Efficiency pays off

I'm down to ambiance fires at this point so I feel pretty good about declaring my year end total: 2.7 cords to heat approximately 2400 sq foot house.

Other than the heat given off by light bulbs, people, pet rabbit, etc we have heated exclusively with wood. (Hot water is an on demand propane water heater). Granted we live in a relatively mild climate but I also kept the house quite warm.

Pacific energy fusion stove. I designed my house myself and incorporated aignificant thermal mass which really helps keep things comfortable- we went away for a week and the hiuse had dropped only to 64 by the time we got back. I don't have to worry about getting cold overnight when the stove starts winding down.

Heated most of last year with some truly wretched half punked tree of heaven that I stashed when I was clearing for he house build. Started hoarding last year about this time. Knowing that I would be burning relatively soon, I started off with quick to dry species. I started the year burning some old cedar fence posts that I scrounged from a pile in the yard (there was a big pile and the top half or so was good enough for firewood) nth at gave me an extra month of drying time for the rest. Moved on to some pine and finished off the year with tulip poplar and sweet gum. So the 2.7 cords was by no means high grade stuff.

It has been my dream since 1978 to have a self sufficient house. I've taken a big step towards thst goal by being able to stay warm using the trees from my own land. I have about 20 acres of forest so I should be able to harvest firewood sustainably for as long as I am able.

Thanks to FHC I know to work ahead and Im slowly but surely getting ahead so next year is looking even better than this year.

 

Math error: 2.7 cords. Still not too bad.

My son' ducks just started laying so we had duck eggs for dinner to tonight. Mushroom logs hooked me up as well. Still have some venison in the freezer (they are like varmints around here) and the catfish I stocked in the pond a couple years ago are huge. Dropped some old drain pipe and stuff in there to create breeding structure so I'm hoping to get a self sustaining population. Every so often I feed them so I can see how they look and it looks like we've got several size classes. I'm hopeful they are breeding. I'll have my son start fishing some out this year.


To top it all off, a breeding pair of geese have moved in and built a nest. I'm hoping they will act as decoys for the flocks that fly over all winter long. If I'm lucky it will be goose for Christmas.

Life is good!!

 

Good for you Bret
Where do you live?

 

That's an impressively low amount of wood to be heating solely with firewood for an entire season. I have no doubt it's due to the design and efficiency of your home. Congrats!

I can't say the same about my place. It's insulated well, but I get very little solar help from the sun. Good for my AC electric bills in the summer, but I need more heat during the spring and fall.

 

Same here, that's ok with me. My wood is free and electric isn't.

 

I'm in North Carolina so fairly mild winters but still cold at night and often cold in the daytime. I get essentially no solar heating because my porches are so deep. I was more interested in keeping sun out than gaining heat in winter. I could have designed it for some solar gain in winter; perhaps that was a mistake but not a huge one. I was able to play the day / night temperature spread this fall by opening up at night and closing during the day. Kept it in the low to mid 70s without heat or air conditioning for all of October and November. Did need to run a dehumidifier.

Exterior walls are built with the thermomass system which is a sandwich if 4 inches of concrete on either side of 6 inches of polyurethane. It seemed that every step was an uphill battle. The contractors wanted to cut the form tie wires off at the surface; I insisted they be sleeved and pulled to avoid thermal bridges. Roof/ ceiling is 12 inch polystyrene metal SIPs that rest only on the inner concrete so that there is continuity of the insulation envelope. The contractors wanted to do everything the easy way but I insisted that it be done what I thought was the right way. Looks like it worked!

 

Sounds great. I have the same goal. I have a long ways to go though, hopefully not 30+ years though. I really want to design my next house, but I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to do that. I have about 2400 sqft too, but poorly insulated, leaky as heck, and I can jam pack my stove full of wood, plus have the pellet stove cranked up, and still by the time I get home from work and the stove is out and most of the house is down to 60 or upper 50 (coldest days low 50's or less). And it never fully recovers until I have a day off I can feed it 3 or 4 times in a day. I really need to ditch this place.

Good job keeping firm to doing everything the right way!

 

I'm heating 1000sq.ft. in northern Illinois; and I've burned probably 2.75 cord. Was burning much higher BTU wood this Winter vs. last. I can count the number of times the furnace kicked on with just my fingers and toes for this Winter. I'm not counting the long weekend I went to Missouri snow goose hunting in that though, because I wasn't here, and I had the furnace set a 55*F while I was gone.

