One of our projects is now for sale:
Built on a 809 m2 section next to the historic Riverhead Hotel. The Building is a double storey timber framed building on a fully insulated concrete slab.
The cladding is rebated bevel-back macrocarpa weatherboard left natural. The intersecting monopitch roofs give it a interesting appeal and the north facing roof has a solar-thermal panel installed that provides 75% of the annual hot water. Latest LED lighting installed.
Read more: Riverhead passive solar design house
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- Category: Blog
- Last Updated on Friday, 22 March 2013 07:43
- Written by Ingo Ratsdorf
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I stumbled across an article Sustainability is dead. While the message in the article is not wrong, it created some interesting discussion.
Those are my thoughts:
Sustainability in itself does not necessarily relate to any reduction. Please look up the definition of "to sustain" and I think you won't find any mentioning of any "reduction".
The issue is what people attribute to the word when they talk about it.
I have quite often said that there would be no need to have energy efficiency or lower power consumption _IF_ we would manage to get our electricity "sustainably", ie not generated in a way that we would cause pollution or use up resources. Then you could use as much as you wanted. We only trying to reduce because it's the simplest short-term option without changing the system.
However this whole reduction is not about doing good, it's about doing less bad and therefore is still bad and not sustainable.
Image that I beat up up less or give you less poisoned food... not happy I suspect.
Sustainability about changing the way we do things, not reduction.
So it's not the word, it's the attributes.
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- Last Updated on Friday, 08 March 2013 09:14
- Written by Ingo Ratsdorf
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Earth Hour is about collective impact, beyond the hour.
Earth Hour has now become much more than a symbolic action. It has evolved into a continuous movement driving real actions, big and small, that are changing the world we live in.
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- Last Updated on Tuesday, 18 December 2012 08:44
- Written by Ingo Ratsdorf
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So tell me, in a nutshell, why you would not want to be efficient and save resources?
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- Last Updated on Wednesday, 06 March 2013 10:16
- Written by Ingo Ratsdorf
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I have been driving "Paul" now for a year, a second generation model Prius, built in 2001, so about 12 years old.
Despite of people's fear of ageing batteries, costly battery replacements and the funny belief that it may be not a "real" car, slow etc, it is beautiful to drive, can speed around corners (probably due to the low mounted battery pack), has easy steering, can make a U-turn on a street, can zoom into small car parks and is very silent.
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- Last Updated on Friday, 21 December 2012 07:39
- Written by Ingo Ratsdorf
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We keep on discussing biofuels. However no article or report was yet able to destroy or even lessen my concerns about them.
- Many of the concepts use prime agricultural land
- Its manufacturing needs energy.
This whole biofuel story does not add up to anything as long as we divert agricultural land for the manufacturing of fuels that need a high energy input during manufacture. And where does that energy come from?
Biofuels are not renewable as long as the electricity generation is not.
The raw material grows "on trees", the energy for manufacturing does not. How silly are we to believe that biofuels will solve our issues?
New EU proposal will minimise the climate impacts of biofuel production via eco.viaexpo.com
The report reads "low carbon" solution. Well, it's still not a zero-carbon solution and will never be unless we clean up our energy supply. Once we have done that, however, we might as well use electric cars and use the energy directly rather than building factories, using land, carting materials around, burning stuff, ...
I just stumbled across this great article:
Energy return on investment, peak oil, and the end of economic growth
Biofuels are recent plant material that has been converted through some combination of chemical and/or thermal processes into a liquid fuel. The main fuel products from these processes are biodiesel, or more commonly ethanol. There are numerous reasons why alcohols do not produce as good fuel as gasoline, and we present here two. First, the energy density of ethanol is only about two-thirds that of gasoline. Second, and most compelling, the energy contained within the biofuel product is nearly the same as the energy used to produce the biofuel. In other words, producing biofuels provides roughly zero net energy to society.39–43 Oil, on the other hand, produces roughly 18 units of energy per unit invested, and gasoline roughly 10 units per unit invested.44,45 These points indicate that gasoline and biofuels are imperfect substitutes and place doubt on their ability to replace oil.
So it's not just me noticing the flaw in the conversation about biofuels, ethanols and methanols.
We don't. If you think we should we feed hungry people rather than hungry cars join the call for Food not Fuel today - http://www.actionaid.org.uk/foodnotfuel
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- Last Updated on Wednesday, 20 February 2013 07:30
- Written by Ingo Ratsdorf
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I wonder quite often why we do things the way we do them and how we got to it.
One of those wonderings was about subdivisions and creating sections for residential houses. Two places come to mind: Long Bay and Riverhead.
I followed the story around Long Bay development and subdivision rather loosely, drove past it several times over the last weeks while taking the family to the beach.
Massive developments, massive roadworks, culverts, banks with little sections and driveways. It looks almost surreal and industrial. It once was a farm with paddocks and trees, now there not a single tree left, just bare stripped land, terrassed for easy building of houses like ducks in a row. However I believe noone got their ducks in a row there really. The whole place looks just boring and dead. The earthworks took two years. The noise, dust and cost must have been incredible to produce this outcome.
Riverhead South is a new subdivision, welll south of Riverhead, the village I live in. The same thing is going on. Once farmland and orchards, now completely stripped of everything, no soil, no grass no trees. The smell of stinky clay is disturbing. They did not leave a single tree. It was reasonably flat before, I have no idea why everything had to be stripped. The earthworks have been going on for half a year and are far from finished. The noise and dust that is covering the neighbours... incredible.
Why are we doing this? Why are we sinking so much money and time into reshaping the land? Why can't we just do subdivisions the good old way? Remove some trees, put pegs in, highlight your building platform and leave it to the buyer to decide what to do instead of spending all this money to strip, get "reimbursed" by the buyer and have him planting again.
Who developed this funny way of skinning the land that does not seem to make any sense to me?
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- Last Updated on Wednesday, 12 December 2012 07:46
- Written by Ingo Ratsdorf
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My dear wife found a nice app on her iPhone the other day. I had a look at it and installed it too.
The free version lists the most common 50 additives, whereas the full version has a lot more.
Food Additives 2 By IGRASS PTY LTD
Avoid those additives that are potentially dangerous or unsafe to your health & see which ones are considered safe. This application is perfect for those at risk, the health conscious, parents, vegetarians, vegans and/or people on religious based diets.
What I found amazing is the fact that most food colours (series 100) are potentially dangerous. So the lesson from there: Avoid colour in your food, unless you use spices or vegetables or fruit - I mean NATURAL ingredients.
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- Last Updated on Wednesday, 09 January 2013 07:10
- Written by Ingo Ratsdorf
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I stumbled across another Dubai article on inhabitat. This time about the world's tallest building: Burj Khalifa.
To me just another monument of architecture and mankind, a phallus of technology, thought to be sophistically engineered...
Read more: The Incredible Story Of How The Burj Khalifa's Poop is Trucked Out of Town
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- Last Updated on Friday, 08 March 2013 09:16
- Written by Ingo Ratsdorf
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My son Janus is currently doing fundraising for his 2013 north island Scout Jamboree in December 2013. Jamboree is a massive 10 day camp with 4,000+ SCOUTS that will be a massive adventure and learning experience for all attending. Tags: gifts , presents , fairtrade , organic , idealcups , lovenotes , fundraiser , scouts , jamboree
Read more: Looking for Christmas presents? Support this fellow then... More Articles... |
