PV

EHH week 17: resilient design

Most houses are totally dependent on municipal utilities for power and water, what a friend of mine calls “life support.”  Cut the utilities, and the occupants are left to freeze in the dark while their food rots. 

 

A major goal for Harvest House’s owners is to be able to withstand all nature’s calamities in their house.  In the Seattle area these include earthquakes, floods, and wind.  In December 2006, a wind storm left over 1 million without power, some for as long as 5 days. 

 

This house was designed by the structural engineer, Harriott Smith Valentine, to the strength of a critical facility, like a hospital or an airport control tower.  The building is superinsulated, has a root cellar to store food, and has four huge tanks in the basement to store rainwater.  Without any operating equipment, the occupants will have shelter, warmth, food, and water. 

 

Factor in its solar energy systems, and this house can enable its occupants to live in complete comfort for at least 3 weeks.  With both photovoltaic (solar electric) panels and solar hot water tubes, which are backed up by batteries and a propane generator, the lights will glow, the refrigerator will stay cold, the oven can warm, the heat will flow, and the water will be potable.  By rationing their usage of electricity, they could live independently for many months.

 

With climate change ratcheting up the frequency and intensity of storms and droughts, there is a growing interest in what Alex Wilson calls Resilient Homes.  Alex and Jerelyn Wilson of Building Green visited Eastside Harvest House in October 2011.

EHH week 01: about Eastside Harvest House

Welcome to Eastside Harvest House, a new home designed to harvest food, sun, and rain on site.

A Kirkland couple seeking to build their new home had three main criteria for their site: ample space for an edible garden, room for elderly parents to live comfortably and share their home, and enjoying a sweeping view of Lake Washington and the Olympic Mountains.  They found a 1 acre dream site in the heart of Kirkland, largely undeveloped, with sweeping views of lake and mountains to the west.  The house is a 5 minute walk to grocery stores, coffee shops, retail, and restaurants.  There is a bus stop right at the street with service every 15 minutes to Kirkland, Bellevue, or Seattle, enabling car-free living.

The site will boast an abundant 6500 square foot garden for the owners to grow their own fruits and vegetables.  Irrigation will be provided by a subsurface drip system to irrigate two dozen raised beds, a dozen fruit trees, and numerous edible berry bushes.  A basement root cellar will store the garden bounty and ample kitchen counter space will enable home canning in season for personal use or to give as homemade gifts.

This 3500 square foot single-family residence will be divided into two suites, each with its own kitchen.  The master suite will group the living, dining, and kitchen in one great room with a master bedroom and bath, a guest bedroom and bath, his and hers offices, and an exercise room.  The private in-law suite will have a smaller great room, with two bedrooms and one bath.

The floor plan allows for long term flexibility depending on the occupants.  The wall dividing the great rooms is structurally designed to allow connection as one single dwelling, perfect for a large family with the in law suite becoming the children’s wing.  But the wall can subsequently be divided again in the future to suit two smaller families.

The house will be one story over a full daylight basement to fit it into the gently sloping site.  An elegant stair will connect the two levels.  However, all the principal rooms in both suites are located on the main floor flush with driveway grade to allow for accessibility for elderly parents now, and the middle aged owners in the future.  Bathrooms are designed with aging in place in mind, with curb-less showers, comfort height toilets, and grab bars.

This house has ambitious ecological goals, targeting LEED for Homes Platinum and Built Green 5 Star certifications.  100% of stormwater will be captured and infiltrated on site in a 2200 cubic foot rain garden.  Rainwater from the metal roof will be collected in four cisterns in the basement totaling 12,000 gallons.  Filtration and UV sterilization will allow the homeowners to use the rainwater for potable purposes in addition to toilet flushing, laundry, and irrigation.  This is the first residence in King County to be permitted to drink its rainwater.  The project anticipates net zero energy, supplying 100% of its own power with a 17kW photovoltaic array and 30 evacuated solar hot water tubes.

The Eastside Harvest House is a truly functional, beautiful, and sustainable addition to the vibrant community of Kirkland.

Project statistics
Location: Kirkland, Washington
Lot size:  41019 square feet (almost 1 acre)
Number of units: 1 dwelling unit with attached mother in law suite
Total gross square footage: 4400 gross square feet (3570 conditioned)

Project Team
Client: (confidential)
Architect: VELOCIPEDE architects inc
Contractor: Model Remodel LLC
Civil engineer: springline design, LLC
Landscape architect: Outdoor Studio
Structural engineer: Harriott Smith Valentine Engineers, Inc.
Mechanical engineer: Ecotope, Inc.
Solar designer: Solterra Systems, Inc.
Surveyor: Pacific Geomatic Services, Inc.
Geotechnical engineer: Geotech Consultants, Inc.
Arborist: Urban Forestry Services, Inc.

 

EHH week 23: PV system

With the array rack in place, it was time to install the PV panels.  Each one is 4 feet by 4 feet and secured to a special stairstep bracket that allows air to pass around it to help keep it cool.  Ironically, the hotter the panels are, the less power they generate.  The bracket also provides a nifty chase for the wiring that runs from the back of each panel.  The brackets are bolted to aluminum rails which in turn are bolted to the steel pipe rack.  Simple.

 

The panels are Silicon Energy Cascade SiE195, made about an hour away in Marysville, Washington.  They arrive in tidy flat stacks and are absolutely gorgeous.  They have no aluminum frame like most PV panels.  And they don’t have a white PVC backing, so they look great from below, which is how the homeowners will see them.  The cells are spaced apart a little bit, so you can actually see the sky through the glass gaps.

 

The electricity they generate is fed to two DC to AC inverters, SMA America Sunny Boy 8000-US (grey), which send electrons to the utility grid and to four AC to DC inverters, Sunny Island 5048-US (yellow).  The yellow inverters charge the 24 on-site sealed-lead-acid batteries, Sun Xtender PVX-12150HT, that live in cabinets in the garage.  If the power grid goes out, like it did for 300,000 people during a blizzard a few weeks ago in January 2012, the batteries can keep this house humming along.

EHH week 22: PV rack

The Eastside Harvest House is aiming to be a net-zero energy building.  That means that it will generate on site at least 100% of the energy it uses on site.  All the energy the homeowners use for heating, hot water, air conditioning, lighting, cooking, fans, pumps, computers—everything—is expected to be 15,500 kWh (kilowatt hours) for a whole year. 

 

To generate that much electricity, they need to install a 17 kW (kilowatt) PV (photovoltaic) system.  A fixed 1 kW PV array tilted at a near optimum 25 degree angle from the horizontal and facing due south generates about 980 kWh annually in the Seattle area, even with our notoriously cloudy weather. 

 

That means we need a 60 foot long by 24 foot tall array.  We can’t use the roof of the house or garage because they face the wrong direction, aren’t steep enough, and are too small.  So the solar contractor built a custom rack from steel pipe.  It runs over the garage and is partly supported by the garage roof.  The rest lands on concrete footings on the ground, each at a different height which required precise lengths of pipe.

 

The rack made use of standard pipe fittings to make it relatively easy to weld together in the shop and then assemble with bolts in the field.  It is powdercoated black to stand up to the weather and look sleek.  A structural engineer made sure it can resist strong winds trying to send the PV panels into the neighbor’s yard.

Smart design begins here.