Syracuse, N.Y. – Imagine your house was so well-insulated and efficient that you could live in it without paying for natural gas and electricity.
Ivonne Fernandez might not have to imagine.
Fernandez is buying a new house on Syracuse’s Near West Side that is so super-tight that solar panels on the roof should produce all the electricity she needs for heat, hot water, lights and everything. Over the course of a year, the solar panels should provide as much energy as she uses.
If they do, Fernandez will be able to avoid paying all but the $17.33 monthly charge to have an account with National Grid. (That charge is unavoidable unless you live off the electric grid.)
Home HeadQuarters, a nonprofit housing agency, built the new home with state funding aimed at driving higher efficiency in New York’s housing stock. To meet aggressive decarbonization goals, state officials are pushing to make as many homes as possible all-electric and energy-efficient.
Fernandez’s new home is the third of eight to be built in a cluster near the corner of Otisco and Ontario streets. They will all have energy upgrades funded by a $1 million grant from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. Home HeadQuarters is calling the area “Resilient Corners.”
Fernandez’s house is the first of the group to achieve “net zero” energy, meaning it makes as much as it uses. It also is one of just 44 single-family homes in New York state certified as a “passive house,’' an exacting efficiency standard for homes that require very little energy to run, according to Passive House Institute U.S.
Fernandez, 53, is a teaching assistant who works with special needs children in the Syracuse school district. She moved to Syracuse 33 years ago from Puerto Rico and raised her children in a public housing project three blocks away from her new home.
For the last 18 years she has rented an apartment at the Centennial Gardens complex near Onondaga Park.
Her new home is all-electric, featuring an air-source heat pump for heating and cooling. It is several times more air-tight than an average house, as measured by blower door tests, so it has an energy recovery ventilator to mechanicially circulate fresh air through the house.
Most of the insulation is at least double what building codes call for, said Dan Wright, the construction manager for Home HeadQuarters: R-80 in the attic (versus R-48 required by building code); R-45 in the crawl space (versus R-15); and R-56 in the walls (versus R-21).
All the windows are triple-glazed, meaning they have three panes of glass.
To achieve the performance he was aiming for, Wright used a wall-insulation system of his own invention. He used six-inch insulating foam boards specially made from his design, topped with four inches of store-bought fiberglass batting.
All told, the energy efficiency upgrades and the solar panels added about 25% to the construction cost, said Kerry Quaglia, CEO of Home HeadQuarters. The house cost $450,000 to build.
Home HeadQuarters’ mission is to sell homes to first-time home buyers with incomes below the area median. To do that, it relies on subsidies. In addition to NYSERDA funding, the project received other state housing subsidies plus money from Mayor Ben Walsh’s Resurgent Neighborhoods Initiative. The city provided $140,000, most of which came from federal stimulus funds.
Home HeadQuarters will sell the house to Fernandez for $175,000.
As more houses are built to the passive-house level, the materials and methods will become more standardized, which should reduce the upfront cost, said Chris Straile, a consultant from Sustainable Comfort Inc. who worked on the project.
“The thing is, we’re just doing this stuff for the first time. … So we need to build it like five to 10 to 20 more times to really find out what (is) cost effective,’’ he said.
To test whether Fernandez’s house lives up to its net-zero promise, Straile installed energy monitoring equipment to track how the house performs for the next couple years, he said.
Thursday, Home HeadQuarters hosted a ribbing cutting with Fernandez and state and city officials. The solar panels had not been installed yet, but they will be expected to produce 7,500 kilowatt-hours a year. That should be enough to balance out what the house draws from National Grid.
Under the utility’s net-metering tariff, Fernandez will get credit on her bill for every kilowatt-hour the panels produce. They will probably crank out more power than she uses on long summer days, but less during the deep chill of January. Fernandez can roll over any credits and use them during months when the solar panels come up short, said Jared Paventi, speaking for National Grid.
Fernandez said she is excited to own a home for the first time, especially because her mortgage payment is not expected to be much higher than the $625 she pays in monthly rent.
And those low, low utility bills?
“It’s going to save me money,’’ she said. “It’s a blessing. It’s a blessing to me.”
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