by:
MATT McKINNEY
Sometime in the next few weeks, Paul Brazelton will move his
family into a 1935 Tudor in south Minneapolis that has no furnace. He's
just finished a massive renovation of the family home and even though
winter's bearing down, he removed the boiler and plans to use that
basement space for his daughters' home-school classroom.
He also took out the fireplace.
If this sounds like the most uninviting house (and classroom) in
Minneapolis, there's something else to know: Brazelton, a software
engineer and passionate environmentalist, has nearly finished a retrofit
of his house to the stringent engineering standards of the Passivhaus
model, a German system of homebuilding that uses insulation and highly
efficient doors and windows to save energy.
The finished 2,000-square-foot home could be warmed even in the dead
of winter with a pair of small space heaters, Brazelton said, though the
family plans to piggyback on their hot water heater and use an in-floor
heating system in the basement.
"We're really nervous," said Brazelton, half-joking, "because when
it's 20 degrees below and you can feel your house contracting and
cracking like it's just trying to resist the cold, it's hard to believe
that two space heaters from Target will do the trick for us."
The finished project is on track to be certified by the Passivhaus
institute of Darmstadt, Germany, as the first "EnerPHit" home in North
America, according to their architect Tim Eian of TE Studio in
Minneapolis.
The EnerPHit standard, designed for existing homes, has been used
thousands of times in Europe, said Eian, a German native. Such homes see
their energy use fall from 75 to 90 percent.
more about energy comsuption:
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