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BetsyB

"betsyb" wrote in message
...
Solved all your problems. I read this in the Anchorage paper this morning
and you'd love Eagle River. The view of McKinley is awesome from the
location of this place.

Bioshelter for sale
3,200 square feet, view, garage, sunroom -- and who needs a well or septic
field?
adn.com story photo
Bob Crosby and Lou Anne Person-Crosby are trying to sell their
experimental home. They're standing in the sunroom, in which small ponds
are part of a water recycling system.
adn.com story photo
The "bioshelter," engineered for water and energy efficiency, sits on
sloping property in the Eagle River valley and includes a rock garden. The
home has large southern-facing windows. (Photo by MARC LESTER / Anchorage
Daily News)


A unique architectural detail of the Crosby home is a meditation room
accessed by a hole in the wall of the master bedroom.


The kitchen of the Crosby home in Eagle River takes advantage of daylight
passing through the attached sunroom/greenhouse. "It definitely extends
your sense of daylight hours," Bob Crosby says.


Wastes collected in the composting toilet, along with kitchen scraps, are
recycled into a rich humus the Crosbys use in their landscaping. (




By DEBRA McKINNEY . Anchorage Daily News

(Published: October 15, 2006)

For the past 20 years, Bob Crosby and Lou Anne Person-Crosby have been
living in a laboratory with a wetlands running through it, along with a
heap of plants, a legion of worms and a gazillion microorganisms.

That may sound a little crowded. But the house the Crosbys built way up
Eagle River valley has plenty of space for them all. The whole point when
they designed this place was to need and use less.

Because of the various resource- and energy-efficient features built into
their home, they consume about a third of the energy and 2 percent of the
water a house this size normally gobbles up.

Bob, an ecological engineer and designer of the house's innards, calls his
creation a "bioshelter," a term coined in the '60s by the New Alchemy
Institute, the sustainable-living research group of its day. The idea
behind it was to emulate a living organism, "where energy efficiency is
synonymous with survival."

So this house is sort of alive. And it's for sale.

After 20 years of this live-in experiment, the Crosbys are parting ways
with the bioshelter to pursue a new project in Costa Rica. But first they
need to pass their creation on to new owners -- or caretakers, really. And
so far, finding those people hasn't been easy.

This house is just so unusual in so many ways.

The composting toilet that "flushes" with a toss of sphagnum moss. The
super-efficient Finnish masonry fireplace that radiates heat all day. The
house is so well insulated and has so much capacity for storing heat, it
would take at least a week to freeze

up at an average outside temperature of 10 degrees.

But it's the water system more than any other component that goes where
few, if any, have gone before.

The house has no well or septic system; it doesn't need them.

The Crosbys' water supply comes from rainwater collected off the roof.
It's filtered through soil, filtering fabric and a thick layer of sand and
gravel, then zapped with an ultraviolet sterilizer and stored in a
5,000-gallon cistern beneath the house. That's the well.

From there, it goes through in-line cartridge filters, then on to the
faucets, one of which is designated for drinking and cooking, rigged in
the kitchen with a special under-the-counter, triple-filtering system.

As for lacking a septic system, the water that normally disappears down
the drain -- from showering, dishwashing, clothes laundering, teeth
brushing, all but toilet waste -- gets recycled.

It's not terribly unusual for alternative homes to have gray-water
treatment systems, Bob says. But they're generally one-way designs, with
treated water going away via a garden hose or down through a drain field.
The Crosbys' system is closed.

Instead of being wasted, household gray water does a continuous
loop-de-loop as part of a multistep purification system that uses some of
the same principles as a municipal wastewater treatment plant. Only this
one is a whole lot easier to live with.

The centerpiece of the treatment process -- the only stage that's part of
the Crosbys' living space -- is a miniature wetlands teeming with aquatic
plants inside the house's two-story, 12-foot-wide, passive-solar
greenhouse. This greenery creates the ambiance of the tropics while
serving as the "biofiltering" system. In nature, wetlands and swamps
around coastal areas do the same job.

From the wetlands, cleaned water overflows into a pond, then seeps down
into a leach field below the greenhouse, where the treatment process
continues out of sight. The goldfish swimming about are the canaries in
the mine. Should they go belly up, the Crosbys would know they had a
water-quality problem. Never happens; their fish die of old age.

Purely for aesthetics, the Crosbys added a little waterfall and a series
of gently cascading ponds lined with plants running most of the length of
the greenhouse. So together with the wetlands, it's like they have their
own indoor creek.

After a bit of experimenting, followed by a major overhaul of the original
design, the Crosbys say, they got this greenhouse component down. Water
quality and odor problems they were up against in the beginning have been
solved. Now there's just a slightly earthy smell. And about the only
maintenance is riding herd on the plants, which go nuts in this
environment.

"That's it," Bob said, "just beating back the jungle every now and then."

LIVING HOUSE

The original plan, in the early '80s, was to build a cabin. That got
scrapped when Bob and Lou Anne entered and won a home-design competition
sponsored by the now-defunct Alaska Energy Center. As the house plan
evolved, what emerged was a design that showcased both the Crosbys' areas
of expertise: Lou Anne's as an interior designer who likes simplicity,
openness and curved walls, and Bob's work with the concept of biological
architecture, or "biotecture."

The end result, this bioshelter design, received an Energy Innovation
Award from the U.S. Department of Energy in 1987.

