By John Fry

Massive, insulated masonry walls hold solar gain, cutting winter heating bills by 40 percent and eliminating the need for air conditioning. Photo byJohn Fry

When I mention that I live in a passive solar home, I’m invariably asked whether it has electricity-generating solar panels, high-efficiency wood stoves, geothermal heating, or a Trombe wall. When I answer no, the house contains no extreme carbon-fuel-fighting technology, the reaction is often a mixture of disappointment and skepticism.

“So it isn’t really a solar home, is it?” remarked an acquaintance.

Well, yes it is. While the house doesn’t look much different and didn’t cost any more than a conventional home, it consumes 40 percent less heating oil. That’s what’s extreme about it.

When I decided to build the house in the late 1970s, magazines were filled with pictures of solar homes, and gasoline shortages were still fresh in people’s minds. President Jimmy Carter, an engineer, persuaded Congress to pass legislation granting generous tax credits to people who built energy conservation into their homes — in retrospect, an idea vastly superior to waging oil wars.

I had bought a gorgeous 4-acre hillside in Westchester County, north of New York City. Upon it I determined to build a house, a paragon of energy frugality, that would surely please President Carter. But before I broke ground, I made two enlightening trips.

First, I drove around New England, visiting some of the solar homes that America’s newly eager energy conservationists had built for themselves. The weather that summer was intensely hot and when I arrived at these glassy new homes, many of their owners were outside on the lawn, seeking relief from the sweltering air inside.

The following winter a writing assignment took me to dry, frigid northeastern China, the former Manchuria. Wandering around a large market town, I noticed that the two-room concrete-block homes did not align with the lanes. Universally they aligned with the sun. All the windows faced due south. The northern wall was typically bermed into a hill.

Why, I reflected, even when lot sizes allow any kind of siting, do snowbelt Americans orient their houses to the street and not to the sun?

In 1980, I worked with the architects Conger & Lytle and William Hamilton Roehl to design a house on a true northsouth axis. There would be compromises. Whatever the loss of energy efficiency, the house must have expansive views westward across 2 miles of water, forest and hills. There would be no investment in solar water-heating panels, unwarranted at the time by existing technology and by the infrequency of sunny winter days.

The resulting 3,538-square-foot house consumes, on average, 900 gallons of heating oil annually, or .254 gallons per square foot. The comparable cost for a conventionally designed and sited frame house, built 10 years ago down the street, is .421 gallons per square foot, or 65 percent more. Moreover, that house requires air conditioning.

As a result of the government’s tax credit 27 years ago, I paid nothing additional to build a house that is now saving me, and America’s imbalance of petro-payments, well in excess of $2,000 a year. And because of its design, air conditioning is unnecessary.

The house incorporates many tons of masonry, insulated on the outside. Three-inch sheets of Styrofoam were glued onto the cinder block walls of the two lower stories. A mesh was glued onto the Styrofoam, then Dryvit troweled onto the mesh. The stucco-like finish doesn’t crack, is weather-resistant and needs painting perhaps every eight years.

The Dryvit system is familiar to builders today, but 28 years ago it was not widely employed in home construction. Even less used, tragically, is its energy-conserving complement: plastering the inside of the concrete walls, enabling the masonry to act as a thermal bank for solar heat gain. The house remains cool in summer when the interior is insulated against the hot outside air.

Shallow balconies running along the southern face keep the big windows shaded when the sun is high in the sky, yet allow sunlight to penetrate deep into the house in winter. Window quilts prevent heat loss at night. A motorized blind on a principal west window descends on winter nights and on hot summer afternoons. In summer, a large attic fan draws cool evening air into the house. A vestibule serves as an air-lock entry. Floors laid on grade, and walls below grade, stabilize interior temperatures.

The massive masonry core of the house, insulated from the outside air, contains flues for the furnace and for the wood-burning fireplace, measuring 46 inches wide by 18 inches deep. On most winter days I build a fire. All the wood comes from my own land.

The greatest challenge to living in the house is not its physical demands, which are few, but reminding my family to draw down the blinds on winter nights and open the windows on summer evenings. It is one of the truths of energy conservation that the cooperation necessary to make it work is often difficult to solicit among one’s nearest and dearest. I console myself with the thought that Napoleon was unable to command Josephine.

No, my house is not a work of blinding technology. It is a compromise with easy living and lovely vistas. It will not satisfy those for whom a solar home must attain zero use of carbon-emitting fuel. But if developers, contractors and new home buyers had switched to its simple cost-efficiency 25 years ago, America would be a different and more energy-secure place than it is today.

About the author: John Fry is a former editorial director of Times Mirror Magazines and founding editor of two former New York Times Co. magazines, Snow Country and Golf Course Living. He is the author of The Story of Modern Skiing, published by the University Press of New England in 2006.

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