I have good attic insulation, decent windows....................but if the wall insulation in my house is anything like what wasn't there when I gutted my master bath for a remodel.....................I don't have much there. Some of the "bays" between jack studs etc. had no insulation at all in them when I gutted the bathroom. House built in 1975 also!!!!

 

I hear you on the poor wall insulation. My previous house despite upgrading all the windows and retrofitting insulation to the walls still went through spring and fall needing heat at night and A/C by day to stay comfortable. It is amazing how much better performance one can achieve today than what was completely accepted even 40 years ago. I suppose my son will heat with birthday candles when he grows up and builds a house.

 

Is that the wall that they build there on site and then flip upright with cranes? How did you finish the inside if you don't mind me asking. Do you have insulation in the foundation floor? Curious of the basic layout also, 2 story over basement or? I hope to build an energy efficient home sometime so I'm always thinking about how to do it.

 

They do a tip-up but mine was poured in place. It is not insulated under the floor- rather, the wall insulation extends down to the foundation. A better way would have been to extend the insulation out under the porches as wings, like the passive annualized designs do, but the way I did it works well enough. The idea is that by insulating the perimeter, the earth under the floor becomes part (likely the largest part) of the thermal mass. It is a common misconception that the ground is cool at depth. In fact (simplified) it is in equilibrium with the average ambient temperature with some effect from rain- that happens to make the earth at depth in most parts of the US cool. The earth under my house much more affected by the temperature in my house than it is affected by the outside temperature. I can't really calculate the time constants involved, so I don't know if the ground has yet reached equilibrium. Dirt is the inexpensive thermal mass, and dirt under a floor slab is free, so I designed to make use of it. Passive Annualize Heat Storage by Hait has great discussion of this. I did not build a passive annual house, but I did apply some of the principals and it has worked well for me.

My house is very modern inside. The interior perimeter walls are unfinished concrete. Looks great with abstract modern art, but probably wouldn't look good at all with a more traditional interior. Floor is finished concrete- people think it would be cold on the feet; it is not, but if you drop a glass or a plate, it is done for. Interior partition walls are all non-load bearing and simple drywall. The ridge line is held up by a big I-beam and a few metal columns that are concealed in an interior wall. It would be very simple to nail furring strips to the perimeter walls with a ramset gun, and a hoot as well. I did it when I installed slatwall in my changing room. Then finish however one desires over the furring strips. We have painted a few of the interior concrete walls for color and it looks fine in the context of very modern decor. I do enjoy the ease with which I can hang things on my concrete walls- no searching for a stud! I put a crapload of outlets in the perimeter wall because it would be very hard to retrofit them. First thing a lot of people comment on is how many outlets I have. I tell them that I've never been any place where I said "you know what sucks about this place? Way too many outlets". But I'll be dammed if the one place I somehow managed not to install one isn't the exact place I could use one now.

My house is a single story ranch- type design with porches on all sides. We live in a mild climate and unheated porch space is taxed way less than heated space. If you really want to save money in the long run, design for tax efficiency as much or more so than energy efficiency! South porch gets sun in winter and is unscreened (no bugs in winter). North porch is screened for use in warmer weather. Attached carport rather than garage- I still get to my car without getting in the rain, but I'm not as tempted to store stuff in it. (my old house had $20 worth of junk in the garage and $50000 worth of cars in the driveway. I decided I couldn't be trusted with a garage).

I originally intended on a full basement, but the budget didn't allow it. While I was in final design revisions, my mom reached the age where she could not get around well and that inspired me to ensure full handicap access in my house, so in the end I'm cool without having the basement. Master bath is full handicapped accessible, my son's bathroom has a tub. The basic floor plan is a rectangle divided up the middle on the long axis. One half is the "public" area: kitchen, dining, living room. The other half is the "private" area: two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a utility room, and a changing room (big closet). I've arranged the doors so that each bedroom/bathroom is en-suite but added a pocket door between the bedroom and bathroom so that I can close off the bedrooms when we have guests but preserve guest access to the bathrooms. I don't like the idea of paying for a "guest bathroom". If a person is close enough to me to be a guest in my house, he can use my bathroom.

I worked with an architect for a while but that was a total waste of time and more importantly money. I ended up doing all the design work myself and worked with a structural engineer. One of the things I did was have a minimum number of windows. Even the best windows are poor insulation compared to a wall. I do have windows where I want them and have quite a big one in my living room, but for example, I have no windows in my bathrooms, my changing room, or my bedroom. I have a door in my bedroom for fire egress. It opens onto a screened porch on the north side of my house and I open it at night about 4 months of the year to let in the cool night air. Most people would not be happy in a bedroom without windows, but my wife and I both work odd hours and oftentimes need to sleep in the daytime, so we are happy to be able to control the light. When I met with an HVAC engineer to do a heating/AC load analysis of my plan he told me that the house looked like it was designed by an engineer not an architect and it would be very easy to heat and cool. Again, not everyone would be happy with a house like mine, but I really do like form to follow function so I am delighted.

