Monday, April 15, 2013

Step 3a: RECON TIME! Survey the LAND for Materials: Building Green 101

If this is your first time. let us recap: We are building a Eco-Friendly building to house a bunch of companies. If you want to read the story from the beginning, check out our first blog at: The Introduction 

I'm back from my first trip to the property since the snow has melted.  I took so many pictures my camera is now no longer working; but my brother came along and I snapped some with his smart phone.  I went with my brother.  We search for material we could use to build a structure (building or house) totally green, with sustainable features and ease of use.  We walked the property once, then twice, then again, and again, and again.....

Again, we are not going in order (The 5 EASY STEPS) to build our business incubator, so for this post we will share some of the pictures we took of the land and some material we found on the property we think will be of good use.....


This is looking left on the property....we are standing front of the driveway.  The stone wall goes all around the property, I'm pretty sure what is on our land is open game to use, so we will try to repurpose as much stone as we can.


My brother came with me to survey the land.  This is him looking down the driveway.


We own all the way to the back of the picture.  If you see at the end of the drive way there is a clearing, past the clearing about 50 yards there is another stone wall which marks our property (total 8.9 acres)


To the right of the property.  Some standing lumber is seen around the property.  When you are building green you don't necessarily want to think about chopping everything down...but it is there in case we need it...


We have water on the property, AAGWATT will be happy.  (AAGWATT is one of my venture companies.  No, building a sustainable green building does not pay the bills.  I make my money writing business plans and consulting small businesses via my website NicholasCoriano.com & my business Cervitude IR)


More water.  It pools up in the front and streams onto the property from an adjoining parcel.  We are planning on trapping the water and creating electricity from the stream.  We talked about collecting water in storage tanks from the roof of our building, it may be the case we can re-use the water after capturing it in a lake...


The water flowing out into our property creates a pretty decent current and we can probably use this force to create electricity.  FREE ELECTRICITY!  As long as we have a stream running through the land, we should be able to convert the energy to light the house or run appliances when needed... 


After carefully surveying the water situation, we realized we might not need water storage tanks for rain harvesting or using rain water once it is collected on our property.  We have read about plant that naturally filter water and we have enough rock on the property to build a quarry.  The landscape of the property rolls down hill to the front, this will allow snow melt to end up in the lake we are planning to build in the front.  This lake will also harvest any rain water we need....


This is the driveway....we are planning on starting here!  
Looking to do something like....
No the bride is not ours....just some inspiration....

The rock wall below is ours and we will use that for sure...


Below are some pine trees on the property...good for sale...


Some old barrels and table that we will re-purpose....


Another pine tree......


And Another.....


This is the clearing of the land...A shot of the clearing...the rivets in the ground where made by a big truck or backhoe ....while it was wet they where driving and logging....the water accumulates..but me and big bro had solved the water issue before we left #ManMoveEArth.


Another shot of the land...the fact that water was already being harvested allows us to focus on collecting the rain water and snow melt for use....


More trees and lumber....


Found logs on the property...may be used for post for a barn or structure...have to work it into the plan.  When you are building a sustainable home or building and really want to build GREEN, you have to use what you have around.  Going out a buying supplies is kind of not the point.


More logs...and the boulder in front of the logs is one of many on the property.  Building with boulders or loose rock on the property is pretty much a must since we have so much of it....


That was the end of the RECON mission.  We found plenty of material and our water supply in our sustainable home/building is pretty much solved.  Energy was checked off the list when we found the water streaming.  

Note: When you do a quick search on rain harvesting, the first thing that pops up is the Wiki definition:
Rainwater harvesting is the accumulation and deposition of rainwater for reuse before it reaches the aquifer. Uses include water for garden, water for livestock, water for irrigation, etc. In many places the water collected is just redirected to a deep pit with percolation. The harvested water can be used for drinking water as well if the storage is a tank that can be accessed and cleaned when needed.
We need to be sure we can drink this water, so purification of the water once harvested from the rain or snow is essential.  We will continue to think about this issue.  Storage tanks of some sort for purification of water collected from the roof or a lake may come in handy after all.  Let's keep an eye on Green Building, Eco-Friendly, Sustainable Thinking friends at RainHarvest Systems, Rain Harvesting Supplies, Rain Water Collection, and Rain Harvesting Solutions.

It was a long day....and we put up a sign!  I'll post the rest of the pictures on our next post....

-Nick

#TheHomeskapeProject
479 Mang Road
(8.9 Acres)
Salisbury, NY 13365 
Little Falls, Herkimer County