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Valley
News, October 1, 2005
Donald Maurice Kreis
Whether
you are a fan of architecture, a connoisseur of interior decoration
or just plain nosy, if you like to check out the homes of strangers
the opportunities are rare indeed. Today is a noteworthy exception,
and it features a virtuous premise.
October
1 is the tenth annual National Solar Tour Day, the brainchild of
the American Solar Energy Society. The Society collaborates with
various local and regional organizations – around here it’s the
Northeast Sustainable Energy Association – and persuades the owners
of solar-powered homes, residences with “green” design features
and other energy efficient buildings to open them up to anyone who
cares to stop by.
Organizers
know that Americans are generally a cautious lot when it comes to
the design of their houses. So the objective of the tour is to
disabuse people of the notion that solar panels and other energy
efficient design elements are only for hippies, llama owners, organic
farmers and others of the countercultural back-to-the-land fringe.
Take,
for example, Jeff and Christina Plant, whose home on Route 120 in
Cornish Flat is on the tour. Both work at Dartmouth Hitchcock
Medical Center; he’s a nurse-anesthetist and she’s in care management.
They watch TV in their living room, listen to a stereo and do
not otherwise appear ready to catch the next love bus to the Woodstock
Festival. They also live off the grid in a solar-powered house.
What
made these people decide to seek out such a lifestyle? “We didn’t,”
Jeff Plant readily admits.
If
you visit the Plants, what will strike you is not the power source
but the breathtaking craftspersonship of their dwellingplace.
Oak timber-framing, held together by pegs, clever joinery and gravity,
rather than nails, is the work of local timber-framer Tom Paige.
The kitchen has elegant custom cabinetry of curly maple, with
an ingenious special telephone desk and granite countertops, all
by carpenter Dale Shafman of Cornish.
It
was the countertops that hooked Jeff Plant, he recalls. And when
the real estate agent mentioned that the place was solar-powered
and not even connected to an electric utility, Plant figured:
“We’ll give it a year, see what it’s like and decide.”
The
verdict, eight years later: “It’s fine.”
A
wood stove in the basement provides nearly all the heat for this
fiberglass-insulated home (rated R20 in the walls and R30 in the
roof, for the tech-savvy). The stove is sensibly placed right
in the center of the house, surrounded by a small opening that allows
convection to move more warmth to the pair of bedrooms two floors
above. A direct-vented propane wall furnace is useful chiefly
when the owners will be away too long to feed the stove during heating
season.
“We
usually sleep with a window open in winter,” Plant brags.
To
those whose mental picture of solar power was formed even just a
few years ago, the Plants’ array of photo-voltaic panels will seem
shockingly small. They moved the panels from the roof to the ground
adjacent to their garage when they bought the place, since the panels
need to be kept free of snow to produce energy in winter. (February
is a great month for converting light to electricity and November
is by far the worst, according to Plant.) There are only eight
panels, forming what looks like a small hut rather than a big farm.
Being
a nurse-anesthetist requires a certain zest for detail and science,
and that side of Jeff Plant will come out if he talks you into going
to the basement to see the corner full of wall-mounted gizmos that
run the system, along with a vented cabinet full of deep cycle batteries
at their feet to store the solar energy.
High-tech
boxes by manufacturers Trace Engineering and Outback Power Systems
(the latter apparently started by renegade engineers from the former,
who took their toys “out back” of their former employer to tinker)
convert DC power to AC. Their microcircuitry can vary the charge
to the batteries as appropriate, thus prolonging their life, and
send beautiful sine waves of AC power upstairs. Square waves,
and other kinds of harmonic distortion, are not good for today’s
sensitive consumer electronic devices.
The
Plants are not the energy efficiency equivalent of religious fundamentalists.
They have an 8,000-watt propane-fueled backup generator behind
their garage – and they definitely use it regularly since they need
it to run their washing machine. A refrigerator also runs on propane.
There
is a long list of similar stories to be experienced in person during
today’s open house at locations throughout New Hampshire and Vermont.
In the Upper Valley, there’s a straw bale home in Norwich, a hardware
store with “economical earth friendly biomass hearing” in Lyme and
a house in New London designed by the local avatars of elegant neo-traditionalism,
Sheerr & White. The Cobb Hill co-housing community in Hartland
Four Corners is giving tours to show off its fine Jeff Schoelkopf
architecture as well as its commutarian living arrangements. The
best place to find the details is on the web at http://nesea.gaiahost.coop/buildings/openhouse/.
Once there, click on “open house sites now available.”
In
his 1994 book The Ecology of Commerce , environmentalist
Paul Hawken issued a call for the development of an economy that
is environmentally sustainable and even regenerative. But he famously
added that we must design a system “where doing good is like falling
off a log, where the natural, everyday acts of work and life accumulate
into a better world as a matter of course, not a matter of conscious
altruism.”
You
will not see that world anywhere on today’s National Solar Tour.
“It’s not like falling off a log,” says Jeff Plant of
life in his solar home. The Plants’ power system demands more
vigilance than the effortlessness required of utility customers.
But what about those power outages that plague utility customers
from time to time?
“We
blew a fuse once,” Plant reports with a smile.
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