Thanks to the guys at Garzac plumbing, the grey water system is now plumbed up and connected. Awaiting only a grey water wetlands to start discharging water into (and, of course, a family living in the house producing grey water!)

The schematic of the grey water system (Grey water schematic) shows what is going on here, but the plumbing ended up being rather complicated as the sewer line from the rear guest house (pipe at the bottom of the picture) comes into the corner, gets joined to the blackwater outlet from the house and discharged to the main sewer line (leaving the picture at the left).

You can see the grey water line exiting the house, and then there is a big diverter valve that lets you divert the water to the sump tank (to the right) or directly into the main sewer at left (if for some reason you are using something in the house you don’t want to go into the grey water system, or if you don’t have your grey water leach fields set up yet!).  The black water sewer line exits the house below the grey water line and discharges directly out to the left.

The grey water comes out of the house too low too be discharged directly into the wetlands, so it needs a BRAC sump pump designed to work with grey water to bring it up to the discharge level (this is NOT ideal – we would have avoided much of this complicated plumbing if we could simply have a gravity discharge, but we couldn’t get it to work with the slopes of the property). The tank is not a holding tank – it is a temporary surge tank.  The pump is sized to be able to keep up with the drains in the house, and discharge water up out of the pipe sticking out of the top of the tank into the wetlands as fast as it comes in.  However, if the pump breaks,  grey water needs to overflow directly into the sewer rather than backing up into the house, so the overflow line with the white check valve on it leads from the tank into the main sewer line (if the main sewer line were ever to back up, the last thing you want is sewage backing up into your grey water system which is why the check valve is there).

The big white pipe along the top is connected to the roof downspouts and leads to the rain water cachement tank in the back yard.  The grey conduit is the main power and the low voltage data lines running to the back guest house.  I wonder if we can get a few more pipes in there somewhere.

The grey water outlet showing the diverter valve, surge tank with top discharge, overflow line with check valve and all the exits to the main sewer at left

The construction of the wetlands will be another big project, and will probably be something we have another construction party for (like the bale raising), so if you missed the bale raising and would like to build some wetlands and a stream later this summer, a general call for volunteers will go out close to the time.  Drop me a line if you would like an invite.  If you were in the bale raising party… you’re already on the invite list

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The view above the stairwell where you can see five paint colors!

As we embarked on painting, I was rapidly running out of time to research what we needed to do with the paint, so this is a bit quick and dirty.  I know that low or no VOC (Volatile Organic Compounds) paint gets you LEED points and “Green Points” and your Boy Scout merit badge for saving the earth, but NOWHERE in all of the info about low and no VOC paints is there any kind of *quantitative* data about how much you don’t emit if you “go low VOC”.   There are many of the same kind of wishy washy relative “this is better than that” statements to be found on the web and in those lazy journalism eco-articles, that made me go beserk about countertops.  Of course the marketing materials of these paint companies assure me that I am saving the world by buying their product, but, can you blame me for being suspicious?  I couldn’t find anything that would let me calculate how much I would save by using low VOC, in numbers that meant anything to me and could give me an idea of relative values.

So I did a back of the envelope calc, and decided to buy zero VOC paints, but this is not as rigorous as I would like it to be, and if there is anyone out there who has done a real analysis of this, I’d love it if you could drop me a note.

First some definitions:

“No VOC” = 5 grams VOC/Liter of paint

“Low VOC” = 20-200 grams VOC/Liter (most eggshell and flat paints that claim “Low VOC” on the label are in the 25 g/L range, but glossy paints tend to be up towards 150 g/L)

“Regular”  (i.e. “interior latex paint”) = 200 grams+/L

NOTE: this is for the base only, and some companies play fast and loose with their claims as the colorants can add significantly to the VOCs in the paint, but these are reasonably good ranges.

Some of the 27 odd gallons of paint we used

Many of the benefits that people ascribe to the low and no VOC paints have to do with indoor air quality, but since 99.9% of the VOCs are gone after the first two weeks of drying – it seems to me that this aspect of the low/no VOC debate only really matters if you are painting a house you are going to be living in at the time of painting, since after the paints are fully dry, a properly vented house would have no discernible difference in air quality.  Given that we aren’t living in the house yet, I discounted the indoor air quality aspect (since painting with the stuff, however, next time I am painting a house that I am living in at the time, I am DEFINITELY using “no VOC” paints, as anecdotally, it made a huge difference in the livability of the space during the two week drying time)

But if I am simply interested in figuring out my effect on the environment, if I use about 100 liters of paint (~27 gallons) of paint inside the house (including primer and extra coats), then using zero VOC paint in the house vs. “regular” saves at least 200g/L*100L = 20 kg of VOCs

From the EPA “Automobile Emissions: An Overview.” Fact Sheet OMS-5. August 1994, my typical commute of two “cold start” car trips a day and my car sitting around evaporating fuel, I produce about 24g of VOC per day from my car (4 g/day from evaporation only if I just let it sit and don’t use it).   So painting the house with “zero VOC” paint is the equivalent of over 800 days of a 1997 automobile’s VOC emissions. (OK, I have a newer car that that, and my running and evaporative emissions are probably much lower, but even if it is half that, I am saving over a year of car emissions)

That was enough for me to make the decision.  Without looking into it further, we went zero VOC, and bought the Benjamin Moore “Natura” paints.  And they were remarkably un-stinky as we painted.

