We were in France on vacation this year, and I was interested to see a growing deep green orientation there.  In the past, it has always felt like France was lagging behind Germany, Sweden, and the UK in addressing climate change on the ground.  I could feel a difference this year though – in the street art, growing bio street markets, and green initiatives. 

In Paris, a year long planning process resulted last year in “le Grand Paris“, sponsored by President Sarkozy as a way to reshape the capitol to have a smaller footprint in the coming centuries.  Several new deep green skyscrapers, such as Hypergreen, have been proposed in the last several years.  Just in the last two years, Paris has started a dedicated effort to promote bicycling, and there was a new bike rental program called Velib which was used by lots of folks, including commuters – in a short amount of time it has become a great success. 

zHome at Hypergreen display, Cite de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine

Out in the countryside, PV panels were showing up on roofs.  Folks said the big controversy was the local planning authorities were concerned about the aesthetic integration of the panels on the historic tile roofs.   All in all, really positive signs – you could feel the change in the air.

PV installers' van

7-26-2010 from zHome.

We will have our next monthly walk through next Thursday.  It will be an interesting class as we have a ton of things going on in the ground utility-wise (ground source manifolds, etc.), and we’ve left it exposed for folks to see.  We will specifically be discussing the manifold tie-together of the ground source wells with the mechanical contractor (Northwest Mechanical).  We’re also gearing up to pour our slabs which have a fairly complicated subgrade due to additional penetrations for ground source, photovoltaic conduit, and rainwater plumbing.  We will be going onto the site this time so will be asking folks to sign a liability waiver.  We will also do a brief project overview for those of you who haven’t been out before.

Ground source well pipe thermal fusing underway

Here is a link for directions.  We are in east of the High Street/Highlands Drive intersection on High Street – look for the group on the sidewalk.

For those of you coming from downtown Seattle, the site is only 200 feet from the Issaquah Highlands Park and Ride, which is served by Metro Route 218 and Sound Transit Route 554 (the 554 only has a return bus to Seattle).

We’ve been having a great turnout of 20-30 folks to the classes, so please come and join in the fun!

What’s up with all these tubes?

Tubes!

The tubes are conduit runs through the foundation.  This is a photo of the concrete forms.  Concrete will be poured into the forms to create the foundation walls.  The tubes provide a chase for things to be run up into the unit – wires, pipes, etc.

Seems like a lot of tubes, right?  We have a lot going on in these units – regular stuff like water pipes and electricity, but in our case ground source piping, extra wires for the solar panels…and who knows what else?  So we have a lot of tubes.

This is an interesting video of Nick talking about the recycled content of our drain board. The left over scrap from our ground source well pipe was 100% recycled into materials such as the drain board.

Nick Nied of Ichijo USA and Clint Hamilton of Howland Homes

This is Nick Nied of Ichijo USA, and Clint Hamilton of Howland Homes.  These are our joint venture partners building the project.  Nick is project manager for construction, and Clint is the site superintendant.  I will do more extensive profiles on both of them in the future.