How much money did we save and how much carbon dioxide did we cut?

A Summary Of:

Money Saved, Carbon Dioxide Cut, 

Investment and Financial Return.

In addition, the DOE estimates our house value has increased $111,000.

Please note that for triple-glazed windows the investment and savings are the additional costs and savings above that for double-glazed equivalents. Please see Chapter 4 in Zero Carbon Home for details.

If you found this post helpful you will almost certainly find the book, Zero Carbon Home, even more helpful. It is written in the same easy-to-read style backed by the same rigorous scientific approach and financial analysis. The book costs $14.99 as an e-book (or iPad or Kindle) or $24.99 as a paperback and is available by clicking here.

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What is Passivhaus? Should I make my house a passive house?

PassivHaus (Passivehouse), PHIUS

PassivHaus is a standard for low-energy or zero-energy houses. It was developed in Germany by the PassivHaus Institute. There is a U.S. branch of the PassivHaus Institute called the Passive House Institute US or PHIUS. PassivHaus certification requires compliance to their exacting standards for both building materials and methods of construction as well as the final result in terms of energy efficiency. Every element of the construction must be audited back to its source. The PassivHaus standard for total energy use is 60 kilowatt-hours per square meter of floor space per year. This is equal to 5.6 kWh per square foot per year. If your house has 2,500 square feet of living space then your total energy budget to meet the PassivHaus standard (including heating fuel like natural gas or heating oil, plus your electricity use) is about 14,000kWh per year. The average U.S. house uses about 11,000kWh per year in electricity alone. When you add in the extra energy used to heat the home, often five times the amount of energy used in electricity, the average U.S. house uses about 500% more energy than the PassivHaus standard.

After we installed the fab four (insulation, heat pumps, solar panels and triple-glazed windows) our house is using about 6.5 kWh per square foot per year or only about 16% more than the PassivHaus standard. This is a remarkable result given that the Passivhaus standard was created for new houses and our house is a 1970’s design with no sealing of the walls against air infiltration and with only average insulation in the walls. Zero Carbon Home and PassivHaus have similar approaches to reducing energy consumption such as better insulation, low-E triple-glazed windows, heat pumps and solar panels. But because of the prescriptive details and audit trail on building components required by PassivHaus it is almost impossible to apply it to the renovation of an existing house and it is only applicable to new construction. It is both expensive and time consuming to do the audit.

If you found this page intriguing you will almost certainly find the book, Zero Carbon Home,  helpful. It is written in an easy-to-read style backed by a rigorous scientific approach and detailed financial analysis. The book costs $20 and is available by clicking here.

Is a zero carbon home the same as a net zero energy home?

Zero carbon footprint and net zero energy

The terms zero-carbon footprint and net-zero energy mean essentially the same thing. Since even a single light bulb uses electricity (which is a form of energy) a house can never use zero energy. However, since you can generate electricity from solar panels it is possible to have a house that generates all of the energy it uses over the course of a year. If you generate enough energy to power your home every single day of the year then you have gone “off grid”. If you generate as much energy as your house uses over the course of a full year, but not every day, then you have a net-zero energy house which, unless you are able to read in the dark, will require a connection to the grid via a net meter so you have power, and light to read by, at night.  If the energy used by the house is all generated by zero-carbon sources (such as solar panels or a wind turbine) then the terms net-zero energy and zero-carbon footprint mean the same thing. In theory, if you used a diesel-powered generator to make all the electricity your house used (and that was all the energy your house used) then you would have a net-zero energy house, but this is not usually how the term is used. In common usage a net-zero energy house means a house which generates all its energy on site and that energy is made from zero-carbon sources like solar panels or wind turbines. Hence it is equivalent to a zero carbon house.

To see an explanation of other energy and zero-carbon terms click here:

If you found this page interesting you will almost certainly find the book, Zero Carbon Home, helpful. It is written in the same easy-to-read style backed by the same rigorous scientific approach and detailed financial analysis. The book costs $20 and is available by clicking here.