i am impressed with your experiment, and i hope you are able to build these types of structures and make a great living doing it.  you deserve to!

please keep us posted...

the greenest energy is that which you needn't ever produce.

Looking forward to more detail.  

But of course seeing is believing, build one and document it on video like you did with your plugin bike, and maybe the conventional wisdom will shift?  

Let's have a revolution!

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

2800 sq ft is BIG house! In many parts of the world, that's way too big for four people. However, if you feel you need it, I suppose that's good.

Thanks for the article-may it inspire others to work in their own environments to produce something as effective.

"A lot of people were also skeptical about living in a 1,200 square foot home."

That gives me pause.  Really?  I've been on the planet long enough to have watched how much bigger middle-class houses have grown.  

Seems to me that a major aspect of "green" living is to carefully analyze how much space we really need.  When you dig into that question you inevitably surface your basic values.  

You're missing the point.

A solar-hydrogen home can let you live anywhere.

Retrofitting a home in the dying inner urb is dumb.

Sprawling into rural Eastern Washington and buying some cheap off grid land is now possible.

There's plenty of sunshine and nearly by towns all have cappucino.

Set up solar-hydrogen, you power your SUV and home for free.   No roads?  Well that's why they call it an "off road vehicle".

Water?  Power a reverse Osmosis system and capture back the by product H20 from consuming hydrogen.

As long as a Clearwire Wimax tower is nearby for Internet access what else do you need?

The new America is a sprawling super suburb without the urb...and without the traditional grid...let's say in the language of s+s (software plus services) that we will be loosely coupled to the grid where before we were tightly coupled.

"(hint)"

I'll guess how it works yet, hehey.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

what is the environmental impact of the obtaining the raw materials and building the house? these are important albeit not as important as the perpetual impact of the house.

also, when do you plan on posting more details about the house?

With mass storage?  That way in winter, low solar says, ground tempered air at 55% can be circulated in the envelope.  That lowers the winter heat loss from a super insulated inner wall to match the waste heat from the electrical load, appliances and so forth?

But how can you heat domestic hot water in winter with virtually no solar?  Use a ground source heat pump.

But how do you store enough solar electricity for the winter months?  You don't.  You can use net metering, selling excess power to the power company, mainly over summer months, to offset the grid electricity you need in winter.

How close is that guess bio-d?  I'll take your silence as a confirmation, hehey.

Come on everybody, start guessing.

Lest anyone claim this puts the hurt on the power company, which gets nearly zero revenue, but has to power the winter months peak load.  Wind power peaks in winter, so if every home had this design the power company could install utility scale wind, a cheap way to meet the winter peak.

The power company would still get paid for managing the grid.  With a fair profit determined by the utility commision.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

How about a geothermal heat pump or something similar instead of solar? If there's so little sunlight in Seattle PV is a very inefficient way of producing energy/heating.

Zumbi also highlights a major point: How much energy is needed to produce the materials for building the house? It's nice that stone and steel are recyclable but a lot more energy is expended on production than for instance on production of wood. And what about the insulation materials? Chemically derived insulation products take huge amounts of energy when compared to hemp or cellulose.

I have an article here somewhere from a passive house magazine with info on exactly this kind of thing. If I can find it I'll post it here.

Their mirror finishes also degrade fairly rapidly.  Old solar concentrator glass mirrors not laminated have endured 30 years outdoors.  The new glass-silver-palladium-paint mirrors are expected to last 50 years.

I have been asked to make a community of 15,000 carbon free, plus future growth.  The solar heat portion, most of the energy, will cost $60MM, and employs seasonal heat storage.  This is much easier than making one house carbon free. Off-site solar power may about double the cost.  Carbon free must include everybody, including existing buildings or we are all cooked.

Think outside one box.

"On Leasowe Road (in Wallasey, Cheshire, England) is the first building in the world to be heated entirely by solar energy. At 53.4°N, it is also the most northerly. The "Solar Campus" was formerly St George's Secondary School, and was built in 1961 to the designs of Emslie Morgan, the Assistant Borough Architect, who spent a lifetime looking into ways of harnessing the sun's rays. His research resulted in a matchbox like building with, on one side a drab, windowless façade and on the other 10,000 square feet (1,000 m²) of glass, a giant solar wall. The wall is built of glass leaves two feet apart. These draw the ultra violet rays from sunshine and bounce them around the walls of the classrooms. The walls become warm and heat the air. Hardly any warmth escapes through the school's massively thick roof and walls covered with slabs of plastic foam. On the coldest days it is always 60 degrees Fahrenheit inside, and in summer the school is cooler than its more conventional neighbours, for panels inside the glass wall can be turned to deflect heat or absorb it.

