Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
Better Heater: Steve Kelly uses a variety of passive solar tools to help heat and cool his Willow Glen home, including these old dye buckets, which store water and are used as a thermal mass to help heat up the house.
WG residents use solar power to weather state's energy crisis
Heat from the sun helps cut power bills and saves energy
By Kate Carter
Looking for a way to reduce your PG&E bill? A few Willow Glen residents may have a suggestion--go solar. And they don't mean blanket your roof with photovoltaic panels in order to power your television set.
Passive solar design is a simple and renewable alternative to heating and cooling a building, rather than relying on nonrenewable energy sources, they say, and anyone can do it. All it takes is two easy steps: good insulation to keep warmth in and cold out, or vice versa; and a predominance of south-facing windows that allow sunlight to shine on a thermal mass, which in turn keeps a building warm in the winter.
"Anybody planning on remodeling can save considerably" in heating and cooling costs, says Frank Schiavo, a professor in San Jose State University's department of environmental studies who teaches classes in solar home design. "You can build a solar home for the same price as a normal home."
Schiavo should know. He has worked as a consultant in the construction of a winery, two schools and 25 homes that employ passive solar design elements. He has also worked to incorporate passive solar elements into 43 home remodels, including two in Willow Glen.
From the outside it is next to impossible to tell that Terry and Carol Denevan's approximately 3,000-square-foot, two-story home on the banks of the Guadalupe River, or Steve and Susan Kelly's approximately 3,000-square-foot, two-story home south of Curtner Avenue are heated mainly through solar energy. Both of the Willow Glen homes look like the others in their respective neighborhoods, except for the wall of windows they have on their south sides. The Kelly home also has three photovoltaic panels on the roof that they use to heat their water.
Stepping inside the homes, there isn't really a noticeable difference, either. Both feel comfortable to live in, especially in the "sunrooms" they have on the other side of south-facing windows.
Those sunrooms are the key to heating the homes in the winter, and also to keeping them cool in the summer. Two stories of windows facing south allow winter sunlight--coming from a sun low in the sky--into the rooms. Both rooms have tile flooring--a "thermal mass"--that absorbs the light's warmth. They also have thermal masses facing the windows that consist of rows of water-filled containers painted dark colors (to absorb more warmth and to match the interior decor).
The thermal masses store heat during the day. When the sun goes down and the temperature drops, the heat dissipates from the tile floor and water containers to warm the cooling air. A ventilation system helps move the warmed air to other rooms in the house and rotate hot air from the ceiling back down to the floor.
With double-paned windows and extra-thick floor, wall and roof insulation, auxiliary heat sources, such as wood- or gas-burning stoves, are really only necessary on particularly cold days, Schiavo says.
The homeowners say they never turn on their furnaces, and they don't use air conditioning in the warmer months, either.
Sunlight comes into the sun rooms at a much higher angle during the summer and is shielded by overhangs that prevent the homes from baking like ovens. Instead, the thermal masses that remain shaded throughout the day work in reverse to store cool air and release it, keeping the inside temperature comfortable.
Both the Denevans and the Kellys say that protecting the environment is important to them. Both families make use of other environmentally friendly devices and techniques, such as composting, using fluorescent and natural lighting and recycling used materials that would otherwise be thrown away.
Photograph courtesy of Steve Kelly
Through the Roof: Willow Glen residents Steve and Susan Kelly have three solar panels on their roof that they use to heat their water.
Harnessing the Heat
But they both take a pragmatic view of the choices they made to install passive solar elements in their homes when they remodeled them in the 1980s.
"It was a neat idea," Steve Kelly says. "It's an efficient way to use nature and a way to bring the outside to the inside of the house, architecturally."
"This is maintenance-free," says Kelly's wife, Susan. "That's why it's passive. There's nothing electric about it, except the fans."
The Kellys found out about Schiavo before they had planned what, in 1982, turned into their 450-square-foot sunroom. Steve saw an article about Schiavo and his work in a PG&E publication and was interested in seeing what he could do for their home.
The Kellys were also able to take advantage of a tax break offered at the time that gave them back 55 cents for every dollar spent on their project.
Steve had already done some work with solar power when he spearheaded the effort to get their neighborhood pool installed with solar panels to heat the water. Bringing solar into their own home was the next step.
