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span class="inline inline-left">Certified: The logs and beams at the Moores’ home are either certified, recycled or from previously felled trees in the area.Building a house with no carbon footprint is still more expensive than your average house, but for pioneers like the Moores in Evergreen, Colorado, paying 11 percent more for their charming home in the Rocky Mountains was worth it and “the right thing to do”.

Mike and Ann Moore, parents to three and grandparents to six, built their Santa Fe-style adobe house, perched at 2,300 meters in elevation, three years ago with the intent to make it carbon neutral.

On a beautiful winter day, the couple welcomed dozens of the US State Department’s Hubert H. Humphrey fellows to their 325-square-meter house and gave them a tour as part of an Institute of International Education sustainable development workshop. Mike gave the tour, explaining how their home is carbon neutral. “We hired people who know how to do that,” Mike said.

Working with a team of experts, including architects, builders specializing in zero-carbon footprint construction, and solar heat and electricity experts, they took the first step in their energy-efficient house by building an “airtight building envelope”.

Builder Ecofutures, Inc. and architect Thomas Doerr used building materials in the foundation, exterior walls and windows to make sure the house receives the mountain air, keeps warm in the winter and cool in the summer, and gets maximum sunlight while avoiding the negative effects of ultraviolet light.

The next thing was to ensure the home gets fresh air while keeping the humidity low. “During the warmer months, we let fresh air in by opening six strategically located, electronically operated windows in the evening and closing them at dawn,” Mike said.

In the winter, the process gets more complicated. The Moores have a system called energy recovery ventilation, which basically sucks fresh, cool air in through a pipe planted several feet deep and removes the house’s stale air, which meets the fresh air in a heat exchanger. The warmer stale air transfers the heat to the cool fresh a

Winter lunch: The kitchen provides a warm feeling that pervades the entire house.ir in the exchanger and the fresh air then warms the house. That way the Moores can avoid using conventional heaters that consume a lot of energy.

The Moores also produce energy on site using a photovoltaic solar power system, which generates 14,400 kilowatt hours of electricity per year, which is slightly higher than what the house consumes. The Moores do not use the power directly but sell the electricity to the US electricity network, called “the grid”, and buy back the electricity from the network. “I don’t know the exact amount, but we pay slightly more than what we get from the grid,” Mike said.

The scheme, however, still keeps their utility bills low, he added. For the entire solar power system, the Moores spent a costly US$70,000 but they got an incentive of $40,000 from the government for using the solar panels.

The savings from the lower utility bills will pay for the initial investment in nine to 10 years if utility prices are stable,” Mike said. “But prices have gone up, so it may pay up faster.”

The sunlight provides more than just electricity, but also a backup for the heating and water heating systems. The backup system uses 20,000 gallons of solar-heated water stored in a former milk storage container. During the three years the Moores have lived in the house, they have never had to turn on their backup heating system, Mike said.

The house has a system to recycle greywater from sinks, showers and baths to be used for the toilet.

Mike made sure the house did not use toxic materials and all the wood was either recycled from old buildings, certified by the Forestry Stewardship Council, or local wood from previously felled trees.

Energy auditors in the US, however, look at a house in isolation when they decide whether it is carbon neutral or not. They do not look at whether the house is close to public transit, Mike said. The house is “coincidentally” located near a bus stop to downtown Denver. The couple, however, uses a hybrid car to travel; the nearest grocery store, for example, is about one-and-a-half kilometers away.

A testimony to the couple’s environmental concerns, the home also shows the Moores’ love for the world’s cultural diversity with decorations from all over the world, especially Africa. Artisan works make the house warm and pretty while hanging plants add to the atmosphere.

Wealth from the sun: Even during winter, the Moores’ house gets plenty of sunlight to supply the photovoltaic system. Next to the solar panels is a chicken coop and an outhouse.The Moores were among the first generation of Peace Corps volunteers; they were posted in Togo, French West Africa, in the 1960s, where Ann observed how mothers in Togo always carried their babies close to their bodies while they worked, which she thought was the reason babies there were calm and happy. She saw that in the 1960s American mothers rarely held their babies close; they put babies in plastic chairs, which she believed made the babies fussier. The couple developed a baby carrier called a Snugli, and sold the company in 1985. Ann later designed two more products: Weego, an improved version of the baby carrier, and Air Lift, an individual carrier for medical equipment like oxygen tanks.

Mike, who loves music and yodeling, and Ann, who has a degree in nursing, have a passion for the environment. They serve as directors of EAS+Y, the Evergreen Alliance for Sustainability with You, which they said aimed at “fostering and nurturing activities in our community to address needs of recycling, plastic bag pollution, community gardens and composting.”

In the US, where some politicians and citizens believe climate change is not real but rather a claim that serves to obstruct economic growth, what the Moores have done is still a rarity. Mike, nonetheless, is optimistic about the future of environmental awareness in the US.

More and more people are building houses with no carbon footprint, forcing extra costs down, he said. “We hope that this might one day be everyone’s house.”

— photos by JP/Evi Mariani