Matthew Nistico

Jay Angler wrote:Soooo... you don't have to mow artificial turf, but you do have to weed it - seriously! I met a guy on his hands and knees struggling to get tree sprouts out of his artificial lawn without damaging the lawn part.

Is the issue with plants dying that you have too many extremes? Dry, wet, cold, heat? Can you narrow down which of the extremes did in your early attempts?

I'm not convinced that you can't fix the roof problem other ways. Giving us permies a list of what you've tried, and what you think killed those tries, might give us ideas of how you can fix it naturally.

For example, have considered rocky mulch with succulents?

My first instinct is to agree with Jay.  There must be a way to fix your problem without resorting to artificial turf, which my gut tells me is a temporary solution at best.  It will degrade in time, needing replacement and, I suspect though I couldn't elaborate, giving rise to unforseen problems along the way.

Better in my opinion to have just mulch than to have, essentially, synthetic carpet on your roof.  Perhaps a rock mulch would be a good place to start, as Jay suggested.  Over time, observe what weeds establish in the rock mulch, and that might provide clues how to proceed with a green roof.

But in the meantime, yes, please elucidate: why do you believe your current green roof is dying?

Jay Angler wrote:I'm pretty sure that I've been told that clay tiles are so much heavier than most other roofing, that unless the house was engineered for it, they can't easily be added. Same with many "green roofs."

Yes, those are both true statements.  I designed my own home and read the same in every book I used.

Catie George wrote:fridge and hot water heaters are huge sources of heat in a house. My grandma used to keep her fridge on a side porch (old summer kitchen) of her AC free farm house. I have always thought having the water heater out of the living area would be super nice. Or maybe insulated around?

Good ideas in re: the water heater, but I can propose a better one.  When next you need to buy a new water heater, invest in a heat pump electric water heater.  Rather than using a resistive element, it generates heat using a compressor, essentially an air-to-water exchange AC unit built into the top of the water tank.

They are currently significantly more expensive, like 2x to 3x the price compared to an equivalently sized resistive electric heater (not counting government incentives in some areas).  But they are also significantly more efficient, so you will recoup much, or all, of the initial investment with energy savings over the unit's lifetime.  This of course will vary depending on how expensive is your local electricity.

But the beauty of this tech for our current conversation is that, rather than generating heat that will ultimately add to the ambient air temperature, a heat-pump water heater literally sucks heat out of the ambient air, leaving the room cooler and drier.  You would never want to stick these outside or in an unheated basement because, like any heat pump operating in heating mode, they loose efficiency dramatically when ambient temperatures are cold.

They are also very convenient to install.  Just plug in to a wall outlet and attach the water lines.  They were originally conceived to encourage people replacing a gas-fired water heater to switch to electric.  Typically, such a transition would necessitate the additional expense of an electrician to install a new 240V circuit (per USA norms) and run the line to wherever the water heater is located, which location is non-negotiable because that is where all the hot water pipes lead to.  Whereas heat pump water heaters draw so little current you can plug them into any 120V outlet.  Depending on the model, they don't even require a dedicated circuit.

Will Meginley wrote:Going forward, we want to build some kind of outdoor kitchen. Cooking a meal on our stovetop raises the temperature in the living area by three to five degrees, and baking anything adds anywhere from five to ten. I figure the easiest way to remove heat is to not add it in the first place. We can grill right now, but I don’t want to be burning propane all the time. A cob baking oven and a J-tube wood burner would be nice. I just need to create a flat spot for them first.

Consider building some advanced hay-box cookers.  By "advanced" I mean that you can achieve the same effect without actually using hay or straw, which strike me as an inevitable and undesirable mess.  Then you could still do at least some of your cooking inside while adding much less heat to the room compared to conventional stove top cooking.  The expense of creating the cookers would be far less than building an outdoor stove top.  You would probably still want to build an outdoor oven for baking, but anything to minimize your expense would be a win.

