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‘Greenest House’
Rising on Hilltop
‘Envelope’ Uses Smidgen of Energy
FLY CREEK
If ever you’re inclined to feel blue about our planet’s energy future, look up the Kosmer
family, John, Linda and daughter Alyssa.
“This house goes for the jugular on energy costs,” declares the bullish father of the house,
standing in the Kosmers’ bright, high-ceilinged living room on a Day Road hilltop. He peers
through large, south-facing windows toward a view that seems to go on forever.
You may have heard the rumors:
The “greenest house in the county” is being built near Fly Creek.
Well, this is it, the result of centuries of thinking about solar energy and the four-decade
career an Adirondack-based architect, Bruce Brownell, has devoted to understanding and
experimenting with capturing the sun’s power.
Brownell has now tested his conclusions in more than 300 homes, and boils it down to “three
basics.”
One, the “insulation envelope.” “Tape, caulk and seal” is his mantra. He wraps his houses
in two separate 2-inch layers of insulation.
Two, orient it to the sun. Most windows should face south. East and west windows are
“energy neutral.” North facing windows are an energy drain; make them few and tiny.
Three, build on a 12-inch-think concrete foundation with air returns snaking through it.
During the day, the concrete absorbs heat; when things cool down in the evening, it gives off
heat.
The statistics Brownell and Kosmer toss off casually can’t help but impress:
• These solar homes – as opposed to the 600,000 “solar abortions” (Brownell’s term) that
constitute most attempts in that direction – are heated 70 percent by the sun’s rays.
• Conventional homes may be rated R-20, but only perform at a third of that, R-6. Brownell
homes perform at R-36, six times the efficiency. Homes like Kosmers are 20 times “tighter”
than standard construction.
• It uses one-seventh to one-ninth the fuel needed in your normal house.
Back to the Fly Creek hilltop.
It’s been a long journey for John Kosmer from a soho loft and a Victorian in Brooklyn to this
sparely designed, three-story modern home that clearly thrills him. It’s the eighth he and
Linda have tackled. For much of that time, he was home-improvement editor of Victorian Homes
magazine, so he had to be sold on the merits of the new.
To hear his story, there’s some kismet here.
A couple of years ago, he and buddy James Dean, the Cooperstown stairmaker, drove past a
blackened sign which, it turned out, had been there 16 years.
The sun was striking the sign precisely right so that two words could only barely be made
out: “For Sale.”
Eventually, he and Dean bought the property and split it. But, at the time, John and Linda
had finished a sizeable renovation of the former Fly Creek Hotel and did nothing for a while.
Intrigued by the hilltop’s potential to tap solar energy, John dug out a book, “The Solar
House,” that a buddy had loaned him in 1980 and he’d never gotten around to giving back.
He could immediately see it was out of date, which took him to the Internet, which eventually
connected him with Brownell. The more he learned, the more excited he became, and that
excitement is manifest as he and his builder, John Carrigan of Building With Integrity,
Laurens, start walking around the house pointing out the specifics.
Here’s how it works.
The south-facing windows let in the sun’s rays, which are reflected off the living room’s
light-colored bamboo floors; likewise in the second-floor bedrooms. (Not only is bamboo
hardy, it is renewable.) The heated air then rises through a full-length atrium into the
third-floor area, so far unfinished.
Kosmer and Carrigan step out of the kitchen into a utility room off the garage.
There is a fan, which draws the air down through an air shaft from the third floor and blows
it into the ducts that run through the concrete pad. The concrete pad absorbs some, but not
all, of the heat. The rest blows back into the rooms. Every room in the house has vents
that let the air in, and vents that take the air out.
The air circulates through the house three times an hour.
In the utility room, it is run through a HEPA filter – that stands for “high efficiency
particulate arresting” – which cleans out any impurities.
In mid-winter, say, when it’s in the teens and the sun hasn’t shone for a couple of days, the
temperatures inside may drop.
The thermostat will kick on a small Baxi hot-water heater – propane-fueled, it heats water as
needed; no energy-wasting tank. That same water you would use to wash your hands circulates
through a radiator-like tray under the air-pump, and the air begins to heat up again.
Kosmer also has an air-tight woodstove in the living room, and can throw a few sticks into
that, which heats air that goes into up to the third floor and is pulled down through the
shaft by the ...
