chokecherry's Profile

Huh, low techie here. I have black plastic office garbage bins. Each one has the city recycling sticker on the outside. The outside and inside I took a silver marker and wrote "paper" "plastic" etc. and the recycling arrows. With our household (5 adults plus visitors for the homebased business) we produce more than those bins can hold in two weeks (how often the city picks up) and so I am looking at the gaiam ones as backup to maybe put on hooks on the wall in the back stairwell. We've got a tiny kitchen for our situation so something I could hang up higher and maybe catch the extra cans and plastic would work.

First for hanging items on a wall you place what is often called a "deadman" in the wall. These are blocks of wood placed where you would want to have something to drill into. They are placed in slightly from the inner plaster. Secondly, you might want to explore something called "cob" which has passed some amazing shake table tests. These are what engineers and code types use to determine whether or not a building material or design would "hold up" in an earthquake.

As for wiring and plumbing you can run conduit through walls during building as empty conduit and pull wire later, or you can design a groove/shelf/whatever into the wall (assuming you are building cob) during building and use that run as your place of wire and cover it with a shelf, decorative board for hanging pictures, a chair rail (no, they've never been used to hide wiring ;)

Lastly, you need to understand some physics. There is a difference between thermal resistance and thermal mass. Thermal resistance means that the material or insulation will slow the temperature being transmitted across a differential gradient. Or... in simple terms it keeps the cold out and the warm in or the other way around if you live in a different climate. Thermal mass means that there is a time lag in that temperature change. This is why cities, which have huge thermal mass, are quite warm at night after the sun has gone down as the thermal mass, here concrete, is re-radiating the heat of the day.

This thermal mass traditionally made adobe homes extraordinarily comfortable in a hot, dry, clime. Read... before airconditioning.

All in all the low embodied energy of these methods of building that are suited to the comfort of their occupants in hot, dry climes means they are the type of building we need to see more of, especially as we don't need to use that chinese drywall in adobe or cob buildings!