Their house is primarily heated by the sun shining on 150 gallons of water contained in two rows of old paint buckets, painted to match the ground-level cabinets in which they reside. The sun also heats the tile floor. The addition also has 2-inch by 6-inch studs, rather than the common 2-by-4s that allow for more room between the studs and thus more room for thicker insulation. Vents near the ceiling allow warm air up into the second floor bedrooms and down the staircase into the rest of the house. A fan and a pipe, running from floor to ceiling, bring warm air near the ceiling back down to the water buckets on the floor.
The Kellys use a gas-burning stove--also in the sunroom--to heat their home on cloudy, or especially cold, days.
Steve and Susan say they use their sunroom more than any other room in their house--for eating meals, playing with their animals or relaxing on a two-person hammock they hang up in the summertime. The only drawback from Susan's perspective, aside from the havoc wreaked by the hammock, is the beating the furniture takes from the sun.
"This is where we put all the old furniture," she says.
The Denevans undertook a more ambitious project and chose to add about 1,850 square feet of upstairs and backyard add-on onto their 950-square-foot-home. Not only that, but they decided to draft the plans, and do much of the construction by themselves.
Terry Denevan showed his plans to a couple of consultants before taking them to the city's planning department. When planning officials saw how many windows he wanted, they suggested he talk to Schiavo, whom they knew was working on homes with lots of windows.
"The city said, 'You have too much glass, you're going to lose too much energy,'" Denevan says. "Frank said, 'When I'm done, we'll double the glass and they'll accept it.'"
The Denevan home's sunroom has two stories of double-paned windows that shine onto a tile floor and 350 gallons in 88 plastic canisters along the second-floor balcony. The room is heated through those thermal masses, but, Denevan says, their main source of heat is a wood-burning stove, also in the sunroom.
Schiavo says the main heat source is really the thermal masses, with the stove as a backup.
Regardless, the two serve to keep the house toasty, even on cold, rainy days. The second floor is connected to the sunroom through the open-loft master bedroom, and heat spreads to the downstairs front of the house through a short hallway. And Denevan says he received $12,000 in state and federal tax credits available at that time for his improvements.
Reducing Pollution Costs
Jerry Martin, spokesman for California's Air Resources Board with the Cal/EPA, says that wood-burning stoves are more polluting than natural gas burning.
"From an economic standpoint, with the high cost of natural gas right now, a wood-burning stove would save you money," Martin says. "But it would probably increase the amount of pollution in the home."
The reason for the pollution, he says, is the amount of particulate, or soot, wood-burning fires emit in the air. Natural gas emits less, but, he says, they still don't know much about the specific harmful byproducts natural gas burning can emit. Nevertheless, he says he wouldn't recommend a wood-burning stove to someone with respiratory or heart problems.
Denevan says he is aware of concerns about pollution caused by wood-burning stoves. He uses, and also sells, firewood that he collects from construction sites, scraps that would otherwise end up in a landfill. In fact, most of his house, as well as his back patio, is built with 5 miles of scrap wood and millions of used nails he collected throughout the six years he spent remodeling the house.
"Everything pollutes," Schiavo says to explain the trade-offs Denevan makes, as everyone does, to preserve the environment. "It's just a matter of how much. The solar home, overall, is still taking a much lighter approach than an average home," when it comes to environmental impacts.
Working to preserve the environment can pay off now, as well as in the future, too. The Kellys' and Denevan's foresight shows on the savings they make in energy costs.
In February, the Denevans had a PG&E bill of $158: $75 for 933 kilowatts of electricity and $83 for 49 therms of gas. The Kellys' PG&E bill for the same month was $147: $61 for 675 kilowatts of electricity and $78 for 47 therms of gas.
According to PG&E spokesman Scott Blakey, the average residential February PG&E bill in California was about $172: $59 for electricity (a price that is fixed) and $113 for gas (a price that is deregulated and changes.) That is an average of all residences of all sizes in all climates, not of 3,000-square-foot homes in Northern California.
Energy efficiency and solar energy are not just ways to get through the current power crisis, but also ways to get through the even bigger power crisis looming ahead, when nonrenewable energy sources are gone, Schiavo says.
"In industrial countries, 90 percent of all energy is from nonrenewable sources," he says. "To me, it's just foolish. Rather than waste, why not use the sun? It comes to us free."
Willow Glen, California Since 1992
