Over 500 people came to see the energy efficient demonstration home, built by Rural Electric Convenience Cooperative Co., on the first weekend. The home in Chatham features many of the energy saving techniques illustrated in a manual available from most electric cooperatives.

What do you get when you start with an industrial-strength heat pump, blend in a few thousand feet of underground plastic tubing, fold in a lot of insulation from old newspapers and sprinkle on a healthy dollop of caulking compound?

If you stir all those things in with a well-built home, you'll come up with a Certified Comfort Home, and Rural Electric Convenience Cooperative Co. (RECC), Auburn, has built one in Chatham. This demonstration home should help convince rural lllinoisans that a nice, warm, conventionally built home can be comfort conditioned without breaking the bank.

The home, a 2,019 square-foot beauty with a full basement, was built by Weldon Ladage, a RECC member and area building contractor.

For a long time rural people faced a tough choice. It took a lot of energy to heat and cool a home, and energy of any kind was expensive. They could swelter in the summer and shiver in the winter, or struggle with high energy bills.

There weren't many viable alternatives. Energy-efficient houses were expensive, and while a few people shelled out big bucks to build "underground" houses, or double-wall "envelope homes," most of us had to make do with plain old frame homes whose basic construction methods dated back centuries. Others built homes out of blown foam applied over inflated balloons, or resorted to other measures. To put it charitably, most of the resulting homes looked a bit "different."

Those are extreme measures, and expensive. Home-owners who didn't have a lot of money to spend were out of luck.

The co-ops wanted to help members who were having trouble coping, so they formed a committee to devise a set of guidelines that would show people how to build homes that would be affordable to build and to live in. And they wanted to use existing, off-the-shelf materials and techniques, when possible, to build a reasonably priced, energy-efficient house that would fit nicely in any neighborhood.

It has been said, only half in jest, that the camel was the result of a committee's attempt to design a horse, and many committees seem to work that way. Not this one.

The group blended simple technology, reasonably priced materials and better building techniques to come up with "A Guide to Energy Efficient Construction Standards," which is better known as the Certified Comfort Home (CCH) Manual. Experts from the co-ops in the state huddled with architects and energy-efficiency wizards from throughout the Midwest to hammer out construction guidelines which, if you follow them carefully, will enable you to keep warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Most CCH guidelines are based on simple things. A slight change in framing techniques saves some energy, and a heavy dose

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of caulking and weatherstripping helps even more. The use of wet-blown cellulose insulation is a major option, but the book gives detailed tips on installing fiberglass insulation, too. Cellulose insulation is made from recycled newspaper that's treated with a fire retardent. Wet-blown cellulose does not settle, has a high insulating value, fills voids and reduces air infiltration. A geothermal heating and cooling system is an important part of the program, at least in the northern two-thirds of the state.

Building to CCH standards only costs about a small percentage more than it costs to build the "average" home, and a Certified Comfort Home will cost less than half as much to comfort condition the year around. Best of all, there are no exotic materials or esoteric construction methods.

Tri-County Electric Cooperative in Mt. Vernon is so confident of the efficiency of homes built to CCH standards that it guarantees a certain energy price for three years. If the bill is higher, Tri-County makes up the difference.

Dana Smith, director of member and public relations for RECC, oversaw construction of the co-op's demonstration home, which was built with careful attention to the guidelines set forth in the manual."Stopping air infiltration is the single most important thing you can do to cut energy loss," Smith said, "and any new home can be comfortable and affordable if the builder follows these construction techniques.

"RECC's demo home, all 2,019 square feet of it, will cost less than $50 a month to heat and cool," he adds. With the geothermal heat pump a waste heat recovery system can provide virtually free hot water during the air conditioning season.

Bryce Cramer, district office manager for Egyptian Electric Cooperative Association, Steeleville, and chairman of the CCH committee, says, "This book spells out ways to control heat loss or gain, infiltration, caulking and weatherstripping, and everything else you need to know to build your home as snugly as possible.

"All 2,019 square feet of it will cost less than $50 a month to heat and cool."

"Ideally, you should follow all the guidelines in the book," Cramer says, "because you'll get the best possible results that way. But it's not absolutely necessary. The more you do, though, the more comfortable your home will be, and the less it'll cost to heat and cool it."

As mentioned earlier, the Certified Comfort Home is just like any other home, but it's built with proper amounts of insulation, very tight sealing and a geothermal or air-to-air heat pump. And it offers at least three advantages over homes heated with fossil fuels. First, it's available anywhere there's a power line. You don't have to wait for the gas line that may never come. Secondly, there's the safety of not having combustion byproducts in your home. And thirdly, there's the fact that electricity is now coming down in price at the same time gas prices seem to be going up.

