Here is a video of my presentation:

Stanford Efficient House Presentation from otto pohl on Vimeo.

You can also download the presentation here: 525 South Black Presentation

Looking back on the process, what was interesting was how many of our points we had before we even started: the location counted for a lot. The key is urban infill and proximity to amenities such as shopping, restaurants, and recreation. We also got a lot of points for the miserly energy usage of the house.

Our weakest point was probably landscaping. Going with a traditional grass lawn in need of irrigation, even if we kept it small, didn’t score us a lot of points. The other place we missed some points was in using recycled products.

Then there were a few places where we didn’t get points for things we thought deserved them. We found both of our bathtubs, for example, on the side of nearby streets, discarded by renovating homeowners. With a little cleaning we thought their 1950s design fit our new house perfectly. The USGBC’s LEED rating system, however, was not impressed.

But overall we’re pretty proud and excited about the LEED Gold status! We’re one of the first (maybe the first?) in Montana, and across the country I think fewer than 1,000 houses have reached LEED Gold certification. Of course, if we want a plaque for the wall, we still have to pay for it.

To be honest, the time lapse video a little disappointing, a shortcoming due to two problems.

First, I had originally mounted the camera on a conveniently-situated telephone pole, which would have been great. Unfortunately, the first thing the contractor did was install the temporary power pole right in front of my camera, obstructing the view. So I moved my camera to the temporary pole, which seemed sturdy but proved to move around a lot over the months. So the time lapse video is a lot more wobbly than I would have liked.

Second, my home-made construction of the camera housing worked great until we had a hard rain storm in April. This soaked the camera and ruined it.

But enough of the negativity: check out the video!

Untitled from otto pohl on Vimeo.

Home energy system overview on the evening of December 31

Some noteworthy facts:

–We used 3,024 KBTUs of energy to heat domestic hot water (DHW); 2,402 of those, or about 80%, came from the solar heating system.

–We used 23,935 KBTUs of energy for home heating; of those, 1,554 (6.5%) came from the sun.

While those percentages are impressive, and in line with what had been predicted, it is also worth taking a momentary detour to examine the financial benefit of the $13,000 (retail) solar hot water system. The system produced 4,518 KBTUs of energy, which is about $45 worth of heat. Of that, the house used only about 3,950 KBTUs (~$39). Would I have saved more than $39 if I had taken the money and invested in more insulation? One thing worth noting is that we used almost 10x the energy to heat the home than we used for solar hot water. This is why perhaps I shouldn’t have oversized the system in an attempt to partially heat the home. Having a small system to heat the DHW makes sense, since hot water usage is fairly constant throughout the year. But oversizing the system in the hopes of providing partial space heating, as I did, might not make as much sense since you need another order of magnitude of energy, and the system produces the least just when you need the energy the most (ie on cold dark winter days).

On the plus side, the house only cost about $240 to heat so far this winter. Not bad!

–The underground air tube seems to be working great. At the moment I took the above snapshot, the outside temperature was -9F, and the tube pre-heated it to 27.7F. I should note that the next temperature meter, located just a foot or two further down the pipe, measured 36.2F, and I’m not sure I can completely justify why the temperature would have risen anther 8 degrees in such a short distance. Yes, that stretch of pipe is in the mechanical room, and therefore at room temperature, but 8 degrees in such a short distance seems odd. But the key is that the outside temperature is well below 0F but the fresh air is above freezing by the time it reaches the HRV. Despite the fact that we had a number of fairly extreme cold snaps, with extended periods of -20F, the HRV electric pre-heater has not had to turn on once.

–The HRV system is working great. The snapshot shows 100% efficiency, which can’t be completely right, but I’ve noticed it around 95% efficient at various times. My system is an Ultimate Air Energy Recovery Ventilator, and from this performance perspective I am very happy. However, the thing is noisy. There is quite a pronounced hum at low volumes, and when it runs at full tilt it sounds like there’s a truck idling outside. (It’s worse in my case because the laundry chute carries the noise from the basement right up to the master bedroom.) I had Mike McPherson come back and connect flexible hosing to the system, in the hopes that it would dampen the sound, but it didn’t help much. I also called the company but apparently they don’t really know what to do either. I could spend hundreds covering the box with sound-deadening material, but at some point I think I would just recommend a different system, even at the cost of a little efficiency. Since I am getting so much benefit from the underground air tube, perhaps we can sacrifice a little efficiency here in the name of quiet.

