Design For Limited Planet Living With Natural Energy

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Concessions must be made to living in a house with no central heating system. "Most people find our house chilly in winter," says Sydell, "but you learn to live and dress differently." The Lipsons also tend to use the house in zones. Some areas are warm, and others are allowed to become quite cool. The area within 12 feet of the wood-burning stove (which is set on tiles to absorb and radiate the heat) and the kitchen, which receives warmth from cooking, are used intensively.

The 36-by-32-foot house cost the couple $30,000 to build, but they economized by doing most of the work themselves. They had no building experience, nor were they even particularly handy, and it took them five months to build the house.

"The house suits our lifestyle," Mrs. Lipson says. "We like living in the woods. There is a certain joy in living in a cool environment. I now find I don't function very well in a house with central heating; it dulls me and makes me sleepy."

"You live differently in a solar house. We are much more aware of what the weather is doing."

In its first year of operation, Norah and Richard Davis's solar house attracted two thousand tourists. "We finally had to put up a 'No Trespassing' sign," Richard Davis said. A transplanted southerner who went north to Bar Harbor, Maine, to teach philosophy at The College of the Atlantic, Professor Davis wanted to build a house out of recycled materials. On the advice of a colleague at the college, architect Ernest McMullen, his plans were expanded to include a solar heating system.

Locating recycled materials wasn't that easy, although the Davises did discover some interesting "finds": the ballroom floor, doors, and 12-foot-long counters . . . from the Evelyn Walsh McLean mansion (she was famous for owning the Hope Diamond, now in the Smithsonian Institution); structural timbers from a razed sardine factory; and a 2,000-gallon gasoline tank from a filling station to store their solar-heated water. "We didn't save much money using recycled materials," Richard says, "but we got materials we couldn't otherwise afford—the 1-1/2-inch solid wood doors and the quarter-sawn oak floors, for instance."

The Davis house is a compact, 1,300-square-foot building with an open interior plan for the living-dining-kitchen area, two bedrooms, and a utility room. Expenses came to about $30,000.

The solar collectors, a trim bank of 26-foot-long fiber-glass-faced panels, take up about half of the southern facade of the house; a greenhouse that opens to the kitchen and a deck occupy the rest of the front.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print