BLUE HILL, Maine — To Nico and Jessica Kerwin Jenkins, living in their net-zero home on Long Farm Road is a little like seeing the world through a snowglobe, in reverse.
“There could be a nor’easter happening outside,” Nico Jenkins said. “There could be all this snow swirling around in the wind, and you don’t feel any of it. There’s no sense of a draft or anything like that.”
That’s why the man who built their 2,200-square-foot home, Sergei Breus, calls it one of his “space capsules.” The Blue Hill-based contractor builds net-zero homes, which are built to be so energy-efficient that they cost nothing to heat, and produce as much energy as they would consume in a year. With walls and windows so thick and air-tight that they mask almost all sense of the wind beyond their doors, net-zero homes are unique — there are likely about six dozen in Maine — and can be challenging to build and live in, though they are starting to catch on.
“My customers, pretty much half of them, are retiring people moving to Maine who want to live in new homes, and local people like middle-class professors, teachers, who want a zero-carbon footprint,” said Breus, an oceanographer and native of St. Petersburg, Russia, who moved to Maine and got into building homes on the Blue Hill Peninsula about 30 years ago.
The latest house he is building, at 149 Parker Point Road, is an example of a net-zero home’s advantages and what can be difficult about living in one. The rectangular-shaped, 1,732-square-foot building has 14-inch-thick external walls being stuffed with blown-in cellulose insulation that give it an R value, or rating of its resistance to heat flow, of R-54. The ceiling insulation, which is still being installed, will be R-104, Breus said.
That’s more than twice the insulation recommended by the Maine Uniform Building and Energy Code for walls and ceilings in private, residential dwellings. Under the the most recent standards being enforced, buildings must have R-23 walls and R-49 ceilings.
The house will be so airtight that its heating system, a heat pump, will only occasionally need to provide heat to the eventual homeowners. The building will get its electricity from a solar array that will be installed off-site, about five miles away, in East Blue Hill. The array will have enough panels so that Emera Maine will credit the homeowner for electricity the home generates, Breus said.
The house has an odd look from the road, with five small narrow horizontal and vertical windows, because the road is north of the house and in shade. To the south, the house has a large 8-foot-tall and 18-foot-wide bay window, a sliding-glass door and bay kitchen window, to take maximum advantage of the best direction for sunlight.
“We don’t build houses that look pretty from the road. We build houses that face nature and the sun,” Breus said.
The building, which is about half-built, is so well-insulated that it needs an air exchange system. Without it, dust, carbon dioxide and other gases expelled by its eventual inhabitants and household machinery — including computers, refrigerators and microwave ovens — would eventually build to toxic levels.
That’s one element of living in a net-zero home that, compared to more traditionally-designed homes, requires some work on the homeowner’s part. Exchange systems need filter change-outs as many as three times a year, Breus said. Breus also imports his windows from Europe, typically Germany or Ireland, because the best American-made windows aren’t as energy-efficient and well designed as what he can get overseas, he said.
But the biggest problem with net-zero homes, Breus said, remains builders and architects unaware of how to build net-zero homes or turn existing homes into net-zero structures. The level of awareness among homeowners is also low.
Given that the reporting of net-zero homes is voluntary, the number of such places in the U.S. is hard to gauge, but it’s likely miniscule.
According to the Net-Zero Energy Coalition, Maine had 74 single-family homes in 2018 that were certified by the Zero Energy Project. The U.S. and Canada had a total of 22,146 zero-energy buildings in 2018 — 59 percent more than in 2017. About 6,097 of those net-zero energy structures in 2018 were single-family homes in the U.S.
The number of net-zero Maine homes will likely increase when the 2019 tallies are released late this spring. A Portland company, BrightBuilt Home, topped the list of individual companies building net-zero homes, with 78 projects in development in 2018, according to a Zero Energy report.
The three-bedroom, three-bath home at 149 Parker Point Road is on the market with a listed sale price of $600,000. According to a listing on Zillow.com on Thursday, the price was fifth-highest out of 15 homes with three bedrooms for sale in Blue Hill.