Archive for October, 2008

Guest post: Miko Coffey – Natural carpets on trial

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

Whilst I am on blogging “sick leave”, I have invited anyone who fancies it to write a guest blog post. If you’re interested in contributing a self-build, green or cat-related post, please email me! Meantime, many thanks to Miko Coffey for this contribution.

Since we moved into our Brixton house 7 years ago, we have gradually been refitting it to be a more environmentally-conscious home. Having fitted the entire ground floor with sustainable (and rather lovely!) bamboo plank flooring, it’s now time to bid a none-to-soon farewell to the horrible cheap synthetic indoor-outdoor carpets we inherited on the top 2 floors, which have worn through in several places. You know the kind of carpet I mean – the kind that sells for £9.99per sq metre and infects student properties with its depressing – almost squeaky – plastic-ness. In fact, it’s this plastic-y attribute which led young entrepreneur Kelly Atkins to invent a new eco-material made from heat-treated (aka melted) carpet that can be molded into any shape. She actually got the idea when she accientally left her iron on her student accommodation carpeted floor. Check out her products and her cheekily named company Carpet Burns. (No, I don’t own shares in her company, I just think it’s cool!)

But I digress…
In searching for a more sustainable carpet, I popped onto le web for a good old look around, and while there are loads of ‘normal’ carpet shops that have a natural range or two, I am dubious of these. In many cases, only the fibres are natural, not the backing or glue. And they are also often treated with stain repellents that contain long scary names, and they will also probably be laid with some kind of foamy synthetic underlay, too. Luckily, it didn’t take me long to find a few places that sell/make 100% natural chemical-free carpets. I’m not interested in scratchy sisal, seagrass or jute, because I want something soft underfoot for the bedroom, and I also reckon those tough fibres might be painful for my kitty’s tender paws. Besides, they tend to look a bit too natural/earthy for the decor of my modern house.

So after browsing a bit, I decided to order some samples from Urbane Living. They have a great selection of wool carpets, including some wool/goat blends. They stock ranges from The Alternative Flooring Co and Crucial Trading, which meant I could order samples of both of these leading sustainable flooring brands in one place. You have to pay £1 per sample (postage included), but this cost is refundable when you order your carpet. They also ask you to send back your samples so they can re-use them, which is cool by me.

Thickness

Selection & Price
I was concerned that natural carpets would be substantially more expensive than their non-eco counterparts, and while some of the luxury ranges cost up to £51 sq m, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the ones we were looking at for the hallway cost around £23-26 sq m. We did like the look of one that cost £34 sq m, but this is not much more (if any) than a similar ‘normal’ carpet that’s part wool, part synthetic. The main downside with 100% natural products is that the colours are more limited than you get with synthetics. The colours are mostly neutral (beiges, taupes, creams & greys), although there are some rather funky coloured stripes if that’s your thing. But I like neutral colours for floors anyway, so I chose a few different textures, fibre contents, weaves & colours, and a couple of days later, my samples arrived. Even the envelopes at Urbane Living are sustainable: their stationery is 75% recycled post-consumer waste & 25% elephant dung! <insert contrived poo joke here>.

Feel-good factor
My hubby and I quickly got our bare feet out and tried stomping & stroking on each sample to see what they felt like. In fact, they all felt great compared to the nasty synthetic stuff. And the best bit was that they didn’t smell like chemicals. We had a hard time deciding which to choose for the hallways, but there was one resounding winner for the bedroom, a carpet that my toes fell in love with, one that felt like little tufts of pillowy poofiness: Wool Pebble. The name says exactly what it looks like, and it’s got a lovely deep pile that’s around twice as thick as the ‘Pecos’ one we chose for the hallways. As for the office, that’s a whole different kettle of fish. I want to find some funky cork but the hubby wants carpet, so we’ll have to wait & see who wins that one.

Wool pebble
Wool Pebble

Pecos
Pecos

Stain Test
Now, any cat-person knows that whatever carpet you choose must be able to withstand the bane of all cat-owners: kitty puke. Those treasures of undigested kitty krunchies & fur that always seem to appear when you are in a hurry to leave, or when you’ve come back from hols. Because my kitty doesn’t barf on demand, I decided to try the Old Jedi Wine Trick and poured some stale red plonk onto the creamy white wool carpet sample to test the stain properties. I reckon if it can handle red wine it can handle the contents of Dierdre’s cat-tummy no probs.

