What's so cool about it? It's made out of straw bales and is completely off the grid and it costs about $500 a year for all its utility costs, including heat and electric. And that's pretty cool.
The owner of the house, Mary Ellen Blakey, gave a tour of her house on 7/25. A lot of people were there. The tour was set up with the help of Green Local 175, an organization that is trying to promote green economic development within a 175 mile radius of Utica. Check this out: Green Local.
In the course of the tour Ms. Blakey told us that the bales are straw bales, not hay bales, and that the difference between the two is that straw bales contain the wheat or oat stems only and hay bales contain the grain that's fed to livestock. She also said the bales have an R-value of about 50. And the house doesn't have a basement, but an insulated concrete slab that keeps the first layer of bales about 18 inches off the ground. And that just about the most important thing about building a straw bale house is that you can't let the bales get wet. And that she didn't build an underground or earthen berm house because of how damp it was in upstate NY. And that the bales are covered with a coat of plaster made from sand, clay and lime. And the plasterers were from VT. And the roof was put on by Mennonites.
She took us inside the house. We didn't go upstairs (it's a one-and-a-half-story house) because the upstairs wasn't quite finished yet, but we did get to look at the bottom floor, which was one big room, with the kitchen flowing into the dining room and the dining room flowing into the living room and so on. Except for the bathroom, which was separate. It was very rustic. Big wooden beams. No refrigerator. An icebox instead. Wood stove. Solar oven. A battery closet for storing electricity collected from the solar panels, which are not on the roof of the house. Huge, argon-filled Marvin windows lined one side of the house. The house's windows cost about $12,000. Outside dimensions of the house were under a thousand square feet. Not a big house and not a house that everyone could build, but just about as low in the carbon footprint area as you can get. And the scenery was beautiful and so was Ms. Blakey's garden.
The off-the-grid part was really cool, but the coolest thing about this house to me was the fact that none of its heat or electricity were from coal-powered plants, which spew enormous amounts of fossil fuel emissions into the air, contributing to climate change. It would be nice if every house in America could be off the grid, but since that isn't possible, it would also be nice if we could get more electric from clean sources like solar and wind. Wind? Wind turbines? Buy electricity from electric companies that's produced by wind farms, or maybe even solar farms? Why not? Then people who can't afford their own solar panels or windmills or who live in apartments can use electric that's from renewable sources.
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