The system is now reset for the beginning of the year. Let’s see how the rest of the winter shapes up. In the meantime, a big shout-out to Jon Schafer of PowerHouse and Todd Hoitsma of Liquid Solar for installing and maintaining this great monitoring system!

To see the current status of the house, check it out here: http://www.welserver.com/WEL0250/

But momentary frustrations aside the house is looking *beautiful*! Check out these photos (kitchen photos to follow as soon as the final appliance install and countertop unveiling takes place):

Living Room

Living Room--with the man of the house swinging in his cradle

Upstairs Landing - Anne's first act was to unpack the books

Bonfire of The (Master Bath) Vanities

Master Bath - Note laundry chute (door in built-in cabinet)

Master Closet

Everett Takes a Meal Break in the Dining Area

Breakfast Area in Kitchen – Wooden Bench Top is from the tree that was on the lot

I spent a lot of time making sure we lit the curio shelf that's in one side of the wood stove popout

The mechanical room is a tad Rube Goldberg – But oh so worth it. If you have 5 hours I'd be glad to bore you about every detail...

Another living room angle

Anne in the den with all of the cra... I mean wonderful personal belongings we moved over

Here are a few quick pix of our house. We’re hoping to get our Certificate of Occupancy in the next week or so, which is required in order to finalize our house mortgage. And since the best rates are given to people who don’t require a long “lock” time, we went with a 30-day lock mortgage last week. So the clock is ticking! Right now the house is in that final pupa stage where it still looks like a construction site disaster, but where it will suddenly at the end, when the debris is moved out and the carpets rolled out, it will suddenly transform into a finished house. We shall see.

House from Street

Back of House

Entry Hall to Living Room

Living Room to Kitchen

Second Living Room View

Reverse Living Room Angle

Kitchen -- Howdya Like the Backsplash Tile?

More Kitchen

North Kitchen Wall

Upstairs Landing

Master Bath

Jess Armitage and Scott McPhie install cabinet lighting and the cabinetry

You can’t really see the floor underneath the blankets, but since the house is going to be so bright and white, Anne wanted a dark floor. It’s a beautiful coffee color that looks like it will really offset the white walls and cabinetry nicely. I spent more time obsessing about the finish. There are several options: very high VOC finishes like the Swedish Glitsa; oil-based polyurethane finishes; and water-based polyurethane. If you search around online you’ll find various people who swear by one or the other product, but the trend clearly appears to be to the low-VOC water-based finishes. They are now so good that there is hardly a reason to introduce higher-toxicity finishes into the house. Our finish needed only a day of drying before workmen could come back in the house.

Upstairs, the landing/hallway area is starting to take final form. The big north-facing windows that give light to the hallway are painted and uncovered again. The small window to the stairwell we added in the last minute to add light to the hall bathroom is in and painted; and the bookshelf is done and painted.

The windows are in and painted; the bookshelf is painted; we're getting there!

In the bathrooms, the addition of the tile is really starting to make the space look plausibly like a usable space. In the photo below, you can see the tiling on the floor and around the tub, as well as the little built-in cabinet that is built up around the opening for the laundry chute (the opening is covered by paper in the middle of the cabinet).

In the master bath, tiles and cabinetry are giving the room a final look

I forget whether I mentioned this previously, but we found that tub on a curb about two blocks from our house. Someone was gutting their house, apparently, and had no more use for this mid-century tub that was almost in perfect condition. We’ll take it!

