by Faith Morgan and Evan Schieber / Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions / January, 2014
Faith Morgan, Trustee of Community Solutions, and Antioch intern Evan Schieber interviewed Andy Holyoke, a local straw bale home builder earlier this year. We needed a little more information before posting the interview, so I biked a few blocks to the newest straw bale house being built in Yellow Springs to talk with the builders, Andy and his wife, Beth. Andy has been building straw bale homes since 1996. He has built nine straw bale structures to date--including homes, a commercial greenhouse, garage, retrofitted barn, and this current project. He builds with a crew, although homeowners often contribute labor, and the community will come together for bale stacking and plastering parties. Andy and Beth told me that walls can easily be retrofitted using straw bale because straw bales (standing on edge) fit into the standard 2 by 4 wall spacing of conventional homes. Andy and Beth don’t live in a straw bale home, but they have retrofitted some of their walls with straw. If one already owns a home, retrofitting is a good alternative to reconstruction.
Interviewer: The focus of this interview is to understand what brought you to your environmental interests and what you’ve done with that interest - your lifestyle, your work. Where did your concern for the environment start.
Andy: Well back when the first Earth Day happened, in 1976, I was thinking, “Oh, it’s about time everybody started paying attention,” because I was brought up in an environmentalist family. You might say in an environmentalist town, before we had that term, at least before I knew about it. My dad rode a bike you know: college professor, riding his bike to work. As long as I knew about it and probably before I was born, he was a biker, for transportation purposes.
Another formative experience for me was heading off for college. I read an article that suggested, at least as far as cars go, if you take the amount of money you spend on your car, and the amount of money you spend to buy the car, keep the car up, buy the gasoline, you’ve got a dollar figure. And if you divide that by your hourly wage, you’ll get the number of hours the car cost you. And then if you add those hours to hours you actually spend in the car, and then divide it by the number of miles you go in the car, you get a true miles per hour. And they say, the article claimed that when you did all that math you’d end up at 5 miles per hour or something like it. And their suggestion was that you might as well skip the car and use an ox.
So I took that to heart and have tried to avoid using the car; it’s not really helping you that much anyway when you count in everything. So for thriftiness purposes, I bike. And I always take into account how many people are in the car when I’m driving. Because of that article I say, well I’ve got four people in the car. I can go faster and reduce my gas mileage because with four of us we’re still getting a better people-miles per gallon then we would if it were just me. So, when I’m by myself I usually drive pretty slowly.
Interviewer: I use that too. When we went down to Berea, I said to the two students with me: “We’re getting 150 people miles per gallon.”
Andy: Right.
Interviewer: That’s very interesting; I grew up in town but I didn’t think about your family or your dad in that way. To some extent, in Yellow Springs, a lot of people were doing things like that.
Andy: And it’s good exercise. One of the things that puzzles me is all the people who drive to some place to exercise. One of the things that bothers me is, you know, I like to mountain bike on the course out at John Bryan [Sate Park]. But there’s not a good way to bike to John Bryan unless you go through the Glen, which is not allowed. But there is a route through the Glen, which is a fire trail which they drive tractors on. So occasionally I ride through the Glen to go mountain biking in the park because I’m try to save the world! St. Rt. 343 is not a good way to bike there. Anyway, I should probably try to make that an accepted way to get to John Bryan. But I’m not sure I’ll be able to convince them that those of us on the mountain bikes will stay on that one path.
Interviewer: So I don’t know what your age is, I know you’re a little bit younger than I am.
Andy: 61.
Interviewer: So as you’ve gone through your 61 years, how what has led you to what you’re doing in your life and how you’re supporting yourself? You build straw bale houses, but have you built houses with two-by-fours too?
Andy: I’ve done lots of building with two-by-fours, including in the straw bale buildings, they have lots of two-by-fours in them. All building is a compromise, as you know. You have to choose between how much you want to spend and how good a product you’ll have versus how far it’s been shipped.
Interviewer: I think what you’re saying is, you try to take into account what the embodied energy in the building is and also so that of the products that are going into the building.
Andy: Yes, how much are you going to save by using something that’s been shipped from farther away? But certainly I was doing building before I heard about straw bale building, and I’ve given a lot of thought to materials and maintenance. One of the things that drives me crazy about buildings is that they always need work. With the perfect building, you wouldn’t have to mess with it unless you wanted to change the format, so to speak. When I first heard about straw bales I thought this is a really good idea: using a waste material, and the energy efficiency. So, yeah, I jumped right on that bandwagon.
Interviewer: And were you doing anything special in the buildings you did before that?
Andy: Nothing out of the ordinary. Just trying to make them well insulated.
