housing

Freight Containers as Student Housing

- Adam Clare

Tempohousing uses shipping containers to create housing and other buildings for places that can use it. Simple, modular, mobile, and funky.

In 2002, the city of Amsterdam had a very urgent need for student housing and was looking for new and original ideas to quickly solve the problem. Only temporary building sites were available (as in any city, land was scarce), so the solution had to be mobile, affordable and had to have a quick set up time. Traditional construction was not going to work: too expensive, not mobile, and too slow. Tempohousing (at the time also known as “Keetwonen”) was the only company who could offer solutions with the budgets and timeframes. But to live in what looks like a shipping container was completely new in Holland, so many hearts still had to be won.

Cannabis Houses = Zero Carbon

- Adam Clare

Hemp, part of the cannabis genus, is a great building material according to researchers in the UK. EcoWorldly has a good write-up on the hemp housing research.

Technically speaking, hemp is the common name for plants of the entire Cannabis genus, although the term is more typically used to refer only to strains of industrialized varieties which are not cultivated for drug use. Because industrialized hemp grows so quickly, requires almost no pesticides or herbicides, controls topsoil erosion and is a significant carbon sink, many environmentalists have been touting the plant as an eco-friendly miracle crop for decades. Furthermore, hemp can serve as a green-minded replacement for many other raw materials which aren’t good for the environment, such as tree paper, plastics and certain clothing fibers. Hemp seeds are also edible, and hemp seed oils offer healthy alternatives to other cooking oils.

Urbanites Pollute Less

- Adam Clare 2 Comments

A Canadian study has looked at how much carbon per capita a person living in Canada produces and the conclusion is that if you live in a city you produce less carbon. Once more it’s proven that living in an urban centre with high density is better for the environment than urban sprawl.

When it comes to climate change pollutants, Toronto residents are among the greenest in Canada, says a new study.

The report, published in the April issue of the journal Environment and Urbanization, says metropolises, commonly denigrated as big, dirty places, are in fact spewing fewer greenhouse gases per capita than the rest of their countries.

“Blaming cities for climate change is far too simplistic,” said author David Dodman, a researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London, England. “There are a lot of economies of scale associated with energy use in cities. If you’re an urban dweller, particularly in an affluent country like Canada or the U.K., you’re likely to be more efficient in your use of heating fuel and in your use of energy for transportation.”

Dodman found that the average Canadian is responsible for 24 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions each year, while Torontonians just 8.2 tonnes.

Radiant Heat Flooring for Warm Feet

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Radiant heating is so great that it seems that it’s too great for us to have in every home. Essentially, it’s a system to heat your house using heating tubes under the floor. Here’s a blog post on the coolness of a hot floor.

Perhaps the most appealing aspect of the radiant floor heating is that it creates not just a warm room, but an entire warm floor. The heat still rises, but it’s rising uniformly from ground zero instead of from a single fixture or a couple of vents. The result is often that rare anomaly, barefoot comfort in the dead of winter. Such systems are particularly good for homes with high ceilings, where forced-air heat often ends up where it is least needed unless the homeowner is endowed with the agility of a bat.
Not only are radiant-heat floors warm, but the system does without unsightly and space-hogging ductwork in the home. Lacking vents to keep uncovered, you can place your furniture and doodads wherever. There’s no blasting faux-desert wind wreaking havoc on the hairdo. The system is silent, and in this noise-prone day and age, that is golden. It also works well with tile and wood floors, in addition to concrete.
Not only does the home look nicer, but so do the energy bills. Because of the even heating generated by a radiant floor heating system, its thermostat may be set 2-4 degrees lower than that of a forced-air heating system. This in turn can reduce energy costs by 10-40%. (Check with your local utility company to get an estimate of how much a 2-4 degree decrease would save you).

Converted Ship Containers

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Here’s seven cool things that people have turned useless shipping containers into.

Small, well-designed and low-cost homes are a key tool for building cities and dense communities where many people and families can live safely and comfortably while sharing resources efficiently. With the green theme growing in popularity across every stretch of the world, more and more people are turning to cargo container homes for green alternatives for office, and even new home, construction.

There are countless numbers of empty, unused shipping containers around the world just sitting on the shipping docks and taking up space.

The reason for this is that it’s too expensive for a country to ship empty containers back to the their origin in most cases, it’s just cheaper to buy new containers from Asia. The result is an extremely high surplus of empty shipping containers that are just waiting to become someone’s home or office.

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