St. Albert's straw bale house will be one of the star attractions this Saturday as it takes part in Edmonton's annual solar home showcase.
St. Albert residents Rick Winklmeier and Kelly Gray will open their home to visitors this Saturday as they take part in the 13th annual Edmonton Eco Solar Home Tour. The annual event is meant to promote green construction and solar energy in homes.
There were so many eco-homes to choose from this year that it was hard to turn any of them down for the tour, says Andrew Mills, vice-president of the Eco Solar Home Tour Society. They went with 12 in the end — twice the number they had last year — nine of which are new to the tour.
Residents will get to visit 12 homes throughout the Edmonton region that feature green technologies, Mills says, such as solar panels, geothermal heating and rainwater collection. Eight of the homes are at or near net-zero in terms of energy use.
"Energy efficiency is not something you have to legislate," Mills argues, and it's not something you have to pay people to do. "People will do it given the opportunity, and if you show people that other people are doing it, they don't feel so lonely about it."
Solar showcase
From the outside, Winklmeier and Gray's straw bale home doesn't look much different from its neighbours on Belmont Drive.
Which was kind of the point, the couple says — they wanted to show you could build a straw-bale house in the city without it looking like a weird science project. "We are fairly normal people," Winklmeier says. "We don't have straw hats and we don't have a barn."
The couple got the idea to build with straw a few years ago after Gray, an environmental biologist, discovered that it was renewable, a great insulator and chemical-free. They put up the home's pre-fabricated straw panels last year and are finishing the interior this year.
The walls are 15-inch thick straw bale panels, Winklmeier says, which are soundproof, essentially fireproof, and equivalent to R32 in terms of insulation (R20 is the industry standard for walls). The upper walls and attic are insulated with recycled blue jeans (denim) to far above industry standards.
The roof has four solar hot water collectors that help heat the home in the winter, he continues. "In the summertime we basically don't have any gas usage at all. We take free hot showers and [use] free hot water throughout the day."
The home uses about the same amount of gas per year as their previous one despite being twice as big, Winklmeier says. "It's cleaner living, too," he adds, as the building materials were pretty much VOC-free.
Peter Bull's Edmonton home is also on the tour. His home features two solar electric systems, one from 2005 and one from 2010, which demonstrate the rapid pace of change in the solar industry.
Bull says he got into solar in order to better understand the systems his company worked with.
His 2005 system features 18 solar panels linked to huge 120-pound batteries in his garage that store up to 500 amp-hours of power. "Enough to keep things warm and beer cold," he explains, and to keep the furnace, fridge and lights running during a power outage two years ago. It was also a legislative pain to set up, however, and he didn't get paid for the power he produced.
Fast-forward to his second system in 2010. This one was far easier to register, he says, due to the province's new micro-generation rules, plus he gets paid for his production. New solar panel technologies such as micro-inverters made the panels much simpler to install. While his first system cost him about $35,000, the second was only $19,500 despite being about the same size.
Cheap sun
Solar power is still a luxury item due to its cost, Mills says, but the price has come down a lot in recent years. Igloo Prebuilt Homes will have a solar-powered net-zero manufactured home on the tour that is just slightly more expensive than a regular home.
The tour runs from noon to 4 p.m. on June 9. See ecosolar.ca for details.
