‘Zero-energy’ house is one family’s dream home come true
By EDWARD M. EVELD McClatchy Newspapers
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — For a lot of people, the most environmental act they regularly accomplish is to carry the recycling bin to the curb.
Sarah Hoffmann’s dream was to go far beyond that.
Hoffmann, her husband, John Spertus, and their three children will move this fall from their Kansas City, Mo., home into their new house atop a hill northwest of Weston, Mo.
The home’s architect is calling it “the greenest house in the Midwest, possibly in the country.”
While energy bills get increasingly scary — the air conditioner whirs nonstop this summer, the price of natural gas goes up every winter — Hoffmann worries as much about the planet and the future. How long can we keep depleting and polluting?
So rather than merely worrying, Hoffmann and Spertus seized their home-building opportunity to use sustainable design and hope the house will be a model for an energy future that’s not far off.
For starters, the 2,500-square-foot house will be so good at generating its own electricity that at times it will send excess electricity back to the power grid. It will use radiant tubes in the concrete slab for heating and cooling.
The house will use half the water of a regular home of its size, with part of the credit going to “dual-flush” toilets, which use a lower water flush for liquid waste than for solids.
We posed a few questions to Hoffmann — whose career has gone from doctor to mother and community-based farm operator — about the family’s “zero-energy” home.
Q. What first got you interested in these topics?
A. I’ve been thinking about this forever. I’m a bit of a science nerd, and I’ve been interested in renewable energy and sustainable lifestyles for a very long time. I was a teenager during the energy crisis of the 1970s. That was a formative time for me. I very much followed these technologies and the sustainable lifestyle movement as it’s grown very, very, very slowly over the last 30 years.
Will you know how to work this house with some of its unusual technologies?
That will be a tremendous amount of fun. We will have to take a very active role in working with this house. A lot of the things are so cutting edge it’ll take some time for us to adjust to it, some training and some tweaking. And we’ll have to be very tuned into what’s going on with the weather to use the house appropriately. It’s designed to keep us warm and cool when we need it. It’s sited on a hill. During the spring and fall we need to be very active about using natural ventilation, opening and closing windows. It’s not a push-button house.
Why be a guinea pig like this?
I really think as a country we are ready to move into this direction. That’s my hope, and I’m hoping that having something out there that’s doable and can be an example will help make a difference. And I think the more people begin to think about what is possible for residential buildings, then things will come down in price and be affordable.
How old are your children and what do they think?
Daniel is 8, Jake is 13, and Eliza is 15. They’re very on board. There’s a lot of excitement about the whole process we’re going through. You know how kids accept what comes in life, so they may take for granted a little how amazing it is for us to be part of this.
And your husband?
He likes to say that he loves watching it come along. He’s very busy. He’s a research cardiologist and has a very active research practice. We’ve had many wonderful conversations and have enjoyed working on this, but, truth be told, he gets really involved when the going gets rough.
What about the house’s interior design?
Jason (McLennan) was fabulous at teasing out our style, our aesthetic. We’ve always lived in older houses ... so we started with the Arts and Crafts style, so that you can see the beauty in the form itself.
And the house is a part of your ambition to have a small farm business?
Yes, I had a longstanding dream to be part of the sustainable farm business. I worked for two years as an apprentice with the intention of opening my own business. That’s when we bought this farm. It’s an absolutely beautiful place to enact the idea about the house as well. Those two things came along in parallel. The farm is called Green Dirt Farm. I am raising dairy sheep and hoping in the next year or two to go commercial with a small-scale business making sheep cheese. Right now I sell grass-fed lamb at the Brookside Market. I’m really happy to have a small business the children can participate in.
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