The good news is that the water-resistant properties of wool meant the wine beaded and ‘floated’ on the surface of the carpet for a minute or so before it started to soak in, which meant that I could have probably soaked it up quickly in a real-life spill. The bad news is that I forgot the key to doing a stain test is to actually have the appropriate stain remover in the house. I had no club soda, so tried salt (rubbish), then vinegar (better), then bicarb (even better, esp with vinegar). These all worked to a degree, but there was still a faint greyish blob visible. I whipped out some proper commerical stain remover, and it worked no better than the bicarb. I wonder what would have happened if I had club soda or white wine to pour on.

Wine stains

The results of the test are kind of pointless, as I don’t intend to have red wine anywhere upstairs anyway, and I am sure cat-vom is much less stubborn than red wine. I am also not buying the cream carpet, so I don’t think that grey-ish tint would show on the taupe or grey carpets we are going to get. And the really cool thing I found out AFTER doing the test is that Urbane Living can put a solvent-free water-based stain treatment called Intec on their carpets when you buy them. Voila – even clumsy alcoholics with a penchant for cream can go natural without worry.

Underlay, Underlay!
Urbane Living can recommend an installer, so we may give them a call when we are ready to purchase. In the meantime, I started thinking about underlay. After all, you will buy just as much underlay as carpet, and I couldn’t see anything about eco-underlay on any of the carpet manufacturers’ or suppliers’ websites. A quick Google and I found some recycled carpet underlay called Re-Lay, which is made in the UK from recycled carpet, textiles and truck tyres. Sounds like it’s even more durable than traditional underlays, so I will be sure to ask about using this when we get our carpets fitted.

We’re still some way away (financially) from getting the carpets done, but based on my research, we will definitely be getting natural carpets rather than stinky synthetic ones. Accoridng to Carpet Burns, a synthetic carpet can take up to 250,000 years to biodegrade, so I am happy to shell out for something that I can feel good about walking around on for the next 10.

- Miko Coffey (words and photos)

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Guest post: Shedworking’s Five Favourite Green Building Bloggers

Monday, October 27th, 2008

Whilst I am on blogging “sick leave”, I have invited anyone who fancies it to write a guest blog post. If you’re interested in contributing a self-build, green or cat-related post, please email me! Meantime, many thanks to Alex Johnson for this contribution.

Shedworkers are green workers and this is reflected in the interest on the Shedworking site whenever we feature a green issue, technique or supplier. Consequently, we keep a keen eye on the best of the environmentally-oriented bloggers who focus on architectural issues, of which our favourite five (actually six if you count carefully with some others suggested but that’s not such a snappy title) are:

1) Lloyd Alter at Treehugger
Lloyd is not only a decent chap, he is arguably the most influential blogger on green architecture (and we’re proud to have brought his cracking outhouse to the world via Shedworking). He is readable, intelligent, has a fine sense of humour and isn’t afraid to be controversial when needed.

2) Jetson Green
Run by Preston Koerner who calls it a ‘web magazine’, it covers anything to do with “green building, sustainable architecture, good design, clean technology in the built environment, and eco-friendly development”. It covers mainly American builds and issues but does reach out elsewhere sometimes. Preston is also on Twitter.

3) The Green Workplace
Run by Leigh Stringer who works global architectural firm HOK, it calls itself “the leading blog for those who design, manage or occupy green workplaces” which is quite true. Wideranging and well researched, this is another place I go to on a daily basis.

4) Mary’s Greened House Adventure
Though slightly in abeyance at the moment, this is an excellent blog which follows Mary’s construction of a green garden office from pre-drawing board to actually chopping up the straw bales for the walls herself. A personal but also useful blog, Mary is an international environmental consultant

5) Tiny House Blog and Tiny House Design
Not specifically green but all about the delights of living small rather than wasting big

I’d also recommend regular visits to Inhabitat (especially their Prefab Friday posts) and materialicious (again, not obsessively green but with a green sensibility).

- Alex Johnson

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links for 2008-10-20

Monday, October 20th, 2008

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Guest post: Mimi Hui – Green roofs

Friday, October 17th, 2008

Whilst I am on blogging “sick leave”, I have invited anyone who fancies it to write a guest blog post. If you’re interested in contributing a self-build, green or cat-related post, please email me! Meantime, many thanks to Mimi Hui for this contribution.

On a cold winter evening in Westchester, NY, I huddled in front of our massive fieldstone fireplace to stay warm. As I gazed upwards towards our cathedral ceiling to admire the sheer beauty of the structure, it hit me that our gorgeous 19 foot uninsulated slate and wooden beam ceiling was primarily responsible for our super high gas bills.

