LouLife

In the mid-1980s , engineer and environmentalist David Brown Kinloch, 50, bought an abandoned camelback shotgun for $7,000 in the heart of the Phoenix Hill neighborhood. Louisville’s original fine-dining kingpin, Casa Grisanti, was across the street, but otherwise the neighborhood was dilapidated. “I took out three dumpsters full of trash and junk” from the 1,600-square-foot house, Kinloch says.

Duncan is the first in LG&E's service area to use "net metering"; his photovoltaic roof panels (left)

Choosing a house with an east-west orientation so it had a long, south-facing roof, he began retrofitting it with what is called “passive solar” design elements that maximize the capture and retention of solar heat in a building. The result years later is an ingenious series of additions and changes, all designed and built by Kinloch, that allow a household of four (Kinloch and his wife have two children) to rely largely on the sun for heat and hot water, with wood stoves as backup and natural gas as a tertiary source. In December, the family’s Louisville Gas & Electric bill was less than $100.

It’s much harder to retrofit a home for passive solar capabilities than it is to build one from scratch. That’s because the design elements that help a home capture and hold heat include things like the angle and amount of roof overhang, the structure’s general orientation, and the presence of numerous windows on the south side to let in large amounts of sunlight.

“David is one of the smartest folks I know,” says fellow engineer and environmental activist Sarah Lynn Cunningham. “He can study a problem and quickly create a solution that is functional and elegant.”

Kinloch’s approach included “super-insulation,” accomplished by wrapping the exterior with six inches of Styrofoam and then covering it with stucco. “What I’ve built here is basically a large Thermos
bottle,” he says.

When I walk into the family’s living room, I’m reminded of a very spacious loft. There’s a high ceiling with several long, exposed wood beams. Along the southern wall of the room, up high, are several huge windows. On this unseasonably warm winter day, the sunlight streams in.

Kinloch pulls on a cord to demonstrate the system he’s devised. Nonflammable and nontoxic solid foam shades ride on a pulley system. In the morning, if the sun is up, he or his wife Cindy opens all of the shades. In the evening or on cloudy days, the shades are pulled to cover the large windows and hold heat in.

The exposed-brick interior walls of the house perform a function as well. Though brick is a poor insulator, it is a great heat sink (what engineers call thermal mass), holding heat for long periods once it is heated. On sunny days, the sun warms the brick, which releases it slowly well into the evening. (This is where Kinloch parted with his college professors: He felt that large amounts of brick in proportion to the number of solar windows would hold and release more heat and reduce his energy bills even more. He says he was right.)

Kinloch also calculated how much roof overhang he would need on the south side to block the hot summer sun yet allow in warming rays during the winter, which are emitted at a lower angle due to the sun’s position in the sky on those shorter days. In addition, a chimney effect keeps the house comfortable in the summer. (The family uses no air conditioning.) At night, as the atmosphere cools off, ground-level windows on the north side of the house are opened. Heat rises, so cool air flows in from the windows, pushing even more warm air up to vents above the solar windows, where it moves outside. Kinloch says there is only about one week a summer when the house is uncomfortably warm.

The family also has a solar water heater that provides for their hot-water needs three seasons out of the year. The entire arrangement has captured the attention of neighbors.

“Most of the comments are, ‘Oh, you live in that house,’” laughs Cindy Brown Kinloch, 42, a part-time social worker for the Phoenix Hill Neighborhood Association. “They wonder what the big windows are for.”

She says she feel much more in touch with the seasons living in a solar home. “You’re much more connected to what the sun is doing,” she says.

Her husband says he chose this way of life to “live as lightly as possible on the Earth,” and adds that “our grandchildren have an equal right to these resources as we do.”

Onto the Grid

It’s oddly thrilling to watch Bruce Duncan’s electric meter run backwards . On a sunny day in January, the meter on the Highlands bungalow the architect is renovating spins very rapidly counterclockwise, indicating that power is running from Duncan’s house out onto the Louisville Gas & Electric grid.

Duncan, 57, is the first person in the LG&E service area to use net metering, a system that measures not only how much power a resident pulls off the electric power grid, but how much flows back out to the grid from a home or commercial building’s solar, wind or hydro power. In effect, Duncan generates electricity from solar panels on his roof, uses some of it and sells any excess back to LG&E, receiving a credit on his bills.

A digital readout on his solar system tells how much electricity the panels have produced so far on a given day. Sometimes the news is really good: Last October, for instance, soon after the $14,000 system was installed, Duncan’s utility bill for the month showed an $8 credit.

