Milford Home Featured on Energy Tour

Thursday, October 1, 2009

By PATRICIA JILLSON

Correspondent

MILFORD – Rob and Carolyn Halstead recently cut their monthly energy costs in half, despite more than doubling their living space to accommodate a family of eight.

Find out how on Saturday, Oct. 3, when the Halsteads open their newly built 4,600-square-foot Ruonala Road home to the public during the eighth annual Green Buildings Open House tour.

“If it makes sense financially to be energy efficient or green, then we go that route. But where the payback just to go green was not there, we did not do it,” said Rob Halstead. The result: dumping their dream of a log cabin home and substituting it with a unique, highly efficient hybrid home that combines multiple building styles and heating options in a way that supports the Halsteads’ home-schooling lifestyle and even saves money.

The GBOH tour, sponsored by the New England Sustainable Energy Association in conjunction with the American Solar Energy Society, is one of nearly 80 to be offered simultaneously throughout the state. Organizers aim to educate consumers about ways they can help preserve the planet while reducing heating and electricity bills.

Homeowners who visit the Halsteads’ seven-bedroom, 3½-bath house in search of creative ways to harness and reuse energy resources won’t be disappointed. They’ll find a mix of typical and top-shelf strategies designed to meet commonplace needs in a less-than-common way.

Perhaps the most striking attribute of the home is its hybrid nature, which melds conventional wisdom with cutting-edge technology. Traditional stick-built framing surrounds a three-story post-and-beam core that uses the insulating qualities of thick wood. Standard electricity augments the power of a geothermal heating pump that extracts heat from underground water to power both heating and cooling units. Simple dark tiles in the foyer harness heat from sunlight to enhance geothermal radiant floor heating.

“Whether you’re remodeling an existing home or building a new one, (green) technology has come a long way in just a couple of years. There is a package for every budget, but you can certainly build a home that is energy efficient,” said Steven Reddy, a builder who has three houses on the tour, including the Halstead homestead.

GBOH tours will be conducted in homes, schools and businesses scattered throughout New England, the Mid-Atlantic states and Delaware. Last year more than 600 sites attracted more the 15,000 visitors. This year only 465 sites are registered, including 76 in New Hampshire and 114 in Massacusetts. Locally, a home in Hollis and businesses in Nashua and Bedford are on the tour; Peterborough leads the state with five stops on the tour. A full list of stops is available at www.nesea.org.

“Every year the number of people who (tour) has gone up and up because everybody is worried about energy cost fluctuations flirting with $4 per gallon of oil,” said Reddy, an environmentally conscious, or “green,” builder who is a registered member of the NESEA.

During the tours, homeowners and facility managers will showcase the latest in renewable energy technologies, sustainable building materials, and energy efficient appliances.

At the Halstead house, some energy-saving tactics – the use of dual flush toilets, Energy Star rated appliances, compact fluorescent lights, and a first-floor fireplace plus basement pellet stove – will be obvious.

But visitors also will experience the insulating benefits of other technologies and techniques sight unseen.

For example, a Smart R wall insulation system incorporating tight caulking and cellulose blown over foam seals the home so well that drafts are essentially non-existent and air must be re-circulated to maintain acceptable air quality. Also, studs in the home are set eight inches farther apart than the industry standard, reducing by 1/3 the amount of wood used while better insulating walls; insulation blocks drafts better than wood does.

“A lot of people will spend a lot of their time in the basement looking at the geothermal sytem,” Reddy predicts. “It’s very effective – for every one unit of electricity that it burns, it collects four units of heat from the earth,” he said. “You leverage the cost of electricity for heat from the earth, and in return not buying any heating oil or propane.” In the basement two unassuming square boxes house clustered heating pumps that propel water from under the ground to two tanks. Electricity pre-heats water in one tank, designated for domestic uses such as washing and drinking. The other tank holds hot water ready and waiting to radiate heat through hoses installed directly beneath the overhead main floor of the house.

Geothermal heating typically pays for itself within five years, as long as the water is drawn off a pre-existing well, said Reddy. A government study conducted when heating oil cost $2.25/gallon determined that geothermal heating cost about half as much, he said.

Reddy predicts that the Halsteads’ geothermal system will pay for itself within three years rather than five, because the house is so well insulated and designed for energy efficiency. Even the air re-circulation system, Life Breath Ventilation, contains a heat recovery component.

From mid-July through mid-August last summer the Halsteads spent much more on electricity for the 3-bedroom home they were living in than for their under-construction larger one – $245 versus $144. In the old home they lived and ate together, but computers were off because many of the kids were away at summer camps and only a window air conditioner and a single fan cooled the house. In the new house, as power tools worked through the waning days of summer insulation kept outside heat at bay. The few appliances in use didn’t do much to add to electricity usage, thanks in particular to the refrigerator’s Energy Star rating.

“ ‘Build it tight and ventilate it right’ ” is the direction the (building) industry is definitely going,” said Reddy. Some consumers like that direction for cost-saving reasons; others base housing design decisions on strong convictions about global warming and protecting the environment, he said.

Most green technologies – geothermal heat harnessing excluded – add only 5 percent to the cost of a new home, Reddy said.