Barry Rehfeld - Home Sweet Zero Energy Home

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR

Home Sweet Zero Energy Home

I attempted my first net zero energy home in 1995 and quickly learned that designing and building a net zero energy home requires extensive knowledge of energy efficiency, residential renewable energy, and green building. This book provides an excellent overview of these and other vital topics that will help readers make choices to reach their goals of building the greenest, healthiest, and most sustainable homes on the planet.

DAN CHIRAS, director of The Evergreen Institute and author of The Homeowners Guide to Renewable Energy,Power from the Sun, Power from the Wind, and many more books on residential renewable energy and green building

Net zero and zero carbon buildings are the wave of the future. If you want a house that costs you next to nothing (or nothing) to heat, cool and operate, Rehfelds book is an excellent guide for home owners. From passive solar design, walls, windows, appliances and government grants, Home Sweet Zero Energy Home provides a comprehensive outline of how to build your own zero energy house.

GODO STOYKE, author of The Carbon Charter and The Carbon Busters Home Energy Handbook

Home Sweet Zero Energy Home illustrates the bright future of mainstream home building as it evolves to incorporate the goal of zero net energy use without exceeding the cost barriers which have hindered it in the past. Mr. Rehfeld cuts through the technical jargon and examines the key topics and information necessary to transform this once esoteric building strategy into a new paradigm for our standard way of building.

DAVID A. PILL AIA
Pill - Maharam Architects
Architect/Owner of a Zero Net Energy Home

What it takes to develop
great homes that won't cost
anything to heat, cool or
light up , without going
broke or crazy

BARRY REHFELD

Copyright2011 by Barry Rehfeld.
All rights reserved.

Cover design by Diane McIntosh.
Blueprint background iStock (Nicholas Belton).

Printed in Canada. First printing November 2011.

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-86571-698-8
eISBN: 978-1-55092-492-3

Inquiries regarding requests to reprint all or part of Home Sweet Zero Energy Home should be addressed to New Society Publishers at the address below.

To order directly from the publishers, please call toll-free (North America)
1-800-567-6772, or order online at www.newsociety.com

Any other inquiries can be directed by mail to:

New Society Publishers
P.O. Box 189, Gabriola Island, BC V0R 1X0, Canada
(250) 247-9737

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Rehfeld, Barry J.
Home sweet zero energy home : what it takes to develop great homes that wont cost anything to heat, cool or light up, without going broke or crazy / Barry Rehfeld.

ISBN 978-0-86571-698-8

1. Dwellings--Energy consumption. 2. Dwellings--Energy conservation. 3. Renewable energy sources. 4. Sustainable living. I. Title.

TJ163.5.D86R44 2011 644 C2011-906373-5

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For Elizabeth

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recommended byMother Earth News

T ODAY, MORE THAN EVER BEFORE, our society is seeking ways to live more conscientiously. To help bring you the very best inspiration and information about greener, more sustainable lifestyles, Mother Earth News is recommending select New Society Publishers books to its readers. For more than 30 years, Mother Earth has been North Americas Original Guide to Living Wisely, creating books and magazines for people with a passion for self-reliance and a desire to live in harmony with nature. Across the countryside and in our cities, New Society Publishers and Mother Earth are leading the way to a wiser, more sustainable world. For more information, please visit MotherEarthNews.com

Contents

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Free and Clear

I F YOU WERE driving through the small town of Townsend, Massachusetts, along Highland Street in the spring of 2011, you would have passed the future of building just off the side of the road. You would have passed it, too, because at thirty miles an hour the small new development looks the same as any other small middle-class neighborhood youd see in New England.

The nearly two dozen houses already built and occupied are a typical collection of robin egg blue, canary yellow, warbler gray and cardinal red single- and two-story clapboard homes with steep gabled roofs. Had you taken a right, though, on to Coppersmith Way, the developments single road, youd have seen almost immediately one of the rarest of sights in any single community.

All but one of the homes have solar panels visibly darker and shinier than the gabled roofs they cover on one side. Towards the end of the lane, you would have seen a nearly completed house that on close inspection had some other uncommon features: unusually deep walls and windows that are noticeably wider than most windows.

Townsend, Massachusetts home with solar panels facing south.
Photo Credit: TRANSFORMATIONS, INC.

You might have wondered whether what youd see inside the house or any of the existing homes would be different too, then shrug and think maybe not any more than the little youd seen so far. Youd be right, and thats just the point.

The future of building is not about any radical change in the way houses and other buildings look. It goes deeper, to the way they work, and here the change is nothing short of revolutionary. Put simply, these are houses that will produce as much energy as they use. This balance is summed up in the name they are known by: zero energy or net zero energy homes.

It doesnt stop there, though. The spirit, if not the letter, of zero energy homes requires that the energy produced must be from completely natural renewable energy sources typically solar, but possibly wind too converted into electricity on the property. What isnt used at the time its produced is fed into the local utility grid. Any energy consumed when the sun isnt shining or the wind blowing is also electricity, supplied to the home by traditional fossil fuel-burning power plants. Eventually, however, those plants will be replaced by solar, wind, geothermal and ocean wave power facilities as they have been in a few communities to some degree today when coal, oil, propane and natural gas supplies start running out or become more expensive than the renewable sources. (And nuclear facilities become untenable.)