Davis Tyler wrote:I'm surprised to hear so many suggestions related to evaporative cooling.  In my experience, it's the humidity that makes summer uncomfortable; adding more humidity just makes the problem worse.

Thank you!  I do realize that evaporative cooling, while less efficient, is still technically effective in a humid climate, but do you really want to go there?  I live in a very humid, very hot location, and anything that increases the atmospheric swamp through which I must wade in the summertime is a non-starter.

Keeping myself and the interior of my living space in shade, maintaining high airflow, wearing minimal clothing, and simply the fact of having acclimated to the heat (without AC!) physiologically for many years now get me through the summers.  Any of these solutions strike me as preferable to intentionally increasing the humidity inside my home.  

Dale Hodgins wrote:

Burl Smith wrote:Might be interesting to see what the temperature is 3feet down below the surface of the soil there in Cebu, and then figure how much cooled fluid would need to be moved thru a heat exchanger by a solar powered pump to make the idea feasible.

Approximately 80 degrees in places that have plant cover. At least 5 degrees hotter in areas  that are completely housing and paving. Nighttime temperatures are in the 70s.

Absolutely.  I've heard from many people that geothermal cooling and earth-integrated buildings are silver bullets for keeping cool in hot weather.  You just have to tap into that infinite reserve of cold temperatures just a few feet underground, they say.  And that's true... in a temperate climate.  The subsoil acclimates to the average annualized temperature which, if you go sufficiently deep, is effectively constant.

Of course the same physics applies in the tropics.  But where the average annualized temperature is 75 degrees or warmer, it doesn't do you much good.

Perhaps if you could drill really, really deep you might tap into cooler temperatures, I don't even know.  But that wouldn't be practical in any case.

Jay Angler wrote:OK, so it sounds as if the door insulation is doing a fair job of keeping the heat from getting through it, but burning your hand is *not* a good thing!

I am thinking the same thing: that situation is in need of a permanent solution.  Is the whole outside face of the door sheathed in metal or something?  Is it just the doorknob that got so hot?  And why?  That is certainly not typical.  Perhaps it could be as simple as rigging up a doorknob replacement out of a non-conductive material, like wood or plastic, and painting it white.

Wild wood sorrel pops up dependably and always makes a nice addition to the green leaf salad.

But probably the most useful volunteer has been turkey tail mushroom.  I had two rows of mushroom logs fail - I set them up, inoculated them with commercial cultivars, and two years later have seen zero sign of the intended mushrooms.  Probably took too long before inoculating them, and did so during an unfavorably dry season.  These were windfall trees, so I didn't have the choice in when this operation was occuring.

Since then, they have sprouted nothing but wild fungus.  I was able to confidently ID the wild fungus as true turkey tail, however, which is medicinally valuable, and have harvested a decent quantity for myself and for resale.

Nancy Reading wrote:If the eaves are open it is not surprising that the temperature varies so much. I suspect that if you blocked gaps and insulated the roof you might find the temperature range was much more suitable for cool food storage - a slightly damp coolish place is ideal for many vegetables and drier shelves for pantry items and seeds perhaps.

Clearly closing the gaps in the eaves and adding insulation to the ceiling would be a good first step.  If I wanted to explore the potential for this structure as something like a root cellar, I'd also consider berming earth higher on all sides.  That would go a long way towards stabilizing the temperature through the seasons.  You have the advantage that the masonry walls should be impervious to soil contact.

Inge Leonora-den Ouden wrote:Most of the time I drink only water. It's from the tap, but boiled first and then cooled down. Not cooled in the fridge, I don't like it that cold. I prefer 'room temperature', or even 'body temperature'. If I don't forget I add a little 'sea' salt (Atlantic ocean, from France).

Do you have unreliably safe tap water in the Netherlands?  I would be very surprised.  Why do you boil it first?  To me that always makes for "dead tasting" water.  If you want to eliminate chlorine, I think that can be achieved with sufficient hours of passive evaporation.