 I don't understand the energy man, I don't think Taekwai, Stan Osserman, and with the dog who's being a good watchdog today, making all kind of noise, I'll try and keep her quiet. It's coming up on Christmas time, so I decided to do a show that's a little bit different. I want to, for those of you that don't know, I'm looking at building a house on the Big Island, and I actually started off my college career in architecture, and did a couple years in that and switched design. I found out the school I was in was an accredited for architecture, but I always wanted to be an architect and I did a lot of building construction in the civilian capacity before I was in the military, and I find designing and building a nice house is a real challenge, so I wanted to just kind of talk about some of the features that go into general things about designing a house, and then talk more specifically in the energy realm, for Stan Osserman, about building off the grid and some of the things you want to consider to help make yourself more efficient, more sustainable, and give yourself realistic parameters when you want to design off the grid and some of the things you would consider as you get design off the grid. So, another thing I want to mention before I get too far into this is a friend of mine told me that one of my shows has over 60,000 views on it, and he said there were a whole bunch of questions, you know, for several months that apparently I hadn't answered, and that's because I don't get that feedback, that feedback goes directly to think tech, and if they don't forward me the question, then I don't get to see it. So, if you have questions that you want to send to me, I set up a special Gmail account called stan.energy.man at gmail.com, so Stan, S-D-A-N, .energy.man at gmail.com, you can send me questions there, and I'll try and check that a little more often and answer specific questions. The last one I got by Sara Dippity was a guy who was complaining that I was two 90s on batteries and my information was old, so I had to school him a little bit on why I was still not all excited about batteries yet, I still think hydrogen's a better way. Anyway, let's get started with, if you want to build a house of any kind, there's a lot of things you have to consider, so I'm just going to start from the ground up and we'll start with the location. Number one, there's things called zoning, and a lot of people get mixed up between zoning and building code, but zoning is made so that the government can kind of keep like structures in the same area together and it builds into the building code, but for example, you have areas that are zone wetlands and you have areas that are zone agriculture and you have areas that are zone industrial, and in the zoning there's different rules and stuff, so as you look for a piece of land, you're going to buy a piece of land, you want to kind of look at the zoning first and make sure that it's suitable, and the realtor will tell you that. If you tell him you're looking for a place to build a house, he'll steer you the right way, but just for example, Ag 1 is a one acre, at least a one acre parcel and you can put one structure on it, and that structure can be a house, so even though the land is zoned, Ag 1, you can build a house on it, generally speaking, just check with your local county officials, but you should be able to build at least one structure, but once you build one structure, you might be maxed out already because it could be a barn, it could be a shed, a big shed, or a garage or something, and that may max you out at Ag 1 for your county, so check the zoning in your county first, but zoning also clues you in on some other things, like if you're in a low-lying area near a river, near a stream, near anything that could be flooded, a floodplain is pretty obvious, you can build a lot of times in these areas, you just have to be aware of it, but I would suggest that you don't do that because, you know, when it comes time to get insurance for your building, you may not be able to get flood insurance if you are in a floodplain and things like that, so that's just a general start, look for a nice view, look for things that you're near, for people who have kids, school zones are, you know, another thing you look at for where you want to build, and, you know, once you get a nice place, you think it's a nice neighborhood and you checked out the zoning, then you want to think about what kind of house you want to build in, if you're in a gated community, a lot of times you have what they call CC&Rs, which are rules for how to build your house, and like for example, where I'm building my house, one of the ways we like to build houses in Hawaii is what we call Post-On Pier, and we do that because it helps keep the insect issues down, it helps keep you away from the ground, which a lot of times it's pretty moist in the tropics, it allows you to put your cold water lines under your house, and if you want to put hot water lines, you can put them in your attic and keep the hot water hot and the cold water cold, which is an efficiency thing, so we're going to talk more about efficiency later. It also, you can, if you have Post-On Pier, you basically put metal pans underneath all your beams