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Those warm shimmering hues… Oh! how I love the beauty of wood!  As I feed this addiction – am I contributing to deforestation, environmental degradation and global warming?  Am I evil because I love wood so much?   Should you be asking “So, Catherine, when are you going to stop demolishing the tropical rainforests of the world because you like how they look cut and sanded with a nice clear coat over the top?”

Wood can be sustainable, and it has a very low embodied energy, but buying wood indiscriminately can do a lot of damage to the environment.  More than anything else in this house, wood was destined to be my worst temptation towards ethical downfall (and it isn’t too fun to admit a lapse).  We wanted a lot of beautiful wood, and weren’t sure this could be done without serious compromise of principals.  So did we manage to put so much wood in the house in an environmentally sustainable manner?

Well… yes, and no. We tried, but maybe not hard enough.

FSC Certified Lumber

First the good news.  FSC certified wood is available, and that is the majority of wood that we used in building the house.  The FSC, aka The Forest Stewardship Council is an independent non-governmental certifying body that evaluates and certifies the sustainability of wood products.  Wood grown sustainably is just that – a sustainable resource that is being farmed rather than “mined”, does not include irreplaceable old growth trees, and it works with local growers all around the world to create not only a sound environmental practice, but strong economic base in wood growing areas.

The FSC certified white cedar in the soffit

What’s not to love?   The FSC is the most credible certification system (alternatives like the timber industry-backed Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC) are around, but they lack a certain independence that seems necessary).  FSC wood usually costs more because it has “Chain of Custody” certification in which the wood is in the custody, from harvest through the saw mill, of certified FSC companies who agree to certain standards, and are regularly audited for compliance.  There are some critics of the FSC system saying that it is too lax in its oversight of some logging operations, and that there is corruption in some areas where loggers can bribe the certifiers, but overall, despite the lapses, it seems to me that when problems are discovered and pointed out to them, they de-certify violators, and the pressure that FSC certification is bringing to bear on the timber industry around the world is a strong positive force.  We specified that all of our framing lumber, soffit wood, plywood and engineered lumber in the house be FSC certified.  Likewise, Kolbe, our window and sliding door manufacturer could provide FSC certified wood for the frames.

But not all woods are available with FSC certification, so we deviated from purity.

Reclaimed Walnut flooring

Our best deviation is using wood which is “salvaged” from old timbers from deconstructed barns, or “reclaimed” from agricultural fruit and nut trees when they are cut down for replanting orchards.  Using wood from these sources is an excellent way to get beautiful wood without contributing to deforestation.  Reclaimed wood is not eligible for FSC certification as there is no logging portion, but as it is not contributing to environmental degradation, it seems just as good and just as “green”.  We decided to put in reclaimed walnut flooring in the upstairs rooms and walnut stair treads from Restoration timber which is an excellent resource for reclaimed wood.

Someone else's cabinets made out of lyptus

The front door in Honduran mahogany

A little bit more of a grey area is the kitchen cabinets which are “lyptus” – a brand-name for a particular type of eucalyptus wood grown and supplied by a company called Fibria.  Lyptus is a fast growing, plantation grown tree which has PEFC certification of sustainability (which seems great until you realize that PEFC is that industry certification system, so maybe not the best choice, but after some belated research, it really does seem like a relatively sustainable wood).

The choice I made that I am the most conflicted about is the Honduran Mahogany doors we had made.  That’s right: Honduran Mahogany.  When I first started looking into wooden doors for the house, I looked at many different species of wood, and stumbled upon a great company on line with beautiful door designs: Mahogany Doors Honduras.

The wine cellar door

I entered into a lengthy email exchange with Gary, the owner in Honduras, about the sustainability of the wood, the process by which they obtained their logs, kiln dried them themselves, fabricated the doors, and then exported them (I’m sure he thinks I’m crazy).  He assured me they exported with CITES certification because they handled everything from the logs to export of the doors.  Great! everything was grand, I ordered the doors, excellent price, great communication, (a bit of delay) , but they finally came and they are BEAUTIFUL – really really beautiful.

But I had probably stopped my research a bit early (once I had the answer I wanted, I will admit, I didn’t look any further).  In my research for the blog entry, I dug a little deeper, and I probably would have been happier not knowing.   CITES is an extremely shortened acronym for “Conference of the Parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora”.  Yeah, endangered species.  My doors may be certified, but the wood is still an endangered species.  Best spin:  the CITES certification process provides a sustainable local industry to an area that wouldn’t otherwise have a legitimate local economy and might need to resort to poaching and destroy the trees anyway.  More realistic: those trees probably shouldn’t have been cut down, no matter what the certificate says…

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