Sustainable home design -- More flexibility with the building code

 Rules were made to be broken. That idea which germinated with Christendom in a very powerful way needs to be seen in its truly positive context. The movement has lasted because it works to advocate for  freedom and resist tyranny; it has limited the ambitions of all the pharisaism that quickly creeps in if authorities assume control over us.   

Men were created to be free and the only laws we ever need (and respect) are IMO simple laws and simple explanations that make sense.
In case you are now worried, Romans 13 puts an incandescent burner on "just doing what you like "( that destructive philosophy of the present age; Current protesters take note. The Emperor's were finally surprised that these confusing nonconformists who could be obedient and rebellious at times,  were some of his best citizens -it's just that they wouldn't reliably always worship him and do what he said; they were free people. 

Simple laws that make sense work;  Like the 10 commandments. Laws should have a positive side that we can see when we are in sober mood and know ourselves to be better parents than our would be wannabe governors.   
Like the +ve side,
Idea :  Assume there is a best way of doing things and it matters if you place all good things in order. 
1. Honoring your Creator -he knows what is best for you 2. Prioritize properly 3 Don't bad mouth the good,    4 Take a wellness break on one day of the week 5 Honor your parents and enjoy  the quality of life they and sound authority will show you  7 be faithful  do not break commitments like marriage ,8 not pinching what belongs to others but being creative yourself  and 9 do not gossip but build people up  and most positive freedom of all - loving with all your heart mind and strength ,

Using your mind to love means you will sometimes break the rules made by mere men.
Enough theology. Enough bout true freedom, respect for authority and how they best work together. 

My purpose in writing HERE is I just wanted to start a post on giving more freedom to people to build homes at lower cost 

The Victorian Building and planning codes are a mess and should be subject to more review, There is a lot of hot air about regulations from polys, but as usual, the polys don't know which carriage of the long planning train to jettison or reform and are just as likely to bomb the wrong places in what is an essential but delicately balanced thing -- planning permissions   
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YOU------PROBABLY  HAVE IDEAS  so share them HERE 
Just a list for the moment

1. WASTE WATER  The current system is preoccupied with assuming everybody in a house uses a lot of water each day ( say over 200 litres ) Yes , If you build a big house on your rural block watch out  because our soils are very poor absorbers at times and an effective WW system  can cost you the earth.

The above said , there is not enough provision for planners to allow flexibility with buildings where only one or two people live in a building  esp rural , eg
1. Volume estimates Where tanks are the only water supply which naturally limits the amount of water used and planned for disposal . Where there room for more grass filtration ( if land suits ) 
 2. Switching devices designed in
Where sullage and sewerage can be separated and seasonal discharge to  different soil sectors is possible   
see more in earlier posts
 

2. "GARGOYLES"  and MORDORS  must be an option 
In Australia's arid climate ( over 6 months drought) the idea of trying to force runoff and precious warm weather  garden growth potential through a series of contorted corners and rapid grade changes is doing what has always wrecked our castles . leaving sitting water and easily blocked gutters.
And that water is doing nothing for the growth of tomatoes and cucumbers and flowers, By running storm water through hard surfaces in the warmer months,  we are increasing the risk of storm damage and literally wasting our precious fresh water  , with the soil ready to take more .

 I am not saying don't have downpipes  but give the spouting a chance to do its best work in summer and spring and allow it to over top into the garden and getting scouring velocity for spouting exits too. ( switchable for summer autumn ??)
You heard it first here on BLOGGER   Not everywhere would suit but these options and choices are sound . Could call them spouting finians or switchable scouring exits.
I call them Mordors ( more doors ) in the tradition of the Goths -- to exit evil and bring good to the ground below, see the diagram.  

Tiny Homes

Yahweh tried to remind his creation that, as he does not need much space to live, why should they. 
Perhaps downsizing is the way to go.  I like the idea of building a tiny home, and have just built one.

