Deep Energy Retrofit Blog moving to Blogger for ease of use

I have been blogging about my passion for super energy efficient homes for the past year and a half or so. Up to now all of my blogs have been self built on my website www.ecohousesofvt.com. I have put lots of time into formatting and uploading, etc. I would much rather use this time to actually work on projects and write/broadcast about them.

For those of you who are just starting to follow this blog I will spend a bit of time on the background story. 

My name is Chris West. I am pushing 50 and have been fascinated by the energy we use to heat and cool our homes for years. In 2010, I returned back to the US after spending 10 years living in the Netherlands (Holland) where I got a Bachelor's in Science in Mechanical Engineering. While in the Netherlands I spent time working towards a better understanding of how buildings work and how we use energy in our buildings. 

Upon returning I decided to get certified as a Passive House Consultant. Passive House is the most energy efficient building standard in the world. With the thoughtful application of modern building science we now have at our disposal the tools to make homes that use almost no energy to heat or cool. A big step in the right direction.

When I moved to Northwestern Vermont in 2010 I bought a rather simple house. It is a 1976 raised ranch pictured here with someone else's dog. This is what it looked like when I bought it. It 'ticked all the right boxes' as they say in England. Not to far from an airport or hospital yet secluded, in the woods. Not a beautiful house but more than enough for me, my wife and two kids. 

I was in for a big surprise when we had our first Winter. Not because we were taken aback by the cold, we know Vermont and were expecting it to be cold and even like the cold. No, it was the amazing amounts of fuel we needed to burn to keep the house warm, and this was before heating oil hit $3.95 a gallon.

There are many design problems with my house which detract from the amazing view out of our front window. The biggest was that one quarter of the space in the house was taken up by a 'tuck under' garage. It was a 'heated garage' meaning that there was a heating circuit that sent hot water through radiators in the garage but it was still almost as cold as the outside temperatures. This garage was below my bedrooms! The floor of the bedrooms was freezing most of the Winter (which in Vermont starts in early November and ends in late March). The two nine foot wide and seven foot tall garage doors were a big part of the problem.

The task at hand

What to do about this house that hemorrhages heat in the heating season? The heat in the Summer was bearable for the most part, but we needed to do something about that heat loss!

The plan is to get rid of the garage doors, take the garage space and make it conditioned floor space. Then once that is done to super-insulate the house.  How to do this is part of the story of this blog. The rest of the blogs will be about my experiences on other high performance projects and energy audits of existing homes.

To bring yourself up to speed start off at my online blog at www.ecohousesofvt.com. After you are done with the last blog you can come back here for the continuation.

Thanks.

Chris!