The program centers more on attention to detail than just about anything else, Cramer says. He adds that he still likes fiberglass insulation and used it in the home he built a few years ago in Murphysboro, even though he had to use 2 X 6 studs to get enough insulation in the stud cavities.

"I installed it myself, and I paid very careful attention to how I put it in," he says. "Sloppy installation of fiberglass batt insulation is the leading cause of problems and will cost you money in the long run."

He notes that his 3,600-square-foot house cost just $146 to heat all last winter.

While Cramer used fiberglass insulation in his home, most of the committee members still prefer wet-blown cellulose insulation, which is a mixture of finely shredded recycled newspaper and a light glue, which fills all those little nooks and crannies and doesn't settle as time goes by.

Below, many of the energy saving features of the home are hidden behind walls. Displays were set up to show the advantages of features like wet-blown cellulose insulation.

Above, Jimmy Ayers of Rochester, right, chairman of the RECC board, discusses the home with builder Weldon Ladage. The home features a unique electric fireplace.

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Dana Smith, RECC director of member and public relations, looks on as the geothermal heat pump is fine tuned.

Ask your banker about an Energy Efficient Mortgage An Energy Efficient Mortgage (EEM) allows a home buyer to qualify for a larger mortgage by allowing a higher debt to income ratio than lenders normally use to calculate loan qualification. Energy Efficient Mortgages allow the significant monthly energy savings of an energy efficient home to be put toward a higher monthly mortgage payment. You can find out if EEM's are an option by asking your lender. Four (4) Federal Lending Programs offer EEM's: Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC), Federal Housing Administration (FHA), Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA), and the Veterans Administration (VA). If you would like more information on the Certified Comfort Home Program or the EEM's, contact your local electric cooperative office.

One advantage is that the insulation fills spaces so well that a whole-house wrap, a must with batt-type insulations, is unnecessary with wet-blown cellulose. Since it completely fills the stud cavities, you can get enough in your 2 X 4-framed walls to get the job done. There's no need to frame with the more expensive 2 X 6s, or to use the special door jambs and window frames such construction calls for. The insulation and tightness has an added benefit in keeping outside noise out. The RECC demonstration home is not far from Interstate 55 and you can't hear the traffic inside. Insulation was also added to an interior wall between the kitchen and master bedroom to stop interior noise.

Smith emphasizes, tightness is important. Air moving into or out of the house must be kept to an absolute minimum. By and large, you can accomplish this by caulking, then caulking some more. One contractor noted that it took 47 tubes of caulking compound to seal a CCH home he built!

There are a few modest framing changes that your builder needs to do to make your home easier to heat and cool, and one is the "California corner," which allows more insulation in the corners, where cold and mildew are often a problem. The manual calls for a foam gasket between concrete basement walls and the sill plate, to seal any uneven joints. Raised-heel trusses are recommended to allow attic insulation to fully cover outside wall edges, and door and window headers have foam panels sandwiched between the boards to minimize the movement of heat. In line with its emphasis on caulking, the manual urges that the builder apply a healthy bead of caulk before installing high-performance windows.

Once you've wrestled the insulating and air infiltration problems to the ground, the heating and cooling system comes next. Not surprisingly, the different climates of the state make a difference. Co-ops in the southern "banana belt" often recommend an air-to-air heat pump, with backup electric heat.

As you move north and into the part of Illinois where Mother Nature gets serious about winter, geothermal heat pumps make much more sense.

While geothermal heat pumps cost more up-front, the payback can be reasonably short. They are as cheap to operate as any gas system, or cheaper. They don't give off fumes, and the one system both heats and cools. You don't need a separate furnace and air conditioner, and many co-ops offer incentives and rebates to help with the added costs involved. The systems can also save you about 40 percent on your water heating costs.

If you're giving any thought at all to building, be sure to get a copy of the CCH manual, and discuss the procedures with your contractor. Often, a builder is reluctant to try new methods simply because he is used to building "the way we've always built." But talk to him, and have him talk to the people at your co-op. The old way was good enough when we didn't care about the cost of heating and cooling, but the new way is far better and not all that hard to do.

And whatever you do, talk to the people at your co-op before you even begin building. They can help you build a much better house, and one that you can afford to live in comfortably the year around. They'll be glad to give you a free copy of the CCH Manual.

— Story by Jack Halstead

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