You get it. It just keeps going round and round.
Talk to Kosmer and Carrigan and Brownell, and you soon conclude you’re talking to true
believers.
With the Internet, “you can’t suppress (the technology) any more,” said the builder, who took
his whole crew up to the Chain of Lakes to undergo Brownell’s training.
“There’s a lot of big money here to be lost and be gained,” so there are many entrenched
interests resisting innovation, said Kosmer. (To give just one instance, he said, Dow
Chemical would benefit if the layered insulation becomes standard; Corning’s fiberglass
insulation would lose out.)
“I would suggest that half the heating bill of a typical house is ‘leakiness,’” said
Brownell. “You live in a sieve.”
He believes that the principles of solar heating should be taught to elementary students.
When they grow up, there will be a wholesale generational shift toward solar energy.
Here are a couple of neat things that should be mentioned.
In the winter, when solar heating is needed, the sun is low in the southern sky, and
therefore shines more directly through insulated glass. The rays also bounce off the snow in
front of the solar windows, delivering a double-whammy of energy into the solar home.
In the summer, the sun is high in the sky. It hits the insulated glass at an angle and is
deflected, and thus doesn’t go into the house. (That said, Brownell has reluctantly
concluded that, in this day and age of air-conditioning everywhere, most people will still
want AC in the summer.)
Kosmer’s house will cost him 20 percent more to build than a normal house, but – a man in his
50s – he anticipates getting it back in the years ahead. As oil costs rise, he says almost
gleefully, he’ll get it back all that more quickly.
Brownell proselytizes whenever he can.
He’ll ask a typical crowd: If you close your curtains in the evening against the cold, raise
your hand.
Almost everybody does.
Doing so, he then explains, cools the air between the curtain and the glass. Since most
valances are a couple of inches from the wall, the reverse of what happens in a Brownell
house will happen: The air cools and drops to the floor, drawing hot air behind the curtain
and cooling it, and so on.
In effect, closing the curtain makes a room colder, not warmer.
“That’s what Americans know about energy – which is nothing,” he said with some disgust.
“It’s awful.”
Again, if you start feeling a little blue, you know who to call.
Photo: Jim Kevlin
 Seward
Balks on
Bed Tax
He Tells County:
Don’t Raid Kitty
COOPERSTOWN
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
State Sen. Jim Seward, R-Milford, adopted something of that approach on a request from the Otesgo County Board of Representatives for him to introduce legislation to allow a doubling of the county’s bed tax from 2 to 4 percent, or from generating $500,000 in revenues to $1 million annually.
And the Village of Cooperstown, which has been pleading, unsuccessfully, for a bigger share of those revenues, may be a winner – or may not.
Seward’s first round of bed-tax legislation had asked that the county use the new revenues for expenses “reasonably related to the cost of supporting tourism,” said Duncan Davie, the senator’s chief of staff. This year, however, the money was diverted to other purposes because of a budget crunch, and the county board is now asking Seward to double the bed-tax take.
Wait a minute, was Seward’s reaction.
“The senator wants assurances,” Davie said, “that it won’t be swept into the general fund for the next county budget crisis.”
He needed those assurances in short order, said his aide, since the legislation would have to be introduced Thursday, June 21, the last day of the General Assembly’s legislative session in Albany.
By the evening before, he had those assurances, according to county Rep. Donald Lindberg, D-R-I-Worcester, the county board chairman. Lindberg said he had sent a letter to Seward that afternoon saying “We would be open-minded; we would put quite a lot of it into tourism.”
County Rep. Ron Feldstein, D-Otego, chairman of the powerful Administration Committee, said representatives had met with the Cooperstown Chamber of Commerce, not the village, and assured the local chamber the county “would continue to provide significant funding.”
As for special allocations to Cooperstown, Feldstein said the village would have to apply for impact aid from the bed tax just as any other municipality must do.
In part, Seward was influenced by a letter from Mayor Carol B. Waller decrying the county’s failure to help Cooperstown maintain its tourism-battered infrastructure.
“It’s as if they’ve invited everyone to dinner in our house,” said Waller. “We’ve got the meat and potatoes, but the plates are cracked and the forks are broken.”
In other words, the county had been spending $200,000 a year to promote Cooperstown’s attractions – the National Baseball Hall of Fame, the Fenimore Art and Farmers’ museum, Otsego Lake and so on – but has done relatively little to help the village in return.
