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Sunday, September 20, 2009

Sustainable tour - with students from STEP University of Waterloo

Today we were part of an all day tour organized in part by STEP, The Sustainable Technology Eduation Project (STEP) at the University of Waterloo. STEP is a working group of the University of Waterloo Sustainability Project, and aims to research, promote, educate, and demonstrate the feasibility of renewable energy technologies (both on campus and in the community).

The tour group visited a number of sites in our region, looking at sustainable initiatives around energy, techonology (e.g. greywater filtration systems, solar hot water), and sustainable building (e.g. strawbale, geothermal). We were very happy to meet them and talk about our experiences as a small, owner-built, homescale model of what we hope urban sustainability can look like. In particular, the strawbale construction, cob oven, coldframes, passive solar greenhouse, and greywater system were of interest to the group. Next year we are hoping to look into solar hot water heating (to heat our radiant floor hot water), as well as install a living roof on the new addition. When talking to these kinds of groups there are always more ideas and projects to dream about...

More on STEP: www.step.uwaterloo.ca

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