| John F Robbins: energy consultant, solar home designer and adult-ed instructor - KY USA |
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I design, analyze, consult and teach about superinsulated, solar, energy efficient and healthier homes in Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and Michigan since 1983. I help homeowners and small companies lower energy use, cost and pollution, guided by my 26-year experience with efficiency and passive high-performance in the design itself as well as efficient energy-conserving operations in the structure after it is built or remodelled. I audit and analyze heating, cooling and electrical loads and usage, whether conventional or alternative energies, whether my designs or designs by others. I examine and fine-tune electrical loads in prep for converting to solar power, as I also did with my own office which runs all its electric plug loads on solar electricity and batteries since November 2001. I've substantially retrofitted my own last 2 homes for very low energy bills. So if you are you looking for energy consulting and/or home design during your next new or remodeling project, check out my Design, Consulting & Education offerings.
The rest of my website contains many articles on energy you may be interested in. Its outline is always on at the left of the screen. Best way to contact me is by email (johnfrobbins@insightbb.com) or phone (859-363-0376). Best time to find me in my office is 10am to 5pm Monday through Friday.
If you are interested in learning more about me personally, continue reading down my homepage. There are even a few of my original "eco-tunes" at the bottom if you want to sample some of that.
Who Am I? Pretty much the same at home as well as at work...
I'm as much an environmentalist, renewable energy enthusiast and energy efficiency advocate at home as I am at work. When it comes to using less polluting energy and taking more advantage of solar power in our lives, homes and offices, I have personal experience doing just that.
I also enjoy hiking in the woods (especially on forest trails) as well as creating and maintaining trails. As a Sierra Club member, I lead trail maintenance and blazing volunteers who have helped clear and create trails in Northern Kentucky's Big Bone Lick State Park. I enjoy planting new trees as well as burning dead ones in my energy-efficient fireplace. I not only enjoy reading about astronomy and all kinds of solar stuff, but I also like using my telescope at night to see deep-sky objects and using my various solar stuff to keep warm, get light and generate power. I enjoy music as well as being a musician who composes and plays mostly my own music. I'm an avid tennis player who enjoys playing tennis more than watching others play. Fortunately, my wife, Gail, shares many of these interests, goals and pastimes, including taking care of our rural Northern Kentucky home and property since 1997.
Once lived in a Cincinnati suburb called White Oak
In 1979, we bought a fixer-upper with efficiency and solar potential. We'd just experienced those super-cold and snowy Ohio Valley winters of the late 70s, so we proceeded to insulate walls, ceilings and the basement, replace windows, and install solar collectors and a passive solar greenhouse. I encountered folks in a local group called AEA (SW Ohio Alternate Energy Assn., www.aea1.org) doing these same kinds of things, learning as they implemented various energy and ecology measures in their homes and businesses, so I also joined AEA. We planted over 40 trees in our less-than-a-half acre yard, both reducing the mowable lawn area and creating shade for summer cooling. This dramatically reduced our energy bills and made the home much more comfortable and enjoyable. By 1983, I brought my energy consulting and design business into my home, which dramatically reduced how much I drove my car. When we moved to this home, we had thought we'd be there only 5-7 years, but we were still in the house 18 years later. The good thing about that is that we got most of our "paybacks" from all the energy-efficiency and solar stuff we put into that house!
Began wishing for darker night skies
In the early 90s, we had bought a used 8" Schmidt Cassegrain telescope to view night sky objects from backyards and local parks. We also bought new astronomy binoculars. We were learning to view planets, meteors, comets, star clusters, galaxies and nebulae, but we found so much what we wanted to view was obscured by worsening night sky light pollution in and around Cincinnati. So we began considering that night sky darkness and convenient backyard stargazing would be requirements for our next home.
We discovered that astronomers just about everywhere were confronting this "night sky light pollution", caused by the increasing numbers and densities of unshielded outdoor light fixtures which cast too much sideways- and upward-cast light beams into the night sky. A light-polluted sky up high has a light-to-medium gray background, instead of dark gray-to-black, so only the big and bight objects are visible. The horizons at a light-polluted site are speckled with porch and security lights. The Cincinnati Astronomy Association (CAS; www.cinastro.org) headquartered just west of Cincinnati, had meetings on this topic. As a monthly columnist in the CAS newsletter, I even wrote about this topic about how to find an astronomy-friendly homesite in a carelessly night-lit metropolis like Cincinnati. I discovered there is an international group advocating and educating about this issue, the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA www.darksky.org ), which I joined. I tried to get involved in the political and environmental arenas around Cincinnati and the surrounding Hamilton County, Ohio, but few even wanted to learn about the issue or what could be done to improve night sky darkness. This increased our urgency to move where our night skies would be more reasonably dark.
After familiarizing ourselves with sky-viewing possibilities in different areas outside Greater Cincinnati, but not wanting to move "too far" away, we developed criteria about what to look for and accept in our next homesite. We decided we'd accept at least a pie-shaped dark-night-sky area from the zenith (straight up) to the SW horizon to the SE horizon. We eventually moved to a homesite in NKY which still met this criteria, even though night skies were washed out to the north, west and east, and getting slightly more washed out each year due to ever-expanding local lighting mostly in and around Independence and Alexandria KY. This site had a small house on it, which seemed to have potential for several of our energy goals as well.
