My wife and I are trying to have our cake and eat it too. A large house that relies largely on renewable energy.

The house is jammed full of both open and closed cell foam insulation.  Every wall and ceiling is filled with this stuff. Even with the house unfinished, it’s had a major effect on keeping the place warm this winter.  This turned out to be a pretty significant investment because of the space involved. But the long-term cost savings will be enormous and result is a lot less heating and cooling being needed.

The Zo-e-shield windows weren’t cheap but even right now in the Winter with the house not done it’s amazing how blatantly more effective they’ve been than the windows we have at our current house.  With our current windows, you touch the glass and it’s very cold. In the new house, they’re cool but not cold. It’s very noticeable.

I agonized about having to clear land to build the house.  There were some black walnut trees, cherry trees, cedar, beech and a few tulip trees.

After talking to the builder, I found out that for a small cost, I could have that wood milled and used on the house. Most of that wood isn’t used in any particularly  flashy way but the wine cellar really benefits from the beech, cedar and walnut mix in giving it an old world look.

In the United States, radiated heat is still not the norm. In Europe, for conservation reasons, it’s practically mandated. It saves a lot of energy heating and cooling the house this way.  Moreover, a closed loop geothermal system with 34 bore holes has been put in (it’s not hooked up yet so right now we have to use the backup boiler until the house is done).

To top it all off, is the 20KW solar array. 

Here’s the thing that most people aren’t aware of: conservation is 10X better than production. It’s cheap and easy to save a lot of waste on energy use. It’s expensive to produce energy.

The 20KW solar array won’t be enough to power the house in the Winter (I live in Michigan) but during peek months it should more than cover it.  So for some months during the Summer, I’ll be a net producer of energy.

Now, there’s a lot of other things being done too such as gray water system, water collection gardening, lots of use of natural light, and on and on.  But these are the “big things”. 

Something not quite related to the house but one of the most expensive things I’ve worked on is removing the invasive species from the 13 acres of property. A lot of people get caught up in Co2 emissions or what have you. But in terms of real world damage human are doing every day that we could easily resolve ourselves? Invasive species. They’re wrecking our forests, lakes, rivers, and yards. It’s a serious problem.  What we’ve done on our property is probably on the extreme side – literally paying tens of thousands of dollars to have the native trees fed, invasive vines removed from them, removal of invasive trees, bushes, etc.  But I think it’s pretty important for the overall ecosystem of plants and animals.