An adventure in some good (and bad) decision-making in an effort toward greater sustainability.Our home for the past 6 years has been in a triplex in the Wedge neighborhood of Minneapolis. Originally built as a single family home, it now is a three story building, with a unit on each of the three floors. Tenants live on the first and second floors. We live on the third - the attic or former servants quarters - which is the smallest and therefore least expensive of the units. This has allowed us to save money that can be reinvested back into the building. Below we list our projects as of April 2020.
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When we bought the house, we knew that financially the best decision was to live in the cheapest unit - the attic. The attic was unfortunately the only unit without hardwood flooring and with carpet. Carpet is hard to clean and requires more long term maintenance. We reclaimed hardwood floor and installed them upstairs. See more coming soon.
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As soon as we purchased the house, we signed up for a home energy audit by CEE. Unsurprisingly, our 1893 behemoth of a house was not very efficient, only scoring 44 out of 100 on the Energy Fitness scale. The major recommendation from the audit was to insulate and air seal the walls. So that's what we did. Read the details, soon to come.
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After (theoretically) having completed the cost effective energy efficiency steps, our next opportunity was to clean up the energy generation of the house. To do that, we turned to solar photovoltaics. In the middle of winter, we installed a 9.3 kW array spanning the triplex and the garage that, at the time, produced 140% of the consumption need of the three units. Installing solar on a multifamily building can be complex when it comes to metering. More details to come about how we did it at the time.
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Our boiler broke in April 2018, and rather than replace it with another natural -gas consuming boiler, we decided to go electric - electric air source heat pump that is. A very complex project, in which we became very unlucky victims of a polar vortex, and which has necessitated another project (envelope retrofit). Heat pumps are an energy efficient heating option that results in fewer ghg emissions.
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