Our original plan had it on the staircase wall, like this:

original location of fireplace

and in elevation:

original fireplace location in elevation

It seemed so cool. We imagined a floating, wall-mounted sideboard that happened to have a fireplace in it, very modern and chic. We thought that we’d build a half wall over the staircase so that the stovepipe could run up it. In short, we spent so long planning it and discussing it that we were pretty blindered to reality by the time building happened.

As the wall was being built, we quickly realized that there simply wasn’t room for a big, horizontal, sideboard-type fireplace. I looked around and found a small stove that would fit. I took a photo of the wall and Photoshopped in the stove to scale:

The Rais stove photoshopped in to the staircase wall

We had lost our sideboard idea. We also realized that we liked the light coming down from the upstairs windows, and didn’t want to build the half-wall for the stovepipe. So the pipe would have to run in midair all the way to the upstairs ceiling. Less than ideal. But it still wasn’t enough to make us reconsider.

Our “the emperor has no clothes” moment happened when our friend Beth Cochran stopped by. “Why aren’t you putting the fireplace against that wall?” she asked, with all the guilelessness and innocence of someone who hadn’t spent months obsessing over the house in paper form.

We had our various rehearsed arguments we had thought of over the months when the entire project had been theoretical, but in the end we conceded she had a great point. We looked at it this way and that. I remember at one point thinking that both locations had their pros and cons, and that it probably didn’t make too big a difference in the end.

We played with little pieces of paper that represented the furniture on the living room blueprints to see how we might use the room differently. We realized that our main fear – that the room would become too narrow for the couches if the fireplace was against the wall – was essentially unfounded.

We moved the stove.

Here a few photos of what it looked like as it came to life:

The new fireplace framing

Once the stove was in:

The BIS Nova stove installed

fireplace with taped drywall

The move of the fireplace was interesting not for the facts of the case, but for the process of decision-making. I think it happens more often than you’d care to think: decisions that don’t get made as much as hardened as they accrete sufficient history, time, and effort. At some point there is just so much investment in the path taken that it is incredibly hard to look at the facts anew. Even when the facts are obviously in contradiction with the chosen course.

A few more notes regarding fireplaces that I learned while doing the research:

1. Traditional fireplaces are well-known to be a terrible idea from a heating perspective. When you light an open fireplace, you’re essentially creating a draft that pulls warm air up and out of the house. The fire radiates only a little heat into the room when it is lit, and at all other times the (typically metal, typically ill-fitting) damper allows heat to rise out of the chimney.

2. I was confused by the categories: wood stoves (applies to any wood-burning unit other than a traditional fireplace, but typically means a freestanding cast iron unit), fireplace inserts (designed to be inserted into an existing masonry fireplace), and zero-clearance fireplace insert (does not require an existing masonry fireplace, but still has fairly strict regulations regarding proximity to combustible materials.

3. Wood stove design has been completely overhauled since 1990 due to EPA regulations limiting the amount of smoke to 7.5 grams of smoke per hour. The best get down to about 1 gram/hour and can have efficiencies of 78%. They are typically free-standing pellet stoves. (See the whole EPA list as of Jan 10, 2010). Our zero-clearance insert is rated at at 4.8 gm/hr and 63% efficiency, ratings that are about standard for the style of stove.

4. Some of the higher-rated stoves have catalytic converters, which in theory are a great idea. Rising smoke travels through a honey-combed, catalyst-coated grid. The catalysts reignite the smoke, burning particulates and releasing heat. In practice, apparently, they tend to soot up quite quickly and require regular replacement. The other way of achieving reduced particulates and higher efficiency is to raise the temperature of the fire, which can be done through design and clever use of insulating materials.

5. We installed a hose for dedicated fresh air intake so our stove won’t backdraft.

6. Fans to blow air around the stove and into the room are a great idea. Make sure the model you choose has one.

7. There comes a point when you have to pull the plug on research. We were generally horrified by the curlicued, bad-bed-and-breakfast design of most wood stoves, and really liked the simple, clean lines of the BIS Nova. We also wanted a wood stove, not one built for pellets. And we’re not going to use this for primary heating; to a significant degree our stove will be for the ambiance.