The Forest Hill house was commissioned by a night-shift worker with a love of house plants & the land upon which he was raised. The lot, bequeathed by grandma, faces due south with a big sky view, interrupted only by a distant fir; ideal for passive solar harvest, active photovoltaic (PV) harvest, and vegetable harvest!

Built over the winter of 2020/ 2021, Jeff tells me the build was all straightforward, except grinding down the interior slab-on-grade after the stick-frame walls were built. The grinder is a frustratingly twitchy machine, time consuming, and no one’s favorite job. The result however is a beautiful concrete floor with the aggregate cut-through, showing patina from the bull-float & the cream in the concrete. This floor will endure through many years of very hard wear.

Equally durable materials are used to clad the SIP roof & walls; NuDura metal roofing & Hardie fiber-cement lap siding combine to protect the insulating SIPs foam panels. The siding was hung in-house by TC and the fellas did a fabulous job of precisely stacking the board-joints, setting up a very pleasing pattern in the siding.

To clad the small 6” ICF (Insulated concrete form) upstand, TC uses colored 26 gauge metal to protect the insulating foam from impact & abrasion.

The highly insulated energy-shell enables this home to be heated with 12Btu/ hour (max) Fujitsu minisplit. This is an all-electric, net zero house, ready for the future. Including the coming storms….

Battery power is a hot topic these days, with grid managers planning for greater grid efficiency by storing off-peak grid surplus in privately owned battery systems.

TC Installed the 5Kw LG lithium-ion house battery on the exterior north wall. Integrated with the PV, the battery allows the PV produced electricity to be stored, ensuring this all-electric house works even when the power goes down.