Paradise Valley home one with environment

By TREVON MILLIARD Chronicle Staff Writer

EMIGRANT - Pouwel Gelderloos’ house collects everything his family of four might need, whether it’s electricity, heat or water.

The water isn’t pumped from a well or piped from a city supply. The power doesn’t travel over miles of electric lines. The heat isn’t generated by natural gas.

Instead, this architect from Holland used his 35 years of experience in construction and some common-sense to construct a house that is completely self sufficient.

“We try to maximize all that hits the house,” he said. “I look at the weather a completely different way than most people. When the wind is howling or the rain is pouring, I’m happy.”

All the water used by the family comes from the sky. Wide gutters gather rain from the rooftop, which is then filtered and stored in a 10,000-gallon underground tank.

Hot water, achieved through the power of the sun, is used to heat the house via pipes in the cement and stone floors. Much of the house is built of brick, stone and cement because these materials are good at retaining their temperature.

An octagon-shaped, glass-wall solarium also keeps a portion of the 3,000-square-foot house at 60 degrees Fahrenheit, even during the depths of winter, just using the sun’s radiant heat. And the cement holds that heat throughout the night.

“The entire day this area here gets hit by the sun,” Gelderloos said of the solarium.

Electricity comes from solar panels and a windmill in the front yard, which are linked to batteries in the garage. The batteries can hold up to 7 kilowatts and this past Tuesday, they were completely full.

The house is hooked up to outside electricity in case the batteries run out of energy. But it takes about two cloudy days in a row to do that since even without the sun, the house can still harness the wind.

“My electric bill is only $15 a month,” he said, “which is basically the monthly hookup fee.”

Gelderloos designed all these applications and built the house at the edge of Emigrant, population 372, in 15 months.

But he didn’t do it just to follow the trendy “green” movement. Yes, his house leaves a smaller carbon footprint than most, but that’s not the main point, he said. Nor is the fact that it cost about 25 percent more to build than a typical house, yet costs significantly less to run, he said.

“That’s what makes it attractive to mainstream America,” he said. “But it’s not only a financial concern anymore.”

It’s survival, he said.

People are completely dependent on the “grid,” Gelderloos said, but if for some reason, electricity is cut off, “we’re all dead in the water.”

Being hooked into the grid to get all your electricity and utilities is like being hooked into life support at a hospital, he said.

Also, electricity isn’t the real concern if things go horribly awry.

“People have lived without electricity for hundreds of years,” he said. “But you can only live without water a few days.”

Just in case, Gelderloos’ house has a well and a pump, but he’s yet to use it, he said. It’s only for when his rainwater-storage tanks bottom out and that hasn’t happened since the family moved in three months ago.

All of the house’s water is gathered from rain or snow that land on the roof. Warm-water pipes help melt the snow in the winter. All the water is filtered in the gutters by sand and gravel intended to get rid of the big stuff - “just like Mother Nature does it” n then passed through three other filters down the line.

Based on local weather, the house should collect 35,000 gallons a year, he said. A normal family of four uses 60,000 gallons, he said.

But the 35,000 gallons in his house collects goes a lot farther than it would in most houses.

All the gray water - except toilet and kitchen-sink water - is fed into the soil below the plants in the solarium. The water the plants don’t use descends through the soil to a sandy layer that filters it, then through another man-made filter and then on to a pair of 55-gallon storage barrels, ready to be used again.

Toilet water isn’t reused, but dual-flush toilets cut down usage by enabling a person to use either six-tenths of a gallon or 1.6 gallons per flush. “This is important because toilets are 40 percent of a house’s water use,” he said.

Another water saver was putting all hot-water faucets close to the hot-water line. “How much water do you waste waiting for hot water to reach your faucet?” he asked, then turned on the bathtub faucet. The water turned from cold to hot in seconds.

As a result, the family can still live as they always have and even pamper themselves.

“You don’t need to worry about being skimpy when living off the grid,” he said, showing off the master bathroom’s oversize tub and separate dual-head shower.

The hot-water heating system involves running water to the roof, through a winding radiator-like glass tube and past a copper tube filled with acetone, which is boiled by the sun’s heat and warms the water.

The warm water then travels to the basement and heats the cold water in the storage tanks. The first tank is warm, the second is 120 degrees Fahrenheit and the third gets the water hot enough for showers, to heat the floors and to melt snow on the roof.

He’s selling designs for his homes on his Web site, www.oasishybridhomes.organd.

But even though he’s received many calls, he’s yet to have one solid order, he said.

“Compare me to Rembrandt,” he said. “Famous and poor and from Holland.”

Trevon Milliard can be reached at tmilliard@dailychronicle.com or 582-2657.

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