[Greenbuilding] (not really) Re: Biochar as Annual Cycle Building Dehumidifier
RT
ArchiLogic at yahoo.ca
Fri Jul 3 14:26:57 CDT 2015
On Fri, 03 Jul 2015 13:32:25 -0400, Norbert Senf <norbert.senf at gmail.com>
wrote:
> There is a workshop next week near Kingston (ON), with some
> international cookstove experts:
> http://mha-net.org/docs/15052201.pdf
>
I was just heading out the door when Norbert's post came in and in looking
at the PDF mentioned above, the author of the announcement contained
therein mentioned that the site of the workshop (Odessa ON) was near
Napanee ON and "that's where Avril Lavigne is from, don't you know".
Me ? I'm from an older generation than that which would have mentioned a
skateboarder/pop music personality as a community's claim to fame.
Point Anne is also just up the road from Odessa and it is the village
where Bobby Hull (aka "The Golden Jet") of 1960's NHL hockey fame is from.
In fact, I would venture that Point Anne would be an ideal spot for a
gathering of Green masonry stovebuilders.
It is the site of the ruins of an old cement plant complex. (Visible in
GoogleMaps "satellite" view around co-ordinates 44.155387, -77.304755 )
From the water, in the Bay of Qunite, one catches glimpses through the
trees on shore of what looks like a gable end left standing after a bomb
attack, like some WWII village in Europe.
Approaching the site from land, one first comes across small mountains of
huge limestone blocks haphazardly stacked, as if a Brobdignagian giant
had rampaged through the site of Stonehenge in a drunken rage. 44.157161,
-77310197
In the late 1950s was a great place for little boys (like myself) to play.
In the 2010's , I suspect that it'd be a great place for a gang of
grown-up stone masons to play.
*
On Fri, 03 Jul 2015 10:14:43 -0400, conservation architect
<elitalking at rockbridge.net> wrote:
>>
> For the past 3 years, I have been reducing the humidity in my house in
> the summer by temporarily heating >to 100F+ temperature for a few hours.
> ... my wife did not want me to do this
>> The second year, I pointed to the mold forming to convince here it was
>> a problem, also in August. Similar >results to first year. This year,
>> I convinced my wife to proactively dehumidify by drying the house when
>> I >first saw it get to 80%RH temporarily. I did this last week to get
>> down to 64%RH.
>> Also, on select days where RH is in 50s%, I ventilate the house with
>> fans. I was able to reduce by 5% the >last time this way.
I'm with t'missus on this one.
I think that the strategy of actively heating up a house to 100+ degF in
summer as a means of cooking off moisture from envelope materials that
were used to passively dehumidify a space seems ... [insert your choice of
descriptors that you imagine Eli's wife would have used in discussions on
the matter].
I think that the strategy is akin to holding one's breath and staying
underwater in a swimming pool as a "passive cooling" strategy, emerging
from underwater only when on the verge of passing out due to lack of
oxygen, to gasp for air briefly before going under again. As a means of
keeping cool, it would work but there are collateral deleterious
consequences .
In both cases, (dehumidification and cooling) proper ventilation would be
beneficial.
Again, rather than placing bio-char in a crawl-space to function as a
desiccant, plain old clay, as an earthen plaster on walls, say 2 to 3
inches thick (or even as sun-dried blocks stacked up to serve as
partitions replacing stud-framed partitions throughout the actual living
space would likely perform as well or better than an equal mass of
bio-char with far lower embodied-energy consequences.
And rather than heating up the entire house to 100+ degF to dry out the
desiccant materials when mould activity becomes imminent, perhaps the clay
could be configured as something like a Trombe wall in each room, and
venting the moisture-laden super-heated air outdoors (if possible) rather
than the winter mode of directing it to the adjacent living spaces.
*
Lynelle Hamilton <lynelle at lahamilton.com> wrote:
> ... 67 Electra 225. Mine with the 430-4bbl (inherited from my parents
> in 73) routinely held 9 people(!). On a mpg per person, it probably was
> a lot >friendlier than many vehicles
When I was in high school in the late 1960s, a relative tried to unload a
1960 Buick Electra 225 "Microsoft Excel Green" convertible (think Big
Fins" fore and aft) onto me when I first got my driver's license. I didn't
bite. But pretty much all of the vehicles that we drove back then
regularly accommodated surprisingly large numbers of bodies ...
frequently even when the vehicle wasn't moving come to think of it.
--
=== * ===
Rob Tom DT7-64
Kanata, Ontario, Canada
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/greenbuilding_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20150703/e3217687/attachment.html>
More information about the Greenbuilding
mailing list