Dreaming My New Home

For those of you who don't know me: I have a dream to build a moderately-sized, passive-solar, timber-framed, living-roofed, cordwood cabin home in North Idaho. In my minds eye, the combination of these unique building techniques should create a rustic-beautiful home that is at once strong, quiet, well-insulated and graced with such great thermal mass as to easily maintain an even temperature year-round with a minimum of additional energy input.

In addition to these architectural features, there are some noteworthy systems I hope to incorporate in the home, as well:

A Russian Masonry Stove. [a.k.a Finnish Heater, Masonry Heater] Basically, this is a massive (meaning heavy as well as large) fireplace that dwells in the middle of a home so as to radiate the heat stored in it's mass into the home throughout the day and night. As the flue and masonry are located inside the warmer home envelope, a positive draft is easy to get started.

Unlike a standard fireplace, the firebox burns at such a high temperature as to actually burn the exhaust gasses and nearly 100% of the fuel solids - leaving no soot or creosote and next to no ash. Firebrick and refractory masonry cement in these heaters must withstand temperatures in excess of 1000 degrees Celsius!

Additionally, the flue itself is constructed as a meandering maze of passageways and baffles that act as a heat-exchanger allowing the stone and brick mass of the fireplace to absorb the heat of the exhaust before it leaves the house. There is no need to damp-down or smolder a fire to keep heat overnight; the masonry itself will store the heat from a quickly and completely burned fire and radiate the stored energy over the course of days - not hours.

Lastly, the huge mass of this fireplace isolated in the center of a home also allows it to act inversely in the summertime: storing overnight "coolth" and acting as a temperature-swing damper. In a properly designed passive solar home the deep-reaching winter sun will warm this mass in the winter while it should remain shaded in the summertime, accentuating it's effect as a thermal capacitor.

These stoves are standout in my evaluation for their ability to use ultra low-tech solutions (mass, blast door damper, meandering flue) to burn wood more completely and more efficiently than any other type of stove while also exhausting less greenhouse gasses than even pellet stoves with the newfangled catalytic converters!

A Composting Toilet. For most Americans (and Westerners in general, I think) this is a hard concept to grapple with. We are accustomed to flushing our outgoing waste and have been trained to regard it as a disease vector. In the last 2 years, I've had the opportunity to read a book titled 'The Humanure Handbook' and experience first-hand the use of a well-managed composting toilet...

The book is enlightening because it helps to draw an accurate picture of the damage we are doing to our environment by simultaneously polluting our ever-rarer drinking water and making dangerous waste of an otherwise highly-valuable and perfectly safe fertilizer and soil-remediation component: compost.

The first-hand use of a composting toilet proved that this practice is not smelly and is also very clean. In addition, the garden vegetables I enjoyed while on retreat at this property were a testament to the value of humanure compost in growing a healthy and abundant garden.

In it's most simple form, a composting toilet can be a 5 gallon bucket used to collect your outgoing waste which is then covered with a "bio-filtration mat" of materials such as sawdust and fireplace ashes each time the bucket is used. This mat prevents flies from getting on the waste and also is incredibly effective at containing any bad smells you may fear. In addition, this material will ultimately bulk-up the compost and provide important nutrients and air space for the thermophillic bacteria in your, ah-hem... stuff, to do it's job. At regular intervals, this bucket would be emptied onto a larger compost pile with all other compost-able waste from your life: leftovers, eggshells, bones, yard waste, dead rodents, etc... and covered again with a bio-filtration mat.

The humanure book and the folks I visited both employed a three-pile strategy where a compost bin is allowed to lie fallow with no new material for a period of at least 2 years before the compost is used as a soil additive. There are a myriad of things to know about the bacteria within and safe-handling of a humanure compost system. If my notes have piqued your interest, please do read Joe Jenkins book: 'The Humanure Handbook'. The book is entertaining, somewhat revolutionary and most certainly well-researched and full of crap.