June 29, 2010 Update from Ann and Gord

The public tour on June 6th was fully booked almost 3 weeks ahead.  Not so with our July 4th tour with no bookings as of today…very strange.  Attendance at tours is always hard to predict…possibly something to do with the long weekend (but this hasn’t been the case in the past).  Anyways, we have decided to take the day off and go kayaking so are going to cancel the tour.  We have not been kayaking since our honeymoon over 5 years ago.  It time for us to take a day off, pack a picnic and go paddling.  Next public tour is August 8th.  Booking has begun for this tour and since the Harrowsmith magazine will finally be out this tour is sure to fill up.  See tour link on our blog for details.  https://ecosenseliving.wordpress.com/tours/

All workshops at Eco-Sense are fully booked for this summer but we do hope to have a work party later this summer to put the upper living roof on the house.  All our workshop booklets have been uploaded to our blog.  https://ecosenseliving.wordpress.com/downloads-brochures/

The wet spring has slowed down completion of the cob bathroom, but it is almost done and looking great.  Check out photo on our blog.  https://ecosenseliving.wordpress.com/

Cascadia/Vancity Research Project:  Vancity Grant details

Gord has put in long hours researching equipment, reading manuals, installing sensors, setting up dedicated laptops, installing dataloggers, setting up software, and exploring research options.  We would like to thank Christina Goodvin (mechanical engineer) for all her engineering help through this process, especially with the solar thermal side of the research.  Check out this link to see some data and graphs.  Hobolink

The KD2Pro Thermal Properties Analyzer is also giving some good solid data for the mass wall system.  R-Value for the pumice cob wall is coming in at 0.93 per inch or for our 22 inch walls this means R-20.43 with a standard deviation of 0.013.  This data came from 27 tests of one drilled hole.  Now we need to do this 24 more times to make sure that the testing is bullet proof and statistically significant.   For the first time in our post university lives our statistics courses are proving useful.

Let the experimentation begin.  We are going to make up all kinds of new cob/plaster samples and do the thermal properties testing on them.  Way too much fun for us geeky energy nerds.

All of this is keeping us quite busy as we digest all the goings on in the world.  Here are a few links we found interesting these past couple of months.

http://vimeo.com/11859670 Video link to Charles Eisenstein

http://vimeo.com/10635494 Video link to Vandana Shiva

Link to Environment Canada on the Warmest Spring in Canadian History since records began http://www.ec.gc.ca/adsc-cmda/default.asp?lang=En&n=4CC724DA-1

and finally to depress everyone, the oil spill in the gulf is small potatoes compared to what has been happening off the Nigerian coast.  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-nigeria-niger-delta-shell

Ann and Gord