Is it possible to live comfortably through a frigid Chicago winter in a furnace-free house?
Mary Chris Jaklevic and Roy Schuster and their two children are doing just fine. Their new home blends nicely into a block of century-old Oak Park houses, yet is built with rigorous 21st-century techniques aimed at reducing energy use so low that a hairdryer could heat some buildings.
While not quite achieving that level of efficiency, the 3,800-square-foot Jaklevic-Schuster house is warmed by energy-efficient lighting, household appliances, cooking, the residents’ bodies and the sun. Instead of a conventional furnace, two small-capacity heat pumps provide backup heating and cooling. An electric resistance heater and Italian wood-pellet stove are used when temperatures plummet. Two bathrooms have electric floor heat.
“It’s really all about insulation,” said Jaklevic, who is chronicling living in the house in her blog, fourthickwalls.net.
“What’s the first R in reduce, recycle and reuse?” she asks. By slashing heat loss from the typical built-to-code Midwestern home, there is no need to “put in a lot of new technology which can break down,” she said.
The family is part of a tiny but growing cadre of environmentally concerned homeowners and builders from Massachusetts to Portland, Ore., adopting the rigorous European “passive house” standard.
“We focus on conservation first. It is taken very seriously. We are aiming at energy savings of 90 percent from current code,” said Katrin Klingenberg, executive director and co-founder of the Urbana-based Passive House Institute U.S.
Klingenberg said other American measures of “green” building, such as Energy Star and LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design ratings by the U.S. Green Building Council), take “incremental steps.” The German passive house standard, which despite its name also can be applied to commercial, public and remodeling projects, “identifies where we have to be at a global level” for serious energy savings, she said.
Thirteen homes in the U. S. meet the code’s strict requirements, but 100 more are in the pipeline, Klingenberg said. Many, like the Jaklevic-Schuster residence, will not meet the high standard but are near qualifiers. Most are in the northern U.S., but the principles, with a different mix of insulation, window and air circulation, can be applied in warmer climes where cooling is the major energy issue.
Klingenberg attributes growing interest to “(building professionals) looking for a unique selling point, and it is appealing with rising energy costs” in a slow economy. To date, 240 builders, architects and engineers have taken the nine-day training offered by Klingenberg’s organization, though not all have taken the qualifying exam for passive certification.
On a practical level, passive means building with accepted techniques “kicked up a notch,” said Tom Bassett-Dilley, the Oak Park architect who collaborated on the Jaklevic-Schuster residence with La Fox-based Marko Spiegel, who is an energy consultant and auditor and co-owner of One-Watt Construction, a passive building company, with Allen Drewes.
The key elements at the Jaklevic-Schuster home are not trendy green devices such as a geothermal system or wind turbines but rather extreme insulation, fanatic attention to eliminating the points where warmed interior heat migrates out of the building, superior windows, energy-efficient fixtures and appliances, and a design that maximizes solar heat.
The Oak Park home, which has not dropped below 70 degrees this heating season, has 12-inch thick walls and almost that amount of insulation beneath the basement floor and outside the basement walls. The roof is made of 18-inch panels. Triple-pane glass windows are used throughout. The largest are on the south side to capture the sun’s natural warmth, while smaller north-facing windows minimize heat loss.
The family moved into the four-bedroom home in September, so as yet there is little energy data. But Jaklevic said a preliminary estimate for the annual heating bill is $250, and cooling is expected to cost around $125 a year.
Seven times more air tight than a conventionally built house, there are “no drafts or hot or cold spots,” said Jaklevic. The house is so tightly sealed that it is equipped with a mechanical ventilation system that continuously pulls in fresh air warmed by vented hot air.
The ventilation system is “almost the best part” of living in a passive house, said Judd Blunk, whose furnace-free Batavia home is in its third winter.
“The fresh-air ventilation in most homes almost relies on the mistakes in the house, the unsealed cracks and crevices for air flow and recirculation,” said Blunk. “My home is comfortable because there is a controlled and constant ventilation, which keeps humidity at a constant and comfortable level as well as the temperatures. I’m never sick. If we cook salmon, the smell is gone in 2 1/2 hours. Fresh air flow is managed, controlled. It is very German.”
Cost comparisons are difficult since each project is individual. Proponents estimate a passive home costs 10 to 15 percent more than a conventional one, and there is a debate about whether the U.S. has a ready supply of the building products needed for passive construction.
Passive houses have four times more insulation, but the added cost is offset by eliminating the cost of a furnace, said Spiegel. On the other hand, the high-quality, high-efficiency windows necessary for such projects cost significantly more than top-of-the-line windows at Home Depot. Homeowners pay more for construction, but they benefit immediately from lower utility bills, Spiegel said.
Blunk said his home is 2,700 square feet, and he pays about $45 a month for gas.
“As energy costs go up, I just get smarter and smarter,” he said.
Bassett-Dilley believes passive building could be an immediate, practical way to reduce current and future energy use. It will take years to develop cheap, plentiful fuel alternatives, he said.
“We can afford conservation. We can’t afford renewables at this time,” he said.
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