[Strawbale] Re: Strawbale Digest, Vol 4, Issue 9

[avantgarden at wxs...]

> ..I am looking for a collegue in Italy, who is willing and able to give
> help to a lady from the Netherland that wishes to build two 50 m2
> strawbale houses in Italy.
> I dont have any idea about the legal procedure of building with straw in
> this country and hope to find someone who can help my client and lead
> her through the planning and building process.
> Cheers, Harald Wedig

Thank you very much, Barbara, Catherine, Friederike, Dirk und Herbert;-)
Stefano Soldati and Margareth Schwarz are the ones I am going to contact.
Your reaction is like a warm "welcome back" to the international
strawbale community to me.
At the moment I am working on a baleproject in germany, a 150m2 family
home. 
Its post and beam and the remarkable thing about is the heating system.
The house is standing in a rather shady situation, sad enough, solar
systems cannot be applied for heating. Instead electricity is used to
extract warmth from the outside air and sending this warmth via water
through pipes. Those heat up the loam stucco inside the house. Who knows
the english term for Luftwärmepumpe, I guess its not airwarmthpump;-)
The bad thing about it is, that it needs electricity for this process.
The good news is: It needs very little maintanance and consumes little
electricity. Last week I noticed a weekly average of 25 KW per day
keeping the house temperature at 20 C° whith an average outside
temperature of -3 C°.
In the beginning I didnt like this solution and tried to convince
architect and users of a brick stove system. But I must confess, that
the convinience of the mentioned heating system ( it needs less
maintanace than a fridge) is more compatible to the average user. There
will be a wood burning stove as a second, redundant system, too.
Cheers, Harald