Connecting My Home to Nature

When my friend Carol Venolia, an architect, told me that she and another architect, Kelly Lerner, were writing a book on natural remodeling, I could hardly wait to see it. I have known Carol since she asked me to write an Introduction to her first book, Healing Environments, in 1987.

For much of the time I lived in California, Carol and I lived within a hour's drive of each other, and had many lengthy discussions over the years about what it means to be in harmony with nature, while feasting at restaurants half way between our two homes. So I knew this book was going to be about integrating our lives and homes into nature and not just limited to purchasing green building materials.

I finally received a hot-off-the press copy of Natural Remodeling for the Not-So-Green House: Bringing Your Home into Harmony with Nature and I am thrilled! It is everything I expected from Carol and more. I should say that Carol directs the EcoDwelling program at New College of California and is a columnist for Natural Home magazine. Kelly was given the 2005 World Habitat Award for introducing straw-bale construction to China. And they both have years of experience designing green homes.

In a world where green building is about materials and certifications and sometimes complex engineering, Carol and Kelly bring us simple things we can do to bring our own existing homes and ourselves into greater harmony with the natural environment in which we dwell. This book goes beyond saying "bring in the sun for natural light'...it actually shows a diagram of the sun's changing path in relation to a house throughout the year, a chart of qualities of sunlight from different directions, gives you step-by-step instructions on how to figure out how best to bring the sun into your home (or shade it out, as the case may be) and much more.

This passage from the Introduction explains their philosophy best in their own words:

...we don't just mean redecorating your house with eco-friendly materials; we don't even mean rehabbing your house to be more energy-efficient. We mean that you can be healthier and more joyful while having increasingly beneficial interactions with the ecosphere. In other words, this book is about much more than remodeling; it's about how you relate with all of life--including your own...

When you become more aware of the sun's path, the wind's direction, and other resources that are all around you, your responses will feel--well, natural. Seemingly minor actions undertaken in harmony with the biosphere can be more powerful and beneficial than dramatic but shortsighted gestures.

The goal of natural remodeling is to modify your dwelling so that it becomes a positive mediator--not a barrier--between you and the rest of the living world. A home that is warmed and illuminated by the changing light of the sun, cooled by breezes and the shade of greenery, and blessed by birdsong in the garden is not merely energy-efficient, it is also healthful. By reuniting us with the web of life that is our birthright, such a home naturally nourishes body and soul.

...our touchstones are: What will be best for all of life? What will bring you home to Mother Nature? The vitality of the biosphere--including you--is our standard for measuring success.

And...once you get past the expense of whatever modifications you need to make to your home, reaping the benefits of using the gifts of nature are free.

When my husband Larry and I visited California last spring, we met Carol for coffee and asked her to give us some ideas for cooling our home in Florida using the principles outlined in her new book. Since we've been working on finishing our bathroom remodel first, we haven't gotten to actually doing any of this, but I wanted to share what we learned from Carol as an example for you of the direction taken in her new book. Even though both Larry and I are pretty familiar with being in harmony with nature and green building concepts, we left that meeting with a whole new view of cooling our house, and great interest and enthusiasm for doing it naturally.

We asked Carol to tell us how we could use the principles of natural remodeling to make improvements to our home in Florida, so we could reduce the amount of fossil-fueled air conditioning we use. Air conditioning is our number one use of energy in our home.

Instead of only looking at what kinds of products we could use, Carol took a different approach. Her first consideration is what the body knows, then she looks at what the site is doing, and then finally, after everything that can be done between the body and the site is looked at, then she looks at what products are needed, if any.

Here is what we learned from Carol...

About Heat Transfer

Thermal comfort is one of the first subjects discussed in Natural Remodeling, and Carol and Kelly begin not with the building, but with our own bodies. Just what is it that makes our bodies feel warm in the winter and cool in the summer?

Carol explained that our bodies constantly produce heat from the food we eat, and go through various processes to maintain a normal body temperature as it is exposed to a variety of environmental conditions. When our bodies get too hot in the summer, we perspire to release heat through evaporation, and blood circulation increases to bring heat closer to the surface of the skin, so it can be lost to the surroundings. The opposite happens in the winter to retain body heat.

Then she showed us how heat transfer works. She explained that heat tends to move from warmer areas to cooler areas in three ways.

She had me put my warm hand on the cool table. I could feel my hand getting cooler. "That's conduction," she said. "Movement of heat from a material to a material."

