The superinsulated home that I designed and built for my family of three in Greenfield, Massachusetts has been comfortable for the entire year and serves as an example of successful design for our climate. We moved in to our new home in February 2012.

Modest in size, our home measures 26 feet by 32 feet and has 1,500 square feet of living space, with two full floors plus a partial third floor tucked into the slopes of the cathedral ceiling. In order to decrease the overall volume while maximizing south-facing exposure, we chose a saltbox shape.

An opposing design goal was a sense of spaciousness, which was achieved with higher ceilings. The first floor has 9-foot ceilings, while the master bedroom’s cathedral ceiling is a rather tall 15’6″. Closets, utility spaces, and bathrooms were all positioned on the north side of the house, and generous windows allow natural light (and solar heat) to enter all but one of the living spaces. To facilitate the movement of heat throughout the home, we chose an open floor plan and included an additional air passage between floors adjacent to the stairwell.

A thick concrete slab and lots of south-facing glass

The house is built on a slab and makes use of passive solar design. One quarter of the south-facing wall is glass, which is significantly greater than design norms. The 7-inch-thick slab is thicker than usual. Since the majority of our windows are conventional double-pane windows with standard low-e coatings, we have a weighted average SHGC on the south of only 0.33 — not as high as some passive solar designers recommend.

When the house is not heated by the sun, we use a single 12,000 Btuh Mitsubishi air-source heat pump located on the first floor. When the outdoor air temperature is 5°F, this ductless minisplit unit is capable of putting out 11,200 Btuh. Other than internal loads (appliances, lights, occupants and cooking), there are no other heat sources.

The home has been very warm and comfortable throughout the winter. Since our modeled heat load is 15,000 Btuh (0°F outside, 68°F inside), I was concerned that we weren’t going to be warm enough. Most of the difference may have been made up by using nighttime single-cell cellular blinds on 83% of the glass. (More details on performance are in the next section.)

Double-stud walls filled with cellulose insulation

The house has lots of insulation and a very tight envelope. The blower-door test showed that the house has 0.54 air changes per hour at 50 Pascals. The home has double-stud walls with 12.5 inches of dense-packed cellulose (installed at a density of 4 pounds per cubic foot). The roof is framed with parallel-chord trusses insulated with 21-26 inches of cellulose (depending on the pitch of the roof).

I was originally planning on dense-packing the trusses, but later realized that this was not going to be possible due to their depth, and was probably not desirable since the roof assembly was going to be unvented. Switching the design was costly, since the change didn’t occur until we were almost ready to insulate. The change required the installation of an interior air barrier and the creation of a 4-inch-deep ventilation channel by stapling Typar to the underside of the top chords of the trusses. We also reinstalled the ridge cap with Coravent under it. Our insulation contractor then filled the cathedral ceilings with a “medium pack” of cellulose, installed at a density of 2.5 pounds per cubic foot — dense enough so that it won’t settle.

The foundation has 4 inches of XPS below the slab, and 6 inches of XPS installed vertically against the stem wall.

Solar hot water and an HRV

In addition to passive solar orientation and high levels of insulation, our house has many other design features that improve its energy efficiency. We have a water-charged drainback solar hot water system with two 4’ x 10’ SunEarth collectors and an 80-gallon HTP SuperStor tank with electric backup. For ventilation, we are using a Venmar EKO 1.5 heat-recovery ventilator that returns 80% of the exhaust heat back to the house. The ventilation system pulls stale are from the bathrooms and kitchen and supplies fresh air to the living space and bedrooms. We ran 6-inch main ducts with 4-inch branches, and there is one more supply than exhaust.

One of my favorite energy-saving ideas for the home is the laundry rack installed over the air passageway between the first and second floors. The natural air flow between the floors dries most clothes within a half day. If that isn’t quick enough, there is a ceiling fan right above the drying rack. It has been so effective that we have not needed to purchase a clothes dryer for the home. The best part is that we love doing laundry since it is so effortless; the washing machine is also on the second floor and the rack is at waist height.

Recycled materials

Our finish flooring on the first floor consists of a mosaic of granite countertop off-cuts. If one calls around to countertop installers, chances are that one or more of them will have a large pile of scrap and broken pieces that they are willing to give away. Our granite off-cuts were 1 1/4 inch thick. This is not an easy or quick material to work with, but the result is very rewarding. Not only is the material recycled, the added thermal mass benefits the passive solar design and serves as a remedy to the cold appearance that tinted concrete slabs sometimes create.

In addition to the granite, we used a number of other recycled materials in our home. Earlier I mentioned that the majority of our windows were conventional double-pane double-hung units. These were all jobsite cast-offs or former floor models from a lumber yard that closed. They were purchased before construction began and worked into the design. This is also the case for all of the exterior and interior doors. Although there are a couple of windows that, from the outside, do not match, the differences between them are minor and arguably make the home more interesting.

Other recycled materials include all of our foundation foam, sinks, cabinets, and doorknobs. Many of our recycled materials were obtained from Craig’s List and our local building salvage store, Renew. Our siding (tongue and V-groove clear Western red cedar) was also a lucky Craig’s List find. We installed it on vertical strapping over Zip sheathing. CoraVent prevents bugs from getting into the rainscreen gap behind the siding.

