Sunday, after we finished working, we came back east to check out the new place they’ve been building  just past Southgate.

Well, the best thing about it, is that it’s pretty much finished and it looks a little better from the outside now that it has two tiny porches outside of each of the upstairs bedrooms, and a large wrap-around deck outside of the living room. I’m hoping the landscaping grows quickly.

A few observations:

There are large sliding glass doors on the western side of the house. The afternoon sun in the west will make it hot on that side. Strange that someone building a supposedly “green” home, would do something which would cause the cooling system to have to work harder. Common sense would dictate putting larger openings on the east side, where the cooling breezes come from and smaller ones on the hottest side of the house.

The living room/dining/ kitchen area are about the same size as ours, but the ceiling is lower, and there are 6 (yes, six!) ceiling fans, 4 in the living room area and 2 in the kitchen. Can you say overkill ?! You can hardly see the ceilings because the fans are all crowded together.

The master bedroom is east of the dining area, and there are 3 or 4 windows in the bedroom which opens into a laundry room/closet/ bathroom. It seems to be a nice room, but we’re confused by the placement of the washer/dryer – in a hall leading to the closet/bathroom. The bathroom faces the main road and there are two large windows which look right into the bathroom/shower! Bizarre!

The two upstairs bedrooms are small, but each has a big walk-in closet and a sea view. There’s also another large bathroom in a hallway between the rooms toward the front of the house, and a large attic/storage area to the rear.

This house has excessive amounts of storage space and the rooms feel cramped even without a lot of furniture. One of the people we took the tour with looked at each room and said that they could have moved a wall here and there to provide more living space without taking  much away from storage. She’s absolutely correct, and she is currently renovating an older house elsewhere on island. It will have solar hot water and the windows facing the breezes are becoming French doors with a nice open veranda.

Anyway, the entire southern-facing roof  on this “solar house” is largely photovoltaic material which will create much of the house’s electricity. The builders are guaranteeing 80%. There is an inverter to change DC to AC, but no storage batteries. They are participating in the “net metering” program with WAPA. But that means, if WAPA goes out during the night, the people who buy the house have to rely on their propane generator rather than stored energy from batteries.

Also since they have a propane generator, one would expect a gas stove, clothes dryer, and maybe even refrigerator to reduce the amount of electricity needed. The whole house could be probably be powered by the photovoltaic system if the dryer, fridge and stove weren’t electric. The house is for sale for $495,000. (One of the guys we took the tour with kept saying, “$150,000, tops!”)

Despite the  many problems I personally see with this house, it is a good idea. We hope that more projects (especially big ones, like the hotel/casino projects) actually begin with alternative energy production in mind.  I just wish that people with enough money to build something like this would have more common sense.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 24th, 2009 at 10:49 am and is filed under Island Buzz, St. Croix, Terry Talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.