Welcome to my house page. My wife Robyn and I are both very concerned about the environment and have decided to build a home with minimal impact on the immediate surroundings and global warming. This page highlights the eco-friendly features of our home and document its construction.

In the fall of 2004, my wife Robyn I bought 90 acres of forest and wetlands to have as our own paradise. We love living in the woods where one is more likely to meet a deer, wild turkey or even coyotes and bears, than you are to meet people. When we first stepped foot on the property, we found trails carpeted in fallen yellow maple leaves and we knew we had to buy it. About half of the property is provincially protected wetlands which is OK since we plan to keep the property as natural and pristine as possible. Many people ask if we plan on farming it, sub-dividing it for sale or suggest that we build hunting cabins for rent. While I’m sure we could find some way of use our land to make money, that is not the point. We love nature and want to be surrounded in it. The only other plans we have, besides building the house, is to extend the existing trail system for hiking, biking, dog walking and skiing.

Given the rising price of oil and the pollution caused by our addiction to fossil fuel, I decided that I wanted to do something to reduce our contribution to that problem. Several years ago, while still living in Pennsylvania, I began making improvements in our home’s energy efficiency. By changes to more efficient lightbulbs, changing a few windows, caulking potential leaks and adding a timer on our electric hot water heater, I reduced our largest monthly electric bill by 50%. I also decided that using solar energy in my next house is not an option - it is a must.
For our new house, we decided to use as much renewable energy as possible. Our electricity will come from 1000 watts of photovoltaic panels (solar panels) and a wind turbine rated at 1000 watts. The house is located over 300 meters from the road, making the installation of power lines from the utility companies pricy. I talked to Hydro One, our local utility, and found that it could cost over $10 000 to run the power lines to the house. Given that expense, we decided to stay “off the grid” and store our electicity in batteries. An inverter (a type of transformer) converts the DC power from the batteries to standard 120 Volt AC. During times of year, where there is not enough sun or wind to keep our batteries from running flat, we have a diesel generator, burning bio-diesel, to back us up. Bio-diesel is made from vegetable oil through a similar process to making soap. It burns much more cleanly than diesel, produces almost no net CO2 and lubricates engine parts far better than diesel. Many people are under the impression that living in an off-grid home means going back to the dark ages. While it does force you to pay attention to how much energy you are using and how much you are producing, life at home remains relatively unchanged.

Our heat comes from three sources. The house design is a passive solar design and takes advantage of the sunlight coming through the windows. In the winter the sun is low in the southern sky, so we have more windows on the south side of the building to allow the sun to heat the interior. In the summer the sun is high in the sky, so there are overhangs to keep the direct sunlight out, to keep the house cool. The other sides of the house have fewer windows to improve the insulation value of those walls. In the spring and fall, it’s likely that we will not need to use the other heating systems at all. In the winter, the sun may provide about 30% of our heat. The second heat source is radiant floor heating. It will be a hydronic system, which means that a boiler will heat water and the hot water runs through tubes in the floor, heating the floor. The boiler will be an oil boiler, but we will be burning bio-diesel in that as well. The third heat source is a masonry stove. A masonry stove is a type of wood burning stove, except there is lots of stone work (masonry) that stores the heat from the fire and radiates it slowly in to the room.