Speaker: It may be hard to believe, but the average monthly electric bill for this 4,300 square foot, French country style home is just $150, and the benefits don't stop there. This exceptional house was designed to be super-low maintenance and easy on the environment in almost every way imaginable. And the materials and construction methods they use could bring the same benefits to your home, too. Katherine Homan and her husband had this house built as their retirement home.
Katherine Homan: We knew, we were going to be reaching years when our health was going to be getting frail. We wanted the house to help us stay healthy, and so we wanted a house that was free of toxic emissions, of gases that come out off like the paints and the materials that you use to build the house.
Speaker: Enviro Custom Homes built the house. Richard Harwood co-founded the company and Cathy Williams is the current owner and operator.
Cathy Williams: The owners were great, because they came to us with their clear picture of what they wanted, which was a healthy house. They wanted energy-efficiency, environmentally-friendly and they needed the house to be low-maintenance.
Speaker: Enviro Custom Homes was able to address the toxic emissions issue by carefully selecting the building materials.
Cathy Williams: When you build a new house, you usually have issues about needing to air out. It takes about a year for all the fumes to burn off in the home. In this type of building, using the low VOC paints, we have carpets that are recycled, which do not out-gas and also the flooring that you will notice throughout the house is concrete decora, and that is actually done to the slab directly and that does not cause any out-gassing either.
Speaker: This house produces much of its own electricity by tapping into the energy of the sun. This array of low profile photo voltaic panels, is located on the south side of the house, which is not visible from the street. This array does most of the work. A separate raised solar panel is used to generate electricity for heating water.
Speaker: These peel-and-stick photo voltaic panels are the key to the whole system. Very simple to install, you just peel the backing off, of it and then stick it in place right on the roof. Now, they each have wires coming out of them. They go into a box inside the attic. Than that box has one wire coming down over here to our conversion center.
Now, this takes that power from DC and converts it into AC at 110 volts. It comes right across and into our breaker box. Now, if we have any excess power that we are not using at the time, to run the house, we can just send it to some batteries and store it for later or we can actually send it back to the power company and get a credit on our utility bill each month.
Michael Holigan: The home's electric bills are also low because the heating and air conditioning is a geothermal system that uses the constant temperature of the earth to help cool the house in the summer and heat it in the winter.
Speaker: There's a unit upstairs that takes the heat out of the air, transfers it to water then actually comes down through this pipe. That pipe goes 250 feet down into the ground and then loops it back up. As the water goes down through that pipe and back, the temperature of the earth actually cools the water down. The unit goes back into the upstairs unit, air is blown across it and it cools the interior of the house. It does just the opposite in the winter time and it does it all at a fraction of a cost of running a typical heating an air conditioning unit.
Michael Holigan: The home owners save on their water bill by collecting the rain water that comes off the roof. The water from the metal roof drains into a 550 gallon above ground, collection tank. They also save because the home's landscaping was done in a style called xeriscaping. The xeriscaping method uses plants that require very little water.
Keeping with energy efficiency, they went with a SIPs panel for the framing material. Now, a SIP is a Structural Insulated Panel. It looks like a giant ice-cream sandwich, that's actually a piece of oriented strand board, some foam and then another piece of oriented strand board. This one is super thick because this is actually a roof panel, but the walls are built out of the exact same material. And as you can tell, even though the material is square and boxy, the house doesn't have to be. It's got a really nice profile and anything that your architect designs you can build out of a SIPs panel.
Now, these are so energy efficient we have a 4,300 square foot house here that's only using a three and a half ton air conditioning unit. Think of the savings there. You save a lot of money on the installation of the unit and using it every month just by framing the house out of a SIPs panel.
Speaker: Radiant barrier foil on the underside of the roof keeps the attic about 30% cooler than attics without this kind of protection. This reduces the strain on the air conditioning system and lowers operating costs. In addition to comfort, the owners pay particular attention to style.
Katherine Homan: After thinking about, having this dream-built house that was healthy and something that was low-maintenance and inexpensive, I said I still want to have a beautiful house. I want to have a house that I feel proud of, and it doesn't look freaky.
Speaker: The builders accomplished that goal inside and outside.
Richard Harwood: The exterior fa?ade is a manufactured material made of cementitious stucco, and it was actually applied by hand to look like stone. The mortar joints were all tooled in and the contractor literally created a painted face to it and then sealed it in order to give it 20-25 years longevity.
Speaker: Enviro Custom Homes also made sure that the home was completely handicapped accessible. The doorways are wide enough to accommodate a wheelchair and the extra-large shower has grab bars.
Katherine Homan: We were able to really get like a French country design into the home. A lot of nice angles and corners in the house. It was a myth that when you build with SIPs, it ends up looking like a box. I think this house dispels that myth.
Speaker: If you would like more information on how to built a stylish, low-maintenance, energy efficient home, visit us on the internet at michaelholigan.com.
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