Florida,
I read your post on net-zero and found your observations to be very interesting. However, I see no mechanism on the forum page to reply. The bottom content of your message is buried under ad space, and it covers up the reply buttons. If there is some way to modify this problematic display feature, I would like to know.
I went back and reviewed the first link to the net zero house that you commented on. But I am not sure if I entirely understand the energy production setup. Is this house heated entirely by the passive solar gain, plus the windmill electricity driving the heat pump?
Or are they also burning wood? You mentioned burning wood, but I am not sure I follow your point on that. I do see what appears to be a metal class A or class B vent stack on the house. It is particularly evident when you enlarge the photo.
Replies
I don't know about the site issues. When I look at the thread I can see the Reply button. Another site improvement i suppose.
The house is heated with a ground source heat pump whose cost I didn't even get into but suffice to say it's real expensive. I think it would be impossible to have any kind of meaningful solar gain in VT in winter. Any heat gained on those few "sunny" days would certainly be lost at night or on the far more often cloudy days.They do burn a little wood but it doens't amoun to much.
I understand your point about the cost of the equipment not paying back in a reasonable time, if ever. However, as I understand it, payback is not part of net zero. But rather, the objective is only to use 100% site-produced renewable energy; and to have a zero carbon footprint. I have never understood how any objective measure of the carbon footprint is possible in a practical sense. So, that to me, is the most dubious of the two facets of the net zero objective.
However, the heating objective seems like no challenge at all if you are permitted to spend unlimited resources on a renewable energy heating plant without any payback requirement.
But I really am curious about adding wood burning heat to the net zero concept. How do you know that the amount of wood they burn does not amount to much? And how can they justify burning any wood at all? That seems like cheating on the net zero objective.
I agree, cost seems to be no object and neither does it seem to matter if you actually use more energy but do it offsite. I don't doubt that net-zero is possible if money is no object, you force some of the costs off on other people and you're not required to account for the energy cost of the equipment you install to get to net-zero. In the real world everyone else does have to account for those cost so I can't see any fair comparison at all.
They only burned 175 Kwh's of wood which is maybe 1/8th of a cord so it's not much. But as I said until we know the costs to get thta wood to their fireplace the Kwh's produced means nothing. The wood certainly creates carbon emissions as well.
Another house on their website was "Net- zero" remodeled to the tune of $1.2 million for a single occupant and is lived in half the year. A total waste of resources.