beausoleil architects

Now we’re cooking with … not gas!

In many parts of the world, for instance sub-Saharan Africa, rural India, the desert parts of latin America and even in China, there is a push to use solar cooking to reduce the amount of wood and charcoal burning, to reduce local environmental air pollution and to increase public safety. Wood gatherers, often children and women, are more prone to attack as they range further from their home base in search of scarce resources. Large stretches of the world are being deforested, in part, by people needing fuel for cooking.

My daughter is going to Senegal in West Africa this summer, on a service trip with her school to help build a rural school.  I thought it might be useful to bring a prototype solar cooker to gauge its social acceptability and to test it in the local environmental conditions. I decided the cooker would have to be:

• Useful for local culinary customs, which involve cooking grain porridges, boiling vegetables, roasting meat, possibly baking bread.
•  Made of cheap (for my budget and theirs), easily repairable, replaceable, and sustainable materials.
•  Effective during the long, hot dry season (roughly eight months of the year)
•  Easily transportable, i.e., light in weight, foldable, durable
•  Hopefully, capable of being mass produced cheaply, if found to be useful and effective.

Solar cooking is simple from a scientific point of view, and also quite intuitive, as anyone knows who has gotten into a hot car on a sunny day. Incoming solar radiation at sea level embodies as much as 100 Watts of power per square foot, mostly in the form of visible light. If the light is absorbed by a dark surface, the surface will heat up, and the heat will tend to be radiated away as thermal radiation. If the surface is surrounded by glass, however, which is largely transparent to light but largely opaque to thermal radiation, then the heat is trapped – this is known as the greenhouse effect.  Using mirrors or lenses, more solar energy can be focused on a small area, increasing the temperature.  Increase the heat enough, and you have a cooker.

My design was based in part from what materials I found readily, and what my tools and crafting abilities were capable of. The design also evolved with step-by-step experimentation. I determined early on that the cooker needed to incorporate a glass shell so as to use the greenhouse effect.  I was able to find an inexpensive, cylindrical glass vase to use as my shell; it’s shape determined that I would create an oven rather than a ‘stovetop’ style cooker.

The design I settled upon had a parabolic reflector wrapped around the cylinder, held in place with a structural frame made of thin sheets that could be knocked down for ease of transportation. The prototype used cardboard, with Masonite or a similar artificial wood panel in mind for a final version. The pieces knock down to a (mostly) flat bundle, small enough to fit within the length and width of a typical suitcase.

The absorber plate which lined the inside of the glass cyliner was galvanized sheet metal with barbecue grade flat black paint as the finish. Some hemp rope, scavenged from the garage, was used for gaskets. Some quick experimentation with aluminum foil and cookie sheets as reflectors convinced me to use real mirrors – true specular reflectors seemed to be called for.

The first test of the prototype reached a temperature of 235 degrees – not great but good enough to bake cookies.  Then disaster: I was showing the cooker off on Earthday and the wind blew it over and broke it into shards…Oh, well, scientific progress goes boink. It was only a prototype, and proved to be less effective than desired, besides being too fragile, and probably too expensive.  It was lovely piece of design, but back to the drawing board!
 
My Challenge to my readers:

Create your own solar cooker – an oven or a boiler
Research local conditions, cooking practices and culture in your target area
Study the science of visible and thermal energy, absorption, transmission, radiation, insulation, and cooking
Design a beautiful cooker
Make a prototype
Test your ideas and your design
Do it again until you get it right
Take it out and try it in the real life
Manufacture it locally, and help transform the economy

Have Fun and Change the World

New Beausoleil designed home in Los Altos now on the market

Check out this YouTube video of our most recently completed project, a two story custom home, designed to suit the needs of the today's families.  Our client is a wonderful private developer in Los Altos, who goes to great lengths to build a quality home with sustainable features.

  

"This exquisite New England style new home combines classic East Coast exterior with an easy flowing floor plan that includes fabulous modern living amenities. Just minutes away from the village, its covered porch that wraps around the front and side, along with the beautifully landscaped yard and patio invite you to enjoy the California indoor-outdoor living. "The home features almost 3700 square feet of living area including four bedroom suites with bay windows and vaulted ceilings, a home office, family and living rooms, a formal dining room with a servery, and a hidden wine cellar nestled under the stair.

For more information, including open house dates, please contact Mansour Moussavian at Alain Pinel Realtors.

 

 

Deconstruction at work!

