Article in Mother Earth News

We've been lucky to have lots of great coverage of our house project online and in some printed publications, but we just had our biggest print article yet. The April/May issue of Mother Earth News magazine features a great article about Passive Houses, and includes a short sidebar with photos and an interview about our house. If you look through the rest of the article, you'll also catch a photo of Pippen. (The article is not available online, so you'll have to check it out on newsstands.)

We're pretty excited to be in a such a major national magazine. We think it's great that an article on Passive Houses will reach a wide audience of people interested in green living. Hopefully this will help boost interest in the Passive House concept.

Another heat source

Multiple people who have taken tours of our house have asked us about these plumbing labels in the mechanical room: Kids tub? Kids toilet?

We didn't have kids when we built the house, but we knew that we planned to live here for a really long time and raise a family here. So we built more than we currently need, in preparation for our future children.

That time will soon come, as I'm pregnant and due to have our first child around the beginning of August. Hence the title of this blog post: we will be adding another "heat source" to the home, making it even cozier in winter. :-)

The change reminds me of the things we did to prepare the home for a future family. The most obvious was that we built the house bigger than we needed, to have room for children. We have two extra bedrooms that we weren't really using yet, and one will soon become our nursery. We included a second upstairs bathroom with two sinks and a separate tub, shower and toilet area, for our kids to use (hence the plumbing labels in the mechanical room). When Blake first did the Passive House calculations before we even began the build, he calculated how much energy might be used and required by about four people -- the number that might live in a house this size.

But perhaps equally important to the extra space needs, we wanted to create a healthy environment for our children, even though we didn't have any yet. We wanted the indoor air to not contain a lot of random gases radiating from the materials in the home. This is why we used low-VOC paint on the walls, and things like MDF in the cabinets and closets that is free of urea-formaldehyde, a type of resin that can release toxic vapors. We chose wool carpeting for the upstairs, which is made of natural materials, is very durable and does not release all the same vapors into the air as regular carpet (no new carpet smell). Downstairs, the stain on our wood floors is non-toxic. These features will be great for a new baby crawling around the house.

Additionally, we have better indoor air quality just by having a Passive House, because we control the ventilation of air in and out of the house. The air coming in goes through a filter and only at the place we allow it, which is much better than just having contaminated outside air leak in anywhere throughout the house.

We're really looking forward to raising a family here, and we're also excited and comforted to know that we've built a home that will be healthy and safe for us and our kids.

I love this place

I don't have anything exciting to report this time. I just felt like sharing that I got home from work this evening, after a day of cold temperatures that never climbed out of the 30s, a day where I did not have the heater running at the house, to find that the inside temperature had actually gone up one degree since this morning.

This especially made me feel good after having walked home in a cold wind that made my ears and nose numb.

I love my Passive House. :-)

A new Passive House book

I realized that I never shared some great news from this past fall, which is that our home is one of 10 featured in a new book called "Recreating the American Home: The Passive House Approach." The book features Passive Houses from across the country, and it's interesting to see the details of each project and how they differ depending on their location and climate. The book is available through Low Carbon Productions.

The author later did a follow-up interview with me about what it's been like living in the Passive House. She recently posted the interview on her blog: www.lowcarbonproductions.com/2011/02/interview-sarah-evans-passive-house-owner-salem-oregon.

I would like to clarify something I said in the blog interview. We never turn off our ventilator, ever. What we did at night during the summer was turn off the heat recovery portion. So instead of recovering heat from our inside air before sending it to the outside, we let it ventilate out and let the cooler outside air ventilate in, without any heat exchange.

Winter chills bring (slightly) higher bills

Sarah mentioned yesterday that we have had to run our heater, and we aren't getting nearly as much free hot water from the solar water heater. This has driven up our energy usage a bit. As you can see in the following chart from Portland General Electric, before winter we were averaging around 14 kWh per day.  Virtually all of that energy was for non-heating and -cooling needs (TiVo, computers, stove, lights, etc).

Note that the months in this chart are for the period ending that month.  So the January numbers are for mid-December to mid-January.  Our energy usage clearly spiked as the temperature dropped, but on the whole it's not a huge increase.  During this time last year at the old house, we used 31 kWh per day plus $154.56 in natural gas for the furnace (which was unusually high).  During a one-year period we spent $1,620.76 on energy (electricity + gas) at the old house.  We are on track to save about $950 per year in our Passive House.  And all of this while being more comfortable than we ever were in the old house.  No more cold drafts, no more chilly corners, no more icy floors.