I guess the idea is that God is reminding us always that we want too much. 
A big home is costly to heat and costly to look after. We have just been visiting all the castles of Europe and noting the stupidity of spending your life paying to fix the roof of your inheritance. 

100 tonnes of wood are needed to keep this place in Cororooke warm and even though Yahweh said to burn to cook and sacrifice there is no burden to keep air warm in the hope some cool cat will come along and appreciate it. We have just visited hundreds of castles in Europe that are no longer homes, even if they ever were such. We must be more practical if we want our houses to be homes. 

God, of course, has the right idea, If you want a house to be a home you have to first make sure you are close to people and they you. You often don't get that if you put up too many walls. 

An acacia box would be too small for us, but for someone as big as God, the symbolism of having him in the same room all the time is deeply profound and humbling. And like some cool cat , he's not making a lot of noise and demanding obedience. He gave us cats to remind us of the great value of the still small voice in our lives and how to get good outcomes by listening and waiting.

The world is your oyster when you don't tie yourself down but we poor earthbound crawling things are no longer in the Garden. We have to work to find food, so finding a good balance between sitting down and bending down is a hard one. Sabbath provides us with the practical opportunity to do both. 

If you are a farmer there is no way you can downsize easily. My friends in the ag advisory agricultural industry will say don't spend your life fixing old machinery (something we 6 kids on the farm used to do because we had no breadwinner and that was all we had ) but that means higher cash flows and a commitment to running with the high speed industry.

  

Life though in its fulness is not about profits but rewards.  And not quick profits but patiently fought for rewards ; gifts that keep on giving, . There are so many economic externalities in there because,  as my family found out,  if the crop only comes once in every 5 years, there is a lot of time in there to play with rusty metal.

No boy should be denied the chance to have his own Scrap Heap Challenge. 

Which brings me to the tiny house we built for a friend on his own farm . A house which now provides the bottom line in any home ; somewhere to sit, sleep and move around . Our friend cannot move around much , so we have provided roof rails to enables some movement around the bed in which he spends most of his time. 

But the lesson is clear , a small house can make a lot of sense. 
The full story is published elsewhere, so just a few pictures to give you an idea of how it can work. 
The original house was 4 rooms made with the never straight offcuts from timber logs in a mill nearby.
This means for all its life of 100 years , the neighboring animals come visiting in search of sharing the wonders that the busy new colonists have brought to the area. There is no condemnation for such productive and busy migrants-- only a quiet joy that they are the ones who are prepared to work hard to get the good stuff. For how much longer though, we ought to ask !


It's true that some of the original inhabitants have become little more than parasites under the leadership of the new colonists ( look up the word - it doesn't have the malintent that many now give it ) . The parasites action of course risks the whole ecosystem if it keeps going - so that that maladjustment must be cut off - to keep going there must be "fences","gates " discipline and cooperative contributions in the new home. 

By putting new aluminum glass and plastic we have been able to close the doors - to welcome only those visitors who we want in our space and who pay their way. Currently the only other residents  besides the big long natural ones are a cat and a chook and they all have to stay mostly outside --- fighting their own natural battles for food . I fear we should do more for the chook, Its cold and the foxes are about. 

Here are a few pictures until I can back to tell you more of the history of this 40 square metres of home.

    

Composting is the way to go

 By combining our high nitrogenous rich wastes with cellulose ( and other carbon chains) in particular ,we can greatly reduce the amount of liquid waste we generate. Lots of paper wood pulp and a little food and other waste . 
Generally
We have bins for recycling, but we need better practical ways of separating and mixing (especially when we can do it on site) wastes on site.
Transport of wastes is very costly and yet little has been done to adopt sound onsite recycling in tourist areas, where the risk of pollution is high. 

Specifically 
The most powerful examples are in the wettest part of Victoria where avoidance of waste water pollution is very difficult, but where dry composting can work. two birds can be dealt with by one change ; reduced water volume and reduced risk. 


