Construction Informer

Time and time again we relearn things. For a very long time buildings that were built in southern climates came almost automatically with wide verandas and wrap-around porches. One of the main reasons was it kept the sun off the sides of the building in the summer and made the structure cooler.

Of course those verandas took up a lot of room and they were a lot of maintenance. So, once air conditioning became affordable and the need to cram more and more structures on less and less space superceded thoughtful development, the verandas and porches disappeared, often being replaced with anemic-looking overhangs at entry points to the buildings.

Now, there are a bunch of buildings sucking up gobs of electricity in order to stay cool. When you add in the pavement and concrete that was lavishly poured in around these structures you have some wonderful heat sinks that require more and more electricity to keep them habitable.

So it isn’t surprising that the verandas are coming back, but these are not typical verandas. Carrying with them all the same benefits that might have been used to sell verandas 50 years ago these new verandas, called awnings, are cropping up everywhere. They are coming in an amazing array of styles, many looking a far cry from an RV awning – although there are those as well.

As these pictures show modern awnings offer some eye-appealing options. It may offend the architectural sensibilities of some I suppose, but for those paying the electric bill it might be time to give pragmatism its due weight. You can find out more at PAMA.

The making of cement uses huge amounts of fossil-fuel-generated heat and so it is the third largest source of greenhouse gas pollution in the U.S. By one account making one ton of cement creates one ton of carbon dioxide, or more.

There are some life forms on earth that have been making cement since, well, forever, and so humans are starting to consider using their processes. Marine coral take calcium and magnesium from sea water and make carbonates out of it at normal temperatures and pressures.

A company called Calera plans to take the heat from the vent stacks of fossil-fuel power stations and use it to dry a slurry made from sea water and the carbon dioxide emissions from the stacks. The process makes chalk which is then used as a substitute for Portland cement. There are other companies on the trail of this process as well.

Since the product removes from the atmosphere and then sequesters carbon dioxide into a useable product that can then be used to create a building, the idea is that will go a long way toward reducing the global warming pollution from buildings – in the U.S. buildings account for 48 percent of that global warming pollution.

One hurdle of course are the regulators that approve structural components like concrete and the other is the people who build with things like concrete. So Calera will be first offering a blend that contains both Portland and the chalk.

Some of the flue gasses from California’s Moss Landing power plant are already turning out material for evaluation and Caltrans is interested in testing the cement from this process.