http://www.dri.edu
	Fall 2006

Welcome to Big Thunder where renewable energy meets creative energy

Building a custom home from the ground up often can be taxing on a relationship—so many decisions, so many hours of planning and work. But for Dr. Mary Cablk, an ecologist specializing in wildlife, and Dr. John Sagebiel, a chemist specializing in air pollutants, chemistry was on their side when building their environmentally friendly home in Reno. Their recipe for success combines a love of nature, an intent to preserve the environment, a lot of thought and a good sense of humor. A dose of experts who “build green,” especially Reno architect Don Clark, provided the necessary ingredients.

“There are very few clients who get fully into the spirit of the process of building their own home. Nobody I have worked with in the past 25 years has done so as much as these two,” Clark said.

The result: Big Thunder, a 3,100-square-foot home that stands as an attractive example of how to build an energy-efficient, cost-efficient home.

“The name Big Thunder is a spoof on all the big cowboy ranches that seem to be cropping up in Montana and other western states, like ‘cowboy heaven,’” Cablk said. “It’s tongue in cheek.”

The soft tones and unique shape of the home’s exterior beckon visitors inside, many of whom may not even notice the small photovoltaic panels soaking up the sun amidst the foliage in the front yard.

“Almost nothing in this house is an accident,” Sagebiel remarks. “There’s a reason for everything, and many times it serves a purpose or function.”

The large windows stand as an example. Before the house was built, the architects created a computer model to determine precisely where the sun would hit—365 days a year. The house faces exactly north-south and east-west. The windows, which stretch across the south-facing wall of the living room and reach two stories high, catch the heat in the wintertime, providing warmth and light. Roof overhangs in just the right spots keep the sun away from the concrete in the summer, providing shadows that cool areas outside on the porch. The west-facing windows are glazed, or mirrored, to repel up to 96 percent of heat while still letting light in.

Sagebiel sits in the “sanctuary.”

“We don’t need an air conditioner to pump the hot air out of the house in the summer,” Sagebiel said. “It’s never allowed to come in to begin with.” Additional cooling is provided naturally through convection using windows high up on the great-room wall.

Impressive wooden beams, originally 80 feet long and cut in half, are reclaimed timbers that were milled some 85 years ago, and each has a unique history. For instance, all the large posts in the house came from an old Seattle police department’s horse stable and smaller beams came from a granary in Saskatchewan, Canada. The rust spots in the wood’s grain from where nails had been for years give the home a rustic feel, like a cabin in the woods.

A door in the entry area hallway leads outside to Cablk’s sanctuary, a private space to shake off the stresses of the day. The couple has built up boulders where water runs over the top, simulating a waterfall. Hot- and cold-water knobs protruding from the side of the house allow for an outside shower in nature, and the water runs down a creek bed that the couple created with native vegetation and rocks. The layers of rocks that encircle the area occupied the space long before the couple, so they kept them and used them for landscaping and privacy.

Wooden beams line the ceiling and juniper posts hold up a railing around the upstairs loft where Cablk takes a breather with a builder.

In the couple’s master bathroom, the toilet and a sink are separated from the rest of the master bathroom, with a door to the outside hallway, in an effort to conserve the number of bathrooms in the house—this one serves as the guest bathroom as well as their private bathroom. The rest of the master bathroom is exquisite, with windows pouring sunlight into the large tub—a re-creation of the Merced River that bubbles and flows through Yosemite Valley. Handmade turquoise-colored recycled glass covers the top and side of the tub, with bits of copper glass representing the mining industry in Nevada. The bedroom sinks two and one-half feet below the dirt grade outside, providing insulation to the room.

The bottom floor and some walls are concrete but emanate heat through the use of hydronics. Solar panels on the roof heat water that runs through the floor to heat the house, keeping heat close to the ground where it’s needed the most. By using radiant heat throughout the house, there is no forced-air system, which means no dust blowing around.

Sagebiel scales the rock climbing wall in the living room, created from stones from Carson Valley’s Slide Mountain quarry.

While a feeling of being at Lake Tahoe resonates from the design of the bottom floor, shiny, beautiful, juniper paves the upstairs floor, creating the sense of being in the juniper’s native Great Basin. Juniper posts form a railing with wire that resembles a fence or railing along a hiking path in the Great Basin. Cablk points out that one can even see where bark beetles made holes in the juniper.

Looking out over the railing, rocks recovered from Slide Mountain in Carson Valley meet the eye, sparkling from the sun’s rays. Starting at the floor of the living room downstairs, the rocks jut out in places and float like a river up the entire length of the 25-foot wall. Hooks and rope dangle near the ceiling, waiting for the next visitor to embark on an indoor rock-climbing adventure. Bragging rights for reaching the top are achieved when a person can read the two names of the stonemasons who built the wall—like many artists they signed their work.

Outside, the energy generated from the photovoltaic panels in the yard is used to pump water from their well. One hour of sunlight per person per day is all they need to keep the water cistern full. Similarly, the 425-gallon solar hot-water storage tank in the mechanical room retains heat for later use. On cloudy days, enough energy has been stored up that their back-up propane boiler rarely gets used at all. The couple’s heating and power bills amount to a mere 10 to 20 percent of a conventional home. They spend only $450 per year on propane, as opposed to the $3,000-4,000 others spend on a similar-sized home.

Sagebiel checks the temperature gauge of the solar hot water storage tank in his “mechanical room.”

The two large photovoltaic arrays in the southern part of the property are a very recent addition. These arrays move to follow the sun and feed their energy back through inverters into the main electrical panel. From there they power the house and any excess goes onto the power grid. Because they are part of Sierra Pacific Power Company’s net metering program, they can “store” energy on the grid and use it later, such as in winter months when there is not as much sunlight.

So, for those of us who are living in a conventional home but would like to apply a “green” thumb to the structure, where does one start? Sagebiel recommends tackling the hot water heater first.

“Invest in a solar water heating system,” he said. “It will give you the most bang for the buck and will interface with an existing house the easiest. And if you have a south-facing house, you might was well put some solar panels on the roof to take advantage of it.”

As with many couples, there’s always a home project waiting in the wings. This spring, the house will become a DRI experiment when Sagebiel and his DRI colleagues connect the house to a test bed for a hydrogen-based renewable power system that resides inside a mobile trailer. The trailer will use energy from a new solar array Sagebiel installed to produce hydrogen, and that hydrogen will power the house. Readers interested in seeing photos of the house and design drawings can visit: http://www.big-thunder.com.