This Saturday is a bike ride around Champaign-Urbana to showcase some environmentally conscious sites around town. It is an 18 mile loop at your own pace. Equinox House will be on the tour and open to view from 11am to 1pm.
More info on the tour is found in this article in the News Gazette. Registration is free and encouraged to ensure you receive a tour guide map. Hope to see you there!
The Styrax tree was planted in the front and we have been spreading wood chips around the site and mixing in compost and putting down grass seed. Here are the most recent pictures of the house. You can see that the shadow is now near the top of the clerestory windows letting direct sunlight into the house for passive solar heating.
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A close up of the styrax tree and watering the front yard grass seed with collected rain water using a pump powered by solar energy. Doesn’t get any better than that! The third picture shows the cistern cover off with the sump pump inside to pump the rain water out.
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Here is the light starting to enter the main living area of the house from above. Because the window sills are deep with the thick walls, most of the light right now hits that shelf and won’t fully be seen until the sun is lower on the horizon.
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This is the fresh air inlet filter box made from a cooler that we’ve shown before. There is a course and fine filter in the box. With a tightly sealed house all fresh air, excluding opening doors, is controlled and comes through a designated opening thus making it possible to filter. In conventional homes air enters the house unfiltered through cracks and holes. This air contains many more pollutants, allergens, and irritants than a super sealed home.
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The kitchen cabinets are scheduled to be in the end of this week and installed the beginning of next week. That will be an exciting time as the last major piece of the house comes together.
