[Strawbale] Strawbale regrets?...

[Robert W. Tom]

On Wed, 30 Aug 2006 13:28:11 -0400, Mark Frazier <fritter63 at charter.net>  
wrote:

> Was in Home Depot this morning doing a quick check on materials costs to
> make sure the budget is still valid.
> I mentioned to the door and window guy that we were building with SB,
> and his
> comment was:
>
> "I have a friend that's finishing an SB house. He said if he had it
> to do over again, he'd just frame up double walls and insulate it  
> normally".


Ay yi yi !

I've noticed that in recent years there has been a disturbing trend of  
people citing comments/opinions of the staff at Home Despots as being some  
sort of valid appraisal of building-related situations.

What's wrong with this picture ?

I would not go to Home Despot for any sort of useful info. just as I would  
not go to Wal-Mart to ask a clerk there for  
sartorial/dietary/health/automotive/gardening guidance.


Me ? I've designed/built numerous double-stud-walled (DSW)  
high-performance buildings (including my own home that I live in now) ...  
but that was in the distant past before the current SB revival.

If I were to do it over again, would I make the walls of my own home out  
of SB rather than DSW?
Yewbetcha !

and Andrew Morrison <andrew at strawbale.com> wrote:

> I find it frustrating to hear people say how cheap straw bale homes are  
> to
> build.  In my experience, the opposite is true and people need to know  
> this
> if they plan on hiring a professional to build their home.  Yes, they  
> will
> save money in the long run, but the house will cost more to build...right
> now.

A couple of things...

You won't see many owner/builders building their own DSW buildings.  Of  
the thousands that exist, I doubt that there are more than two dozen that  
were.

OTOH, what percentage of SBH are built by novices who previously never  
built anything bigger than a dog house in their lives ?

Yes it is true that once you bring in design/building professionals to  
SBC, the result is invariably more expensive than their conventional  
counterparts.

But that's the thing about SBC isn't it ?

It encourages people to become more personally involved in creating their  
own homes , at every level from design through construction to finishing  
and "Dang!" if it doesn't look like a "real house" when they're done.

And in 99.9% of the cases, I'll wager that they look/feel more like  
"homes" than the houses that were done by professionals.

As for saving money in the long run ... I'm not so sure about that.

Long-term savings is about operating costs over the lifetime of the  
building and that is all about performance and performance has to do with  
sweating the details.

I'm afraid that in the majority of the cases, not enough time and effort  
is spent paying attention to the details (mostly building science-related  
rather than craft-related), whether the buildings are done by  
professionals or novices and in most cases, the deficiency is due to lack  
of knowledge more than anything else.

But this would apply to houses built using conventional construction  
systems as well.

But that being said, I think that I would be relatively accurate in saying  
that a DSW building will in most cases, have lower energy requirements for  
space-heating/cooling and will quite likely experience fewer failures of  
the building components. But this will likely change over the course of  
the next couple of decades as expertise in SBC develops and improves.

After all, DSW technology has been in existence for about three decades  
and over that time, there has been the opportunity to work out a great  
many details and make improvements, with the financial backing of many  
deep-pocketed orgs, both governmental and NGOs.

SBC ? I'd say that the first decade of the SB revival was mostly  
experiential, about people trying to discover what possibilities SBC  
offered. As for R&D funding, in the early days, other than the miniscule  
amounts that Don Fugler was able to squeeze out of the CMHC bureaucracy,  
there wasn't much if anything to speak of. It wasn't until just a couple  
of years ago that any sizeable chunk of R&D funding was given to SBC (ie  
Bruce, King of Sausalito/EBN et al ) and even that few hundred $$ wasn't a  
lot by industry standards.

It generally takes about 10-12 years or more for problems to show up in  
buildings so it's only been the past five-or-so years that the  
consequences of the mistakes made in the Early Years
have begun to make themselves apparent and until those failures are  
well-publicised enough to be on the minds of anyone contemplating building  
an SBH, it is inevitable that the mistakes will be repeated and of course,  
we will be hearing "regrets" for some time yet.

But enough of this yammering. Gotta go.

===* ===
Rob Tom
Kanata, Ontario, Canada
<archilogic at chaffyahoo dot ca>
winnow the chaff from my edress in your reply