Meet the Hybrid Home Guy

Adam Bearup Builds Energy-Efficient Homes on the Shores of Lake Michigan

by Gary M. Kaye -
Western Michigan – June 1, 2008 - Adam Bearup’s company Hybrid Homes, LLC is located near the shores of Lake Michigan in the town of Muskegon. He builds what he terms “hybrid homes” so named because they use a combination of technologies to achieve net zero energy status or at least come quite close. But for Adam, building hybrid homes isn’t just his profession; it’s his all-consuming passion.

Bearup has been in the field since long before most of us ever heard of it. His interest goes back to 1992, when still in high school, when his father and uncle had a distributorship for Poly Steel Insulated Concrete Forms. In a high school architecture course he began designing his first energy efficient homes. But he didn’t start building them until 2004, still well ahead of the curve.

The success of Bearup’s Hybrid Homes stands in stark contrast both to local and nationwide trends. He says that out of roughly 1400 homebuilders in his local homebuilder’s association, only about 400 remain. And while most local spec houses are languishing on the market for a year or more, Adam’s custom homes are backordered. He has five homes under construction now and eleven more projects on the drawing boards. The burst of interest in his hybrid homes has allowed him to expand his operations at least two years ahead of his own schedule.

The Philosophy of Building

As Adam Bearup explains it, “ when you build a home you really have three different stakeholders you need to take care of, the homeowner, the homebuilder, and last, the planet.” That’s why all of Bearup’s homes are built to the USGBC LEED-H standards, many of them qualifying as LEED Platinum. While Bearup admits to having some concerns over the current LEED-H program, he feels that it is a much stronger standard than the NAHB Green program because it requires independent third party certification.

Hybrid Homes does not use a “one technology fits all” approach to design and construction. The technologies incorporated into each home may vary based on the demands of the site, as well as the preferences of the homeowner and the budget. Because he builds in western Michigan, where the winds almost always blow with Class 4 or Class 5 strength, all of his homes rely on small-scale wind generators for the bulk of their electric production. Bearup uses 1.8 KW turbines from Southwest WindPower, which he says can be upgraded to 3.2KW. On average, the 1.8 KW units will provide 80% of the home’s electrical needs, putting out roughly 500 KWh per month.

Bearup says that small-scale wind is currently far more cost-effective than PV, but he doesn’t expect things to necessarily stay that way. Right now, it costs $15,000 to purchase and install a 35 foot tall wind turbine. A solar array would cost $40,000 to provide only half as much power. But Bearup thinks the cost of solar will drop, and that’s why he insists that all of his homes are pre-wired with conduits from the mechanical room to the attic so solar can be easily added at a later date.

A Tight Envelope

Bearup achieves super insulation by building the exterior walls of all his homes with either ICF (insulated concrete forms) or SIPS (structurally insulated panels). The approach has two advantages. First, it provides an extremely tight envelope, and second, since the units are pre-fabricated, it helps control costs.

For heating and cooling Bearup uses that combination of technologies that give his hybrid homes their name. He starts off by using passive solar, insisting that he won’t build any home that doesn’t have a southern exposure. He uses solar thermal to provide hot water, which feeds into a storage tank. The tank is used to supply both hot water needs for the home as well as radiant heat. On days when clouds limit the effectiveness of the solar thermal, electricity from the wind generator can bring the temperature in the hot water storage tank up to the desired level.

For backup, his houses are equipped with an on-demand gas fired furnace, but Bearup says the usage of that furnace is generally minimal. We’ll look at some numbers below. Finally, Bearup can also use his cooling units to generate heat. He uses several Mitsubishi “Mr. Slim” wall mounted units. If you’ve never seen one, they’re also called split ductless air conditioning units, with a small footprint, or in this case, wallprint, inside the house, and the compressor sitting on a pad outside the home. While the units are primarily intended to cool, they can generate heat as well. Bearup chose them because he says they have an energy efficiency rating of 250%.

Now the numbers: Citing a 4000 square foot home he built in Onekama, Michigan, Bearup says that without using any heat, on one day in February of this year, with an outside temperature of 21 degrees and a wind shill of approximately 15 degrees he achieved the following room temperature results:

Daytime - No active heating – inside temperature 73 degrees
11 PM – No active heating – inside temperature 71 degrees
2 AM – No active heating - inside temperature 69 degrees.

With thermostats set for 65degrees, Bearup says the heating system would kick in about 3 or 4 AM and run for about six hours until passive solar kicks back in. The cost to run the propane heating system: a miniscule $25 a month. No that’s not a typo, it’s $25 dollars a month. Compare that to a conventional home paying $700 or more a month for propane.

Asked about using ground source heat exchange systems, or geo-thermal, Bearup says that in his neck of the woods they’re just not cost effective, with initial installation costs of $25,000 to $30,000. He says those installations may pay off in places like New England, or in homes he characterizes as “gas guzzlers” but not for the homes he’s building.

Bearup says the weak link in the system is the windows, which, thermal imaging shows, account for most of the heat loss. In order to compensate he uses honeycomb window treatments from Smith and Noble, which he says cuts about 80 to 85% of heat loss.
On top of everything else, by most standards the hybrid home is not only affordable to run, but to purchase. Bearup’s been able to keep his construction costs down to a modest $130 to $150 per finished square foot. That means bringing in a 3000 square foot near zero energy home for about $450,000, or less.

To find out more about Adam Bearup and Hybrid Homes, LLC, visit their extensive website at www.wmhybrid.com