But enough about you

For dense housing, this is awfully pretty:



Cactus building

I went and checked out some seminars at the Seattle Green Living Expo yesterday. The expo was held in the new Highpoint neighborhood of West Seattle. I didn't even know this neighborhood existed until I was researching the expo. It's a new development right in the middle of the West Seattle peninsula. They showed us a map overlay. If Highpoint were laid on top of downtown Seattle, it would stretch from the Convention Center to Pioneer Square -- quite a large area. It's mixed between affordable housing and market-rate, but it was all built to be green and walkable, and not annoyingly homogenous like so many new developments in the suburbs.

I signed up for two seminars that relate specifically to my ongoing dream house design project. The first one was on solar power. I'm not sure we'll put solar on our dream house, but I definitely want to explore alternative energy sources. The information presented was pretty basic, but I don't know much about solar yet so it suited me. Here are some things that I learned:

• If you're building a static-panel system in Seattle, you want to put your panels on a south-facing rooftop sloped 30 degrees from horizontal. On the roof is better than on the ground as you're more likely to clear obstructions. Slightly off the roof, with air circulating underneath, is optimal, because the efficiency of a solar system decreases with temperature.
  
  
• The systems typically installed by the company giving the presentation do not include power storage. If you don't consume the power you generate immediately, you feed it back into the grid and your meter runs backwards. I am curious to find out how much extra it costs to add storage and go off the grid completely.
  
  
• If you install a dual-axis tracking system, so the panels move to follow the sun across the sky, you'll generate about 30% more power.
  
  
• Seattle has an average of 3.73 sun hours per day. That is, if you integrate under the curve of sunlight hitting Seattle, and divide by 1 KW, you get 3.73 hours. Or something like that. That poor guy, trying to explain this graph to a general audience of non-calculus lovers. I was glad not to be him. After a few minutes' Googling, I found a chart of similar numbers for the country. As you can see, Seattle's numbers are very much on the low end, nation-wide, but people are still installing a lot of solar in Seattle. As the costs of fossil fuels continue to rise solar and other "luxury power" will become more financially attractive, even if it is not perfectly suited to the locale.
  
  
• To install a simple 1 KW system, without a new electrical panel, is about $14,000. The costs will be higher if the rooftop is very high or steeply pitched and slippery. To install additional panels, you can just multiply. An average system in Seattle is perhaps 3.5 KW, so we're looking at about $50,000 for a typical install.
  
  
• Using today's numbers for everything, assuming no changing costs, and a frictionless sphere in a vacuum, a solar power system will pay for itself in about 20 years. But, as the presenter said: "The numbers change dramastically if you consider externalities." For example, pollution, the Iraq war, etc.
  
  
• There is a $2000 federal tax credit for individuals who install solar, but for businesses, the tax credit is 30% of the cost of the system with no limit. I am definitely starting a business in my dream house.
  

I attended another seminar too, that was supposed to be about managing your architect and contractor during the process of designing and building a green home. Unfortunately, the second talk was almost content-free so I won't write anything more about it.

Thanks to 14limes for going to the expo with me! Having company made it a lot more fun.

When we are allowed to have grown-up furniture again, this would be fun:



From the designer's web site: "BioWall is a hand woven three-dimensional structure that can be crafted into lace-like walls of any dimension. Springy fiberglass rods are bowed into rings and woven into several dodecahedra that in turn are joined together." And if you grow a creeping vine on it, it doubles as a trellis... excellent. Shoji screens are so over.