One of our clients in Los Altos for whom we designed a major residential remodel made the wise choice to deconstruct the existing home instead of simply demolishing it.  The wood framing, bricks, fixtures, etc. can be reused and not just recycled.  While deconstruction costs a little more than standard demolition upfront as the labor to carefully remove and sort materials takes more time, it can result in substantial tax donation credits to the owner, in this case, in the order of $60,000! See our previous blog for more details on the process. Deconstruction

The clever owners of this project, Eric and Angela Brown, created a time lapse video of deconstruction in action by Rebuid Green of Palo Alto..

 

Now the real work of construction can start cleanly on their new home!

 

From outer space to a neighborhood near you

I recently accompanied a sustainable energy class from my daughter’s high school on a visit to the headquarters of Bloom Energy.  The son of the founder and CEO, Dr. K.R. Sridhar, is one of my daughter’s classmates and Dr. Sridhar was kind enough to open up his manufacturing facility to us and have his chief engineer give the class a tour.

Bloom Energy makes high performance, high capacity fuel cells – similar to the systems that were invented in the sixties to provide power for spacecraft. Bloom Energy’s version was actually developed by NASA to help power proposed visits to Mars, specifically to be part of a system to convert the Mars atmosphere and solar energy to oxygen and hydrogen fuel. Along the way Dr. Sridhar realized that the technology could be used effectively on Earth to create electricity from fuel – ideally hydrogen but also methane (natural gas), alcohol and bio-fuels.  The fuel isn’t combusted, in the ordinary sense of burning at high temperature (not a practical idea in outer space), but is chemically converted using catalysts and ionic filters.  Very high tech devises, fuel cells use some of the same manufacturing techniques used to make computer chips and employ metals and ceramics that are on the cutting edge of material science.

 Ten years of development and a good deal of venture capital later, Bloom is manufacturing ‘Bloom Boxes’, modularized units, roughly the size of a large freezer, which ganged together in groups of six generate 200 kilowatts of power, enough for about 100 homes. Although internal temperatures within the units are well in excess of 1000 degrees Fahrenheit, there is very little waste heat. The exhaust is mostly carbon dioxide and water. When losses from transmission are taken into account, their efficiency is higher than even modern natural gas fired power plants.

The installations are remotely monitored by Bloom on a 24/7 basis. Their modular nature makes it relatively easy to switch out a poorly functioning unit without shutting down the entire array.  Bloom gained quick acceptance from customers who need very reliable power (think server farms and wholesale refrigeration facilities).  The operations manager who showed us the monitoring control room was very proud that the eye of Hurricane Sandy passed directly over one of their big installations on the East coast – and the power output never even blinked.

Fuel cells aren’t exactly ‘green’ in that they typically use fossil fuels as their energy source. Dr. Sridhar ultimate vision, however, is to develop bio-fuel generators, fed by agricultural waste or low environmental impact crops (such as switchgrass) that when linked to his Bloom boxes will give both reliable and environmentally sustainable power. He is especially intent on doing this in third world settings, where such systems, distributing power locally instead of through centralized grids, will have the best efficiency while giving the owners control over their power sources. He would like to vault the third world right over the industrial era into post-industrial civilization, bypassing coal, oil, and, hopefully, global warming.

Maybe it's time to start thinking inside the Box.

While we’re on the subject, there is another local company making fuel cells, perhaps more directly pertinent to architecture. ClearEdge Power makes smaller capacity residential units with as little as 5 kilowatt generating capacity (enough for a single large house).  Running on natural gas, their ClearEdge 5 unit is quite efficient, acts as a de-facto back-up generator, and uses its waste energy to heat domestic water.  Thus electricity, hot water, and emergency power in one package the size of a refrigerator. They are expensive, but well within the budget of a typical McMansion. With current subsidies, and with cheap natural gas for at least the near future, they are actually cheaper than public utility power.  I can’t wait for them to come out with a unit half that size – maybe even one that converts yard waste into biofuels -- then we’re talking about a serious game changer.

Please vote for our middle school robotics team's invention

Voting is now open for the FLL Global Innovation Award, where middle school youth post ideas for their inventions, this year related to the theme of helping seniors stay independent, connected and engaged. The team we have been coaching for the past 6 months, the Awkward Turtles, has submitted their idea for the Turtle Tablet and Beach Band. You can find out more and  VOTE  here.   More information about our team and our amazing experience follows. Please vote early and often.  Voting ends March 1. Thanks!