We implemented a number of other strategies to make our home more sustainable. There is a cold room where, once complete, we hope to store root vegetables and possibly all of our refrigerated goods during the winter. The room has a dedicated air intake and exhaust.

We reduced the use of concrete and drywall, which are both energy-intensive materials. There is no basement, and the rebar-reinforced stem wall is only 6 inches thick.

Rather than use 5/8-inch drywall to span the 24-inch-on-center studs, we strapped the walls so we could use ½-inch drywall. Also, 50% of the home’s ceilings are finished with tongue-and-groove pine instead of drywall. In areas where the pine boards formed the exterior ceiling, we first installed Tu-Tuf polyethylene as an air barrier and sealed it to the top plates of the surrounding stud walls.

Isolating the mudroom from the rest of the home with an exterior door keeps the mudroom an average of 11 degrees colder than the first floor during the winter. Finally, ivory (white) screw-down metal roofing reduces the heat island effect, and perhaps also our cooling load during the summer.

Electric bill for the first year: $700

In its inaugural year, our all-electric home used 4,200 kWh costing us $700. During this period there were 6,691 heating degree days (base 64°F). Unfortunately, we have no way of parsing out how many Btus our heat pump put into the home. Going forward, there will be a TED 5000 energy meter that will allow us to log and compute this data. As I mentioned earlier, the home has been satisfactorily heated. The bedroom doors are normally open, but when closed, some guests have preferred a little extra warmth (provided by a space heater).

The heat pump is normally set to 63°F during the day and 59° at night. Interestingly, a data logger on the first floor recorded an average temperature much higher than the heat pump set points. From October 23 through January 27 it logged an average of 68°F with a range of 62° to 73°F. Even on overcast days with minimal or no solar heat gain, the logger recorded temperatures 3°F higher than the heat pump set point. Perhaps the discrepancy has something to do with the window or slab temperatures, although there is a fair bit of furniture in the way of the slab.

During this period, the data logger recorded an average relative humidity (RH) of 48% with a range between 39% and 67%. The logger was subsequently moved to a second-floor bedroom, where it recorded an average temperature of 65°F with a range of 61° to 72°F. The average RH in the bedroom was also 48%, with a range of 43% to 58%. The humidity has undoubtedly been greatly affected by indoor laundry drying. On average, we did one large load of laundry per day.

I would like to report data from the internal HRV temperature sensors, since the HRV averages the interior air temperature of the house and provides an outdoor air temperature data-point as well. However, 2 out of 3 exhaust grilles are in bathrooms that have exhaust-only fans that leak a fair bit of cold air into the home. This is a bit of a thorn in my side, since it was entirely preventable. My advice to those who want to install an exhaust-only fan: for an additional $100, install an inline motorized damper that operates with the fan switch.

There is one data point from the HRV that is worth mentioning. On one January day my wife reported on Facebook: “I’m so grateful for our superinsulated passive solar house today! It’s 14° outside, but it’s 70° inside with the heat off, the solar hot water is cooking away, and we’re basking in the sunshine.” This is perhaps one of the most powerful stories about our home: routinely turning the heat off during the winter on sunny days.

The drainback solar hot water system has performed very well. Although we have an Apollo SunReports monitoring unit, the data collection has not functioned properly. To date, SunReports has not resolved the issues. However, I can report that I had the water heater’s electrical element shut off from June through September 2012 and we experienced no disruption in hot water.

Lots of volunteer labor

It’s difficult to calculate the cost of our home for many reasons. My own labor was free and unaccounted for, and I had free help from friends, family, classmates, and neighbors. Friends who I did pay agreed to work at reduced rates to accommodate our tight budget. Also, some of the savings we reaped on materials were unique opportunities.

Finally, as with many homeowner-built projects, trim remains to be installed, one of our countertops is plywood, and there are still no closet doors. With these caveats, before rebates and tax credits, we spent $161,000 on site-work and construction, including a foundation for our future garage. After $15,000 in rebates and incentives, $8,000 of which came from Tier III Energy Star certification, we had a net cost of $146,000. That comes out to about $97 per square foot — less if one omits the cost of the garage foundation.

No prior building experience

The fact that we have had such good success (so far) with our home is due to several factors: the knowledge and help of many smart people, thinking every detail through, and modeling all of those details in ArchiCAD.

Our success is even more impressive considering that I had virtually no prior building experience. I had never even used a nail gun. I certainly could not have accomplished what I did without the help of Adam Heintz (who I hired as lead carpenter) and Greenfield Community College professors Peter Talmage and Scott Baum, whose building science classes I enrolled in.

There were many others who helped out in small and large ways: neighbors, classmates, friends, and family members. The entire process of buying and clearing the land, to detailed architectural plans, to photographs of flashing details are all available at our blog.

Spartan Giordano began this building project with virtually no building experience. With help from friends, family, neighbors, and professors, he built a superinsulated passive solar home for his family in Greenfield Massachusetts. Spartan currently installs solar systems with Sandri Energy.