Good morning. I've got a lot on my plate today, leading to a meeting this afternoon with a group of fellow travelers in the adobe world. Yes, a secret society of adoberos, who meet on occasion. This time we'll be discussing strategies to get adobe the proper recognition it deserves for its energy efficiencies, given that the newly adopted energy efficiency code seems to ignore adobe's qualities.
The adoberos have been working with State building officials for decades, ever since we helped the State write the first-in-the-nation "Adobe Code" defining proper specifications for the use of adobe. New Mexico is pretty progressive in allowing unconventional building technologies, and fully recognize the deep cultural heritage of adobe in NM tradition.
Follow me over the fold for more...
The problem now is how to address the "efficiency rating" of an adobe house in the context of a National Energy Code that doesn't recognize adobe ("unburnt clay masonry units") in assigning efficiency values for tax credits to encourage higher energy efficiency in new construction.
I don't have time right now to go into all the arcane details or even line up some links to follow, but assembled today at one of the two major adobe-brick factories in the southwest will be literally hundreds of years of collective hands-on experience in both technique and research, including the head of the adobe program at Northern New Mexico Community College at El Rito. Yes, you can get a degree in adobe here in NM.
There will be attendees from California and Arizona, and perhaps even that fellow from Mongolia who is working with rammed earth combined with bamboo. Yeah, we gab all the time in an "adobe" mail group that attracts world-wide participation.
By dint of over 35 years of adobe handling, I have become one of the "old men" of the industry, working at would be a "post-doctoral" level of knowledge, and I'll do what I can to help out.
But now it's showtime...