As a young couple that had just poured every bit of our last pennies into an old (but gorgeous) house, we felt ill every time we received the utility bills.

This was how my obsession with roofs started. We were simply trying to cut cost.

Fast forward 10+ years and I’m sitting in Ben’s kitchen in Mountain View, CA. It’s a particularly warm day and he half jokes about his “passive solar energy house”. My ears perk up. He explains that the roof pitch optimises energy from the sun to allow for seasonal changes. In the winter, the house naturally stays warmer as it absorbs more sun. In the summer, the pitch deflects the sun to keep the house cooler. I was impressed. He laughed and claimed it to be “just dumb luck”.

However, this provoked me to visit the new California Academy of Sciences building to get a good peek at its green roof, designed by architect Renzo Piano. This was absolutely breathtaking. It is one of the most gorgeous green projects happening in the Bay Area.

However, this made me wonder, how accessible is green roofing to the average consumer?

Well, the installation of green roofs seem to depend highly on where that consumer is located. And no, it’s not just those wacky Californians that are rushing out to install green roofs (in the USA, it’s actually Chicago, IL that leads the US in green roof installation – ~520,000 sq ft of the stuff).

Germany has seen a proliferation in green roofs, largely thanks to some very progressive environmental policies in the way of financial subsidies. The city of Stuttgart, well known for being a highly industrial area, has used green roofs to improve the overall air quality of the city.

In the United Kingdom, adoptation varies quite extensively. Also, the 2007 Chelsea Flower Show’s inclusion of a roof-garden category redefined people’s perception of a green roof from simply being a passive roof to an oasis of escape.

Turkey’s “Mesa Hospital” has won design awards for its green roof but when I glanced across the rooftops of my hotel there, the everyday citizen seemed to take advantage of plants on roof top gardens and balconies more than anything else.

Overall, it seems that despite governmental subsidies, green roofs are still largely installed by corporate and governmental bodies than the average consumer. Should you be interested in installing one for your home, here’s are a few starting points for research.

- Mimi Hui

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Guest post: Jonathan Hopkins – Cats, GPS and visions of a feline future

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

Whilst I am on blogging “sick leave”, I have invited anyone who fancies it to write a guest blog post. If you’re interested in contributing a self-build, green or cat-related post, please email me! Meantime, many thanks to Jonathan Hopkins for this contribution.

Cats and the web go hand in hand. Dogs don’t get that much of a look in really when it comes to the internet do they? Is this because geeks are more likely to have cats and have therefore helped inflate their online credentials? Or because cats just genuinely do a whole load more interesting stuff that makes it onto the web? Not sure, but I definitely fall into the ‘geeks with cats’ category and as such have invested a considerable amount of time in trying to geek out my cat. And, as the first of a what might turn into a few guest posts on Kits and Mortar, I’m going to look at cats and GPS.

One of the most worrying things as a cat owner is dealing with the fact that for a huge percentage of time you don’t actually know where your beloved pet is. You don’t know what they’re doing, who they’re hanging put with and exactly how far they are straying from home every day or night. Well right now, we’re right on the edge of being able to buy a commercial off-the-shelf product that will enable you to do all of this and more using GPS.

Gone are the days of having to buy something super expensive and rather intrusive looking from a website that looks, well, questionable. Pawtrack, so I was told after a few email exchanges, will be available later this month. It’s one of the first proper cat GPS tracking systems I found and have kept my eye on ever since.

There’s already plenty of GPS trackers available for dogs, (and even mobile phones) but when it comes to cats and GPS it all comes down to size. Dogs can lug around a bigger transmitter device attached to their colars, but cats need something a lot smaller. And that’s what’s held up products like the Pawtrack. And even now, looking at the picture of Freddie sporting his Pawtrack, it still looks pretty hefty for a nimble cat.

In the meantime while companies like Pawtrack (and others yet to come to market I imagine) have been developing commercial products, as you’d expect, tech savvy cat lovers have improvised, with some really impressive results. It all started with Mr Lee, whose owner built himself a GPS and camera device that fitted into a neat(ish) package that wing around his neck – giving his owner an amazing insight into what Mr Lee had been up to everyday – from hiding out with mates under cars to meeting blue snakes in the forest.