"I worked for many years doing mechanical designs for housing out in the
villages and was always frustrated with what you couldn't do," Bob said.
"You can't experiment on your clients. So when I had the opportunity to
try some of these ideas, this house was an opportunity to do that."

To understand how the bioshelter works, it helps to think of this house as
a living organism. Think of the walls as the skin, the water supply as the
circulatory system and the recycling system as the kidneys. Think of the
people living inside as the brains.

In the body, the circulatory system supplies nutrients to the cells and
organs and flushes out wastes. It also helps maintain an even body
temperature by sending blood to the extremities to cool off and closing
down capillaries to hoard heat in its core when cold.

The bioshelter's circulatory system works in a somewhat similar way. What
we flush out and consider wastes are nutrients to the microorganisms that
nosh on them, purifying the water in the process, in both the wetlands and
the primary treatment component that takes place in 55-gallon plastic
drums down in the mechanical room.

Instead of being lost to a septic system, recycled water also helps
maintain the house's body temperature. Warm water normally washed down the
drain is kept within the system, and its heat is stored in the thermal
mass of the house.

With all this thermal mass, the radiant masonry fireplace and a natural
gas boiler, their monthly heating bill for this three-bedroom house
averages around $60. Actually, it's less, since that bill includes natural
gas used for the kitchen stove, the clothes dryer and the water heater.

MULTITASKING SYSTEMS

The Crosbys' bioshelter is also designed around the integrated systems
concept, meaning components serve more than one function. The wastes
collected via the composting toilet, for instance, along with kitchen
scraps, are composted and converted into a rich humus the Crosbys use on
their perennial beds and other landscaping plants.

The greenhouse, running the entire length of the house's south side,
serves as a solar heat collector and as part of the water purification
system. The floor of the greenhouse and all the water, soil, sand and
gravel beneath it serve as thermal mass for storing heat.

All windows in the house -- except for a skylight, a small window in the
spare bedroom and a round one in a ladder-accessed cubbyhole designed as a
meditation space -- overlook the two-story greenhouse. This brings in
light while creating a buffer between inside and outside temperatures.

The greenhouse serves as a psychological buffer zone as well. It's easy to
forget it's January when you're looking out your dining room window into a
nicely lit scene with blooming geraniums, thriving plants and a brook
babbling by.

"It definitely extends your sense of daylight hours," Bob said.

"What we have accomplished is designing a house that is very livable and
yet requires no water," he continued. "You could build this house on a
mountaintop, on bedrock or on permafrost. Even in the Mohave Desert. When
it rains, you could fill your cistern, and it's good for the next year.

"And yet all our neighbors have drilled 200-foot wells (at up to $40 a
foot) and spent $10,000 on septic systems. As more and more people build
up here and dip a straw into the aquifer, the water level is going to go
down. Whereas we don't worry about it. We'll never run out."

Now, after immersing themselves in this live-in laboratory for 20 years,
the Crosbys, who are in their early 60s, have decided it's time to move on
to their next experiment in sustainable living. They've bought six acres
in Costa Rica planted in fruit and coffee trees and other exotic plants,
all organically grown.

They want to open a nursery largely devoted to growing jatropha curcas
seedlings, a drought-resistant shrub that produces an oil-bearing seed
that's pressed to produce biodiesel. Selling the starter plants is part of
the plan; teaching the technology of biodiesel production is another.

As for parting ways with the bioshelter, they tested real-estate waters a
couple of years ago when they first got serious about Costa Rica. They ran
a huge color ad for an open house and had a steady stream of tire kickers
but no one serious.

They don't think it was so much the price -- $475,000 for 3,200 square
feet (not including a two-car garage and the mechanical room) and nearly
two acres of land with a view. The water systems were scary to people, Lou
Anne said.

The real estate agent they tried for a while had trouble explaining the
system, too, and ended up making it sound way more complicated than it
was, Bob said.

It was a whole different story when the Crosbys had an open house for the
Bioneers of Alaska, a local network of energy specialists, organic farmers
and everyday people working to create ecologically sustainable
communities.

They got it.

Mariana Gonzalez-Rul was on that tour and came away all inspired. She's
been tinkering with house designs for years, and would like to build an
energy-efficient home in Mexico, where water is a major issue.

"I'd heard about composting toilets," she said, "but not an indoor
gray-water recycling system. For me, this is the answer."

In the two years since the Crosbys first put the house on the market, then
took it off, then put it on again, Bob has made enough changes in the
systems that maintenance is now pretty much painless. Anybody can handle
this, he says.

"We really want to sell this house to somebody of like mind," Lou Anne
said. "The plumbing is here -- obviously we use plumbing. All we need to
do is hook it up to a well and septic tank. But we don't want to convert
it. That would be a shame."

In the meantime, Bob continues to tinker and post his ideas and plans on
his Biorealis Systems Inc. Web site (www.biorealis.com). Although his work
is copyrighted, he wants to share what he's created. His hope is that
people will take these ideas and improve them.

"What I've made available for free is enough that a sufficiently energetic
and knowledgeable person with a shop can do it," he said.

"My goal is to develop technologies for people, including Third World
people who really need it. If we can make it self-supporting or make some
bucks, that's always a good thing. But the primary goal is to develop
technologies that will, quote-unquote, save the world."


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BetsyB

"Nancy G." wrote in message
s.com...
First cold spell comes in Wednesday night and freeze on Thursday. I've
spent 4 days moving orchids. It gives me a chance to perform riage.