guest post

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

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

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.

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