Introducing "She Build"

SHE Build - is a new company that builds a Sustainable Home Environment for the 21rst Century.

The sustainable building techniques that my old friend Bradley Robinson has been innovating since the early 1990s began with adobe (rammed earth) building, then evolved into a unique straw bale system and then graduated to a unique version of the now popular passive house.

Although it requires a minimal amount of energy to heat, unlike a passive house or conventional house, it’s built without a wood frame or standard concrete foundation which is considered obsolete by most experts. It's important to remember that cement is expensive and represent around 15% of greenhouse gases worldwide.

The large cost savings gained from this simple yet sophisticated building technique are integrated into a concrete building platform slab with a crawl space underneath that contains what Brad calls a battery or bio-reactor that purifies water into a useable waste stream of methane, along with a heat storage system that uses solar radiation to collect and circulate heat. You gotta see it to believe it!

An important theme to Brad's sustainable homes is to target benign waste streams into the design of the building systems. By what he calls  “fracking the kitchen sink”, the closed loop process results in a nutrient rich stream of water which is used in his attached greenhouse to grow food.  

Brad's domed homes are built with a minimal amount of building material but contains as much or more performance and strength as conventional homes, as the modular walls are fully integrated with the entire house structure to create a clean building structure that is easy and quick to build. 

Working with four conventional building materials – cement, polystyrene (for the below gradient sub floor), steel and tar, the home construction is comparable to an engineered straw bale (or rammed earth) stress skin system. The walls and roof built from the surprisingly strong and well insulated and environmentally friendly materials, are economically, environmentally and socially responsible. For example, the recovered heat, water, gas and nutrients are not released into the environment and therefore do not cause downstream impacts into the air or water. 

The beauty of the building technique is its use of equal sized modular panels that easily connect together with minimal labor, materials or time. Bradley made his current 1,300 square feet, one story domed home by himself over one summer just outside of Wakefield by the old Carmen Trails youth hostel.  

The materials used are relatively inexpensive, and construction requires no heavy machinery. Moreover, the home can incorporate recycled materials like recycled steel, plastic and reused polystyrene from the nearby StyroRail facility. For example, Bradley is looking into ways to reuse the demolition of old buildings and various waste streams to use in the core of the wall structures instead of polystyrene.

The cost to build this unique version of a passive house is competitive with current passive or conventional homes. The fact that it recycles water, food wastes and building materials and is resilient against extreme weather and risk of fire, means that it is a sustainable home for solving some of today’s and tomorrow's environmental challenges.

Look for more information on the home design, new projects and planned workshops at our website She.ca

P.S. It's been an interesting ride, but I'm no longer part of the SHE Build dream. In the end I couldn't commit myself to the cause because it was too much of a financial risk. This of course reflects the snail's pace of constructive change to building codes, banking regulations, and generally the way we over build our environment. Maybe the whole thing was a pipe dream but I'm not the only one who smokes....