Dry composing using the old sawdust heaps in the Wettest place in Victoria ( Beech Forest) was proposed for the tourist precinct once proposed (and expected for the Otway's Fly and Triplet falls area. If you want to know why this never happened you best contact this author as it's a complex matter. I remain silent because of of over 4 decades work in Eco sensitive development I have noticed there is nothing more disruptive of sound outcomes than interference by high office or media interference.  
From my own experience, It would astound you how much money is wasted by public authorities in the once good name of environment, because the new "authorities" know nothing about the complexities of managing it. 

It would astound you how much money is wasted by public authorities' when the appropriate technology can be adopted at low cost of installation and maintenance provided all the local ecological issues on any site are addressed. 

Composting facilities and bins would reduce the need for paper and food waste to be carted off, just as glass and cans only bins would help make recycling become more than talk, 
While there will always be exceptions i am sure the public in tourist areas would accept better bin choice than occurs at the moment ( in say Colac Otway Shire )   

Crunch time - will design with nature survive?

 Most of you know I post mainly on Government meddling in OUR environment because I want them to stop WASTING huge amounts of our taxes on it and give the job back to locals and properly trained scientists.

 The government MUST stop creating useless empires like GORCAPA and  mega monsters and give regional young people decent jobs planning to really improve this wonderful place.
 Our young people should be designing with nature, not trying to fix things that are broken; pouring concrete and rocks onto soil and water landscapes.

No one enjoys trying to fix up things after degradation has occurred, when by studying and working with soil water and plant processes, nature will do the work better.

The best way to keep Apollo Bay beaches was as always, to work with nature. Who among these highly paid screens and chair people in charge is really listening? 

A few of the 20 and more consultants and agencies realized that the sand moving sideways was an issue, but none have clearly recognized the big picture; the two processes that matter, That sand is mostly on its way downhill and only wind, waves, a beach and a dune can make it rise up ( a bit)

Finally someone  ( I asked the ABC who produced this news item today to investigate what was happening at Apollo Bay ) has read the suggestion I made that the sand that now rests comfortably under the sea after being removed by wave action in the tidal zone ( and off the rockwall  at sea ) can  be realistically loaded and placed back in the near shore zone to remake beaches WITHOUT one bucket load of government and consultancy brilliance. Huge amounts of energy not only saved ,but harnessed; a few metres of easy lifting; It's called soil and water planning; design with nature. 

The big toy trucks and diggers on the beach show how engineers and ignorance of real earth Eco processes ( the seagrass will come back if you plan for it to ) now rule in the " fix one problem create another" governance corruption that is, at the moment , our children's lot. Give one of them YOUR vote at the next election. 

Premier Hamer would turn in his grave at how little full science competence there is in agencies now taking the once good name of conservation he gave to the first Ministry for Conservation .

https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/dredging-and-barging-sand-along-adelaide-s-disappearing-coastline-to-be-trialled

ART must drive effectiveness in the real world

ART must drive effectiveness in the real world, or its disaster 

In other words, we as humans can only deal effectively with the very complexity of interactions in ecosystems by allowing those interactions to draw us into the view. 
YET wannabes everywhere burn up opportunities to deal with the whole by playing with the parts,
I grieve that this means our children are being denied the satisfaction of seeing design with nature work first time and forever. 


Take this picture of the art of harvesting food .On the surface it looks like all you need is a spear and  some camouflage.  Tell me what is missing before i do. 

If our leaders continue to fail to do this completely, we will join the majority of wannabes in wasting huge amounts of public resources on things that don't work.  True degradation.

GET SERIUOS - a lot of what governments are doing to try and solve environmental problems is piecemeal and pathetic.

See one list here of Australians in a completely mad mood in May 2024.
The leaders are moving from playing one game to another with a frequency that demonstrate only one thing - these parties have no idea how all the parts fit together.  