and such, so that the termites will hit the metal pans, and if they do get around the metal pans, it's pretty obvious they build tunnels and you can see them and then you can interdict the termites before they start into your structure, so we do build a lot of houses here in Hawaii on slab foundations, if that's good, but we also do a lot of Post-On Pier. If you do a slab foundation, one thing you've got to consider that a lot of people don't, is where you're going to put the plumbing first, it's got to be in, especially your drain lines before you put in your slab, and another thing that's in the code now is you need to have grounding into your slab, so you have to have grounding wires attached to your metal rebar in your slab, and it's good to have that grounding. Now that grounding can go to your electrical system, it can also go to lightning rods up on your roof, so that if you happen to be on top of a hill, it's a way for the lightning to travel to the ground without destroying or catching your house on fire while it's doing it. Some of the other things, when you're building a house on a single floor, where your toilets and kitchen and stuff are or where they are, but you probably should try and aggregate your plumbing at least close together. I'm going to talk about that more specifically after the break, so I'll hold off on that for now, but especially when you have a two-story building, you almost always want to have your upstairs plumbing right above your downstairs plumbing. In other words, if like the software that I used to design with, which is called Chief Architect, you can actually flip a little switch and it'll show you what's on the floor below or what's on the floor above, and you can see that your toilets are exactly lined up on the same wall, and you want to do that so that you have one vent stack that goes from your roof down through the wall, let your toilets drain into the drainage, and down through the slab, and out into your waistline, and they're all in one line so that you don't have to run all kind of weird plumbing through your walls and do cosmic stuff that costs you more money and also can weaken your structure. Another thing you might want to do is when you do that on a two-story building, make the first floor wall a six inch wall instead of a four inch wall. Instead of using two by four studs, use two by six studs. You have a little more room to put those bigger vents into those walls and going down into your slab. Another thing is, and this one is kind of one that most people don't think about, is fire breaks. This is more important, especially in multi-family dwellings, but I can say when I was young, I lived in an apartment building and there was a fire and went into the building, and the only reason that it was during a blizzard in Washington DC, and if you know Washington DC, they don't do blizzards at all. Not well, not at all. We had four feet of snow and the fire trucks couldn't get into our building, and so that once the building started burning, it really started moving through the whole building, but the architect was smart enough to put stairwells between the apartments and build fire breaks in the building, and the fire breaks actually stopped the fire from catching the whole rest of our building on fire. So I'm going to show that in my design after the break and show you what I mean by a fire break if you can do it in your house, especially if you're doing off the grid. Another thing is, look at your neighbors. I mean, you don't really get to pick your neighbors when you move into a neighborhood. Maybe you can if you hear them having a wild party, you might want to change your mind about where you're living, but if you have neighbors close by, try and design your building so that you have some privacy. You know, don't put your big, big glass window and your nice claw foot super soaker tub in your master bedroom right opposite their front porch, you know, where they're watching you guys take a bath every day, just things like that. And think about that when you lay your house up. You also want to think about how, even if you're not in a floodplain or anything like that, how your low, your, your building area is situated. You don't want to build a house on the low spot of the property. You usually want to build on the high spot, at least for the view, but say you have a lot and you really don't have a view. Don't build it on the low part because that's where the water is going to go. And if you're soils full of clay or rocks and stuff and it doesn't drain very well, you could be inviting all that water into your house. If you have a choice, build on a higher spot of the lot utilities. Even if you're building off the grid, which is nice, you still may want to get county water or private water from a water company, or you may want to get cable TV or something. So think about where that's going to enter your house and how you're going to get it there from the street and try and plan that into your design as well. Two things that most people don't think about until they get to the permitting side are seismic activity and wind loading. But two of the things that your engineer and architect are going to have to take into account when they're working on your design