Greenovation

Doug Selby started Meadowlark Builders five years ago intent on guiding homeowners toward sustainable building. Back then, he'd talk about energy features on projects and watch as the prospective client's eyes glazed over.

Nowadays, Selby says, there's more demand for green building and remodels than there are builders who have experience doing them. His company recently finished an Ann Arbor home that's the first LEED Platinum certified house in Michigan and will soon start work on another.

Maybe you want to save the planet. Maybe, due to propane heat and a budget-pay plan, you just paid a $670 heating bill. In July. (Believe me, it can happen.)

But regardless of whether they're driven by cash or conscience, more and more homeowners are getting to the same place – either building homes with teeny, tiny carbon footprints or retrofitting the ones they've got to tread lightly on the earth.

"You spend every day in your house, and your house is such a natural extension of you," said Kelly Grocoff, whose 107-year-old home on Ann Arbor's Old West Side has become a poster home for green remodeling. "It's easy these day to feel totally overwhelmed - by things going on in Washington, by other things that you can't control - but your home is one place you can make a difference."

Every remodeling decision Matt and Kelly Grocoff make, from heating to toilets to the stuffing in the big comfy chair, takes environmental impact into account. Is it energy efficient? How much waste is there? Is it safe? What's involved in producing it and how far did it travel to get here?

Their adventures in green remodeling led Matt, a video producer by trade, to create Greenovation.TV, an internet TV channel that, when it launches later this year, will be a central source for all the green remodeling resources he's spent years gleaning from every corner of the Internet.

Eventually the site will address green remodeling questions with how-to videos, but for now it links to the Grocoffs' blog, detailing the commonsense changes that have cut their energy bills by 60 percent.

They know people are hungry for this kind of information.

Complete strangers email him every two or three days, asking abut the house. A 70-year-old woman who heard about them through a friend of a friend of a friend showed up at their door on a Sunday morning asking about things she could do to cut her heating bills. Forty people from the Sierra Club showed up for a tour the morning after an ice storm.

The house the Grocoffs moved into in late 2006 had almost zero green cred when they got there.  Inefficient lights, 60-year-old furnace, no shower, no insulation save a single layer of newspaper in the attic dated 1902. Its best energy feature was probably the clothes dryer, which was of the outdoor variety – solar- and wind-powered, come to think of it.

"I believe there are something like 50 million existing homes that were built before 1980, and that's where most of the energy is being used," Matt Grocoff said.

"If you design from the ground up, you can build a new home with almost zero carbon footprint, it's just a matter of changing the design. Retrofitting an old home is a little trickier, but there's lots of low hanging fruit. There's lots of room for improvement."

They sealed gaps used to seal all those gaps around door and window frames, plus the pesky ones around the chimney, along wall seams and around light fixtures that extended into the attic. Once the house was sealed up tight, they had cellulose insulation blown in.

Insulation's not the sexiest renovation, but the cheapest energy is the energy you don't use, and for about $3,800 they got the tightest house on the block. A geothermal heating and cooling system went in about the same time ($19,000), and they now enjoy a heating, cooling and hot water cost of about $500 a year.

Add motion sensor light switches, the latest generation of high efficiency toilets, shower heads and sink aerators, and a power strip that shuts off computer peripherals when they're not being used, and you've got a house that saves you money whether you change your habits or not. (The Grocoffs haven't.)

"The really cool thing is we're really using less energy with more modern comforts than we had in the 800-square foot apartment we were in," Matt Grocoff said.

Someday, Matt says, the house will make its own power via wind turbines or solar panels, but for now the cost - and Michigan energy policy – have put that out of reach.

Len and Marlene Chockley dream of running their home on sun and wind, too. But while the Grocoffs have focused on retrofitting their home, the Chockleys went for the clean slate. They built a passive solar home on 54 acres north of Ann Arbor, recording the progress in a blog that kept friends and family up to speed.

Rather than generating its own energy from the sun, the Chockleys' home stores the sun's energy and uses that to buffer the heating cycle. They'd originally planned to generate whatever energy their house needed with a wind turbine and a solar array, but the bank wouldn't finance the house if it was off the grid.

"They couldn't find anything comparable," said Marlene, a former Washtenaw County Commissioner. "Nobody had 54 acres that they were building a house like this on."

So they tabled some of the bigger-ticket items and scaled back the floor plan. The energy features in the Chockleys' home still cost about $39,000 more than a traditional build, said Jim Acheson of Acheson Builders. Like the Grocoffs, they stuck with geothermal heating and cooling, heavy-duty insulation (R60 in the attic) and EnergyStar appliances. But the Chockleys' home also includes passive solar features that increase efficiency by making the most of the heat the sun gives up for free.

On the home's south side, specially coated Trombe walls – 8-foot-wide sections of filled 8-inch concrete block - absorb and trap the sun's energy. They warm during the day and after about 10 hours they start releasing that heat into the house.

"One of the things that's interesting to me is this is just sort of an average house," said Acheson says. "It's not a house that only someone with deep pockets can afford. It's just an average, hardworking person's house."

The roof overhangs the sides of the house by two and a half feet at an angle dictated by the home's position on the earth. That creates an awning – duplicated on the lower level around the south and east sides - shading the windows from direct sunlight all summer and letting the sun shine in all winter. The winter sun warms the floors, which include a 1.5-inch concrete slab on the main level in addition to the basement slab. Both handle heat much like the Trombe walls.

A skylight over the kitchen provides natural light, and creates a heat chimney. At night they open the skylight and the basement windows, and 25 feet of draw pulls heat out of the house and replaces it with cool air.

So while their new house may not have that coveted zero carbon footprint, the Chockleys have found a compromise they can live with.

"We could have gone crazy doing good things for the planet, but it costs money, and we didn't have the money to do it," Len said. "When we were making the decisions on the house as far as ,'Do we want to do this or do that?' we did what made sense as far as livability, in addition to being efficient to run."