All this week, the Eco Women will be investigating eco construction in the U.S. and abroad. How hard or easy is it to build green? What are some of the materials and techniques available?
Part 4 of 5. For Parts 1, 2, and 3, click here, here, and here.
Today, the Eco Women take their investigations across the Atlantic Ocean to lovely Ireland, where Kari and her husband are building their home.
By Kari of Kari Blogs
When Recycla approached me to write a wee post about my home build project and the trials and tribulations we have encountered because we are trying our hardest to build with the best interests of the environment in mind, I thought “a chance to talk about my house…excellent.” But now that I have started to pull my ideas together, I am afraid that it all might seem a bit negative and rife with troubles. I hope that’s not how it comes across, but it would be fair to say that it isn’t without its struggles.
Our plans for an energy efficient house went far beyond the actual building process, although we wanted to keep than in mind. We are very mindful that you can have great ideas for efficient building methods, but when you are employing someone else to carry them out, the best you can do is encourage them to be efficient.
One of our two main focuses have been on services that we can introduce to our home which will allow us to be energy efficient for the time we live in the house, and make these services the norm for our (hopefully) future children growing up, thus introducing a new generation who consider their surroundings when making decisions.
We are installing solar panels which, if our research is correct, should provide us with 70-75% of our hot water needs, even on the cloudiest of days (of which there are many in Northern Ireland). We had applied for a government grant to assist with the hefty costs of installing solar panels, but, in their wisdom, they have pulled all grants because they feel that they do nothing to encourage people to install them. Not quite sure about their thinking on that, but because of this, we have decided to build and install our own solar panels. My husband, after huge amounts of research, has found plans for their construction and is in the process of gathering all the materials he needs for this.
We considered many forms of renewable heating sources for example wood pellet burning stove for central heating and geothermal central heating but, unfortunately, due to extortionate prices we have been forced down the route of installing oil fired central heating. This wouldn’t be our ideal because oil is obviously in such high demand and the world’s oil stores are being used up at a rate of knots, but the cost of our alternatives were coming in somewhere in the region of 700% higher than the oil fired central heating and there is no available grant assistance. Unfortunately this was just out of our league. We have, however, purchased a plot of peat and are going to install a stand-alone wood burning stove in the living area in which to burn the peat. This will hopefully be our main source of heat in the winter (with the exception of having to put on the central heating for a couple of hours before we get up in the morning and an hour before we come home in the evening) and our only source of heat in the summer.
The main stumbling block that we have found has been cost. The government is pushing for a more environmentally friendly country and encouraging us to “do our bit” but is putting nothing in place to make a practical help towards this. Any grants that were offered have now been stopped, so you are basically on your own with any endeavours you make. There are also no incentive schemes for the manufacturers of the more eco-friendly products to keep their costs down to allow people to be able to afford them, so if you are on a budget (and hey, how many people do you know who are building who aren’t on a budget?), you are less likely to be able to get there by yourself.
Our other main focus and the one area where we did have control and full ability to exert our preferences, was in specifying locally manufactured products and using local firms to do the work, keeping our shipping and traveling costs to a minimum. Every product that has been specified is locally produced, manufactured, transported and fitted. At the end of the day, every little bit helps!
I guess my summary would be that we have tried to do our best. There have been things that we have been unable to achieve, but we have done what we can and it all makes a difference.
Thanks Kari!!! Tune in tomorrow when the Eco Women meander down to England to look at a construction project there.