is how much wind load is going to hit your roof. And that drives all kind of construction issues in terms of the type of wall you have, the stresses that needs to be on, the hurricane clips, the shear wall loading, and the kind of straps you have to have to tie your walls together to your foundation, all kind of things. So start looking at it. If you're in a windy area, understand that's going to affect the design of the building. And same with seismic. Seismic will affect, especially shear walls and how you're hooked to your foundation or your post on pier. The place I'm designing on the big island is actually in a seismic area. So I have a lot of engineering calculations to do on the walls and the roof and how they're all tied together. I'm not in the super high wind zone, but here in Hawaii, you know, we always have hurricanes possible. So hurricanes are pretty clips are pretty much a requirement in the code over here. So that's a little bit of just some of the general considerations of when you're looking at a lot, you're thinking of building, where you going to put your house. Some of the things that run through my mind is I'm kind of laying out where the thing is going to go. So another thing to do now is take a quick break so that think tech can talk a little bit about some of the folks that are that contribute to helping us do these shows. And when we come back, I'm actually show you some images of the house I've designed. And we'll talk about some more specifics on how to be efficient and how to design your house for off the grid. Hey, welcome back to stand the energy man here on think tech Hawaii stand out some again. And we're talking about some of the basics and laying out a house, especially if you're going to build your own house off the grid, some of the things you have to think about. The stuff I talked about before the break was really just kind of some general guidelines on things you should consider that may not come fresh to your, your top of your head when you're just looking at a piece of land and going, wow, this is a really beautiful view on it. I want to build my house here. There's still a lot more to think about. So now what I'd like to do is actually show you some of the some of the work that I've been doing to design my house in the big island. Some of the criteria that I have to meet is I do have zoning issues. I do not too many though, I live in a believe it or not in a a wild animal preserve. So I can't let my hunting dog go out and catch all the turkeys and stuff. But more on the residential code side. I do live in a seismic area. I do have some wind issues. And I do have some, I do live in a homeowners association. So they have some building criteria. For example, my garage has to be attached to the house. I have to have a minimum of 2,500 square feet of living space. Things like that. So you have to read through the CCNRs that come with the homeowners association to make sure you meet their criteria before you spend a lot of money designing your house and putting a lot of effort into what it's going to look like. Generally speaking, they're a little on the conservative side. They want pastel colors or light colors or earthy colors. They don't want you building, you know, minarets or anything. It's going to go 500 feet in the air and have to get air traffic control clearances from the FAA and stuff. So you got to read those things first. But let's look at the first image just to show you what that looks like. It's a two-story house. It's got a double car garage. Actually, the carport or the garage rather is pretty large. It's almost a thousand square feet of roof space. In fact, it is a thousand square feet of roof space. And this view gives you a view looking to the west. And it's really the area I'm in is a rather dry area. So we're going to not do a whole lot of landscaping. We're going to have a lot of rocks and things in there to cover the ground. And we'll have some green areas like where my absorption field is from my wastewater system and things like that. That'll be green. And we'll have a lot of trees spread out that I'll have direct irrigation for because I want to have some fruit trees on. I know citrus trees will go really well there. So I'm going to have grapefruit and lemon and lime and tangerine and oranges. And I'm looking forward to that. But the next image is where I want to get started on some of the efficiency. This is that garage roof. And you'll notice I have a two-door on the front side and a single door on the back side. I've actually designed a lot so that I can drive into the garage and then I can open the back doors. And if you have a four-wheel drive, which I do, I can actually drive out the back doors and down the hill and come out and in and out another way to my house. That'll come in handy if I have to drain my septic system or do any work on the septic system or if I have to do any work in the back of the house. But this garage roof is really important. A couple of things I wanted to point out on. And I didn't draw the solar in yet. But this is like I say a thousand square foot roof, which is going to be plenty big for the amount of solar I want to put on. I want to put on roughly five kilowatts of solar. And I meant to bring up