First Hybrid Energy Home in California

[jpak]

http://www.californiachronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=26277

On a hillside, at 9000 feet, in the resort of Big Bear, is the first California example of a new home building technology that is quietly sweeping through environmentally conscious America. Enertia® Homes get their heating and cooling energy from wood- but not by burning it. The unique house building concept uses the wooden structure as a carrier of solar energy. No matter what the temperature outside, if there is one sunny day in three, this house is a comfy 72 degrees in the living area. This particular home, an ARCADIA is one of thirty self-heating/ self-cooling home designs offered as pre-cut and numbered kits by Enertia® Building Systems, a Forest Products manufacturer in Youngsville, North Carolina.

The Enertia® Building System is a system for building homes and offices that heat and cool themselves naturally using two millions-of-years-old natural principles. The first is Thermal Inertia, a property of this Planet that maintains its habitable temperate climate. The second is the energy capacity of trees- nature’s first solar collector. Greatly simplified, an Enertia® Home is Earth-in-miniature: a house with a massive central core (the primary living space), surrounded by an atmosphere (the Dynamic Envelope/ secondary living space), and built of solid, renewable and sustainable, wood.

The basic concept of the Enertia® Building system was developed by North Carolina forest products engineer, Michael Sykes, who was researching photosynthesis and the way trees use and store solar energy. He was seeking to develop new environment-friendly Forest products for the state’s lumber and furniture industry. He discovered that certain species, conifers in particular, exhibited energy storing properties even after harvest, and being sawn into timber. Besides the normal, sensible energy storage associated with increase in temperature of any solid, conifer wood exhibits a latent energy component associated with phase-change of the resins. Sykes thought this property would be ideal for building solar homes, which need to shift energy from day to night.

Actually, this “thermal inertia” effect is well known to owners of log homes, and timber-block houses. Solar radiant energy absorbed by the outside surface of the timber walls, plus energy absorbed by timbers from the indoor heater or woodstove, continues to radiate slowly from the timbers long after dark. Interestingly, timber-block houses first appeared in Europe around 1350 A.D. which was the beginning of the “Little Ice Age.” Stone houses were just too hard to heat!

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[eleny]

1. Pics of thier homes here at their site

http://enertia.com/

[kestrel91316]

2. Hybrid energy home is a bit of a misnomer. I would call this house

a passive solar home.

[msongs]

3. these houses are way expensive - $400K and up for most designs

nice for the elite amongst us :-0

Msongs
www.msongs.com

[progressoid]

5. Oh boy, at that price they'll go like hotcakes.

I'll take two!

[Xithras]

7. $400k isn't for the rich.

My home is worth about $700k, and I'm certainly not rich. Houses, even run down little 2 bedroom crapholes, are still expensive as heck in California. If you dropped a bunch of those around my area with that $400k price tag, there would be lines around the block full of people waiting to buy them.

[NNadir]

4. Wow, another house behind the Tortilla Curtain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tortilla_Curtain

I'm glad we've made the world safe for rich people. Maybe Governor Hydrogen Hummer can drive the Hummer up the mountain for a refill.

Maybe the consumer Amory Lovins will drive over from the Temple at Snowmass and offer libations from the Gods.

Let's hope they can keep the migrants out, like Delaney.

I wonder if it will start a huge, overwhelming, vast, immeasurably large, climate-change-solving sweep to the grand renewable future like the Solar House in Maine that is now more than 12 years old and still is the unique solar house in Maine.

http://www.solarhouse.com/

[druidity33]

6. hybrid energy?

I think they are just using that "hybrid" word to ride the automobile popularity wave. My house uses Passive Solar, PVs, RF heating (slab on grade) and Solar Hot Water panels... that's more hybrid than this Enertia system.

And my home was sold as an "affordable" house (less than $200,000) with 3 acres, using recycled construction materials (mostly Hardi product)!

This system seems like hype to me...

Can't we mimic the way trees work without using trees?

[Kolesar]

8. a latent energy component associated with phase-change of the resins

That is much more sophisticated than the thermal mass of my plaster walls and tile floors. I could see how this could be applied in a climate that gets sunny. The lake effect makes my town pretty cloudy from November through March.