Now in Northern Kentucky
In July 1997, we moved into a 1986 tri-level house on 5.4 hilltop acres in a rural northern Kentucky town, Morning View, about 40 minutes south of downtown Cincinnati. The house had only average efficiency and ecology features, but had great solar and energy upgrade potential. There were fabulous hilltop and valley views to the south behind the house. Although the north and west skies were pretty washed out from light pollution from Greater Cincinnati, Independence and Alexandria, the skies to the south at night are so dark that the summer Milky Way could be seen even from inside our house, through the existing windows with double pane glass and screen!
After some study and design, we begun to remodel and retrofit this house for much better energy performance, including adding a new passive solar addition. Looking out at night through its 125 square foot south-facing quadpane window wall, we can still see the summer Milky Way in the summer of 2004!
Passive solar addition in 1998
Being an environmentalist.
To me, being an environmentalist in the Midwest USA should be simplified to mean burning less fuel and causing less pollution. So I've driven a 40+ mpg car since 1992 and held down milage by working from a home office and implementing smarter trip management when I do need to drive. I think it's also especially important to reduce our demand for pollution beyond the fuel we burn in our home and vehicles, most notably the pollution associated with coal-fired electricity generation which dominates Midwest USA electric utilities. So we've worked hard to lower the energy bills of our all-electric 2100 sf house. We also need more trees to help clean the air, especially by absorbing all the carbon dioxide (CO2) from fossil fuel-burning, so I'm slowly turning our yard, an old grazing pasture, into a woods.
I like the idea of solar power and what we used to call "appropriate technologies", these all being possible to understand, own, install, manage and control substantially by individuals, households and small companies. These contrast dramatically with so many high-technology solutions, sometimes even solar, where relatively simple energy needs are satisfied by incredibly complicated, costly and sometimes high-impact solutions installed and controlled only by experts. Approaching energy needs with an "appropriate technology" perspective, I believe we need to become more personally familiar our energy needs, with having and using solar energies and solar technologies in our homes and businesses, with controlling as much of these issues as possible.
So whether in my client work or in my own home, I start by taking advantage of as many of the simplest solar applications first, like daylighting, passive solar heating, clothes drying, solar cooking, natural ventilation, and backyard vegetable gardening. I also converted my home office's electrical loads to run only on solar electricity starting in November 2001. In summer 2005, I added solar water heating which now supplies about two-thirds of our household's annual hot water needs.
Solar water heating installed 9/2005; solar PV installed to make office off-grid 11/2001 - modified fall 2006
When we redesigned and remodeled to incorporate our new passive solar addition with overall improvements in insulation, airtightness, daylighting, appliance and lighting efficiency, we also added as many efficiency upgrades to the older parts of our home as possible, including a new more efficient heatpump. My office, like my household, uses as much refurbished and high recycled-content products and materials as possible. Many of our waste materials are recycled or composted. And yeh, we do hang-dry our laundry when outdoor conditions permit, since each avoided use of the electric dryer avoids 4-5 kWh, associated with over 10 pounds of CO2 emissions when kWhs come from burning coal.
My music
For the last 25 years I've played and recorded mostly my own compositions, typically performing with a Chapman Stick (TM) accompanied by MIDI keyboards and drums, sometimes all solar powered. I also play guitar, kalimba and wood flutes. Two past bands are "Vortex" and "Earthlings, in both bands with Steve Hennessy and my wife Gail. Nowdays, my music is composed, performed and recorded digitally, then mastered on CD in my home studio. My recent CDs have been titled "Patience with Nature" (2002), "Inner Self" (2003) and "Power In Vision" (2004). "Patience..." and "Inner Self" included many of my recent experiments with multi-rhythmic compositions, in which different parts are in completely different meter.
My latest CD, "Power In Vision", was released in December 2004. It is mostly acoustic guitar and verses focused around ecology themes and perspectives. Five of the songs were initially debuted at a Sierra Club fundraising concert in Versailles KY in summer 2003, called "Clean Air Music Fair." I performed several of my new CD's compositions in fall 2004 at the Bluegrass Energy Expo sponsored by A-SPI in Lexington KY. Some of the titles include "Solar Man" (about a guy who wants to be one), "Jerry G" (about a future kid being raised in a then-average solar neighborhood), "Show Them" (about a group of off-the-gridders in the future who are debating whether to help out city people used to fossil fuels which are running out and getting very expensive) and "Earth News" (about lots of things we can do to end pollution). Don't hesitate to contact me if you'd like me to perform such eco-tunes for your school or group!
To listen to a few of my tunes about energy and environment, click on these selections:
Copyright 1996 - 2009 by:
John F. Robbins, CEM CSDP
3519 Moffett Road
Morningview, KY 41063-8748
Phone: (859) 363-0376
E-mail: johnfrobbins@insightbb.com