Interviewer: How long ago did you build your first straw bale house?
Andy: I built my mom and dad’s house in 1996. We finished it in the spring of ’97.
Interviewer: Close to 20 years ago.
Andy: Well, it’s still just a young building. I think they should last 300 years. Straw will last forever if you keep it dry. They found straw in the pyramids. And straw bale houses have lasted more than 100 years out in Nebraska. So I’m confident that they’re a long-term solution. I’d like to see them more widespread.
Interviewer: Tell us about some of the straw bale houses you’ve built, and what you’ve learned along the way. Maybe if you could run down also what a straw bale house is.
Andy: OK, well because I am building to building code, I have to please some other people. And for that reason, I have not tried building a load-bearing straw bale. So there’s two basic ways: there is load bearing, where the straw holds the roof up, and there is in-fill, in which you have a structure and the straw is filled in-between. I use the in-fill method because it’s a lot easier for the code officials to understand, and in many ways it makes a lot more sense here. That way you have a roof before you do the straw so that you’re not worried if you can protect it from rain, because rain is the big enemy.
If you’re doing a load bearing, you have to get the bales up and the roof on without getting them wet. So basically I’m building a pole barn and then filling it in. I’ve been doing cement slab floors with radiant heat, which is one of those compromises, because cement is high embodied energy. But if I weren’t using a cement slab I’d have to have more digging done, then I’d use more wood for a flooring structure above the crawl space. I’m not sure which one would be less environmentally damaging. But that’s what I’m doing.
This radiant cement slab is a good choice in terms of being a heat sink for solar gain, and it’s also good for being a heat sink for solar gain from solar collectors on the roof. Radiant heat is a good system for saving energy because you don’t have to keep the air in the house as warm as you would if you were using forced air. This means that, if you have lower air temperatures, you don’t lose as much heat when you lose air with the natural air exchange in the house.
Interviewer: I’ve noticed that in houses I’ve been in that have radiant floor heating, and their gas bills are lower than other people’s.
Andy: If surfaces around you are warm, you feel warm, even if the air is cool. So in a warm room, if you stand next to a cold window you’ll feel colder even if the air is not colder. Because my straw bale buildings have radiant floors, they don’t have a ducting system, which means they don’t have central air conditioning. If they have any air conditioning at all, it’s a window air conditioner. One of our strategies is a common one: open the windows at night during the summer and close them during the day. Because the homes have a lot of thermal mass and they’re well insulated, it works fine, as long as the homeowner is willing to open the windows during the night and close them during the day.
Interviewer: You’ve renovated the house you live in, which is not straw bale.
Andy: Yeah.
Interviewer: Have you done anything special in that renovation?
Andy: Well this house is an old barn, so the walls are about six inches thick. We put in six inches of cellulose insulation, some blown in high density cellulose and some blown on wet cellulose. And then we’ve got about R-40 or so in the attic. We’ve got our wood stove, fairly centrally located. During the winter we shut off the unused bedrooms, and our bedroom is right above the wood stove. And life contracts in the winter, to the space heated by the wood stove. We don’t use this room as much in the winter and every morning when I get up in the dead of winter it’s down to 58 degrees and that’s when I go and start the wood stove up. My goal for when it gets cold, is to get through the winter with one match. So you try to bank the stove down for the night so that you’ve got a few coals for the morning, and you use those to start the next fire. So generally we go for weeks without starting a fire from scratch.
I’ve thought about what I do to lower my carbon footprint. It seems to me that burning wood isn’t adding carbon to the environment any more than when wood rots, it’s the same process as burning, only slower. You’re releasing carbon, but it’s the same carbon that would be released anyway when the wood rots. So I claim that I’m not adding to my carbon footprint by burning wood; I’m just adding particulates to the air.
Interviewer: One of my concerns with burning wood is that if a whole lot of people wanted to burn wood, we could start deforestation. I forget where I was reading about this, where they were doing just that, where people were burning just about everything they could get their hands on.
Andy: Personally I think in the eastern United States, we’re getting more forest rather than less forest.
While we’re on the subject of energy usage of the house, I wanted to say that I have a pet peeve about clothes dryers. I’ve got gas service here. I’ve got a gas furnace, I’ve got a gas stove. I do not have a gas dryer. We do have solar collectors on the room, providing most of the energy for our hot water usage. We have gas on the main water heater too. But we don’t use a lot of natural gas. I would like to convince more people that hang drying clothes is a valid alternative. You have to hang them up and then it takes a little while. You can’t just throw them in the dryer. But in the winter it adds moisture to the house, which I think is a healthy thing. You’re using the heat you’ve got anyway to dry them. It seems crazy to spend all that energy on clothes drying.