Despite dire predictions about the lighting conditions inside the building, all of which proved unfounded, it succeeded. At the time there was no detailed explanation published about why it worked, but work it did, completely eradicating any need for heating. However, Morgan's design died with him, and it was many years before anyone else considered it of more than curiosity value. Similar designs are now being examined across the world.

In practice, the large convector ducts which direct the warmed air to the colder north side of the building are a major safety hazard, and fire breaks have had to be inserted to reduce or cut off the air flow. The result is that on sunny days the south, glazed side of the building reaches unbearable temperatures in excess of 40°C while for most of the time the unglazed north side never reaches a comfortable temperature nor receives much natural light.

A secondary, small single-pipe heating system was installed to give additional heating on cold winter days with very few hours of sunlight. The system is fuelled by oil, which was cheap at the time. Today, the secondary heating has to be used very often, and is very expensive."

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Steam district heating from the waste heat of purchased natural gas cogeneration is now challenged by the most progressive energy planners.  Some have called it a bridge from coal to solar thermal.  Yet it also blocks the economic introduction of solar heat because the gas power sold to the grid pays for the leftover district heat steam. (More advanced district systems use very hot water rather than steam.)  

Solar can be in the image of supplementing fossil fuels or the system can be 100% not fossil fuels.  And solar power is not needed to pay for solar district heating.  Both can send heat many miles from the source with low loss and positive economics.  

I have attended the international conferences on seasonal heat storage, and on annual efficiencies of very large solar heat arrays.  I have also designed and now live in a most efficient passive solar home near Seattle, so I know the limitations of both systems.  Achieving 80% carbon free isolated new home heat without firewood is doable with cost savings.  The last 20% is expensive in Seattle type climate (ignoring hydroelectric power).  Achieving 100% community low-carbon heat for existing homes is doable with cost savings.  Sweden interconnected nearly all existing homes with a nation-wide hot water district heating system in a 25 year giant retrofit of their society.

And for further digression, solar cogeneration is possible but more complicated.  High-intensity photovoltaic power (HIPV - 500 to 1000 suns) is much more cost effective than solar thermal power. However, those HIPV cells like to be cool (60C) for high performance so there is less district waste heat potential unless additional solar hardware is deployed to boost temperatures to 105C.  Distributed local systems can still supply hot water showers and lots of power. Once several hundred billion dollars of HIPV saturate daytime grids then nighttime solar thermal power, with more opportunity for waste heat, becomes a big niche market for capital growth.

For an 80% carbon free world, both high performance new passive solar homes and solar seasonal-heat-storage district heating of existing homes can do the job with positive cost savings and excellent job growth.

Hurray for the chickens!

Hurray for Seattle!  Shopping bags should be painful! (for customers of a certain income level).

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

Free the chickens!  They look happy.  Kids need to grow up hearing happy chicken music.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

I could barely get beyond the fact that so many people have objected to a 1200 sq. ft. home.  For most of my childhood and all of my adult life my family has never lived in a house larger than 1200 sq. ft.  Sometimes it's cramped; that can be a good thing.  Forces us to consume less.  Want that spacious, peaceful, cavernous feeling?  Own less crap.

I read those books by Shurcliff and found myself disappointed at the lack of tangible data to back up the hype. The one house was only 2-3 years old, the other was being built at the time, and the 3rd was just a design on paper, with no immediate plans to build.

I would have rather the homes be built and data be gathered over several years, with a journal about how things performed, what worked, what didn't work, and what wasn't even used.

Do you know of any follow-up writings about these designs that illustrate they stood the test of time?

Do any of the homes still exist?

Last year I tried to get a hold of Mr. Saunders, only to get a reply from his son that both he and Shurcliff died a couple years ago. (2006 I think)

All the patents mentioned in those books are public domain now (patents only last 17 years).

It seems like the only way I will ever find out if those design concepts are sound is to recreate them, which is an expensive proposition to take on if they turn out to be bogus.

Not that I necessarily expect you to have answers to my questions, but maybe someone out there knows more about Saunders' designs?