how green is your roof? - solar panel garden lights

It's a bird and an airplane. . .
No, it's a vegetable field.
The garden with high sky is very good. It feels green.
Katherine Kiziros reports.
This is a rare marriage of realism and fantasy.
As our cities become more and more dense, bigger and hotter, why not plant gardens on the roof?
Green roofs are not new in Australia, but most of those that do exist are rare or elite preserves: lawns on the roof of the Canberra Parliament Building, for example, or roofs. -
Top Garden of Luxury Apartment Building（
The freshwater area on the south bank has a garden on the tenth floor. .
But the green roof movement has a broader prospect: the complete renovation of space above factories, warehouses, offices, houses and apartment buildings.
According to a 2005 Toronto study, if only 8% of the city's roofs were covered by plants, the city's temperature could be reduced by 2 degrees.
Green roofs offset the heat of cities-
The island effect is caused by several hectares of asphalt and concrete.
At Katherine Wilson's home in Coburg, the flat roof overlooking the backyard is covered with pumpkin vines.
She is a member of the Green Roof Australian Council, founded by her father Jeff Wilson in 2006.
Wilson said that many of her committee members are engineers, architects or landscape designers, and their ideas about green roofs are elaborate and high. -
Technological construction.
For her own green roof, she wanted to see what an unprofessional person could do with her budget.
Before starting, she said, it was important for structural engineers to inspect buildings to make sure they were able to withstand extra weight.
Her pumpkins grow in plastic boxes filled with water cells. -
Using natural resin as raw material, a weight synthetic medium was prepared by mixing organic compost and sheep manure.
Roof plants must be sun-resistant and able to withstand sunlight: in Victoria, juicy plants and sedges work best, although local grass is being tested.
Need waterproof layer（
Plastic cloth in Wilson's case
And a layer of root-resisting agent-
Wilson gave up because she grew up every year. -
And filter layer（
Carpet liner (found in springboard)
Absorbing fertilizer-off.
When plants are built, they also need a water supply system, but then the roof should be its own. -sustaining. (
Wilson climbed the roof once a week and watered it himself. )
It may be complicated, but Wilson says she can install pumpkin boxes without outside help.
She warned that you must be rational and stand on the pillars of the roof.
Her goal is to build an inexpensive and simple system that even renters can try as long as the roof is strong enough.
The total cost is $100.
Wilson's pumpkins are part of a wide-ranging roof garden, in the green roof sense: they are widely planted names that can grow in a medium of about 200 millimetres and leave their own devices once they are established.
The world's largest roof is located at the top of Ford's truck factory in Dearborn, Michigan, covering 4. 1 hectares.
It provides a habitat for bees and produces a honey crop.
Seen from above, the flowering roof looks like a huge sloping aerial grassland.
On the other hand, dense gardens can be up to one.
5 meters deep, heavier;
They can transport trees and human traffic. The 10th-
The Freshwater Plaza Garden next to Crown Casino on the South Bank is an example.
Feytogreen Australia is a company that builds freshwater square gardens. Stewart Taylor, sales and marketing manager of the company, says that if a building is designed to carry a green roof, the cost of a green roof will be lower. (
He thinks the cost of a large green roof is between $140 and $160 per square metre. ).
However, remodeling existing buildings to support green roofs may cost more.
A huge green roof must carry about 80 kilograms of weight per square metre.
Fytogreen can build a large garden on a roof of 25 degrees or less.
Taylor says Fytogreen is the only company in Australia to study plants that are best suited to local roof conditions.
Currently, they are trying to determine which native Tasmanian grass is most likely to survive in a vast roof garden.
For the buildings below, the green roof acts as an insulator, reducing the heating and cooling demand by 8%.
They also act as sound insulation.
Other advantages touted by those who support green roofs include improving the efficiency of solar panels, creating shelters for insects and birds, absorbing rainwater runoff, and growing food in places where people live.
More importantly, they add a beautiful and peculiar quality to the urban landscape.
Imagine looking up and seeing vines and flowers blooming on the skyline of factories, offices and apartments.
The pioneers of green roof technology are Germans, and most local municipalities have set mandatory green roof targets for new building development. (
By 2002, there will be one apartment for every 10 apartments. -
German buildings with roofs have green roofs. )
Green roof companies in Australia are still promoting potential benefits to parliament, architects, designers, builders and developers.
The main disadvantage is television. -up expense -
Although they claim that green roofs last longer, energy conservation will offset costs over time. -
Skills are scarce.
"It's a fantastic use of space," said David Kelly, a lawyer who is the Green Roof Australian Council.
He has been growing fruits and vegetables in polystyrene boxes on galvanized iron roofs, and he can enter through the first window. -
Fitzroy's apartment, watering them with nitrogen-
There is plenty of waste water in the fish tank of the pet shop below.
He does not grow many tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, basil, eggplants, carrots, dragonflies, strawberry guavas, peppers and nectarines and peaches on some dwarf trees.
"That's great," he said.
"There were no pests, no birds, no tomatoes. " (
He estimated that he had harvested more than 100 crops this summer. )
Jeff Wilson, the founder and President of Green Roof Australia, has a long-standing interest in urban agriculture.
He remembers the first green roof he saw 20 years ago over a hospital in Singapore.
Roof gardens provide food and treatment for patients.
Wilson was shocked by the original creative use of dead urban space.
Hospitals and gardens no longer exist, but Wilson's example still exists when he attended a green roof conference in Washington in 2005.
Wilson is interested in a research project at the University of Central Queensland, which focuses on using urban organic waste and worm farms to grow food on roofs.
He believes that this kind of innovation is the future direction of development.
Professor Manfred Kohler, President of the World Green Roof Infrastructure Network.
Tomorrow will be a speech at Melbourne City Hall.
He will meet with other speakers between 8 o'clock. 30am and 12. 30pm.