Customer wants a full energy conservation plan

tim smith

 Looking for ideas,  opinions, comments.

Customer wants a complete plan of attack for energy conservation at his large residence. ie, 7000 sft or so, 5 acre site, money is not the object yet until he sees the overall plan. Large moss roof on this very quasi large rambler.

 He wants solar pv appx 10kw, solar hot water, maybe 120 tubes. Maybe 10 tons of geothermal. Already has Prestige modcon boiler. Is looking into high efficiency lighting. Lots of room for vertical bores for geo.

 Existing systems are under floor floor warming, water to air heat only air handlers x 2. Some zone dampers on south air handler. Heat exchanger off modcon for pool also. Does not use pool a lot. Has no a/c and is not necessarily looking for it. Huge amount of glass in house. Decent roof and wall insulation, not great but very difficult to add as all wood ceiling. 

 Here is my take on it, we are in Seattle, a/c is not an absolute it is a luxury and windows open does a lot here. So that takes some of the benefit away from geo. Also we heat with gas, have hi efficiency equipment. Gas is pretty cheap here and electricity is cheap here. But we still have to conserve. Right now the electricity supplied to this house is almost all from hydro electric. Pretty green power source. But all future needs of power for our area as growth occurs will mostly be from natural gas which is very inefficient

Larry Weingarten

Think shell...

...tightening first.  It would be nice if he needed a new roof.  Then you could suggest adding at least 4" of rigid foam under the new roof.  A blower door test would be useful.  Get combustion appliances direct vented or otherwise out of the living space.  Consider heat recovery ventilation.  Use an IR camera to find insulation problems and fix as needed.  Look into combined space heating/hot water and Google "Gary Klein structured plumbing" to round up info on how to make DHW far more efficient.  Serious Materials makes some nice (expensive) glass, but maybe there is some exterior shutter like Synergistic Building Technologies is developing that could be used to reduce night time losses.



Electrically, there is a lot that can be done and it just so happens that Affordable Comfort is sponsoring through the 1000 Home Challenge, a webinar on electrical savings.  It's on the 10th.  Here's a link: http://www.thousandhomechallenge.org/ 



Once all that boring stuff is done, look into the fun solar aspects.



Yours,  Larry

CMadatMe

Can that

Floor warming be turned into primary heating? You have the mod/con. Take advantage of that. Same goes him wanting Solar for electrical. Can we take advantage of the panels and add a few more to use the solar to heat for most of the year and have the boiler for the meat days?. If so take the geo and throw it out of the picture. Makes no sense and don't think it would be cost effective to have both alternative systems. If he wants to provide the solar for his electrical then that's the route for the heating and hot water in my opinion.