A harmonious space: After a year, Pete and Katie Bogle assess their 'green' house

Friday, September 18, 2009 3:18 PM  |  Printer friendly version | E-mail to a friend |

By Katie Scarvey

kscarvey@salisburypost.com

When Katie and Pete Bogle designed their house in western Rowan County, they hoped that the effort they had invested into thoughtful design would not only be good for the earth and their family but good for their finances as well.

Of course one can predict, but reality doesn’t always follow computer programs.

With a year’s worth of power bills, the Bogles stepped back to assess how successful they were in terms of building an energy-efficient home. A glance at a computer spreadsheet reveals that their average monthly electric bill is just over 83 dollars. And that’s it — there are no additional gas or oil bills.

The home’s year-long track record definitely met the Bogles’ expectations.

But this home isn’t just about power bills, of course. It’s a space that gives this family — which includes daughters Abby and Hannah — great joy.

Pete’s an architect with Ramsay Burgin Smith. Katie is a media specialist at A.L. Brown High School, and although she doesn’t have Pete’s design background, she contributed a great deal to the planning process.

Fortunately, Pete and Katie — who met while attending West Rowan High School — share a taste for simple living, and their home is a reflection of that.

They don’t believe in waste, they don’t believe in having too much stuff or having more house than necessary. They believe one’s home should be functional, above all.

This is a couple who definitely understands the concept of simple abundance.

Touring the home, you’ll notice a marked absence of clutter: you won’t see trinkets, gewgaws, fancy decorative accents, and that’s a conscious decision. Katie and Pete share a pared-down aesthetic. Less is more. Function trumps appearance.

“It’s not a Southern Living ‘showcase’ house,” Pete says.

He does consider it, however “a learning tool,” — an example of what can be done if you think things through and “put your money where it matters.”

His mantra: “Sustainable is attainable.”

If you’re assuming that PKB House (as they call it, for Pete and Katie Bogle) cost more than a regular home to build, you’d be wrong. The cost per square foot was comparable, Pete says, to what a regular house would have cost.

The home is 2,200 square feet, with another 1,000 in the basement.

The investments the Bogles made in energy-efficient features have paid off. Their home is, officially, Energy Star Rated, tested by an independent third party. An Energy Star Rated house must be 15 percent more energy efficient than what is required from new construction. The Bogles’ home is 40 percent more efficient.

In fact, the rater said the home was the second most energy-efficient residence he’d ever rated. Some of the home’s notable features include:

• Lots of double-paned windows. They flood the home with natural light, and typically, the family uses electric lights only after sundown.

Katie points out that they haven’t changed a light bulb since they moved in a year ago — they use compact fluorescent bulbs, which use significantly less energy than regular bulbs.

• A high-efficiency wood-burning fireplace — a Quadra Fire 7100. It keeps them warm in the winter.

A plus: It doesn’t require the constant poking and replenishing that other fireplaces need, Katie says.

• An exterior wall system made of structural insulated panels from W.A. Brown & Son. This system cost more than normal two-by-four stud construction but will pay off down the road, Pete says. (Building wrap also helps keep the building air-tight.)

• An energy recovery ventilation system. When a house is air-tight, this kind of system helps control how much air to introduce to the space and pre-treats it before it enters the space.

In order to be able to invest in features that would contribute to lower energy costs, they chose to spend less in other areas, opting for simple cabinetry and less-than-trendy laminate countertops.

Insulated panels will reduce their energy bills — and “granite countertops won’t do that,” Pete points out.

Katie and Pete were always considering sustainability when they made decisions about their home.

For example, for flooring they’ve used bamboo, which is a highly renewable resource, as is rubber, the tile material they’ve used in bathrooms.

They also tried to use products, including carpets and kitchen countertops, that contain recycled content.

But in some ways, the home isn’t what people expect of a model of energy efficiency.

Pete says that he’s frequently asked what kind of solar panels, geothermal heat pumps, etc. they’ve installed.

People are often surprised at his answer: “None.”

“I like solar panels, and assuming I win a lottery some day, I'll have a whole field full of them just because I could,” Pete says, “but these specialty pieces of equipment didn’t fit in the budget, and without designing and building the house right first, they wouldn’t have made a huge difference anyway.

“Our design approach was about building what makes the most difference for the least cost to begin with.”

Still, he has piping in the walls up to the roof ready for solar panels when their finances are such that they can afford them.

Although the exterior of the home looks nothing like an early 1900s Southern farm house, the home was actually designed considering many of the same things those home builders of that era took into consideration: in a pre-air-conditioning era, there was great attention to things like correctly proportioned overhangs, breeze-catching porches, cross ventilation, stack effect cooling, and siting the home to take the best advantage of the sun.

All of those things, Pete says, “were essential to living in this area before central heating and air.

“These are the things we learned from the farm house model and applied to our house. We have the advantage of modern construction materials and techniques to improve on that model.”

Pete also hastens to add that those building with these things in mind don’t have to come up with such an “odd-looking” house as theirs — although one could easily argue that PKB House is more striking than odd.

“Any house could be made to be more energy efficient and we’d all be wise to take those steps,” he says.

He also points out that there are good tax incentives associated with certain features.

There’s a federal Residential Energy Efficiency tax credit, for example, that can be applied to energy-efficient building features, such as the right kind of insulated windows, for example.

Some of the Bogles’ planned improvements will have to wait until they sell their old home on 318 West Thomas Street.

Pete has put together a design for converting that house — built in 1927 — into an energy efficient home and says he will happily share those plans with a prospective buyer and assist them to make those plans a reality.

Katie sums up the family’s approach to life and possessions.

“It really all comes down to stewardship,” she says.

“We want to be good stewards of all of what God has given us — our money, this land, our family, the things we have and even the stuff we choose to give away, the things that others may need and that we don’t need ...”