Walk to the back of Duncan’s house and you will see what look like panels of reflective tiles covering roughly half of that side of the roof. The panels consist of high-tech silicon wafers similar to those used in computer chips. Light (measured in photons) passes through the panels, creating a current and generating electricity (voltage). In contrast to passive solar home technology — which is used by the Kinlochs — Duncan has a photovoltaic (or solar-electric) system, also termed active solar. (A third type — solar thermal, also considered an active solar system — uses the sun’s heat to warm water.)

A key component of the system is an inverter, a device that bridges the technical gap between the rooftop panels and the electric grid by converting solar-generated direct current (DC) into the grid’s “utility-grade” alternating current (AC), allowing the system to feed its electricity out to the grid.

As of 2004, power companies in Kentucky have been required by state law to offer net metering for such systems, so they may become more common. Duncan says his solar panels will generate, on average, about a third of what his current residence uses. But he hopes that the smaller bungalow he is fixing up, with its reduced energy needs, will come close to zeroing out when he applies his solar generation to the power company bills.

Though the initial investment is high, solar panels can withstand severe weather extremes and will last as long as 40 years. Over time, they pay for themselves in lower electric bills. Yet the panels are just “the icing on the cake,” says Duncan. “You need to have all the other things first — insulation, insulated windows. You need to get the envelope closed.”

Duncan is a proponent of “green” building design, an ecologically aware approach to building that factors in more than a home’s energy sources. Those include, among other things, whether or not the lumber being used comes from what have been identified as sustainable forests and the chemical compositions of the carpets.

Duncan has purchased only highly energy-efficient appliances with the EnergyStar label (a government designation indicating high efficiency). An old furnace has been replaced with a new, highly efficient one, and a heat pump was installed on the second floor to help cool the house in summer with a modest drain on the home’s electricity. He also installed an “on-demand” water heater that uses less energy than a conventional water heater.

In work for his firm, Duncan Architects, he encourages his clients to go green as well. “It makes sense,” he says. “We’re depleting finite resources.”

Celebrating the Sun

For Ann Klem, 57, and Dean Smith, 53, the decision to leave their three-story Cherokee Gardens colonial and build a modernized prairie-style home in Fisherville grew out of several considerations. The married couple wanted a spacious in-law suite for Smith’s mother to move into someday. They looked at several houses, were not satisfied with what they saw, and began to think about building. At a friend’s suggestion they checked out property in a development 20 minutes from downtown.

“We walked the property and picked out this piece of land right away,” says Klem, an artist who retired as an information technology manager at UPS. Klem and Smith, who is director of clinical services at HealthSouth Rehabilitation Hospital of Central Kentucky in Elizabethtown, wanted this to be their last move, and they wished for an economical home that would reflect a “general conservation spirit.”

They sought out local architect Gary Watrous, founder of Watrous Associates Architects and an expert in passive solar home design. Watrous was solar when solar wasn’t cool. For 25 years, he’s been preaching the renewable-energy gospel. Almost any building can be designed as a passive solar one, he says, and on almost any budget.

“Basically, we take advantage of Mother Nature,” he says. “First, it has to be super-insulated, twice the normal level of insulation.” Any normal building insulation will do, he says.

Like the Kinlochs have done in Phoenix Hill, Watrous loads the south side of the house with big windows and builds an overhang, letting the winter sun in and sheltering the house from the summer sun. As if in celebration of the sun, the tall living room is painted an intense and deep yellow. Other bright colors are used throughout the Frank Lloyd Wright-style home.

On cold days, fans are used to move the rising heat in the home throughout the house and into the basement. Another fan drives the warm air up underneath the main floor via a patented-design “airfloor” that has a hollow, honeycomb-like concrete substructure. The floor then radiates heat up into the house all day and night. “The floor becomes a heat battery for the house,” says Watrous.

December’s LG&E bill for the 3,500-square-foot home was about $190. Smith says that even on cloudy days, the house often stays warm with minimal heating from the backup dual-fuel heat pump. “You know the old saying that you can get sunburned on even a cloudy day? You still get the transfer of energy,” he says. Typically, if our Ohio Valley area experiences long strings of cloudy days unsuitable for solar energy, they will only occur during mid-winter.

Living in a solar home has changed their lives immeasurably, say Klem and Smith. The big windows put them in close touch with nature. They love watching thunderstorms roll up, and they feel more in tune with the moon, the night sky, the seasons and the sun. “The sense of radiant energy is very ancient,” adds Watrous. “Living with this, we become more sensitized.”