Constipation over WASTE DISPOSAL

 

 Towards Appropriate technology not NIMBY imperatives 

Humans are habitual creatures. The bureaus and parliaments of this world arrive Monday morning to make more rules to try and control the people .
Its  mad and it means poor people feel helpless to help themselves. The planning system only works now if you have money ! 
These rules caused us to send our wastes far away on ships to China. We are mad 
A lot more can be done to recycle and use waste locally and BY  encouraging rural people to do more 

eg Temporary homes for the poor .

The Government IS ALL Talk   on reducing red tape .

Feds should put pressure on states and shire and EPA to simplify HUMAN WASTE DISPOSAL - write up some general specs for both septic and sullage --and make it easier using temporary storage and cartage and other measures using local wetlands and public soil reserves.
Currently local shires can make the process very complex and costly.
These are homes and basic facilities people NEED. Clearly only big blocks would work but there are plenty of them . 
The risk of onsite pollution can be dealt with over a wide area of Australia by professional soil type, annual  rainfall   ( low risk low rainfall), climate and design specs like area of land , proximity to water courses .
STATE s should be MADE to contribute to this instead of making the USER pay up EVERY TIME . Get the Shire to do the work they were paid to do-- not palm it off like they do now . Sound inhouse advice is VERY COST EFFECTIVE -- they just haven't got any at the moment . 

And make them stick to the one month APPROVAL process time WRITTEN in their legislation. 
Shire staff don't decide anything these days, even when they have got 20 reports to help them. (I am exaggerating - slightly ) 

 

Waste ( incl  and esp wastewater)  is the biggest bit of constipation in the planning system !! and it need not be if  more thought was given to setting conditions on use and disposal on bigger blocks in drier areas especially  .
Why cart everything away  --to a central mound ? When with the opposition come up with measures to recycle ONSITE ?   Barnaby Joyce Peter Dutton  Lyle Shelton Senator Matthew Canavan  

When will the FEDs CONVENE  to  review REDTAPE and CONSTIPATION in local government esp ?  Before it becomes THEIR problem again!!!

 

Understanding food production and how to make it work for everyone

 

Clearly, I am not going to answer all your questions here and now, but this post was inspired by yet another inadequate attempt to solve the problem of supply and demand in Agriculture . 
Fortunately for all those who have read this far , the centuries old study of economics and now ecology has brought forth some fruits to help us , at least partially resolve this in practice.
I will hopefully follow up with logical frameworks for action,  links and responses . 
Again, let me say, I am not going to say why Marxism is still providing a very immature response to this world wide problem but neither ( just yet ) am I going to say why Capitalist economies are far too comfortable with their own careless exploitation of the earth and its people . No political imperatives are adequate and their faulty elements need careful probing to be exposed. 

The thing is, economics can provide us with workable answers if we are willing to all get on the same train together with nature. Clearly the above-named divisions remain a handicap. 

As YOU  are NOW here , stay with me. 
Fairness is not a nature thing,  but it is in my mind the human thing and it is more than a mere aim but an inspiration worth fighting for.
Please ask questions. 

This was my original post to an inadequate statement about solving a problem at the supply and demand intersection this week in Australia.   

IF we taught our children properly about economics we would very CLEARLY run a fairer system than we do -- and that's saying something because Marxists ( and farmers and polys etc ) and many inadequately studied agents for change have been meddling in " how to fix things " for centuries now. While being patient and making better choices can help, deeper eco wisdom is the more reliable and rewarding place to put our heads.

All of us here on line know such wisdom is still not common wisdom ----yet!

Understanding the complexities of ecology as it applies to food production will not stop people exploiting each other, BUT if the best ways to improve the system was known and more widely adopted, the profit margin exploiters ( the easily rich) would not be able to exploit producers and purchasers the way they currently do ---economics and its twin sister ecology , would be better managed. And its not rocket science.

Our children need to know these things and be inspired to work at the wonderfully productive resilient rewarding and interesting coalface of nature . http://designwithnature.blogspot.com