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Thursday, May 17, 2012
Feature: March 2007
Power Play
Faced with $500 electric bills, these homeowners finally saw the (energy-efficient) light
Story by Joanna Corman
With three children and a need for a home office, Margy and Kurt Gonzales wanted a bigger house. That meant two stories. Yet they were dreading the anticipated increased energy costs. To compensate for higher utility bills, they wanted thermostats on each floor to control the temperature. What they found was even better.
The Gonzaleses bought a solar-powered “Zero-Energy Home” built by Premier Homes in July 2004. At 2,248 square feet, their new house in Sacramento is nearly 50 percent larger than their previous one. Yet their utility bills have fallen. They were told that, ideally, they would generate as much electricity as they use. “To which I said, ‘Yeah, right.’ There’s no way I believed that,” Margy says.
While they haven’t received a bill for zero dollars, they’re saving 10 to 40 percent on their monthly gas bill and 10 to 60 percent on electricity compared to their old house. “I have actually seen our meter run backwards,” Margy says.
Because of global warming, rising energy costs and California’s solar roof initiatives, super energy-efficient homes are gaining the attention of homebuyers and builders. Yet many prospective homebuyers don’t realize these kinds of homes exist. That’s because there aren’t many.
About 1,500 photovoltaic panels have been installed on new homes from 1998 to 2006 in a state that built 200,000 homes during its construction boom two years ago, according to Claudia Chandler, assistant executive director of the California Energy Commission.
Under the California Solar Initiative, which Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law last year, the state has set a goal of producing 400 megawatts of solar power by building new homes within the next 10 years. One megawatt is enough electricity to power 1,000 homes. These homes will be at least 15 percent more energy-efficient than buildings that meet the state’s existing energy-efficiency standards, which are the most stringent in the nation.
Considering that demand for power in California increases annually by about 1,000 megawatts a year, self-generating power will be an important way to reduce the state’s demand for fossil fuel-generated electricity, Chandler says. Residential buildings account for 21 percent of the nation’s gas and electric use, says Lew Pratsch, Zero-Energy Homes project manager for the U.S. Department of Energy, and 16 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions come from home energy use, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Roseville-based Premier Homes, which built the first solar-powered subdivisions in Sacramento and Placer counties, according to John Ralston, vice president of sales and marketing, is building homes designed to use 60 percent less energy than standard homes. They are Zero-Energy Homes, a designation given by the U.S. Department of Energy for homes designed to reduce energy bills by at least 50 percent. Houses in Premier Homes’ solar-driven 95-unit subdivision in Sacramento started at $244,000, and their 49 homes in Roseville started in the high $300,000’s.
Premier Homes reduces energy use by combining energy-efficient technologies with solar roof tiles. The homes include double-pane windows that filter heat and UV rays to help keep the house at a comfortable temperature; tankless water heaters, which heat water on demand and thereby reduce the amount of gas used; long-lasting fluorescent light bulbs; tightly sealed ducts and foam-wrapped insulation.
Betty and Barry Carroll bought a new home in Sacramento two and a half years ago as an investment for their children. During their search, they discovered the Zero-Energy Premier Homes in Sacramento. “I didn’t even know there was such a thing as an energy-efficient home,” Betty says. “If I had known, I probably would have sought those out.”
While they weren’t looking for an energy-efficient home, now the Carrolls can’t imagine living in anything else. “To tell you the truth, I would not want to sell this house and buy a non-energy-efficient home again,” says Betty, whose utility bills have dropped by half to two-thirds despite buying a larger house.
Greg Weisman discovered that, with a tankless water heater installed in his Zero-Energy Home in Roseville, he never runs out of hot water. At Christmas, the Weismans had 17 people staying in their house. Even with three showers, the dishwasher and the washing machine running at the same time, the showers never ran cold.
Paulette Conway is building an environmentally friendly home in Fair Oaks that she calls “greener than Kermit.” She convinced her husband to tear down their outdated house and build an energy-efficient, solar-powered 3,100-square-foot dwelling that will generate most of their power, heat and hot water from the sun. With $400 to $500 monthly summer electric bills, Paulette wanted to save money. She also was concerned about global warming and tired of living in a house that was too cold in the winter and overly hot in the summer.
The Conway house will not only have an outdoor recycled-rubber putting green, a waterless urinal and floor insulation fashioned from recycled blue jeans, it also will combine energy-efficient technologies that architect J. Paul Asaro says he’s never seen used together in an affordable way.
While most homes have 4- or 6-inch-thick walls, the Conways’ exterior walls are a 12-inch-thick combination of polystyrene and concrete. The concrete is much denser than wood, better retaining heat in the winter and repelling it in the summer. The roof’s polystyrene and engineered-wood panels also will act as insulation.
Asaro, who specializes in green design, is hoping to use the Conway house as a prototype for Building America, a U.S. Department of Energy research and development program that created the Zero-Energy Homes program. He hopes to build an identical home next to the Conway home.
His goal is to make energy efficiency affordable to builders. The energy-saving technology he integrated into the Conway home added 10 to 15 percent to the cost of a typical stick-frame house. “When it’s done on a large scale, that’s when we’ll really see the energy savings,” says Asaro, president and founder of the Fair Oaks-based Asaro Architectural Corp. Asaro built his family a similar home a few years ago.
While construction costs are more expensive up front — the Conways are paying $600,000 to build the house — it will pay off in the future, Paulette says. “If you could prepay your utility bills for the next 10 years and prepay them at today’s rate … and then after that you wouldn’t have any more utility bills … most people would jump at that chance.”
