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WEB EXTRA | Photo Slideshow
WEB EXTRA | Building the House
What would it be like to live off the electricity grid? In the next part of our KPBS radio series “A Matter of Degrees: Climate Change in San Diego,” we visit Laura Silver. Silver lives in an energy-efficient straw bale house in San Diego’s East County and runs her household on electricity from solar panels, supplemented by a small generator in the back yard. KPBS Radio’s Alison St John has more. To reach Laura Silver’s house you drive east on Skyline Truck Trail, and take a small side road that leads steeply down into a hidden valley with a small lake at the bottom.
The house is a modest, ranch-style building set into the hillside above the lake. To look at it, you’d never know the plastered walls are actually built of thick bales of compacted straw. Laura Silver lives here with her three dogs and five cats.
Silver : Good morning.
St John : Hello, what a beautiful house.
Silver : Thank you. A little bit different, but I enjoy it very much.
Stepping inside on a cold morning, Laura’s house feels comfortably warm. The living room is spacious, with a high ceiling, and sand plastered walls. Big insulated windows on two sides let in lots of natural light. There’s a bedroom with a view of the lake, a large bathroom and an office where Laura works from home as a web designer.
St John : Did you design the whole house yourself?
Silver : I did, actually.
Because this out-of-the way valley is not on the electric grid, Laura designed everything with energy efficiency in mind. The long side of the house is south-facing which allows the straw bale walls to act as a passive solar heat sink, attracting heat during the day and releasing it during the night. The double glazed windows are set deep into the thick walls.
St John : So that’s about two-feet-deep hay bales by the looks of things?
Silver : Yes it is. It’s very quiet in here and holds the heat in the winter and keeps it cooler in the summer.
Laura’s lights use compact fluorescent bulbs. Her refrigerator and washing machine are models that use the minimum amount of energy.
St John : It’s pretty efficient huh?
Silver : It is, and I tell you it really cleans the clothes. I’ve never had anything work this well.
The other main electricity users in the house are the computer, the DVD and the CD players. Laura doesn’t have television. Because her two kilowatt solar system can’t keep everything running for 24 hours on a cloudy day, Laura goes outside to crank up the generator to supplement her power supply.
She doesn’t mind the chore. She likes having an independent power supply that covers her lifestyle.
Silver : I’m very happy with it. It’s been very nice. I get a little bit smug when there’s an SDG&E power outage and only my neighbor Ken and I who are off the grid still have power.
St John : So how often do you have to use the generator?
Silver : Most of the time once a day, and I run it for 40 minutes to an hour to keep the batteries charged overnight. If I’m using the computer a lot on a cloudy day, then I’ll probably have to turn it on for a second time for a while.
Eight batteries in a corner of the shed store energy generated by the solar panels and the generator. Once the generator’s turned off, the quiet sets in again, and the sound of birds singing in the rushes round the lake.
This is why Laura loves living out here.
Silver : You just get a chance to be a little bit closer and slower. Things can move a little bit slower out here. It really has changed my whole outlook.
Laura’s life is peaceful, but she’s not that far from the hustle and bustle of San Diego city life. The nearest mall is 13 miles away. She plans her errands to the city carefully though, to avoid adding to the very problem she’s committed to confronting: burning up fossil fuels in long car trips.
We walk back to the house, past the five-foot-high solar panels that quietly generate much of the energy for Laura’s simple lifestyle. She says being off the grid does force her to be aware all the time about how she much energy she uses. And that, she says, is a good thing.
Silver : I’m amazed sometimes at people who just say, ‘Oh you have to go turn on a generator once a day? I would never be on solar, too much trouble.’ Or they don’t want to have to think about power they’re using -- which is kind of scary you know – ‘I don’t have to think about power I’m using’ -- well, you know even if you’re on SDG&E, we all need to be conscious, it seems to me.
It’s chilly outside and we go back into the house, where the temperature remains an average of around 70 degrees. Laura has under-floor heating, but has never had to use it. If it’s cold, she says, she’d rather bake a batch of cookies in her propane powered oven. That’s enough to heat up the whole house for the day.
Alison St John, KPBS News.
(Photo: Energy efficient straw bale house in San Diego’s East County powered by solar panels and supplemented by a small generator. Nathan Gibbs/KPBS )
