Doing research for my next novel which is set in 1984, I had forgotten what a pivotal time that was between passive solar design and super insulation. Up until that time all the excitement was focused on the magic of the sunlight flowing through into the house where it would be absorbed by large amounts of thermal mass in the form of tanks of water, concrete walls like Trombe walls, rocks in boxes or floors, or phase change materials. There were experimental types of glass that had less iron in them to allow more light through. There were ‘double-envelope’ houses – a house built within a house. There were earth coupled houses that used the mass of the surrounding earth to temper the swings in the house. President Carter pledged in 1979 that the U.S. would attain energy independence by 1990. He put solar panels on the White House.

The David Robinson House in Northfield Minnesota, U.S.A. had double glazed windows on the south and triple glazed windows on the other three sides. It had R-30 walls and R-60 roof insulation. The basement walls were R-16 and there was R-16 under the slab. Half the window area faced south and there was active solar space heating. The building had a heat recovery ventilator. “Using an ethane gas tracer technique, the natural infiltration rate of the house was measured to be 0.12 air changes per hour in a 15 mph wind. This test was made with all the natural vents open (bathroom fan, clothes dryer, air-to-air heat exchanger).”

Steve Bliss wrote in Solar Age Magazine, “These passive solar houses just didn’t work in New England. A lot of people were building solar houses that weren’t working. Companies started inventing things to fix these houses – solar shades, insulating shutters, rock bins. Solar Age Magazine analyzed all these things, and we wrote that all of them failed. I wrote a lot articles about what wasn’t working.

“There was a new perpetual motion machine every six months. Proprietary things, magic things. We used to call these houses ‘smart air houses’ – where the air would follow the blue arrows and the red arrows. The smart air knew where to go.”

In 1977 in Regina Saskatchewan Robert Besant, Rob Dumont, David Eyer, and Harold Orr engineered the Conservation House. Rob Dumont said, “In a low energy house, the internal heat gains from lights, appliances, pumps, etc. can supply a good fraction of the annual space heating requirement.” “Simple,” he said “is better than complicated. Passive is better than active. Moving parts fail.”

Princeton University researcher Gautam Dutt, studying heat loss at townhouses in Twin Rivers, NJ discovered previously undocumented heat loss paths through and around attic insulation. It’s hard to remember that was something that had to be discovered. “Studies by Dr. Gautam S. Dutt suggest that fully 20 percent of the energy used to heat single-family, wood-frame houses is lost in warm air leaks to the attic. . . . Of 30 or so houses he checked, all were losing three to seven times as much heat to the outside as the models predicted.”

By 1985 everything was in place:

• The research had been done;
• There were books and magazines that provided superinsulation details;
• Builders could buy low-e windows, HRVs, and blower doors.

So what happened?

• The price of oil dropped from $32 per barrel in 1982 to $11 in 1986;
• President Reagan slashed funding for a variety of energy efficiency programs;
• American energy experts suggestions regarding code changes that were ignored;
• Many were aggressively opposed.

So now we discovering what we already knew over 35 years ago.

Thanks to Martin Holladay for his research.