The Womerlippi Farm and Home Energy Accounts

(To accompany AimeeÕs two house sites)

My partner Aimee Phillippi and I often get asked why we moved out of the ÒBale HouseÓ to the ÒNew House.Ó After we put all that effort into building an experimental straw bale house, why did we move?

The short answer is, we didnÕt like our overall lifestyle at the Bale House very much. We have landlords there who own the land, although we own the house (similar so-called Òcamp leases are common in Maine), and they didnÕt have the same priorities that we did for developing the homestead. (In particular they prohibited a wind turbine and some woodlot clearing we needed badly to make off-grid solar and wind power work well for us.) When I took an Interim job as Provost of Unity College, that gave us the money to buy our own land and we seized the day.

We still own the Bale House. Our friends Jon and Aimee (another Aimee) live in it with baby Ella and seemingly endless dogs, and they seem to like it and as always the finances are great, no mortgage, no rent, no power bills. They too hope to have their own land one day, so the finances work for them.

Aimee and I bought a very derelict, circa 1900 Maine farmhouse for $60,000, on either three and a half, or five and a half acres, depending on which deed you believe (this is also fairly typical for Maine). We put about $15,000 and a summer and fall of very hard weekends into it, and we now have a nice piece of property and a growing homestead. The dirt in particular, and the solar aspect, are much, much better (holy tomatoes!), but also is the acreage of grazing.

Funnily enough, though, the overall lifestyle uses less energy than the Bale House, and this economy helps pay for the mortgage, AND there are less climate emissions. How is this possible?

I really have to able to report on this, because how to do this kind of climate and energy accounting is what I teach for part of my academic work. Walking the talk and leading from the front is a big part of leadership, I was taught when I was in the service (the UK RAF). Students need to see that we are not asking them to do anything we are not prepared to do ourselves.

So here it goes, point by point:

(Aimee thinks this is all rather silly.)

1) Vehicle fuel costs at the pump in 2007 are up over 100% from 2003, when we began the Bale House. The New House is half the distance to school (12.9 miles versus 25), and the roads are much better, so we use half of the gas. (We would do even better than that if we could get a matching teaching schedule and not have to drive separately! But itÕs very hard for the college to do that for us.)

2) Much of the money went into insulation and new windows for the new house. I crammed an awful lot of insulation into the house, including R50-60 in the ceilings and R20-30 in most walls. Our Home Energy Tax Credit paid for $230 of this, by the way. Part of the $15K also went to very good new wood heat systems for the New House, a stove for medium cold days, and a big wood furnace for the dead oÕwinter. These provide 80% of the BTUs, with the old oil furnace left in place for back-up and to keep the pipes warm when we arenÕt home. So, although the heat fuel use is up, most of it is firewood, which is considered a carbon-neutral bio-fuel in Maine.

3) The Bale House had a propane fridge. Propane fridges use propane, not a bad fuel as far as the climate is concerned, but expensive. It also had propane hot water, propane back-up heat, a back-up generator, and a propane kitchen stove. Lots of propane. The New House has a much more efficient propane hot water tank, and a propane kitchen stove. It uses much less propane.

4) We bought grid-based green power at the New House, and donÕt have a back-up generator (although we wish we had one for power cuts). At the Bale House we had off-grid solar and ran the aforementioned back-up generator when the sun didnÕt shine. (We really wanted that wind turbine so we could shut down the genny!) We replaced the batteries every three years (they recycle, but theyÕre still lead-acid). Grid-based or grid-tied green power is probably greener overall (no back-up needed, no lead acid batteries to replace). Our power comes from Maine hydropower and biomass (no construction debris or trash!). You can check it out and sign up here: http://www.energymaine.com/pmresignup/

So overall, we think we have a better deal, spend much less time in the car, and my calculations are that the reduced energy costs pay for a significant part of the house costs (the $60K mortgage plus $15K in repairs.)

And the GHGs are less. Our GHGÕs are still only about 20% of the US household average.

We can still do better. We could really use an electric vehicle, and IÕm looking out for one we can afford, or a bio-diesel vehicle, to get the vehicle emissions down. IÕd like to replace the propane hot water with an evacuated tube solar hot water system in combination with a green-electricity on-demand heater. And I want a Skystream wind turbine one fine day soon.

What does all this prove? IÕm not sure, but the Bale House was an ÒalternativeÓ lifestyle, Mother Earth News kind of set-up. The New House is more conventional, apart form the sheep, I guess, so itÕs more available to most folks. But we still got the emissions down pretty low (about 20% of the average), and the vehicle fuel economy almost pays the mortgage when compared to the Bale House. According to my calculations, taking vehicle fuel into account, we pay only an additional $3219 per year, or $268 a month, to own and run the New House over the costs of the Bale House. That doesnÕt count the much less wear and tear we are puytting on vehicles. Take that into account, and itÕs probably a complete wash. Home ownership for free? Not quite. But very low opportunity costs.

So this report shows how fuel efficiency can now be a very big factor in costing out your house investments. It also shows that you CAN live a pretty normal US lifestyle and not emit a lot of GHGs! Rocky Mountain Institute pegged the US household average GHG emissions at 160,000 pounds per year in 1998, including some things that we donÕt include, such as air travel. But the average probably went up since 1998. If we really do need to get our GHG emissions down 60-80%, and I believe we do, household energy efficiency is clearly a huge part of that. Insulation is the first step. Green power the second. Living closer to work the third. Do all three, you can reduce emissions 50- 60% or so, in most cases, and help pay for your house.

Here are the actual numbers, both GHGs and dollars, very rough. I used conversion factors rounded to the nearest integer. For ease of comparison, I provide the annual total costs of both houses as if we were paying for all construction, installation and repair costs on a mortgage.

Energy type/quantity/ cost per year	The Bale House	$ Cost	Emissions in Pounds CO2 Equivalence	The New House	$ Cost/year (per unit in parens)	Emissions in Pounds CO2 Equivalence
Heat oil (gallons)	0	$0	0	250	$563 ($2.25)	4,750
Propane (gallons)	360	$1,080 ($3)	4,320	180	$540 ($3)	2,160
Electricity (KWH)	solar	$0	none	4,800	$816 ($0.17)	none
Vehicle fuel (gallons)	2,340	$7,020 ($3)	44,460	1,300	$3,900 ($3)	24,700
Firewood (cords)	4	$600 ($150)	0	6	$900 ($150)	0
Mortgage costs	n/a	$2,000	n/a	n/a	$7,200	n/a
Annual total in $ or pounds CO2 E	n/a	$10700	48,780	n/a	$13919	31,610