The Green Beneath

The Ritzau/Harned residence in Hailey is the pinnacle of low-impact living.

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Ritzau/Harned Residence

Some people plan their houses with an eye on keeping up with the Joneses. Local couple Tom Harned and Kirsten Ritzau just want to build a house that is in line with their beliefs and is healthy to live in.

“I guess when I think about the news that I hear—global warming, environmental degradation—I think the awareness in our country and in the world in general is increasing to sustainable, reusable, renewable products and systems,” says Harned, explaining the inspiration behind their home.

Completed in August, the 4,200-square-foot Hailey home is reaching for the pinnacle of low-impact living based on a designation called LEED. LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, a green rating system developed by the U.S. Green Building Council. Achieving one of the highest levels of LEED certification will mean the home has met the highest criteria in environmentally correct home building today. The couple may go even further by achieving a net zero energy home, meaning that through environmental systems, they will produce as much energy as they consume. An added benefit will be no utility bills. In fact, the power company will pay them back for energy they produce beyond what they use.

With lofty goals in hand, the couple turned to local architectural designer Rebecca Bundy and her husband Morgan Brown, a solar energy system designer and LEED consultant at Sun Valley Solar, who guided them through the process to create their green dream.

“You need to start during the very roughest planning stages because there are LEED points for your site location,” Harned has learned. The family chose a site that is walking distance from local markets, schools, restaurants and stores, which is not only convenient, but also earns them points for reducing automobile fuel consumption and being closer to community.

According to LEED and environmentalists, the site work should have as little impact on the environment as possible, protecting natural resources and habitat, preserving as many trees as possible and, hopefully, planting even more. Besides preserving some of the beautiful old cottonwoods along the nearby Big Wood River and planting an orchard, the family will have a xeriscape garden with native plants and grasses requiring less water instead of the usual blue-green grass which, as Ritzau says, is “native to Kentucky,” not Idaho, and requires an excess of water in this dry environment.

As for the architectural design, Bundy created an Arts and Crafts, Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired home. Its flat roof is a series of stacked rectangles and squares that mimic the beauty of the craggy Carbonate cliffs beyond. The house was constructed of insulated concrete forms (later clad in cedar) instead of the usual wood frame. According to Bundy, this makes for much better insulation and creates a house that may last for “many hundreds of years.” A trickle-down effect has been that banks are starting to offer green mortgages and green loans at better rates because of the durability of the homes. “They last longer and work better,” Brown explains.

One of the most important design elements of green building is the actual positioning of the home. Passive solar design for our cold winter climate situates the home to capture the most energy possible from the sun. Here, an expansive southern exposure with many south-facing windows captures the winter sun while a carefully designed roof overhang keeps the house cool when the sun is high in the summer sky.

“When the sun is lower in the sky in winter, this whole room will get filled with sunshine,” says Harned. That way the family is using natural solar energy, not using up non-renewable resources to keep the home warm or cool.

“People say it’s more expensive to build green and some aspects are,” comments Ritzau, “but if you just do a few things early, like designing to maximize southern exposure, you save money and resources in the long run.”

The materials used to construct a house are an important element of passive solar design. Explains Harned, “If you also provide mass, heavy structures inside your home, like concrete floors, a rock fireplace, plaster walls or stone countertops, all those materials will absorb the heat of the sun and slowly release it. We have a concrete floor and stone countertops. We will have a fairly massive fireplace and a tile floor so, yes, we do have enough mass inside the house to absorb the heat. The denser the material, the warmer it will stay after sunset, whereas wood will lose the heat fairly quickly.”

The thermal mass of the concrete, stone and tile also absorbs the cool mountain air on summer evenings to keep the home comfortable during the day. Opening windows in the evening (and closing them during the warmth of day) naturally cools the house, too.

“Sun Valley has an ideal climate for passive solar,” says Brown. “Lots of sun when it’s cold and cool mountain summer nights. A properly designed home here should need little additional heating in winter and no air conditioning in summer.” With fewer windows to the north and west and overhangs situated properly, the home stays comfortable naturally.

Some people use trees or a trellis placed strategically in the west to block the hot afternoon sun’s rays. “If we gain too much heat during the autumn,” explains Harned, “we have trellises designed that can be installed and then planted to keep the lower angling sun of autumn out. It’s pretty cool. You plant something like hops or some other vine and when you want the warmth in spring, the plants are still growing and therefore let sun and warmth in. When it’s high summer, the eaves keep the high angles of the sun’s rays out, and in the autumn the plants have thickened and help keep the rays out and shade the house. This way the interior is shaded from most all rays except the desirable low-angle winter ones.”