The mayor has been lobbying the county to come up with $40,000 to cover the costs of running the trolley system during what’s expected to be a record attendance during Hall of Fame induction weekend at the end of July, but had been pointedly rebuffed.
Waller estimated the village has more than $200,000 a year in direct costs related to tourism. Tourist-related garbage alone costs $40,000 a year to collect. The village had delayed spending $70,000 to repair sidewalks on Walnut Street leading up to Cooperstown Elementary School because of strains on its budget. (At its monthly meeting Monday, June 18, the village board decided that, regardless, it will complete those sidewalks by the opening of the 2007-08 school year.”
Davie said his boss’ concern is not specifically a result of Cooperstown’s travails; he had asked Waller and several other people to react to the county’s bed-tax proposal. He is motivated by three concerns, the aide said.
One, he has had resort to “member items” for Cooperstown’s Pumpkin Fest, Snowfest and other events he thinks the county should be funding through the bed tax.
Two, he wants to make sure local tourism groups and the hospitality industry was comfortable with the bed-tax hike.
Three, he wants to make sure the money, designated for tourism, will in fact be used for tourism.
“He’s not going to micro-manage,” said the aide. “He’s not making any pronouncements on an individual issues and programs.”
Asked about Waller’s contention about the $200,000 cost, Davie said the senator “declines to engage that level of detail.” He would say, however, that “zero would be inappropriate.”
Photo:
$100 Daily-Fine Threat
Stirs Merchants’ Anger
COOPERSTOWN
At about closing time Monday, June 18, a village police officer stopped by several stores with vending displays out front and handed merchants a warning letter.
Get a permit, pronto, or face $100-a-day fines.
That brought a flock of merchants to the village trustees’ monthly meeting that evening in protest.
Ron Jex, who runs Ellsworth & Sill with his wife, Marcy, said the 107-year-old store’s displays are in the alcove, which is part of his building, not part of the sidewalk.
“Everything is on my property,” said Donna Skinner of Stonehouse Gifts, where displays are on the porch.
By mid-week, Mayor Carol B. Waller had convened a meeting for 10 a.m. Friday at 22 Main, and invited merchants to discuss the situation with the trustees
Stink Bombs Punctuate
Sweet Smell of Summer
By Evan Jagels
COOPERSTOWN
With the arrival of summer and Cooperstown Dreams Park’s season, the aroma of stink bombs is again wafting down Main Street.
“Kids will walk in and set them off in the store, which disrupts business,” said Jeff Foster, owner of Legends are Forever. Some merchants say this happens up to 20 times a summer; others, that the characteristic odor can fill their establishments two or three times a day at the peak.
Foster, like most other frustrated storeowners and employees, knows that children are purchasing the stink bombs from F.R. Woods’ Home of Pro Sports at 51 Main. As other merchants have done, he asked Woods’ proprietors to stop selling the item, to no avail.
An F.R. Woods’ employee’s retort to the upset businesses’ complaints:
“They do ‘em outside, said an F.R. Woods’ manager, referring to the children who purchase the stink bombs. “Nothing to do about it, it’s legal.”
The issue arose at a recent meeting of the village trustees, and Police Chief Diana T. Nicols confirmed that view: Since the stink bombs are a legal product, police can’t stop anyone from selling them; they can cite youngsters with disorderly conduct, but have to catch them first.
Said Foster, “What is comes down to is that we’re all neighbors. I love F.R. Woods, they are old-time Cooperstown. I just don’t get why they would try to hurt neighboring businesses.”
The yellow and red label says it clearly, “Stink Bombs,” and a packet of one sells for under $2.
“Throw the glass-ball to the ground or crush it under your foot,” the label advises. “When it is breaking to pieces, an evil smell spreads about, but soon disappears again.”
Not everyone agrees with that. “Even when the smell is gone outside, it still smells in here for hours,” said Samantha Willsey, an employee of Take 2.
“It is constantly a problem,” said an employee at Mickey’s Place, across the street. “Every summer we have an issue with it … It’s horrible and it’s disgusting.”
Other storeowners agreed that even when the bombs are set outside, which would not technically constitute vandalism to the store, the smell is sucked in through air conditioning and open doors in the hot summer months.
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