Every home is different, so don't expect these numbers to reflect every Passive House project.  But we are thrilled with the results we have seen.

Passive House in winter

So we took a very long break from the blog, as we have had a very busy last few months. However, I know many people have been wondering how our house is performing during winter, so this is the first of two posts addressing that. I plan to talk about some of the day-to-day living in the house, and Stuart will follow with actual energy data.

Based on how much internal heat we generated during the summer, we anticipated that we would rarely have to use the heater during the winter (if at all). It turned out that we have needed our heater, although much less than we would have in a non-Passive House.

The picture above was taken Nov. 23 -- the day we received our first snow of the season, and also the first time we had to turn on the heater. The fact that we made it almost until Thanksgiving without using our heater once is amazing to me. On this day, we got a light dusting of snow and temperatures around freezing. The cold temperatures continued to stick around off and on throughout most of December. Also, as is typical in the Pacific Northwest winter, it was cloudy almost every day.

Our biggest lesson from this experience was that we did not realize just how much we had relied on solar gain during the summer and fall. During December, we opened our curtains all day to let in sunlight, but there wasn't much sunlight out there, so our house did not warm up much during the day (neither did our solar hot water heater, meaning the electric heating element kicked in). With the continually cold temperatures, it meant that our house would lose a few degrees inside overnight, and wouldn't warm back up during the day. As a result, whenever we would get home from work after 5 p.m., we would need to turn on the heater to warm the place back up a bit.

The very positive news, however, was that we would only turn on the heat between one and four hours a day -- sometimes a bit longer on a weekend when we were at home -- and that was sufficient. This even held true as the temperatures outside stayed in the 30s and 40s. The inside temperature was around the mid-60s -- slightly colder than the levels we had kept during the fall -- but still quite comfortable. In our old home, we had to run the heater constantly and were never warm.

Another interesting test came for us over New Year's. We left town for the holiday and were gone three and a half days. We left the heater off while we were gone. I'm told that temperatures in Salem while we were away were still quite cold, enough for a very light snow (although it didn't stick). When we got back after the holiday, the temperature inside the house was about 55. So after several days with no people inside and no heat on, and freezing temperatures outside, the internal temperature had dropped about 10 degrees. I think that's not bad at all!

As I said, Stuart will follow up with some actual numbers about our energy use. It went up a bit during December and January because of using the heat, but is still very low compared to what we used in our old home. Overall, we're quite excited about how our house has performed during winter.

National Passive House Institute Tour

This weekend, the Passive House Institute U.S. held its annual conference in Portland. They typically hold the national conference in Illinois, where the institute is based, but this year they decided to have it in Portland because so many projects have cropped up in the Northwest. The conference is attended by Passive House consultants and other builders and architects interested in Passive House design, and they come from all over the U.S. (from 40 different states this year) as well as other countries.

Blake made a presentation about our house at the conference, and I'm told it went very well. The conference also included a tour of local Passive House projects, and we were part of the tour. We were told that about 110 people signed up for the tour, and that they would be coming to our house this afternoon in two separate groups.

So I knew there would be a lot of people coming. But I was still surprised when the first group showed up out front in this GIANT charter bus, plus a second smaller shuttle behind it:

About 70 people stepped off these first buses, all of whom were very knowledgeable about Passive House technologies and were eager to learn more about how our project was done and what we had learned from living in a Passive House. It was exciting to see so much interest in our project, and quite different from the other large tours we had done because these guests already knew a lot of the background about how Passive Houses work. Many of them also are regular readers of our blog.

And this was only the first group. As their charter bus was pulling away, a second charter bus came up behind it. The second group was a bit smaller, which made it easier for us to give tours and answer questions.

I was amazed at how diverse the groups were. I mentioned that they came from all over the U.S., but also from other countries -- I met people who are living in Toronto and in Paris, for example. I was really glad to see that so many people are working to spread the Passive House movement, and it gave me hope that the concept will become more popular. We also enjoyed telling them our story, and I think they appreciated hearing from homeowners about how the Passive House actually works on a day-to-day basis.

Thanks so much to the Passive House Institute U.S. for inviting us to be a part of the tour.

It's working!

Since Oregon has a milder climate, the primary energy needs when it comes to heating and cooling our home surround heating during all the long months of cloudy skies, rain, and cold nights. So we were excited to see how our house performed when fall rolled in this month, with temperatures dipping into the mid to upper 30s overnight every day for about a week.

