cool way to save money on home heating

July 5, 2007
Great Way to Stay Warm: Vodka and Sunshine
By ELAINE LOUIE

Salinas, Calif.

LARRY WEINGARTEN has always seen himself as the low-maintenance type.

In 2000, when he began building his 1,800-square-foot house near here, Mr. Weingarten, a general contractor and an expert on water heaters, had already been living for several years in an energy-efficient 1940s home, where he had added insulation and solar water heating. But with the new project he set himself a bigger challenge: to build, from scratch, a home that would be cheap not only to construct but also to maintain. The exterior would never have to be painted. The deck wouldn’t splinter. No monthly electric bills. Minimal heating costs.

The house, nestled on a 131-acre property that Mr. Weingarten calls Hummingbird Hill for the hundreds of hummingbirds it attracts each summer, was completed in 2006 at a cost of $180,000, or about $100 a square foot. It has allowed Mr. Weingarten, 53, to test his theory that a more efficient house could also, in the ease of its maintenance, be more comfortable than a conventional one.

“Didn’t Thoreau question whether the man owned the lawn mower or the mower owned the man?” Mr. Weingarten said on a late-spring afternoon, paraphrasing slightly.

At first glance the three-story house, which Mr. Weingarten shares with his wife, Suzanne, 65, seems to be little more than a plain wood-shingled rural dwelling. In fact, the shingles are not wood but HardiShake, a colored fireproof mix of cement and cellulose fibers, originally designed for roofs.

In the ’90s customers complained that the HardiShake shingles broke, fell off or absorbed moisture; a lawsuit was filed, and the line was discontinued in 2001. But Mr. Weingarten, who bought his shingles after they were no longer being made, said the reported problems “didn’t faze me” — perhaps because he paid only $7,000, about $23,000 less than stucco, according to estimates he received from builders.

The placement of the shingles on the sides of the house rather than the roof, he said, means they are less exposed to the elements and should hold up better; he also has a 50-year manufacturer’s warranty. And using the shingles meant he didn’t have to paint the house, which would have cost $14,000 to $18,000 and would have to be redone every 10 years or so, according to Will Bullock, a house painter in Carmel, Calif.

The deck, which also looks like wood, is actually Trex, a material made from reclaimed wood and plastic. While Trex is more expensive than redwood ($3.24 a foot for a two-by-six, as opposed to $1.65), the material “doesn’t split, weather or crack,” Mr. Weingarten said — important features in the Salinas area, where fluctuating temperatures can be harsh on exposed surfaces. (The annual range here is from a low of about 20 to a high of about 105.)

Mr. Weingarten also saved money on the banisters and balusters in the exterior stairway, which he made from galvanized steel pipes ($1.80 a foot) and rebar (60 cents a foot), respectively. “Labor to build the metal railing was probably similar to labor to build a redwood railing,” Mr. Weingarten said, but “the advantages of using pipe and rebar is that they won’t need replacement every 15 years or so, and there are no splinters and no upkeep.”

The truly cost-efficient features, however, are the systems Mr. Weingarten uses to power and heat the house. Electricity is drawn from six photovoltaic solar panels on the roof, each producing 105 watts, which power the lights, the computer and some other appliances. The solar panels — along with a 1920s propane stove in the kitchen — have allowed Mr. Weingarten to go completely off the utility grid. So while a home the size of his has an average monthly electric bill of $80 and a gas bill averaging $55, according to Keely Wachs, a spokesman for Pacific Gas and Electric, the local energy company, Mr. Weingarten pays nothing to the utility.

He does, however, spend $43 a month to cover the propane he uses to power the stove, refrigerator, clothes dryer and water heater, and to pay for the gasoline to power his backup generator, which charges the solar batteries on days when there is not enough sunshine — not infrequent, given the thick fog that can sometimes roll over this coastal area. (He turns the generator on so rarely, he said, that he used only about 25 gallons of gasoline in 2006.)

To heat the house, Mr. Weingarten combined solar energy with two much older approaches: radiant heating and gravity circulation. Two solar-powered pumps in the basement circulate a freezeproof mixture of water and vodka through solar thermal panels on the roof. (He said he uses vodka rather than an industrial antifreeze because, among other things, it’s more efficient and is nontoxic.) The mixture is heated to between 80 and 140 degrees, depending on the weather, and then flows down to a copper coil at the bottom of a 1,000-gallon tank in the basement, where it heats water in the tank.

A separate gravity-assisted system heats the house by way of copper tubing that starts in a coil at the top of the tank. As the tank water heats up, Mr. Weingarten explained, water in this coil is also heated, and rises, passing through an elaborate system of tubing in the walls. As the water loses its heat, it falls back to the coil in the storage tank, heats up and rises again, repeating the process.

To ensure that the heat generated this way stays inside, the walls were built nearly twice as thick — eight inches — as those in most houses, and like the floors and ceilings, were made of foam-core structural insulated panels, Mr. Weingarten said. “In the winter, even a little bit of sun is enough to keep the heat going in the water tank,” he said. “As long as there’s 80-degree water in the tank, I can keep the house at 70 degrees.” He acknowledged that in the winter he supplements the system with a wood-burning stove, because his wife feels chilly at 70 degrees.

Since the heat is solar-generated and the wood is free, Mr. Weingarten’s heating bill is virtually zero. All told, he said, his energy expenditures average $43 a month, for the propane and gasoline.

In addition to his professional knowledge of water heating, Mr. Weingarten has an enthusiast’s passion for the subject, on which he has collected more than 2,000 books. He also has 60 water heaters, some dating to the 1800s, with names like the Ewarts Royal Geyser. They have their own room in the basement, a domestic museum of sorts. (Mr. Weingarten finds in the story of indoor running hot water a rich social history.)

But although Mr. Weingarten’s métier is hot water, he has applied his low-maintenance cost-saving approach to seemingly every aspect of the house. To fire up the propane stove, for instance, he strikes a match to avoid keeping a pilot light burning.

And he devised a vacuum system using a $79 cleaner he got at Home Depot. Instead of lugging the vacuum around, he and his wife carry a flexible hose ($150) from floor to floor, attaching it to openings that lead to the Home Depot machine in the basement. This homemade central-vac system consists of sewer pipe, wire and fittings that, together, cost $40.