Page 23 - Green Builder January 2017 Issue
P. 23
Waste not. A push-button, temperature monitoring control sends only hot water through the pipes, preventing the gallons of waste that PHOTO CREDIT: JESSICA DELANEY
occurs when water is gradually heated in a conventional system.
CELLAR DWELLERS Katon says. “Go out west to old buildings—the vaults are always the
Building the root cellar—something considered critical by Keating last thing standing.”
and his wife, because they farm their eight acres organically—also
presented challenges. The difficulty wasn’t that the cellar had to The work included pouring a stand-alone concrete ceiling. “We had
have three chambers to allow for differences in temperature and a guy come in and form up the foundation walls to the root cellar,”
humidity required for the storage of different types of crops, thereby he explains. “We also instructed him to allow the reinforcement rods
dispensing with the energy penalty necessary for storing large to come out of the tops of all the foundations for about five feet.”
amounts of food via refrigeration and freezing. It was getting past
basic structural constraints. A contractor then came in, and with a special tool bent the rods at
90-degree angles. Perpendicular to those rods, more steel rods were
“We went back and looked at how bank vaults are constructed,” laid, and they were then all tied together. “This is done in building
bridges,” Katon says, “but in this case, it was working upside down.”
“Water as a resource is becoming
increasingly scarce... (yet) we The builders then put plywood under what Katon calls the “steel
waste billions of gallons waiting cage” of rods and put a perimeter frame around the top—similar to
for hot water to get to the spigot.” the sides of a sandbox. After that prep work, a cement truck came
and poured. After 30 days of curing, the crew removed the plywood
—Hank Keating, owner/architect, underneath the new ceiling, waterproofed the cellar and backfilled
Stone Fruit Farm it. That part of the project “had its daily challenges for the month or
so it took us to put it together,” Katon relates, “but it came out right.”
IN HOT WATER
Other resource-saving elements presented fewer conundrums. For
instance, Keating wanted a system where you didn’t have to turn
on the faucet and wait for the water to get hot as it spilled down
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