Passive solar yields active savings

BY JOHN KOSMER,

contributing writer

In the 21st Century, energy efficiency and sustainability will be the unfolding story of our time for the foreseeable future. Our country has matured since its founding just like a child. In the late 18th century it was in its infancy, thrashing about trying to get a sense of itself. In the 19th century we were like children, exploring our immediate world, wrestling with understanding ourselves and fighting with siblings. In the 20th century we were like teenagers, full or ourselves, invincible without fear and indulging ourselves with our toys and excesses with no regard to the costs or our future. In the 21st century we have become adults. And when you become an adult, you put away childish things.

People are feeling increasing financial pain as energy costs continue to rise. It’s time to call energy (heat, gas and utilities) what it is in relation to our incomes: expensive. And energy will only continue to increasingly outpace our incomes in the 21st century. The wishful-thinking days about energy (that prices will stabilize or actually go down) are over. Those who are able to take a sobering look at the future of energy costs earlier will fare far better than those who hold onto old notions and take longer to acknowledge the obvious.

Let me say at the outset that upgrading an existing home to increase energy conservation currently runs a distant second to the energy savings you can achieve in a new super insulated passive solar home. Understandably, nobody wants to hear that I am dancing around the notion that 20th century homes are obsolete energy sieves that will take Herculean measures to bring up to speed in the 21st century. In fact, that is one of the challenges of our time. Unfortunately, that challenge has not yet been met.

Consumers and those who service them understandably concentrate on the existing housing market in our unfolding energy crisis. Consumers who already own homes want to keep them, and since existing homes represent more than 80% of the home market, that is where the money is in increasing energy efficiency. Trying to increase the energy efficiency of an existing home, however, is like “a series of unfortunate events.” It is not very effective. There is a diminishing return the more corrective actions you take in a home. Good news on the whole for the energy efficiency of a home but less cost effective for each successive improvement. In the end, those improvements do not amount to much in energy savings compared to a new passive solar home.

I fully understand that my position is a hard sell. It’s no longer just the cost of renovation if you buy an existing home compared to buying new to consider but, like Consumer Reports’ auto “True Cost of Ownership” (over the life of the car), there is now the question of how much energy (and its cost) a home is going to consume in our increasingly expensive energy future. Saving $3,000 to $5,000 a year on a new super insulated passive solar home annually in my area (and more as we go into the future) is serious money and can go towards financing part of a mortgage.

When I owned my previous home, I was unaware that trying to save energy in an existing home was just playing in the margins of energy conservation. Building a new passive solar home was a revelation. I have seen the light and it is coming from the sun. Duh.

My new 4,000-sq.-ft. traditional-style passive solar home costs $125.00 a sq. ft. to build and uses 70% less energy to heat than a comparable size Energy Star qualified home. If this same size home were built in a comparably cold but sunnier climate than my Snow Belt area and had normal height ceilings instead of my high ceilings, savings approaching 80% could be easily achieved.

Bruce Brownell (www.aaepassivesolar.com), a nationally recognized solar engineer for more than 30 years (see page 38), tailored the passive solar system that was incorporated in the house I designed. It operates on three principles. First, it acquires heat from the sun through south-facing windows.

Second, it then stores the heat in a one-foot-thick concrete slab thermal storage battery that works on the simple physics of a cup of coffee. Everything wants to even out to the same temperature. Pour hot coffee in a cold mug and within minutes the mug heats up and the coffee cools down until they are the same temperature. That principle is how the slab works. The slab stores excess heat from air passing through ducts embedded in it and then releases the heat slowly, as needed, to stay in equilibrium with the house.

Finally, it keeps the heat from seeping out by using 4" of rigid insulation on the outside of the exterior walls, concrete slab and roof. You can see a comprehensive description of how the home was built and functions at www.SolarHouseProject.com.

Because the elements of my home act as a system, they are not transferable as a whole or in parts to existing homes. There are no existing home solutions or even new traditionally built home solutions that can even approach those savings.

So my first best advice is counter-intuitive in our present collapsed building market and hard-to-get-qualified mortgage environment. Build a new super insulated passive solar home now. Building labor is readily available, making labor costs the most reasonable it is going to be.

Petroleum derivatives as crude passed the $100 a barrel mark have not begun to impact the escalating costs of all manner of building goods and services as it will over the next few years as oil blows past $200 a barrel. Mortgage rates are not high, just hard to qualify for. Qualifications may ease by the time you are ready to build. Rates float anyway. If they drop two points you can refinance.

Yes. Now is the most affordable time you may ever see to build a new home that can successfully position you to hedge against rising energy costs.

John Kosmer has been the Home Improvement Editor of Victorian Homes magazine for more than 23 years.