 

Our family decided last summer to sponsor a F.L.L. robotics team for our 12 year old son, some of his classmates at West Portal Lutheran School, his friends, and kids from AimHigh, a San Francisco program which tutors low income youth. My wife Christine and I and several other parents were the coaches. Usually these teams are sponsored by schools or for-profit enterprises, so this was quite an operation for our household, which was crowded with lego parts, computers, and a four foot by eight foot game table for ten weeks. The team has an unusual background, coming from five schools and speaking about six languages between them, and it was interesting watching them come together to form a team.

F.L.L. (First Lego League) is the middle school league of the FIRST robotics group, which was devised by Dean Kaman (the inventor of the Segway) as a way to make science, technology, engineering and mathematics and as interesting and 'cool' for students as is sports and entertainment. The high school league was featured in the best selling book, The New Cool, by Neal Bascomb. The F.L.L. competition includes three facets: building and programming an autonomous robot to perform missions on a game table, inventing and presenting a device or technology to solve a real world problem, and demonstrating the team’s core values, including teamwork, gracious professionalism and having fun. Over 200,000 kids competed in this years league, whose theme was Senior Solutions -- making seniors more independent, engaged and connected.

Amazingly enough, our team, the Awkward Turtles, was declared Champion at the local tournament held at Notre Dame des Victoires school late last year, beating out fifteen other teams from all over the Bay Area. We scored second in the robot games (just five points behind the leader) and scored high in the other robot design, core values, and project categories. We were considered the best overall team and got an automatic pass-through to the regional tournament to be held early next year.

The project our young engineers conceived involves a 'simple' computer for seniors to use, essentially an iPad type tablet with an accessory wristband, controlled by a voice recognition system and software specifically designed for a senior's skill sets.  The wristband monitors vital health signs, accommodates verbal interface including reminders, allows for emergency signaling with GPS, and syncs with the tablet.

One of the requirements of the competition is that the kids have to interact with real engineers. We've already met with and gotten feedback from an industrial designer, a software engineer from Adobe, a nurse, and a mechanical engineer who works on medical devices, and had a field trip to the Google headquarters.  

There is also a related international competition where the kid's projects are judged for real-life feasibility, called the FLL Global Innovation Award. The three top finalists travel to the DC area to the US Patent Office and are awarded prizes to further develop their design invention with engineers and patent attorneys. Last year the theme involved food safety; one of the winning teams, for instance, devised a product bar code that erased itself when subject to high temperatures for a certain period of time -- a very useful invention to stop sale of spoiled prepackaged products.

If you are interested in looking at the FIRST programs, see http://www.usfirst.org/.

4 year Solar Anniversary!

What shall we do to celebrate our solar PV system's 4th birthday? While cake is always appropriate (usually chocolate in our family), we thought a blog to give you more details of it's performance would be even better.  We'd like to see solar arrays multiplying on everyone's roof after all!

According to Solar City, the company that installed our system and provides a very informative computerized monitoring, after four years, we have officially offset 21,593 pounds of CO2, the equivalent of planting 10.3 mature trees.  That's quite a forest on our little lot in San Francisco!

Here are some intersting graphs from Solar City:

The first shows a typical year, month by month starting in January. In all four years, May has been our best month, generating between 472 and 503 kWh. July and August take a little dip as we do live on the foggy side of town, but as you can see, there is still plenty of electricity being generated during those months as well.

The next graph, shows a beautiful curve of the path of the sun, this particular day being June 30, 2010, which has so far been our record day with 20.41 kWh generated.

Did we mention that we only paid $29 upfront for our system on a lease basis and that we've saved money from Day 1? Well, we did, but it's been a while.  You can see the details of our solar lease on our early blog post from 2008. Boles Solar Lease info

Our monthy cost for the lease is now a whopping $32 (and will rise to $36 over the 15 year term), and our net savings are about $60 per month, not counting the rise in PG&E rates over the past four years. GO SOLAR! Prices of panels have come down considerably in the past few years and there are great deals out there to save you money and save the planet some unnecesary CO2.

References

We view our clients as our key partners in the design process and many become our friends in the process.  It is with great joy and humility that we share these kind words. Bob and Christine Boles

I highly recommend Beausoleil Architects. As a custom home builder in Silicon Valley, I work with a lot of architects. I hired Bob and Christine to design the remodel of my own home. They are that good!

I have worked on a half dozen projects with them over the years, and they have always come through for us with creative ideas and solutions. I have brought them in to rescue design projects several times when the project architect did not provide enough details. I have worked with them on whole house, extremely energy efficient remodels. Every time they have come thru and given us both great design, and great details from which to build.

