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Urbana man tries out ‘passive house’ ideas

So much insulation has been installed in the house that it should not need a furnace or A/C.

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By Matt Sanctis, Staff Writer 7:49 PM Saturday, July 18, 2009

URBANA — Driving past a small, gray, one-story house on East Water Street, there are few signs that essentially, the home itself is an unusual experiment.

At first glance, it simply looks like a quiet, peaceful home with a gravel driveway and a large garden in the back yard. But once inside, the home’s owner, Ward Lutz, is eager to point out the little details that make his house so unusual. The walls, for example, appear thicker than most. At the end of a roughly foot-long ledge, a living room window is composed of three panes of glass, and krypton gas fills the spaces in between to provide additional insulation.

Ward, a retired researcher at the Mayo Clinic, is one of the few people in the United States who is experimenting with a “passive house,” a concept that originated in Germany in the late 1980s. Essentially, the home has been so highly insulated that it requires no air conditioning in the summer and no furnace in the winter. A small heating element is used only in the coldest days of the winter.

“I decided to retrofit the house and to make it extremely energy efficient based on the passive house standards,” Ward said.

The idea, Ward admitted, is an experiment and there may be issues that need to be worked out along the way. With the help of a local contractor, he began the long process of retrofitting his home to make it extremely energy efficient last year. Traditionally, the idea of a passive house is to reduce energy use in a home by as much as 90 percent, he said.

The attic, as well as each wall of the home, has been packed with thick layers of insulation. The electric furnace was removed, and instead, the home uses an energy recovery ventilator system that draws fresh air into the home while expelling stale air, mostly from the restrooms and kitchen.

Lutz said he drew ideas for the project from a number of sources, including the Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions, a non-profit organization based in Yellow Springs that provides education and promotes solutions designed to reduce energy use in communities.

Rob Content, a program manager for the organization, said they also retrofit a carriage house in and effort to experiment with the techniques. Ideally, he said, the concept will gain ground with the help of people like Lutz.

“We think the passive house concept has some clear superiorities,” Content said.

Lutz said his primary goal was to reduce the amount of energy he consumes.

While he may never fully recover the initial costs of retrofitting his home, he said it’s more important to him that he reduces his own energy demands while he brings attention to the issue.

“It’s very important for me to be able to share what I’m doing here and why I’m doing it,” he said.

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