my statistics on how many square feet you need for your solar. But the reason that I wanted to make that one roof, a shed roof, in other words, only one slope instead of having a peak in the middle, is the orientation and the angle of this roof is really important. The orientation is directly south. And that is because when you have the choice, if you have a clear opening to a Southern exposure, that's going to give you in the Northern Hemisphere, that's going to give you the best orientation for your photovoltaics. So my whole orientation of my house is geared around orienting that garage to be facing south so that it gets almost all the sun all day long. And it's not facing away. So you can see that that shadow depiction there is probably like an 11 in the morning shadow depiction on how the sun would actually shine. And you can see it covers virtually the whole roof. And the part that it doesn't cover that little sliver right by the house is actually a breezeway. And that's another efficiency piece I want to talk about. So let me talk a little bit more about the solar. So the solar on the carport is good for a couple of reasons because I want my inverters and my batteries and stuff to be in the garage. I don't want them actually in the house because if you're going to have any kind of electrical fire issues or whatever, it's probably going to be with the batteries or inverters, especially if they're looking at cobalt batteries instead of looking at ferrous phosphate. You could have some thermal issues with your batteries. Sometimes inverters get a little bit squirrely when you task them too hard. So I want my inverters and my batteries to be in my carport or outside my carport. So all my solar is on the garage roof to begin with. And it's enough solar power to give me all the power I need in my house plus a little extra power that I can turn into hydrogen, store the hydrogen and keep it for energy storage or cooking or heating, cooking on the stove, heating the water heater if I need to use extra heat or drying my clothes if I need to finish off my clothes. Another thing, I mentioned that breezeway between the house and the garage. That's that fire break I was talking to you about. If I do have a fire issue because of gasoline in the cars, propane that's going to be set up initially for the house, it's going to be stored on the garage side. And if there's a fire on that side, I have a roof that I can cut through with a chainsaw and isolate the house from it to keep the fire from spreading to the house. So that's a fire break. It's also a place I can hang out my clothes without having the neighbors see all my vividies or my underwear hanging up. It can go in that breezeway, it's a nice breeze, can dry the clothes most of the way before I throw them in the dryer. So I use minimum energy drying my clothes. I only use it to kind of do a finish on the clothes after I've let them dry up 90% or 95% in that breezeway. Another thing, if we could bring that image up for one more thing, I want to show you something that's really unique. If you see there's a kind of a brown door on the roof off to the left attached to the house. That's actually where the water heater will go. The water heater fits underneath the corner of my master bathroom where the space in a corner of two cabinets is almost always wasted. People put lazy citizens in there, but in a bathroom it's pretty much wasted space. So that's where a 40 gallon water heater would go or an instant on water heater would go or the collector from my solar water heater. That's where it would go. I'd have access to the roof. I can literally forklift everything up to the roof and put it in and install it rather than have to crawl through a closet or tear out my cabinets to get into a water heater that's underneath hidden away somewhere deep inside the house. I literally have all the access to my water heater outside. Likewise, all the hot water comes in or all the water comes into the house and the water panel is in that breezeway right underneath the water heater. So the manifold, which is going to be a PEX manifold, which is how you run nowadays, how you run all your water to all your appliances, your toilets and sinks and stuff. You can run them from the PEX manifold like you do your electricity from a circuit breaker panel. It starts at the manifold and it goes out to your toilets and sinks. And so that's where you want to start to get efficient inside the house. The next image I have is how the inside of the house is laid out for circulation. Now it is a two-story house, but the whole center of the houses actually doesn't have a second floor. It's all open to give you that nice open feeling with people like in water houses. It also has ventilation that you can access at the top that will let the prevailing breeze from any direction come into the house and go out the other side of the house using the pressure differentials to move the air through your house. And then as you see, I have a couple of ceiling fans. You'll also notice in the ceiling the lights that are in there, the recess lights, the count lighting that's in the ceiling, that is all going to be 48 volt direct current, EC, not AC. You can actually get LED lights that are AC and what it does