"Then there's convection," said Carol, "which is transfer of heat by fluid motion; we're most familiar with convection in the form of boiling water." She explained that when water is heated in a pan, it expands and rises to the surface. There it cools off and falls back to the bottom of the pan to be heated again. This creates the rolling motion when water boils.

Then Carol had me hold my hand near the side of my hot cup of coffee. "Warmth can move through space (including air) by radiation, like the heat you feel from a warm object without touching it, or the warmth of the sun on your skin."

Because of the natural laws of heat transfer, the temperature of surfaces around a person's body can be as important as the actual air temperature. There's a clear diagram of how this works in the book. There are two drawings of a little man in a house. In the first picture, the surface is 75 degrees F and the air is 58 degrees F. The little man is comfortable because the nearby surface is warm and not trying to draw warmth from his body. In the second picture, the surface is 58 degrees F and the air is 75 degrees F. Even though the air is warmer, the little man is shivering because his body heat is being lost to the cool wall.

Since what Larry and I want is to cool our bodies, Carol advised us to do whatever we can to keep our surrounding surfaces cool. This includes using insulation in the roof and walls to keep heat out, and shade structures such as awnings to keep the sun's rays off the house. Cool interior surfaces would encourage heat transfer from our warm bodies to the cooler surfaces, so we can be more comfortable even at a higher air temperature.

These natural principles of conduction, convection, and radiation between the building and the world can all be used to cool a specific a house in a specific place at a specific time.

Humidity

In Florida, we have a condition that makes our situation a bit more complex: humidity. In a dry climate, evaporation of sweat is one of the strategies our bodies use for cooling. But if you have ever lived in or visited the South, you know that you can sweat through three changes of clothing and you'll still feel hot.

So in humid climates, the major natural strategies for cooling are shade and air movement.

Keeping A Cool House Cool

The most effective and efficient way to cool a house is to keep heat from coming into the house in the first place.

We already have a jump on that because our house is in a grove of ancient oak trees, which give us so much shade that solar panels are useless. But we still need more.

Some possibilities are:

• roof insulation (we need to check out what's already there and possibly add more)
• a light-colored roof that reflects radiant heat (here in Florida, many homes have white roofs)
• low-e windows that reflect solar radiation and reduce heat transfer from outdoor air
• wall insulation (again, we need to check out what's there)
• a solar-powered attic fan to cool the attic

My house is oriented along an east-west line. The north, west, and south sides have only standard windows, so not much heat comes in there, but in my office where I work all day I have a seventeen-foot stretch of wall-to-wall windows overlooking the garden on the east side, and the morning sun comes right in.

Carol said I should check my east windows for heat in the morning.

"I will," I said, "But I already have a shade over one window to block the sun."

"That's good," said Carol, "but a shade on the inside doesn't block heat. You need to block the heat with a shade on the outside."

Oh. It's times like these when a person with experience and training in these matters can be really valuable.

Air Motion

Another thing that keeps houses feeling cool is air movement. I know this because just turning on our extremely efficient ceiling fans helps a lot before it gets to the point where we have to turn on the air conditioner or we can't breathe (remember it's over ninety degrees F and humid).

Prevailing Winds

I remember, as a child, visiting my grandmother in Fresno, California (another hot place). She would keep the windows closed all day, and then open them in the evening. We would go sit outside on the patio, because it was the coolest place. She would leave the windows open all night and then close them in the morning when it began to get hot again.

Carol took this a step further by suggesting that we could flush our whole house in the evening with the use of window fans. We could set them to pull the warm air out of the house on one side and pull cool air in on the other. This would cool the house down much faster with a minimum use of energy.

I actually have been bugging Larry to install a cupola, which is traditional in old Florida homes. Using the principle of convection (remember that's warm fluid--liquid or gas--rising), a cupola is a square "house" mounted on the peak of the roof, with windows on all four sides and its own roof. When you open the windows in the evening, the hot air in the house rises into and out the cupola, to be replaced by cooler outside air.

Natural breezes can be used for cooling in ways as simple as this, or as sophisticated as wind scoops (traditional in the Middle East) that catch breezes and funnel them into the house.

I just can't even begin to tell you how much I appreciate that Carol and Kelly have written this book and how needed and important it is. It redefines the concept of "natural" from referring to a consumer product made from natural ingredients to meaning "integrating our lives into the flows of nature". This is where we need to go, not just with remodeling, but with every aspect of our lives, individually and collectively. Carol and Kelly understand this and are showing us all first steps we can take in this direction.