Yes thats a good plan though I expect TNP will come up with some fiendishly hi tech ventilation system instead
You want to be careful once you start investigating lime. All your friends will get glazed expressions as you start explaining the latest wrinkle you've discovered
Which reminds me ... Anyone know anything about copperas? It may have been used as a lime mortar pigment Anna
~~ Anna Kettle, Suffolk, England |""""| ~ Lime plaster repairs / ^^ \ // Freehand modelling in lime: overmantels, pargeting etc |____|
Round balers use thinner twine. Alternatively you could buy that used for Hesston (big) bales which is much thicker than the standard you are familiar with.
Tale told of teacher returning gifted ball of baler twine and plaintively asking *what happened to the short lengths with a knot at the end?*
How many and where?
I think you are right to worry about the load bearing capability of bales. I have no recent experience of the mini Hestons used in the TV program but a stack of conventional bales 5metres high will squash the bottom layer by up to 10% over 12 months storage.
You see Anna, I am an engineer, and I use whatever is to hand, that's suitable and cheap.
400 years ago it was oak and wattle and daub and thatch. It looks nice, but it has structural limitations.
Today we have a huge range of plastics, steels and other materials available.
I am neither a traditionalist, not a modernist.
I don't like buildings with steel exoskeletons 'celebrating the use of modern materials' any more than I like a house with no damp proof course, no foundations, and which absolutely requires a breathable skin to eradicate the rising damp. ;-)
I suppose if you gave me an unlimited budget I might come up with a house thatched with carbon fibre :-)
I am by no means sure that slaked lime takes any less energy to make than portland cement by the way.
Arguably we have more oil left than oak trees as well.
BUT we certainly have a LOT of straw around right now. And its engineering properties are actually, in large bulk, pretty reasonable for houses.
As far as breathable/not breathable goes, houses with humans generate water. That has to be eradicated somehow.
In older houses with lower insulation, the water got to the walls and condensed, making them damp, and the walls needed to breath outwards to get rid of it. The walls got damp also because they had no DPC's. They needed to be flexible because they subsided as they had no foundations.
They got round all that by having open fires with chimneys that sucked out warm sticky air, in order to cause smog and pollution in the cities and towns, and by having draughty doors to let fresh air in, and wearing woollens - sometimes the same set - all winter. And by using flexible breathable lime rendering on their flexible wattle and lathe ..
Today we go far far deeper with rigid steel reinforced foundations, so our houses don't move, and with open fires being a bit polluting, we have efficient boilers and hot water heating, and sealed double or triple glazed windows and sealed doors and pack the walls with insulation.
The net effect of that is what water IS inside, stays there and will condense on the coldest part of the house - generally just behind the insulation. So we install vapour barriers on the inside.
And then punch holes in the structure to achieve enough 'background ventilation/air change' to let the sticky fug out in a controlled way.
We probably use far LESS energy to heat our houses than we used to actually.
As I said, I am not arguing particularly for or against either method, as both on their way work, and both are adapated to the resources available.
My complaint about modern houses is their soullessness. My response has been to construct a house to modern standards using a mixture of whatever worked properly and looked good and felt right. I've got single glazed leaded light french doors in a steel encased frame. For example. The look and feel is Lutgyens, the construction is post war steel..in this case. I've got an oak and softwood frame stuffed to the hilt with rockwool. I've got a slate floor with UF heating. And open fires. And fully wired Broadband and TV...
The appearance is very traditional, and the sound of a door slamming tells me I am in a timber house, BUT I don't have the cold, damp and fungal smells associated with most of our local ones, and the house is rigid enough not to need flexible plastering, and ventilated enough not to need breathable walls.
I really do think that there is a sensible discussion to be engaged in about what is the overall best way to build a house today, and I don't thing the building trade has a monopoly on the right ideas any more than either of US do, and certainly the governement is only interested in metting self imposed target that take very little account of the quality of life to be had inside the little hutches and kennels that they are committed to supplying us with.
OTOH I am really for the *most* part a very firm supporter of current building regualtions. Apart from the Part P and disabled ones which are politically instigated, and not a reflection on 'best practice' as such.
The best of the old and the best of the new is my motto.
Thats a fair point, though the conditions are significantly different. A roof dries off and is well ventilated, both of these stop rot. But a bale, once damp, would simply rot, with no drying and no airflow.
I wonder.
yes! no need for a builder there. I guess the problem then is if Jo Public has a loadbearing strawbale house and doesnt maintain it, as people tend to not do.
You cant make strawbale arches can you?? Would avoid a lot of timber...
