See a Concrete House With a $0 Energy Bill
Damon Gray has spent 10 years building wood-frame homes. That’s exactly why he stayed away from wood framing when he built his own home. Wait, what?
“I got sick of renovating homes that were falling down,” explains Gray, who lives in Victoria, British Columbia. “In B.C., it’s a wet climate, which is great for mold and rot. So when it came to my house, I kept telling myself, ‘You’ve got to stop building these things that are going to last only 30 years.’”
Instead, Gray went with a concrete structure to create a home built on super-energy-efficient Passive House design principles. He hasn’t lived in the house a full year yet, but so far, with the help of solar panels, he’s expecting his energy bill for the year to be $0.
Houzz at a Glance
Who lives here: Damon and Annie Gray and their boys, Kael (age 2½) and Ollie (11 months)
Location: Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Size: 3,000 square feet; 4 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms
Cost: $280 per square foot ($840,000)
After Gray measured the sun’s path, the L-shaped design emerged as the most advantageous. Gray learned that the property got the most sun on that L-shaped pocket at 3 p.m., so he responded accordingly. “If I changed the angle of the house by 15 degrees, it lessened the energy performance by 25 percent,” he says.
With many passive homes, which save energy due to how they’re designed and constructed, the building orientation is more compact and cube-like. Gray didn’t want a two-story design, so he made up for the less efficient structure by adding more solar panels, which was a less expensive maneuver than buying better energy-efficient windows. Gray spent four years working out these kinds of trade-offs on paper before starting construction.
The cost of heating was a driving factor. Gray didn’t want high energy bills, so he spent time crunching numbers before making a choice. “If I doubled my wall insulation by spending an extra $4,000, then it saved me well over $200 per month on average for my heating bill. It was a no-brainer,” he says.Once he put solar panels on the roof, his heating bill dropped to nothing, he says.
The solar system cost about $40,000. “For $30,000 to $35,000, I could have gotten geothermal, but I’d still have an energy bill. For $40,000 worth of solar, I won’t,” he says.
The home is set up for rainwater collection too, but Gray didn’t want to spend the $7,000 for tanks just yet. “At some point, I had to stop spending money,” he says. For another $7,000 he could also purchase a battery system that would store energy from the solar panels to take the house completely off the grid.
See a Concrete House With a $0 Energy Bill
See a Concrete House With a $0 Energy Bill
