurpose-reuse-and-upcycle-old-things/

A lot of the ideas may be more usefully called "downcycling", since they are converting perfectly good materials and useful products into uses for which they may be less suited, and which will use more envrionmental resources.

Future proofing

Note to self: never add dates in the future when posting stuff on the internet. "No more till September" turns out to have been "no more till late October" and I should really have know that. Unfortunately I haven't been on extended holiday.

Other bits of life have caught up and I will make no promise about regular posts in the future. Past performance is no guarantee, but certainly a good place to start reading. You may even find some working pictures too. Just hit the calendar below and pick a date. Better still, try browsing by label, or even put a keyword into the search field.

I may write something about Japanese power companies turning down applications to sell them solar power. And I may write something about Glasgow university's plans to divest from fossil fuels. Or I might not. You'll just have to wait and see!

No more till September

I had had ambitious plans to load up several new and old posts so there would be an uninteruppted stream on the blog. I was going to send the fifty half-written emails in my draft box, but of course most of them are just a half baked idea in the title without anything solid to back them up, or solid titles undermined by half baked prose.

So pretty much the same as what usually gets published. 

And I was going to go through the archives and re-publish from the beginning, but even that would have taken more time than I have had.

But it hasn't happened, and now it probably won't happen. Not until September when I get back from my travels. 

I'd like to be sending messages from the yacht, telling you how nice it is to be our of email contact, but of course I'll be out of email contact. 

Recycle or reduce

In keeping with the ecological theme of this blog, I've decided to start recycling posts. Not the wooden kind.

To help identify these recycled posts, I've added a new tag "old" by which to label them. This seems to me much better than labelling any posts that are new "new". If I do that, they are not going to be new for long, so I'd have to change the label later. Posts that are old when they are posted will always be old.

Probably the recycled posts will have some new comments added. In fact I've been putting this off for a while because I know that by the time I've read through the post, checked the spelling and grammar for the inevitable typos, revised some of my more naive and abrasive comments, mended broken links to any photos in the post, or added images if there were none, it would have taken less time to write a completely new post. So maybe I should be labelling them something like "20% extra new".

Or perhaps rather than recycling posts, I should just be reducing them, and keeping true to the ecological mantra.

On blogging and a triple-figure draft box

This is a kind of meta-blog. Nothing to do with the topic of the blog, but just about the way I write it.

The important thing with blogging, and probably all publishing, is to create constant output. Writing is easy. Anybody can do it. You don't even need to be able to use a pen any more. Publishing is more difficult, and publishing writing that everybody will read is the most difficult.

The internet has made publishing much easier. All you need is a computer with an internet connection, then you can get your words of wisdom out to the masses. Of course they may not read it. You cast your bread upon the water, and it floats for a while, then gets soggy and sinks without trace.

In fact most people will definitely not read it. Even if you're very famous and have the most popular blog in the webiverse, it's still only going to be read by the tiniest fraction of a very small percentage of users. 

Anything that can make it easier to get the writing out of your computer and onto the internet is a great help. The thing that really makes it easier, of course, is having done it. Once you have got stuff out, it's easier to get more stuff out; once you've decided that it's good enough, and you don't really need to check it for the twenty-ninth time to find more mistakes and better ways to rewrite sentences that have ceased to have any meaning. Because of course however many times you look at it, there will always be a way of changing it to make it better. There will always be parts that you can rephrase, words that you can cut to make it more fluid and easier to understand, extra bits of information or commentary that you can add. If Shakespeare was alive today he'd probably still be rewriting his plays. At least after scratching the lid off his coffin.

Mechanically speaking, the biggest improvement in workflow was using Gmail. Now I start writing blog posts as emails. They sit in my drafts box where I revisit them a few times. I send them directly to Blogger, which holds them as drafts. Then I can go into blogger and check for typos and add any photos and formatting before adding labels, scheduling the publishing date, and hitting the publish button. Perhaps there is a way to add photos while it is still an email, and add the meta data such as labels, but I don't know what it is.