I didn't follow the conventional thinking regarding placement of the wood stove. Most experts advise placing it centrally so that it more or less heats the house equally. That makes a big assumption which is that you want the temperature even throughout the house. I like it a lot warmer than my wife does. With the stove on one end of the public space, the bedrooms are cooler than the living rooms (as we like it) and there is a temperature gradient through the house. Our old house had a propane space heater and we discovered that it was far easier and more comfortable to have a temperature gradient in the house and simply move to a comfortable place than it was to constantly fool with a thermostat.

There was no shortage of hassles in the build process, no doubt made worse by the fact that I was building something the way I wanted, not the way the contractors were used to. Overall, the place is far from perfect, and if there was one lesson I would pass on it is to design with the knowledge that the contractors will make mistakes, so don't design in a way that requires perfect execution. They are used to slapping things together and making it all look good with 4 inch molding. Because of the modern aesthetic, it didn't cause me much trouble.

 

Efficiency at its finest, any pics? Sounds amazing!!

 

I'll post some pics and a floorpan if I can get them off my old computer

 

You can say that again! I've got comparably low taxes here and still they are close every year to what I would spend in propane. And that's money you see little back from, not like you can feel it keeping you warm in the winter. But I've thought the same - wondering how to build a house minimizing the taxes. But there is very little I understand about taxes. And in my house hunting I am often dumbfounded looking at the taxes, like taxes higher on one place than another though every aspect of the houses would lead me to think the opposite (often even in the same township). Is there a way one can get what the taxes are based off from? Like can I call the town and say I want to build a house and request what the tax would be for my proposal?

Bathrooms, yeah houses now-a-days seem to have 3 or 4 bathrooms. I had never even heard of such a thing until I was in college, our has had 1. Dad always said when he did the big addition in the 90's the tax people kept on hi about him adding another bathroom. Like they didn't believe there was still only 1 in the house. I guess up there they charge a lot of tax for bathrooms.

Sounds like you have a well thought out layout. I tend to want to keep to the efficient 'cube shape', 2 story over a basement (would like a finished walkout basement, but that tax thing again...). A much wider and open staircase leading between the levels to allow good heat movement, and a large woodburner on the lower level and maybe a pellet stove on the main (for backup, or supplementary in the real cold). Interesting about the no windows... yeah I work shift so thats a big plus, but I'm the kind of person who has the windows open almost all the time spring through fall. I don't have AC and don't plan on that being in the future house so lots of windows on the west and east sides to create a good breeze is important. But the little buggers are darn expensive, leak heat, and wear out faster than anything else in the house. I don't blame you. Interesting about the uninsulated floor. My basement floor gets dang cold, but it is unheated down there. I do really like the look of stained concrete and was planning on doing just that for a finished lower level.

 

I've found some photos from during construction that should help make it clear how it all works. Will add floor plan when I find it.


View from the east looking west. To the left is the sun room (it is now all glassed in). To the middle is the summer kitchen- out on the porch to keep heat out of the house. The summer kitchen and the back (north) porch are screened. The back corner is the platform on which the pizza oven goes.

 

This is a view from the substructure of the porch roof looking north east and into the house. You can see the outer concrete wall onto which the porch is attached and also the 6 inches of polyurethane. The inner call of the house is also concrete as you can see where the two doors are. The central I-beam that supports the roof is visible as are some of the SIPs that are the roof (and ceiling). The I-beam only rests on the inner concrete wall so that it doesn't make a thermal bridge through the insulation. Likewise, the SIP only rests on the inner wall- the 12 inches of polystyrene on the SIP abuts the polyurethane and then the gaps were filled with spray-in foam.

 

tstew, place to start with town is the assessors office, every towns a little different. my town taxes no space below grade even with 3/4 finished walk out basement so that is free to me. moreover, they also have a rule that states if 1 wall is less than 5 foot 10 they only count half space of that room. I have 2 floors that are go from 5th 9 to 17 feet on other. my house finished space is 2700 I get taxed on 1132. so they go by current market value which also helps as very few new houses that small. I can only be 5000 value more than most expensive 1132 foot house in town. then tax rate is x per 1000. read the rules it pays...