Tracey Allen was tired of seeing her heating dollars vanish into the chilly outdoor air.
So she and her husband, Stephen Allen, decided to aggressively pursue the possibility of building a passive solar home from the ground up, with other aspects of sustainable living thrown in for good comfort measure.
They now live in an earth-bermed, insulated concrete form (ICF) passive solar home on close to four acres.
And Allen is sharing her well-earned experiences in a new book, Building a Passive Solar House, which offers a homeowner's perspective on the process from start to finish.
"We were always back-to-basics kind of people, but I like a normal house. So I'm half and half - one foot homesteader, one foot city girl," Allen laughs.
This former urbanite now has both feet firmly planted in rural P.E.I., just a 10-minute drive from Charlottetown, where she and her husband formerly lived in a 1,600-square-foot home that, despite having a high energy rating, required a great deal of oil to heat.
Their decision to build a sustainable home was a long time coming for this environmentally minded couple, but the real push came for Allen when she started to look at the downward trends in the finance world and acknowledged that the world has passed the peak of easily available cheap oil.
"Add to this [the fact] that we are getting to that age when the hope of retirement is growing with each passing year - we had to do something - something to get our fixed expenses fixed," she wrote in her book's introduction.
Financially, it made sense for the couple to move just beyond the boundaries of the city to an area where property taxes are about one-third of what they were previously paying.
"Mind you, we don't get the services. We have our own septic and our own water, so you have the upfront cost that you pay when you build - and that's it," said Allen, who waded through myriad sustainable possibilities for their home, including straw bale, cob and rammed-earth construction methods.
The couple ultimately went with ICF from the insulated concrete slab right up to the rafters, and an earth berm on the west and north sides of the house.
Although the popular mindset is that all houses should face the street or road, they let the location of the sun dictate the way their house would be positioned.
"In fact, a number of people have said, 'Why aren't you facing the road?' And [my reply is], 'The sun is that way and the windows are on the front, so that's the way the house faces,' " Allen said
The windows are a super efficient T-Rio triple pane low E and argon gas ther-mopane.
The house has no oil-fired or electric heating system, but it does have a Morso wood stove with a heating capacity of 1,200 square feet.
Being outside the city boundaries meant they might also be able to erect a small wind turbine at some point.
"We were looking for a municipality that wasn't going to cost a fortune, was close to town and didn't have a lot of restrictions," she said.
"I'm still researching [wind turbines], and the prices are going down all the time."
The couple has an electric hot-water heater, but during construction, they added the infrastructure for a solar hot-water heating system that they plan to purchase.
"Honestly, I don't think that our house cost more than another 1,200-squarefoot home, because there were things you trade off," Allen said.
"We paid a little more here, but we didn't pay as much there," she said.
"We've only got one bathroom and no furnace, so that cuts your costs quite a bit, too."
Another cost-cutting measure was the polished concrete floor, which the couple did themselves, eliminating the potential $20,000 cost for subfloor and flooring.
In addition to that, adding flooring would have diminished the heat-collecting capacity by about 70 per cent. "It cost us $200 to do the floors. We went with polished concrete because with passive solar, that's the best to absorb the heat and then release it at night. That's the whole principle [of the system]," Allen said.
The couple was adaptable during the design and building process, and their plans did change quite a bit in some instances.
The carport was removed from the initial design, for example.
They chose to focus most of their attention on the shell of the house.
"Anything else you can change. But your windows, your walls or your roof, those are things that are going to last. Our steel roof will last 50 years instead of 20 years for a shingled roof," she said.
One shift from a typical passive solar house design was the addition of windows to the north-facing side of the house, where there are traditionally none.
"Honestly, the reason we put them in was for the cross airflow, because that has been quoted as a problem in a lot of houses," said Allen, who is making thermal curtains for the winter months to cut down on heat loss when the ventilation is not needed.
The Allens also installed Solatube lighting in spots that do not have a lot of natural light coming in, which brightens these areas immensely.
"The only [overhead] light we have in our bathroom is the solar light, and we get people trying to shut it off because they think it's [an electric] light," she said.
In her book, Allen also presents ideas to help homeowners renovate existing homes to capture passive solar gain.
"This was the first house we built, so I wanted to share the experience. And then the other side of it is that every single thing that I researched on passive solar homes or net-zero homes or all these fancy names of these new energy-efficient homes, they cost a mint.
"I thought, 'We're on a budget and there are probably more people out there who can relate to being on a budget and wanting an energy-efficient home,' " said Allen, who will soon head into her first winter in her passive solar home, which she anticipates will require less than a cord of wood for the Morse stove.
"That I can look at an oil truck and giggle every time [it drives by] is really, really great."
FAST FACTS
? Building a Passive Solar House: My Experience Shared ... is published by Earth Haven.
? It is available online at Amazon's Kindle store and as a colour paperback.