If you want great design you can be proud of, and plans your builder can actually build from, hire them. They will take care of you and deliver what they promise.

Paul Conrado, The Conrado Company  Saratoga, California

I have known Bob and Christine Boles for many years and they have drawn up plans for multiple residential remodeling projects for our home.

You can read further if you must, but let me just say that I have absolutely no hesitancy in recommending them for any architectural project. Period.

But, okay, if you must know why, here you go . . .

CREATIVITY - The best part about meeting with Bob and Christine is that they think of creative space use like no one else. With each project my wife and I thought, "Damn, that is an awesome idea, we would have NEVER thought about doing that."  Bob and Christine make a great team, able to both dream about the possibilities as well as think through the realistic nature of those dreams.

SUSTAINABILITY - I can't wait until the next project that will utilize their deep commitment to and expertise in green technology. If you are in search of architects who can help you to think through ways to preserve energy, conserve natural resources and basically help save the planet, Bob and Christine are your people!

INTEGRITY - Being one who knows absolutely nothing about the technicalities of the architecture process, I have found working with Bob and Christine to be one of great attention and integrity. They are patient with the questions, thorough in their answers and never did we simply feel like clients who were paying for services. On more than one occasion we needed to scale down a project or get multiple estimates and we always felt like were given a wide breadth from which to choose. Bob and Christine not only care about the project and but they also care about the people involved.  

Seriously folks . . . if you are looking for someone to help you think through the entire process of a remodel, dare I say that you would be foolish NOT to give them a call and explore the possibilities.

Bruce Reyes-Chow and Robin Pugh, San Francisco, California

 

We have worked with Beausoleil Architects in the last 6 years to design eight houses for our family-owned home building business in Silicon Valley. Their designs have obviously been popular with a broad range of people as we have received countless compliments on our houses and have sold the houses quickly and at close to our target prices.  They have always been very responsive to our needs and have helped bring to life our collective visions for the homes. We sincerely value their willingness to work collaboratively with the clients.
They are very resourceful in designing different styles of homes and using different materials. Their knowledge and familiarity with Green Building requirements brings an additional dimension to their design concepts and services they provide. It has truly been a pleasure working with Bob and Christine Boles over the years.

Kathy and Mansour Moussavian, MKM Builders, Inc, Los ALtos Hills, California

I have worked with Bob and Christine on two very different projects.  The first was a tear down and new build.  After listening to my wants and needs, they provided 5 floor plans; we ended up combining two for a 6th floor plan. They  then advised through to completion.  Bob explored unique finish treatments; he was very creative through the whole process.  The second project was a complete interior  renovation of a 100+ yr. old house on the coast. Bob and Christine creatively  improved the flow of the floor plan by moving doorways and removing a wall.  Their attention to detail is unsurpassed.  Bob and Christine are a joy to work with--very knowledgeable, professional, reasonable, calm and timely.  Bob met with the planning and building depts. to effectively resolve any issues.  I have interviewed 10+ architects and I will only use Beausoleil.

Jackie Gachina, Los Altos, California

We are delighted with the way our Redwood Shores home turned out!    Beausoleil Architects did a fantastic job working with us to create a beautiful Mediterranean home on the water. Many realtors and neighbors alike say it is the most beautiful home in Redwood Shores.

Bob and Christine are extremely talented and creative. They work with you to provide fresh ideas and then deliver on the architectural details so your builder can make your home come to life. They are true professional and have the highest integrity. We highly recommend them for your projects.

Rick and Barbara Urrutia, Redwood Shores, California

 

 I couldn't have been more pleased with my experience with Beausoleil Architects.  Bob and Christine are warm, extremely knowledgeable, and very patient.  They listened to my concerns for my interior remodel and drew up multiple solutions in a very short time, exceeding all my expectations.  They both addressed my original ideas and provided creative alternatives for the space, including floor plans, elevations and an initial base budget.  They interfaced with the planning department about permits and regulations to insure feasibility and kept me in the loop as needed.  Highly recommended!

Michele Freed, San Francisco, California

Bob and Christine were attentive to the expectations we outlined for the project and offered great suggestions for improvements or alternatives within those guidelines without contradicting them.  The level of detail and thoroughness of the plans was commended by the City Planning Commission members, as well as by multiple contractors that were preparing bids on the project.  Coordination with other parties (eg. Engineering) has been smooth and advice on construction contract negotiations has been very helpful.  We've been very pleased with the level of professionalism of Beausoleil Architects. 

