Passive House

I have really enjoyed watching Grand Designs over the years, and one of the great ideas used occasionally is the passive house.  Passipedia defines a passive house as:

"... a building, for which thermal comfort (ISO 7730) can be achieved solely by post-heating or post-cooling of the fresh air mass, which is required to achieve sufficient indoor air quality conditions – without the need for additional recirculation of air.”

Often having a thermal mass, such as concrete slab floors that are heated by the sun, help to heat and keep the temperature stable.  The result is very efficient buildings that require very little energy to heat or cool the living space.

AT Organisations

I was very pleased to come across the Centre for Alternative Technology at the Eco-Build exhibition in the ExCel earlier this month.  It is "an education and visitor centre demonstrating practical solutions for sustainability", and is based in Wales.  Great to see some practical propagation of Appropriate Technologies, and I must visit them some day soon, if not do a course with them.

Another organisation I've come across is the Alternative Technology Centre (ATC), but looking at the website I'm not sure how up to date or alive the ATC is.  There are certainly some good and interesting links which are still valid though.

My favourite is the Alternative Technology Association in Australia, which produces ReNew magazine, covering many different aspects of AT, and Sanctuary magazine, which covers many excellent ideas in building sustainable modern homes.  In Australia of course, things like water harvesting are more important than in more soggy countries such as in the UK, and solar power could prove more viable than cloudy situations.

Where to begin...?

Alternative Technology, these days, isn't always so alternative.  An example given on Wikipedia is using wind turbines to produce electricity.  Hence, in this blog I'd like to cover all sorts of technologies, mainly alternative, but which could be classified as "cool" or good ideas for enhancing the future of mankind, and indeed the whole ecology of the world (solar system? universe?).

Another angle which interests me is Appropriate Technology, which seems to have fallen out of mode, but I think still has relevance in some circumstances today.  Appropriate Technology, also known as Intermediate Technology, is capital poor - labour rich technology, which often had more relevance to LDC's (Less Developed Countries), but it ain't necessarily so.

Another interesting aspect mentioned by Wikipedia is Open Source Appropriate Technology (OSAT) which refers to free and open source software (is this the angle that Tesla is heading or would they be classified as just Open Source?).  An example of this is Appropedia, a wiki site with collaborative solutions that anybody can make and use AT without concerns about patents.

The plan is to expand on some of these concepts through this blog, and help to gain some understanding and maybe even change our thinking about technology and how we use it today.