Not sure I totally agree with this. Some modern Scandanvian and more especially German timber structures are highly rigid and sealed yet I would say are eco-friendly (and traditional)
All materials have structural limitations and the structural limitations of these materials are not nearly so important as
The economic balance has changed from expensive transportation costs and cheap labour to cheap transportation costs and expensive labour
Big business cannot patent it so there will never be the marketing push to sell it, improve techniques etc
And very useful they are too
It doesn't have to be heated to nearly such a high temperature. There aren't the economies of scale, but that is more to do with money than energy
That was true in the early middle ages too, so they took up tree planting which is one of the reasons there are so many late medieval and Tudor timber framed houses in Suffolk and why Henry and Elizabeth could build fleets of ships. Trees are easy to plant
On a tangent, although some people are planting oaks today, I don't think anyone is bending the saplings to get curved timber. If I were planting oaks I would plant some bent ones
The oldest houses were built in the optimum places where there were no underground springs or problems with water runoff. That just wasn't possible in town centres and everywhere from Georgian times onwards so dealing with ground water became more of a priority.
My house is old enough to have no damp course and no rising damp. In fact I am excited cos yesterday I pulled off the last bit of external cement render (hurrah!) to expose the original 500+ year old sole plate. If there were any damp problems it would not still be there
Yes foundation technology is much better today
And lots of these things are improvements
Oh I agree, except that they economised on energy input by living in much less comfortable houses than we would be prepared to put up with now
The things I do to my house are constrained partly by it being a listed building but more importantly by what I do for a living. I want to understand the complete medieval building system and that means dealing with the building repairs in a medieval way.
Mind you I'm also keen on electricity, central heating, chimneystacks and glass so I'm not a complete purist :) and interfacing old and new technologies is interesting to me too, hopefully combining 21st century comfort with using materials which have low embodied energy and low energy running costs in preference to fashionably hitech products which are heavily marketed. Things which are not advertised require more searching out and understanding, but thats OK, I like doing that
I do too, but strawbale construction will never hit the mass market cos it takes up too much space. Insulating with hemp batts is probably more realistic.
I'm getting interested in linseed oil paint which according to the enthusiasts is very long lasting on external window and door frames (15 years before repaint is needed) and only went out of fashion after the last war cos cold pressed linseed oil was unavailable and boiled linseed oil doesn't work so well. I will let you know the result of my researches in 15 years time :)
Luckily, there are a lot of people for whom the way their house is built is not important, it just has to be there and to be reasonably comfortable
Oil prices are generally heading upwards and as they do, the low energy input options will appeal more to housebuilders. I just like to be ahead of the game :)
Anna
~~ Anna Kettle, Suffolk, England |""""| ~ Lime plaster repairs / ^^ \ // Freehand modelling in lime: overmantels, pargeting etc |____|
I suppose I would wriggle out of this by calling them crossover products, where the best of the new and the old are combined. Its the way building will have to go eventually
Anna
~~ Anna Kettle, Suffolk, England |""""| ~ Lime plaster repairs / ^^ \ // Freehand modelling in lime: overmantels, pargeting etc |____|
Not only does lime burning require a much lower temperature than Portland cement manufacture, the carbon dioxide driven off in the limestone to quicklime reaction is reabsorbed from the atmosphere as the lime mortar sets by carbonation. So, overall, lime mortar has a lower climate change impact than Portland cement.
Oak trees are growing faster than they are being used, in Britain and across the Continent. I'm growing some bent ones for you Anna - hope you live to 150! It's no good saying there is more oil left than oak. Oil doesn't grow on trees and the best guess is that oil production will peak very soon, if it hasn't already, and from then on supply will fall short of demand no matter how high the price goes. See
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oil paint is lovely to use. It is the only paint I use on the oak windows that I make, if they get painted at all. Get the Sweedish Allback paint from Holkham Paints:
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Peter Maitland-Hood makes it at The Real Paint and Varnish Co:
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stuff about copperas at:
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use straw to heat our house. It costs us 60p per bale delivered to our barn.
Not necessarily under straw bale. You need drainage at the bottom of the stack and a poly sheet DPC is likely to cause more trouble by trapping water from above than it will solve by stopping "rising damp" from below.
Only in a log cabin though. We don't use framing timber in a way that causes the shrinkage to make overall dimensional changes. OK, so your sole plate might end up 1/4" thinner, but your walls aren't going to shrink downwards by a foot.
I cleared about an acre of general ahwthron and maple and mirabelle scrub, and two sycamores, and that looks set to last about 6-9 years for 'addiotional winter heating' in open fires. Would work well in stoves.
I believe that coppiced willow is the fastest way to 'grow energy' ...
You can get industrial strength chippers and feed it to fan blown furnaces...
I wish I had installed a heat pump and acres of plastic pipe in the garden too.
I was thinking theyd squash and bend, making the arch hopelessly unstable, but maybe not. Also it only takes one bale to suffer rot on one side and the structure collapses. So I still have reservations about making structural arches in houses out of them.
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