Two solar heating panels on the roof will heat the water and a large array of solar electric panels will supply all electricity needs in the home. Floors are heated hydronically (circulating warm fluids underneath). But what happens when a long snowstorm hits and there is no sun for the panels? The Harned/Ritzau family has backup systems just in case, like an efficient fireplace, a woodburning furnace in the garage, and gas, but their most important source of heat is still the sun.

“This fireplace is kind of a fun one,” says Ritzau, enthusiastically pointing out a main backup heat source. “It’s called a masonry heater fireplace—a massive structure that sends the heat a number of different ways before it goes out the chimney. It’s a much more efficient system of gaining heat out of wood. Most fireplaces burn the wood and the heat just escapes up the chimney. With this one, it has to travel around through all the chambers and heats up the whole mass around the fireplace.” The fireplace needs to burn for only one of every 24 hours. The heat gets stored in the concrete, resulting in a slow-release, naturally-modulated temperature expression which is far more comfortable than a blast of heat from a forced air system.

Both Harned and Ritzau realize that building so environmentally sustainable a home means nothing if one’s lifestyle within it is overly indulgent.

“You can throw a lot of money into solar panels,” comments Harned, “but if you don’t conserve the energy inside your house—if you leave all the lights on (even when they are the energy conserving compact coiled fluorescent lights they will install), you will just be sucking up all that energy and wasting it, more or less.”

Appliances must likewise be efficient, echoes Ritzau.

“It’s great to have solar panels but make sure they’re not just feeding energy hogs,” she cautions. Most of their appliances will be Energy Star approved, meaning they are rated the best products made to conserve energy.

It’s not just environmental health, however, that has inspired Harned and Ritzau. The human health aspect is extremely important to them as well. Years ago, Ritzau, now a successful real estate agent, worked in a small office next to a copy machine and developed bad allergies from the toxic air. With two young children now, she wants to make sure the air in her home is clean. To that end, during the construction process, the couple used products that have the least amount of volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, which are emitted from certain home products like finishes and paints in a mostly odorless but possibly detrimental gas. Choosing lower VOC products will reduce the release of toxins into the air, resulting in healthy air not only for the homeowners but also for the construction workers along the way. Once they inhabit the home, the couple plans to support that fresh-air foundation by employing green housekeeping products to clean the home.

“For me, air quality is non-negotiable,” Ritzau says emphatically. “Carpeting is one of the most toxic things you can have in your house. Carpet is a place for dust mites that are a huge allergen. We’re going to have a minimum amount of carpets all with natural backing and wool underpads instead of the usual rubber pad that will off-gas forever. People are saying that green homes are healthier to live in literally because you take into consideration the air quality.”

In addition to eco-friendly carpets, they are using hard, renewable surfacing like bamboo or cork flooring, which will be upstairs.

An exciting aspect of this whole process for the couple is being a part of introducing innovative new green technologies to the Valley that may inspire others.
One of the latest technologies is their use of constructed wetlands—the first in the state—to augment the normal septic system. The wetlands appear as a patch of lush green plants near the home that naturally purify wastewater, while at the same time providing an attractive landscaping amenity. The system replaces the normal septic method of leaching effluent into the earth that may contaminate water sources. Instead of disposal, it is a natural purification process of polluted water. After passing through the system, the clean water can be used for irrigation or simply left to recharge the aquifer without pollutants.

Designed by John Grove—a biologist with Whole Water Systems who has been installing these systems in Colorado for 15 years—a 1,300-square-foot ditch was lined with clay and a level of gravel and then planted with wetland plants to naturally neutralize all pollutants in the water. The result will be a lush wetland filled with grassy sedges, rushes and wild irises (but no water aboveground) that helps clean the environment naturally.

According to Brown, there are some financial incentives for solar like a federal tax credit, a state income tax deduction, and the ability to sell back renewable energy, but the greatest economic incentive he claims is home equity. “An attractive system should increase the value of your home more than the amount you invest in it. Then it’s free energy.

“The benefit of LEED certification is that the home is a better product,” continues Brown. “An independent third party tests and verifies that the home has been well built and in a responsible manner.” OnPoint, a home inspection firm in Boise and the LEED certification tester for Idaho, has watched over the construction project.

Brown applauds Harned and Ritzau for building a comfortable home that is also environmentally responsible. “They are leading the way. People know it’s a good thing.”

Harned and Ritzau love to share their new environmental ideas. “Whenever someone comes over, we talk about it. Maybe we can grow a little awareness.” >>>