March 29, 2007

Jonathan Brown is retrofitting for energy efficiency an old farmhouse he estimates was built in the 1850s and is part of teh Thistle Creek development on King Street.

By Lauren Heaton

Over the 13 years that Bob Brecha and Kaethi Seidl have lived in their 1880 wood frame house on Dayton Street, the couple has worked incrementally to bring their home to a higher standard of energy efficiency. They’ve spent a modest amount of money, actually increased their living space and given up little more than conceding to wearing a sweater in the winter and hanging their laundry to dry. And what they’ve gotten are reduced electric and gas bills, added moisture to their home in the winter and the satisfaction of knowing they are doing their little part to help reduce waste and greenhouse gases on the earth.

“It’s a lot about getting in the habit of doing certain things to conserve, and after you make the adjustment, you don’t think about it anymore,” Seidl said. “We’re not that extreme. We just do things that are not painful but that make sense.”

As Brecha sees it, there is a hierarchy of energy-saving measures a homeowner can take to reduce consumption, beginning with the cheapest and most effortless kind, which he calls the lowest hanging fruit. In their house, Brecha and Seidl did the obvious things first, such as turning off the lights and computers when they’re not being used and closing doors to rooms that don’t need to stay heated. They also put a timed gauge on their thermostat which turned the heat down to 55 degrees at night and back up to 65 degrees during the day. They have never used a dryer, preferring to hang their clothes outside or in the upstairs hallway to add moisture to the winter air. They also manage to not use the air conditioning except for the couple of unbearable weeks in the middle of every summer. Instead, they open their house to the cooler night air and close it up every morning when the temperature begins to rise.

The sum total of these small actions, according to Brecha, is that his household uses half the electricity of the average home.

The second set of energy savers involves spending just a little money to replace incandescent lightbulbs with compact fluorescents and caulking gaps around pipes, door jams and other leaks that let in cold air. The third level involves investing a bit more money in a new and more efficient furnace, which helped Seidl and Brecha reduce their winter-time natural gas bills down to $200 per month to heat 1,900 square feet. The couple also reinsulated their attic and for $700 blew cellulose insulation into all of the outside walls of the house.

Finally, if homeowners want to get more serious about conserving, they can do as Brecha and Seidl did, which was to install two large solar panels on the roof (purchased used for about $2,000 through the Trading Post) to help heat the hot water for the house as well as the water running in pipes underneath the floor for radiant heating. The couple also replaced the upstairs windows and purchased storm windows with them for much better winter insulation.

“I can’t see why it’s not a big deal to save and conserve energy here,” said Seidl, whose hometown in Germany receives subsidies from the German government to purchase solar panels that actually produce energy for the town.

Grounding solar energy
The ways a homeowner can choose to retrofit an existing house for greater energy efficiency are limitless, it seems, and Ron Kerans and Robin Hamilton chose to focus on a new geothermal heating and cooling system for their home on Southview Drive.

According to Ron Kerans, a geothermal unit works like an air conditioner in that it uses a compressor and a pair of heat-exchanger coils to “pump heat uphill” from the inside of the house to the outside. However, with an air conditioner, the hot outside air is cooling the outside coil, whereas with a geothermal unit water runs through a 1,000-foot labyrinth of pipes under ground at a nearly constant temperature of 55 degrees and cools the coil back inside the house.

The unit works in the opposite manner to heat the house in the winter time and also to heat all the home’s hot water, Kerans said. The compressor and one coil inside the home’s furnace pull heat out of the water, which is usually considerably warmer than the air. The heat is pumped to the second coil, and the interior air is passed over it to warm it before it is sent through a typical system of forced air vents.

The Kerans installed their unit in November for a total cost of about $14,000 and have been very satisfied with it so far. They would have had to spend approximately $9,000 anyway to replace two older conventional furnace and air conditioning units, Kerans said. By paying a little bit extra up front, they will save on heating and cooling costs and expect to make up the added cost within five to six years, he said. For a less efficient house, Kerans estimates the savings will be even greater and the payoff would happen sooner.

“We are absolutely delighted with the performance, and I like the idea a whole lot of doing something that’s energy efficient from an ecological standpoint,” he said.

Kerans considers the system to be powered largely by solar energy, since the ground is essentially heated by the sun. And he likes to think of using his yard, as he said, “as a giant, cheap solar collector.”

Brown’s retrofitted farmhouse
There is another way to retrofit an older home, if one is committed to a significant remodeling investment, as local builder Jonathan Brown is doing with the first home of the Stickelman-Brown development on King Street, known as Thistle Creek. While the other 21 “energy-efficient homes” in Thistle Creek will be new, the one the developers are currently remodeling is a farmhouse Brown estimates was built sometime in the 1850s and has seen only modest subsequent effort to make it heat efficient.

Brown started the project last month to show what could be done to turn a charming but old home into something that is functional by modern standards and saves energy by future standards. He began by spending $1,500 to add a foot of insulation in the attic and six inches underneath the floor and line that with Tyvek housewrap to keep cold air in the crawl space from leaking upstairs. For a cost of about $8,000, he and Ron Stickelman bought an energy-efficient furnace and took the duct work from the basement and ran it through the open spaces in the house to better contain and conduct heat.

Because the developers, hoping to alleviate the laborious need to maintain a painted house, chose to reside the house with natural red cedar, they saw an opportunity to add insulation value on the outside of the home. By layering foam sheathing on top of the existing wood siding and blowing in cellulose under the new cedar siding, they increased the insulation value of the walls from R20 to about R30, Brown said. Though the insulation cost was nominal, the developers spent $10,000 on high-quality siding.

To increase the home’s passive solar gain, Brown relocated windows from the north side of the house to the south side and then decided to build out the north wall on the inside to add a 12-inch layer of fiberglass insulation and give that wall an insulation of R40, he said. And he hoped that adding low-energy gas-filled windows to all 12 of the existing windows and installing storm doors for a cost of $4,500 would complete a major effort to make the farmhouse on King Street so well-insulated and so heat efficient, that “it’s going to heat for peanuts,” he said.

The three-bedroom, two-story home will also have a wood-burning stove with a heatilation blower to heat the house in addition to an energy-efficient furnace, a deck and porch made from recycled plastic and a double car port, which saves on building materials.

Brown cautioned that retrofitting an existing home would vary from home to home, but this seemed like the best plan for the farmhouse, given his goals to reduce maintenance, keep it attractive and modern and take every opportunity to make it energy-efficient, he said.

“We might be overdoing for today, but we’re not over doing it for two to three years from now,” Brown said. “As energy costs keep rising, this house will have excellent resale value for decades to come.”

Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com