is it takes the AC current, converts it to DC in the light bulb, and then gives you a DC light. But you can actually buy DC lighting, industrial DC lighting or commercial DC lighting in the form of the count lights that don't get converted. So what I'm going to do when I build my DC solar panels is the solar panels are going to charge batteries. The batteries are going to be used to smooth power going into my house and convert it to AC power if I need AC power and also store and use that direct DC voltage in the house for all my lighting. And it'll just take a small fraction of the amount of power it does if you have DC, if you have instead of having AC lighting. And you can use much thinner wire. So you save a lot of money on your wiring and it's a lot safer to have all that DC instead of running AC wire all through the house, just for lighting. Other thing is I could put USB wiring into the house, all DC USB wiring, I have to step it down to 12 volts. And then you could charge your phone and use your computer and so many things that you plug into the wall to charge actually have a converter that changes the AC power out of your wall to DC in your laptop computer or your phone. Well, you could, if you have a DC system, you could just make outlets that are just USBs. If you need to charge anything, plug it into that instead of your wall outlet and skip the whole inverter part, which again takes up energy. The next, the next drawing I have is a little bit on how to lay things out. This is the first floor downstairs. And one of the things I like to do in my kitchen is have a skylight, but of course I can't do it here because I have a second floor above. But what I wanted to show you in the kitchen, which is the bottom right hand quadrant of this building where it says kitchen conveniently, it's a pretty much a circular kitchen with a island in the middle, refrigerator on the left side, gas range and an oven on the top side. And guess what's on the other side of the gas range is the gas dryer in the longer room. That's the kind of thing that you think about when you're laying out your kitchen. Not only do you want to have the kitchen triangle, which is your sink, refrigerator and cooktop in a convenient arrangement, so you can move between all of them efficiently and have a workspace like that island in the middle to be efficient in cooking and stuff, but you want to line up your utilities wherever you can. Also the kitchen sink is on the right hand side, smack in the middle of a big window that has a great view, not only my neighbor that's about 500 yards away, but also just a great view. Those orange lines are my sewer lines going out under the house and it can show you where it goes right to that toilet. All the other wastewater from that bathroom is going to go through the walls down to that same line and the bathroom above is right above that. That gap between where it says office bathroom and then the left side is that freeze way that I talked about that you can dry your clothes in and such. This laundry room is really big. The bathroom on the first floor to me is important. It's something that everybody can use, whether you're dirty from working in the garage or out in the yard to having guests over and you're entertaining and you don't want them going in your master bathroom. You always want to have a nice bathroom downstairs that people can use. I have one last picture and we'll throw it up there and we'll close, but this is that open living area, big sliding glass door on the right and big windows to get the view. Your building code will tell you how much light you have to have into especially bedrooms and rooms that you have to have enough glazing to get in there. If you have glass in a bathroom that has to be tempered and things like that, your building code will tell you all that. But this is going to be the living area that will go outside to an outside area where I can have a deck with some grill and things like that. So this is what my house is going to look like. I'm really sold on the fact that at some point in time I'm going to be able to convert my natural gas stove and dryer to hydrogen. And I'll be able to make my own hydrogen from my hydrogen car. I'll be able to use that hydrogen to cook with and to dry my clothes with. And I'll use my solar to make the hydrogen and also run all my DC lighting. My USB ports to charge all my electric gear and my AC inverters to run the rest of the AC in the house. You can get refrigerators that run on DC. You can get refrigerators that use propane to keep them cold. But I'm going to plan to have AC in the house because I'm going to have enough room in my garage for a shop. And that'll be how I design my house to be what I want it to be. And if I can get it built pretty soon, I'll take you on a tour of it. In fact, maybe I'll do a show or a series of shows on building my house. Until next Tuesday, this is Stem Energy Man wishing you guys a really Merry Christmas Good riddance to 2020. I'd rather not ever live another 2020 again. The only good news is it could be worse. And I hope it's not. Hope 2021 is a lot better than 2020 was. So until then have a Merry Christmas. We'll see you next year. Well, I think tech takes a break. And a long until 2021.