Robert and Raquel Rebres, San Bruno, California

We have been more than satisfied with Beausoleil's skills and ability to create architectural masterpieces with complete and detailed plans for all our architectural requirements.  We are also pleased with Bob and Christine's help and guidance in solving planning and design issues brought by the planning bodies in a very time efficient and constructive manner.

Rudi and Annette Koppl, Quinta Properties, Woodside, California

 

Hamptons by the Bay

In post-civil war New York and Boston, the nouveau riche and soon-to-be robber barons of industrial America began a tradition of moving out of the blistering heat of summer in the city for cooler climes by the beach. Summer colonies at Newport, Rhode Island, the Hamptons on Long Island, New York, and other waterfront locals began to spring up.  Many of these vacation colonies were close enough by railroad or ferry that the head of the family could commute to them on the weekends, while the family stayed all summer.

The summer ‘cottages’ they built, more appropriately termed mansions, were in a variety of styles. Indeed, it was in this era that it became clear one could select a ‘style’, build something that evoked an era of history, a mood, rather than build what pretty much everyone else was building.  One of the styles developed on Long Island was a more informal, but still grandiose version of classical design – columns, arcades, pediments, classical moldings but clothed in more mundane shingles or lapped siding instead of brick or stone. The houses tended to be less formal than the colonial or Georgian buildings from the past century (with which they shared some elements), but were, at the same time, grander -- a three piece white linen suit with the pants legs rolled up for playing in the surf. 

At roughly the same time, the newly convenient San Francisco peninsula, reachable easily from the city via railroad after 1869, was starting to serve the same purpose for the gold and silver barons of the west coast. Although in this case, it was probably the summer fog they were escaping for the greater heat of the south bay. Country estates were built for this purpose in the new suburbs of San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties, and they often mimicked the designs made fashionable on the east coast.

It is thus appropriate, in this new age of post-industrial dot.com wealth, to bring back that Long Island beach front style for a new mansion in Atherton, Beausoleil’s most recent construction start. This project for Quinta Properties, being built by George Adair, promises to be a fine family home in the country, full of light, close to the ground for ease of indoor-outdoor living, and both comfortable and luxurious.  

 

 

 

Incroyable! Tres Grande Vitesse…

The French Chateau style house which we designed towards the end of 2010 for Quinta Properties (see “New French chateau in the Bay Area” below) was recently completed by builder George Adair (finishwithstyle@sbcglobal.net) after less than a year of construction – very rapid progress for an almost seven thousand square foot house on three levels. After completing the landscaping and other sitework, the house was staged and introduced to the market with a broker’s tour last week. 

The house reportedly remained on the market for quite some time before a buyer was found: a whole two hours! Perhaps the new owners will have to name the house Tres Grande Vitesse,  TGV for short, like the high speed trains of France. 

A French name would be appropriate, after all, as the house is a fairly authentic example of a ‘Chartreuse’, a traditional type of house found in the countryside of Gascony. A chartreuse can be large or small, formal or quaint, but it typically has one story, though often with attic rooms.  This example sits quite compact on its lot, so even with a half acre lot full of mature trees the grounds seem quite spacious. The house also has very high ceilings, and the combination of tall floor to floor heights, steep roofs and gabled walls, chimneys and finials, and a compact plan makes for a very vertical profile.  It’s a very distinct look from the more usual horizontal style seen in the U.S., and this distinctness might have added to its sales appeal

The front yard is also European -- the front door opens directly onto a motor court, with a detached garage flanking the house. The structure of the house, and its amenities, are entirely modern, of course. Truss framed roofs and engineered lumber helped speed the erection. George Adair is a master finish carpenter though, and the quality of the woodwork is evident. We wish the owners many happy years of enjoyment.

Free Energy Upgrades - our date is set, what about yours?

It has taken a few months to iron out the details and schedule the contractor, but in a few weeks Building Efficiency will be starting the energy upgrades to our 1922 home in San Francisco as part of the Energy Upgrade California Program.  We will be getting insulation added to the exterior walls, air sealing at all the doors, windows and fireplace, and a brand new high efficiency gas heater, all for free!

It's not too late to apply to the program as the $4000 from the state program will be available until the end of the year, but for San Francisco residents to qualify for all the funding (an additional $2000-$5000), the construction work needs to be complete by June 30, 2012.  For more information on the program, including a list of qualified contractors, take a look at the wonderful website the San Francisco Department of the Environment has set up.  You can even take a quick survey  online to see if your home is a good candidate before officially embarking on the process.