Fast forward a couple of years to now and the Mr Lee site has been developed a whole lot further – with DIY or ready-built kits available for purchase, but still very much in the ‘Make’ category of feline GPS. Still though, you can get one of the GPS modules in the UK (complete with PC software, no Mac – Boo!) for just £35. You can check out someone who’s done just that in the UK and shared the results. Quite impressive really for the cost, you just need to add a harness and hope your cat doesn’t just end up doing combat style crawling when wearing it.


Thanks to Alex_Lee2001!

My personal vision for the future of geeks with cats? A cat flap that enables entry based on RFID and alerts the owner via email/mobile/Twitter etc on entry/exit, complete with a photo of the cat going in or out and a time stamp. A super-small version of the Pawtrack GPS hardware keeps a live log of the cat’s position via GPS and this then hooks up to some sort of Nike + type community for cats which plots out all routes and stats online and via mobile apps. Oh and did I mention the fact that the cat flap automatically scans the cat for weight and other health statistics, which is then live-linked to the vet’s system and cat food manufacturers custom production file tailored to the cat ready for customised monthly food production and delivery?

It’s just a shame that cat+ is already registered and appears to be a type of accounting software rather than a next generation cat community.

– Jonathan Hopkins is a creative & digital consultant that blogs at middledigit.net about brands, technology, cats and other things he stumbles upon whilst perusing the interwebz.

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links for 2008-10-15

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

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Guest post: Martin Belam on moving back to the UK from Greece

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

Whilst I am on blogging “sick leave”, I have invited anyone who fancies it to write a guest blog post. If you’re interested in contributing a self-build, green or cat-related post, please email me! Meantime, many thanks to Martin Belam for this contribution.

For the last 3 years we have been living just outside Chania, on the Greek island of Crete. Recently though, we’ve decided to move back to the UK. That has made us notice the different styles of environmental awareness associated with housing in both countries.

The availability of recycling facilities is something that Greece is lagging behind the UK with. Our local municipality had a couple of recycle bins in the town square, but there was no recycling collection at the house. In fact, there wasn’t a rubbish collection at the house. We would have to take our rubbish on a walk down to some skips at the bottom of the road, which were a magnet for fly-tipping as well as domestic refuse.

Recycling is more common in the larger metropolitan areas like Athens, but it doesn’t always go to plan. There are lingering suspicions that the ‘recyclable’ collections end up in the same over-filled land-fills as other waste, and it is common to see any old rubbish stuffed into the special bins in town.

Water is another issue with a contrasting approach. Despite the number of people laughing at us that we are swapping the sun for constant rain, it is the UK where we are more likely to encounter a water shortage. In Greece, water is not treated as a precious commodity. It was usual to hear our neighbours washing their cars at all times of day and night, and on most days a constant stream of water ran down our road from people who had been hosing down their patios and balconies.

Energy use is where we are going to notice a big personal difference though. The flat we have chosen in London features the standard British set-up of central heating and double glazing. We’ve also got a coal-burning open fireplace, that I think will be more of a visual feature than a practical method of heating the house. By contrast, our house in Crete featured under-floor heating. This kept the house warm throughout the winter, but cost us a small fortune in petrol to run it. As it took a long time for the heat to seep into the house, it wasn’t something that you could run for a couple of hours each day, and it had to be left on continuously from October to March.

Summer is a different matter entirely, and the Greek approach really takes advantage of the climate. Not only does the warmer weather mean that heating bills are non-existent, Greece is much more geared up towards renewable and natural energy in the home. Not only did we have solar panels to help cut down on our need for nationally generated electricity, but our hot water tank was housed on the roof. That meant it naturally warmed as soon as the sun rose, and so we never had to use the water heater during summer at all. This is a pretty standard arrangement on the majority of modern homes in Greece.

Greece doesn’t have a very good environmental reputation – for example it has been suspended from carbon trading agreements because of the poor quality of the carbon emission statistics it was supplying. However, there have been some high-profile protests aiming to increase greener transport activities like cycling, and legislation to use more renewable energy in the national grid and raise the level of recycling.

And there will definitely be one environmental improvement by moving back to the UK – I dread to think of the size of my own personal carbon footprint whilst I’ve been living in Greece and regularly flying back to London for work.

- Martin Belam

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links for 2008-10-08

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

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links for 2008-10-07

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

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KnM going into hibernation for a bit

Monday, October 6th, 2008

I have just got back from the physio, who confirmed I have carpal tunnel syndrome. I’m going to put Kits and Mortar on hold for a few weeks whilst my wrists get better. Apologies!

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