Home & garden show highlights
earth-friendly efforts

ABOVE: Chris Chavez talks about a Structural Insulated Panel during a presentation on Saturday at the Gallup Home and Garden Show at the University of New Mexico Gallup. BELOW: Pete Artis and Brian Peifer look at an adobe brick just pulled from the machine that makes them during the Gallup. Peifer, who gave a demonstration on making home bio-diesel, filled the machine with bio-diesel he recently made. [photos by Brian Leddy / Independent]By Karen Francis
Staff writer

GALLUP — With all the talk about “going green,” the Construction Technology Program and its student club at the University of New Mexico-Gallup are doing their part. On Friday and Saturday, the student club and program hosted the Green Gallup Home and Garden Show at the campus.

This is the first time that the program and students put together a home and garden show because it was needed. The show had a green theme in honor of Earth week activities.

Presentations on Saturday included a passive adobe seminar, making and using biodiesel fuel and Shelter Plus Design: Structural Insulated Panels. A tour of the house on First Street recently completed by UNM-G students and ready for sale was also conducted.

On Friday, some 1,000 people stopped by tables at Gurley Hall set up by such organizations as the seed exchange group, Holiday Nursery, Gallup Solar, Shelter Plus Design, Habitat for Humanity and Grow Away Hunger.

“It’s designed for the community by the community,” said Rick Krouth, an instructor in general construction technology. “It gives people access to contractors, vendors. People are sharing information.”

With the “green theme,” Krouth said that the home and garden show emphasized leaving less of a carbon footprint on the environment, making a better way to live and learning about the resources that are available to do so.

“It’s a positive thing — a lot of people networking,” he added

While the idea for a home and garden show came up years ago, the student club and the program decided to finally put it together this year, and the results were beyond expectations.

“We had a killer turnout,” Chris Chavez, another instructor, said. Chavez presented on the structural insulated panels on Saturday afternoon.

“It turned out better than I anticipated,” Krouth said.

While the turnout was good, Krouth said he would like to see more general contractors involved, noting that people often don’t know where to go for resources or even what’s available.

He added that people tend to look for contractors in the summer months when the contractors are swamped with work. This time of year is a good time to seek out contractors though, because their workload is not as heavy as during the summer months, he said.

Krouth added that with the growth of population, contractors and home builders must now think about what is sustainable.

For that reason, the UNM-G Construction Technology program will be starting classes in “green” building in the fall 2008 semester, Chavez said.

“Most materials aren’t sustainable so we have to figure out alternative ways to build. We need to teach our students what the future of construction is,” he said.

A broad range of topics and courses on construction technology are offered at UNM-G, the instructors said.
One class that will be offered this summer is on the basics of design and construction of solar adobe. Krouth gave a lecture and demonstration on adobe or compressed earth blocks project on Saturday to an audience of about 20.

Adobe is a sand and clay mixture which can be made from the dirt on the ground. Using adobe is a more environmentally-friendly way to build homes in this area. Even the fuel used to run the equipment can be bio-diesel fuel, Krouth said.

“It’s going green. Concrete makes a big carbon footprint,” Krouth said.

He added that buildings and homes can be designed to catch the sunlight in winter and shade in the summer.

About a dozen people showed up for the biodiesel presentation by A&E Tractor.