Energy Efficient on the Olympic Peninsula
Built by Michael C.
Glaviano, PhD
Sometimes you
stumble on a place, and you just have to live there. Sometimes you have a life-long goal that requires real
effort to realize. We encountered
both when we found a tiny town in the Far Pacific Northwest and decided to
build an energy efficient, “solar home” there.
Being an
engineer, I like lists. My wife
indulges me in this. For years we
maintained a list of weighted criteria to help us find a great place to live. Each year, we’d do research on the
Internet and read about several places. For our summer vacation, we’d go to the place that looked best. Eventually we found a spot ‘way up on
the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State.
How far up? We’re talking just under 42° north latitude, here. Natural
beauty abounds. Deer romp and
generally do deer stuff all over the place. Ditto crows and the occasional coyote. Orcas ply the waters of Puget
Sound. Fog horns at night. Giant container ships sail past on their
way to the Port of Seattle. You
get the picture.
We’re both
telecommuters. We looked for a
small house that had the right layout for two home offices but couldn’t find
much. We did, however, find a nice
lot right in town. Great southern
exposure. Walk to uptown or to the
Sound. City utilities in
place. We decided we’d take some
time and have a house built. We
were living in northern Colorado at the time, so we made many trips out here to
interview contractors and go over plans with the architect. We knew that long-distance managing a
project of this complexity and importance would be a real challenge.
Now we aren’t
into ostentatious stuff at all. We
wanted modest, homey, and energy efficient. After all, we’re thinking that we’d like to retire here someday,
and it is just possible that energy prices could (ahem) continue to increase
over the next couple of decades.
We found that
lots of people heat with wood here. Natural gas isn’t even an option on the Peninsula. Some people use propane. Others go with all electric homes. The climate is not too
challenging. Winters are pretty
mild (a low of 20°F is a good design parameter). Summer highs in the high 80’s are cause
for lots of complaining and discussion at the local coffee shop.
What We Did
As far as our
energy strategy goes, we decided on the following:
1) Use the south facing property to build a
passive solar design. Put in lots
of south facing glass. Overheating
is not a problem in spring and fall, and we want to grab as much solar energy
as we can on most days year ‘round. Put very little glass on the north. Shade the windows on the west side of the house with a
garage and some trees.
2) Insulate, insulate, insulate. We used R-60 BIB (Blow In Bats) in the
attic. R-30 in the walls. 0.29 U factor windows. Even the slab in
the basement is insulated.
3) For HVAC, we chose a
closed-loop-ground-source heat pump. Basically, if you dig down about 6 feet, the soil temperature is always
about 50°F. If you run
heat exchange pipes at that depth, you can pull heat out of the ground all
winter long. It’s just about as efficient as it gets.
4) We decided that the ultra-tight building
envelope merited some action to keep the indoor air quality high without
opening a bunch of windows in January. To accomplish this, we added a “Heat Recovery Ventilator” (HRV) to the
HVAC system. This is basically an
air-to-air heat exchanger that uses waste heat from stale air to pre-heat fresh
air drawn from outdoors. Although
an HRV uses some energy, it claims to be over 90% efficient.
5) Since my office is in the basement, we
augmented the heat pump system with some radiant floor heat.
6) We have a small, efficient wood stove in
the main living area of the main floor. On days with no appreciable sun, we can warm the main living area very
nicely with this stove.
7) Energy Star appliances.
8) Simple, inexpensive things count
too. We used compact fluorescents
in nearly every light fixture in the house. Since CF's are nearly six times more efficient than incandescent
bulbs, this really adds up.
9) Switched plug strips all over the house
to cut down on phantom loads. Since we were building the house from scratch we even put a switched
circuit in the main living space so that we could power down the entire
entertainment system. No energy
leaks there.
10) Finally, we put a 4 kW PV array on the
south facing roof. Washington
State has a very good renewable energy incentive program. While it’s a big ticket item, putting
in a good size array takes a big bite out of energy bills in an all-electric
house.
Performance
So Far
We moved into
our new place on the last weekend of March. Much of April was consumed with unpacking and setting up our
household. I started careful
tracking of energy use and energy generation in May. May was still very much a “heating month” on the north end
of the Peninsula this year. Here
are our results to date:
Month |
Total Energy Consumed (kW-hr) |
Energy Produced via PV Array (percent) |
May |
1406.7 |
35.2% |
June |
1103.5 |
44.1% |
July |
1242.3 |
49.2% |
August started
out hot and sunny and we had several days in which we generated more than half
of our total energy usage with the array. Of course the weather here can get overcast and rainy, so we can't
predict how the month will turn out. Old timers say that good weather often stays with us well into
November. I hope they're right.
What We Have
Learned
We are satisfied
with the overall energy performance of our home. We've learned quite a bit in the process of building
it. Probably our biggest learning
was that remote house building turned out to be even harder than we
anticipated. The general
contractor we chose was good with telephone and email and was very
responsive. He also was enthusiastic
about the project from start to finish and was basically great to work
with. Had it been otherwise, the
experience may have been somewhere between a nightmare and a disaster.
Do we plan to
expand the energy systems?
To answer this,
we need to consider energy costs in the context of other operating
expenses. Last month (July) our
total energy bill was less than $30. That's only about 25% of our monthly telecommunications expenses and
less than half of our water bill, so from a purely financial perspective, I
don't think we could justify another large expenditure for energy systems at this
time. We might want to look at
rain catchment first. It is pretty
low-tech and will probably have a fast payback. My wife is, after-all, an avid gardener. Reducing our water usage has a stronger
return on investment than other, more expensive energy system enhancements.
I think our
biggest controllable energy expense is probably hot water. Here, we were at the mercy of local
subcontractors who had limited experience with unusual systems. If we had a do-over, I might insist on
a simpler hot water system with a solar thermal assist. If we do decide to expand our energy
system, this would be the top priority.
Would we do
the whole thing over again?
The tight
building envelope is a no-brainer. So is the passive solar design. We have both noticed many cool days when our house is cozy and warm with
the heat turned off while some of our neighbors are obviously feeding their
wood stoves as fast as they can.
The
closed-loop-ground-source heat pump system was expensive, and in retrospect I
wonder if we truly needed it. If
the HVAC subcontractor had been willing to acknowledge that the house was
designed to need little heat and then install a somewhat smaller system, the
net expense difference would have been very small. As it turned out, the HVAC subcontractor insisted on his
standard formulas for figuring out system size. This is a common problem with high efficiency houses. If we
had been local and able to have face-to-face meetings, we might have been able
to influence the subcontractor better. On the other hand, the system works beautifully, so I can’t say that
this is a mistake either.
The PV system
has performed flawlessly and exactly as predicted for this locale. There were no surprises and the
contractor was excellent. I'd do that
again in a minute. Doubling the
array size to 8kW would get us near the break-even point in energy usage.
Conclusion
Our house is
warm, light, and cheerful. It's
also quiet, efficient, and modern. Overall, we enjoyed the process of building our home and are happy with
the result. The house itself gives
us hours of fun activities as we measure, design, plan, and build. We realize of course that not everyone
has the time, energy or desire to interact with a home in this way, but we
enjoy it a great deal.
What's
next? Our next projects focus on
serious gardening to produce fresh, healthy food. Taking transportation costs out of the food supply is one
more energy saver. Fresh, tasty
produce is just plain good. We
have already added a greenhouse. This will enable us to start plants next January or February and may
allow us to grow fresh tomatoes in the winter. I can hardly wait until I finish cultivating our main garden
area...