In our old house, this would have made us groan, because the heater would have kicked on, yet we still would have walked around with sweaters, jackets and blankets. In our Passive House, it was a different story.

This picture shows the thermometer we keep inside the house. The top number is the inside temperature. That is approximately the temperature it stayed in the house all week, even with those very cold nights. And we never turned on our heater -- not once! In other words, Passive House is really working! Not only did we not have to use our heat at all, the house stayed a very comfortable temperature that is much warmer than we ever had at the old house. In fact, several times we had to open our windows for awhile in the evenings to cool things down a bit after we did laundry or cooked dinner.

I'm quite amazed with how great things are working, and also excited to continue to monitor what happens when winter hits.

In other news, we added some more plants to the yard over the weekend, including salal, which is a native bush, two more vine maples, and more snowberry and ferns. We also added four blueberry bushes, which was one of the edible plants at the top of my list.

Also, there is a really great blog post on Small Planet Workshop written about our house by Linda Whaley, who visited us back in September. She is a certified Passive House consultant, and she was touring Passive House projects on the West Coast. She was quite taken by Pippen, as you'll see in her blog entry.

Fall planting

We finally turned our attention today to the unfinished part of our new house: the yard. We chose not to plant things when we first moved in because it was during the hot summer, and the plants would have died unless we spent a lot of time watering them (which wastes water and money). Instead, we waited until now, when fall is here, the weather has cooled and we're getting more natural rain.

Our goal is to avoid planting lawn in the front yard, and only plant things that a) edible (vegetables and fruit) or b) native to Oregon, meaning they will grow easily in this climate with little maintenance or added water. We bought a huge number of Oregon natives from Minto Island Growers, a really awesome local organic food farm that also sells native plants.

Our landscaper, Coleman, from Cascade Landscape Management helped us decide what plants to pick and then helped us place them around the yard. Then we did the manual labor of planting them all. What you'll see in these photos is a mix of Oregon grape, sword ferns, coastal strawberry, dogwood, red flowering currant, snowberry, and a few vine maple trees. Right now, they look skimpy, but once they grow and fill in, we'll have a yard that mimics the woodland you see around Oregon. That's the hope, anyway.

We plan to get a few more vine maple trees and ferns for the front yard. We also have a spot set aside for a small vegetable garden, which we will surround with a few blueberry and huckleberry bushes.

In the backyard, we planted lawn for the dog and for our eventual family to play on. We chose a low-maintenance alternative lawn called Rough & Ready from a Portland company, Hobbs & Hopkins. It's a mix of dwarf grass and clover that's supposed to require little mowing or water. The seeds have already sprouted, which looks really cool.

 

Here's Stuart watering some of the Oregon grape plants we placed in the backyard. In the corner, you can see our black composter -- we started composting for the first time a few months ago. We really don't know what we're doing, but we're giving it a shot (with advice and help from friends and manuals). It's nice to have a place to reuse all our food waste.

Our back patio is made from chunks of concrete that we had to tear up in the front when we poured a new sidewalk. We're trying to grow some low mint and creeping thyme plants in the cracks between the concrete pieces.

I never shared a finished photo of our driveway in the front. As you may remember, we went with parking strips instead of a full driveway, which helps make the area more permeable and decreases the amount of water runoff. We poured some nice river rock between the strips.

Finally, we took another big step toward greener living this past week: we sold our second car. Here's where it used to sit:

Since we both work close to home, we typically bike or walk to work (unless the weather is super rainy). We also live near downtown, where we spend most of our free time. We found that we were rarely using our second car, so we decided to sell it. It'll be nice to not have to pay for the extra insurance, but I also like that it's a step toward making ourselves less reliant on automobiles and gas. We can always get another car later if we feel we need one when we have kids, but for now, this works well for us!

What a weekend

The Salem Green + Solar Tour was a huge success. I couldn't keep count of how many people came to our house on Saturday, but we're guessing it was at least 200! I remember looking around the room as the tour began and seeing at least 50 people, and we kept getting a steady stream all day. It was sometimes overwhelming, but we were happy to see so many people interested in green building and our project.

We answered a lot of questions about Passive Houses and shared info about the various aspects of our build process. Many people seemed very curious about the Passive House concept, and they asked some great questions. Thanks to all of you who visited! We appreciated your interest.

Part of the turnout was thanks to a really great article our local paper, the Statesman Journal, did about our house. It was a very nice story that talked about what Passive Houses are and how our project developed. Here's a link: www.statesmanjournal.com/article/20101001/RL/10010316