This is part of the reason why the number of emails in my drafts box has been heading towards 200. It went over 100 about a year ago. It used to be around 60. I can remember when I tried to keep it below 30. Most of these emails are half-finished or half-started blogs about the house. One of them just says: "Eco cute: Changed back to middle boiler temperature - January 22nd" in the title, with nothing in the message. Obviously a useful bit of information. At least I thought so back in January, 2012. 

I just went through the draft box and in a couple of minutes deleted 15 that are either too late to send or have been waiting so long that they obviously don't need sending. The delete button is a wonderful thing. 

Pictures on a blog. How difficult should that be?

It should be really easy. I shouldn't be spending an hour trying to get one picture into one blog. It should just be drag and drop. 

I have pictures on my telephone and have told it several times to upload them to the internet. There's a function in my blogging software to turn emails into posts, which I use most of the time. I can add photos to my blogs. There's a function on my phone to add photos to emails. How easy would it be to get the phots I send in emails to my blog to appear on the blog?

I used to use Picasa, but at some point google seemed to try to stop me from using that. There are various functions that will automatically send photos from my phone to the cloud somewhere, then it should be as simple as embedding a link to the picture. The latest I tried was on dropbox. It suggests that it's as  simple as clicking the image, sharing the link and then pasting it where you want, but blogger was having none of it. The photo was password-protected. There was nowhere in dropbox obvious to make a file public, except moving it to the public folder. This eventually worked, but the photo was rotated on its side, and not fit to the screen. So I got the picture of the plant pot knocked over on its side with grains of soil the size of moonrocks.

So am I being stupid or is it the internet?

No don't answer. I am just one person. One flawed human. The internet is the combined wisdom of millions, getting on for billions of people. It's bloody obvious that the internet is being stupid.

A picture paints a thousand words. So go to google image search if you want an picture. If you want the thousand words, you've come to the right place.

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.

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!

Blogonomics - 7,500 yen

When I started this blogging lark, one of the options was adding ads to the blogs. I didn't need to, but thought what the hell! What do I have to lose... apart from some credibility?

So I added a widget and ads were added. Sometimes for related products, sometimes for women's underwear. 

I read the terms and conditions, or at least casually glanced over the important ones.

It said that I was not allowed to click the ad links myself. It also said that I should not explicitly direct my readers to click the ads. I don't think it said anything about mentioning that I should not explicitly direct readers to click the ads, so hopefully this paragraph is OK.

And then I blogged and waited. From time to time I looked at the stats to see how much money I'd made. With tens of readers, it came in at a massive 0.0 cents. Over a hundred readers, and it was still 0.0 cents.

June saw my biggest readership, and it was still 0.0 cents.

After June the readership tailed off, which I was a bit worried about. I think the reason is quite simple. I posted more in June, 19 to be preceise, compared with only 13 in July and 12 in August. A simple rule of the internet, perhaps even a simple rule of publishing: the more you publish, the more people will read. 

And then 7,500 yen arrived in the post. Actually, it was a coupon for 7,500 yen, not cash. A coupon for use on google. And not just for use anywhere on google, but 7,500 yen to advertise on google. The idea I suppose, as far as google is concerned, is that I'll advertise my blog, get more people to read it, then that will generate more advertising revenue for them. It may even be that after I spend 7,500 yen of their printed money, they expect me to start spending my own money advertising my own blog. 

I think this is very clever on Google's part. The 7,500 yen costs them practically nothing--just a few bits of paper and postage--and they must be charging much more for their advertising than they are paying content providers.

On the other hand, printing money is the beginning of inflation and financial catastrophe, as we've been seeing in global economic doom of the past few years. 

September so far seems to have earned more than zero. I'm not sure whether this is due to my recent superior writing, or some cumulative effects, or that the advertisers have realised that my readers are not all interested in women's underwear. 

So, in the first week and a bit of September, I've earned 17 yen, which is not bad. Actually 17 yen is a pitifully small amount. It's only good by comparison with 0. Looks like I'll be keeping the day job for the time being.