Mill Creek NetZero Home, December 15, 2009, 14:00.

As we approach the winter solstice and the three-month anniversary of our moving in, we continue to learn about our new house. These observations are mostly qualitative, because we don’t have the rest of our solar modules up, and we haven’t set up monitoring equipment yet. We are tentatively planning to remove the door of our wood stove on July 1st, 2010  and then monitor the house’s energy use for a year.  read more... »

Mill Creek NetZero Home Living Room - finally some autumn sunshine!

Have you ever noticed that as soon as you move in to a solar house the sun stops shining? It’s been overcast since the beginning of October here in Edmonton – since just after we moved into the Mill Creek NetZero Home – and the fact that Edmonton has as many hours of sunshine as Miami has seemed hard to believe at times. Finally we have the return of sunny days, and the house is great to be in right now.

So what have we learned so far?

• the transition to living on concrete floors has been painless for us. They are much warmer than I thought they would be, and since we were already in the habit of wearing Crocs around the house, I really haven’t noticed the different floor surface. We have been encouraging guests to put on a pair of Crocs from the box in the front entrance.
• the house makes us much more in tune with the solar cycle. The above picture was taken at around 1 o’clock. I enjoyed sitting in the sun for a while before lunch, but now that I’m using the computer the sunny areas of the house aren’t appropriate anymore. Solar houses should have non-sunny areas, and the occupants must be willing to flex with what is going on outside.

the library area on the second floor is bathed in sunlight on a sunny day – luxurious at times, and to be avoided at others  read more... »

The Mill Creek NetZero Home is substantially completed.

The stucco is finished on the outside. We went with a cement-based stucco because of its looks and durability.

Peter Amerongen built a brick wall behind the wood burner. We used the bricks from the foundation of the house that used to be standing on the property. This wall adds more thermal mass (to capture both solar and wood heat) to the house, as well as a bit of history.

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A Scan Andersen 10 woodstove, installed in the MCNZH.

People commenting on a recent national CBC article about Edmonton’s NetZero Energy houses spent a lot of effort criticizing the fact that the Mill Creek NetZero Home (MCNZH) has a wood burning stove. Besides proving beyond a doubt that the only thing worse than an ignoramus is an anonymous ignoramus, the comments taught me a bit about what messages to send in a sound bite culture such as ours.

For the record, the MCNZH will consume net zero annual energy without taking the wood burning stove into account. Even if we never burn a fire, the house will consume about 8000 kWh of electricity per year and its PV modules will produce about 8000 kWh per year.

Our Scan Andersen 10 wood stove has been installed, and we really love the quality of warmth that it radiates. Our source of wood will be construction waste from renovation projects in the neighbourhood. If we heated only with wood, here’s how big a pile the MCNZH would use annually:

A pile of tightly packed construction waste this size will heat the MCNZH for one year.

The pile is 1500 litres in volume, and it represents two thirds of a cord of wood (the cord would be 30% bigger because of the extra spaces between split firewood). We’ll be able to burn the wood very cleanly, because the stove is surrounded by the thermal mass of the concrete floors and a brick mass wall that will installed behind it. A quick clean hot fire will radiate heat into the mass, which will slowly release it into the house for hours afterwards.

Because the heat from the fire will be displacing electric heat from our baseboard heaters, we will in effect be converting construction waste into electricity. The wood stove should make the MCNZH a net electricity exporter of 2000-2500 kWh per year. Because the construction waste wood would have rotted in a landfill anyway, I consider it to be completely carbon neutral. That’s good for the environment, and wood heat provides a good deal of the resiliency that the times ahead will demand.

(cross posted at raisingspaces.com)

Resiliency

Thomas Homer-Dixon is a smart Canadian with some keen insight on the problems that our species face. His book The Upside of Down is an exploration of the biggest threats facing us and the planet. Two of his top five are the problems that I think will have the most influence on our way of life this century: Peak Oil and Climate Change.  read more... »