Their electric bill is $27 a month. They sell power back to the utilities. They flush their toilets with rainwater. And they live in Wilmington.
The home of architect Jay DeChesere and his wife, Heather Smith, has undergone a makeover in the past year to become sort of a demonstration project of how green – energy-efficient and sustainable – an existing home can be.
It’s on the Solar & Green Building Tour, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday. The tour, by the Cape Fear Green Building Alliance, begins at Snipes Academy of Arts and Design, 2150 Chestnut St.
The house is a laboratory and not meant to imply that homeowners should adhere to all its ideas, DeChesere said. “It’s to give people an idea of what to do first. People are replacing their windows; they should be doing something else first, spending less money for more benefits.”
“One thing we are interested in over the years is to see if green homes will appraise higher,” DeChesere said. The appraisers have no comparables.
“We are doing an interior upgrade up the street, and the appraiser could not give them any additional value.”
DeChesere’s and Smith’s home is not a sprawling mansion on the Intracoastal. It’s in a 1970s-80s, middle-class neighborhood in Wilmington’s Pine Valley section.
The StarNews visited the home in July 2009 – before any of the work started.
In the rehab, DeChesere added to the house’s size by incorporating the existing garage, bringing the square footage to 1,648 square feet from 1,250, he said. A carport took the garage’s place.
The architect took out the fireplace and installed a built-in entertainment center in its place. “We opened the flue and sheathed the inside of the chimney” and thus created a light well.
“We opened up the kitchen, which was enclosed,” he said, but it retained its galley shape.The materials used throughout the house, however, are radically different than in the original.
Floors are pre-finished bamboo.
The kitchen’s eating counter is a material made from sunflower seed husks, DeChesere explained. The working counter in the kitchen is concrete by ILM Design Build, which also polished and sealed it.
The backsplashes are made from recycled glass, and under-counter lighting is 17-watt LED, which throws very little heat.
The kitchen cabinets are made of bamboo, and the translucent fronts are made from recycled PVC imbedded with a design of sea grass.
Decorative walls in the foyer, kitchen and office look like rattan but are flat and made of a product from leftover stalks of sorghum.
The home’s doors are made from scrap wood. “It’s the first time they have built doors out of this material,” he said. Before the material was used for cutting boards and the like.
Bathroom tile consists of a 20 percent-recycled material made in Tennessee.
And for those who hate the low-flow, 1.6-gallon-per-flush toilets, the house goes one better – 1.28-gallon Toto toilets in both bathrooms, which DeChesere says work better than the 1.6-gallon variety.
When someone enters the master bathroom, a sensor automatically turns on a hot-water circulation loop that yields fast hot water. Because of the loop, there is no waste, DeChesere explained.
The loop gives a clue to the house’s solar and geothermal workings.
The solar-thermal water heater is in a closet. But, “we never turn the water heater on,” the architect said, as thermal panels on an inclined portion of the home’s roof heat the water. The 20 gallons in the tank drain back into the panels at night, DeChesere said.
“We’re using 85 percent water from the roof for rainwater harvesting,” DeChesere said. That water is used for irrigation and flushing toilets, he said. A 1,750-gallon cistern in the back yard stores water.
An array of solar panels in the back yard is used exclusively for power that is generated for 10 cents per kilowatt and sold to N.C. Green Power and Progress Energy for 19 cents, he said. The two panels on the roof provide the house’s energy.
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Ken Keegan Real Estate Broker (910) 523-0903 mobile Email Me http://www.kenkeegan.com/
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