Couple turn to wind power

Dayton Daily News

Xenia Twp. | The electricity meter near the back door of Doug Lapchynski and Mary Jane Foos' house looks pretty ordinary, but every once in a while it does something pretty amazing.

Overall, the wind turbine Lapchynski and Foos built last year has been generating about 650 kilowatts of electricity per month, about one-third of their home's power. But they say winds have been unusually light this summer, and winds are higher in winter. In a normal year, they expect to average 1,000 kilowatts per month.

At 1,000 kilowatts a month, it will take about 20 years for the turbine to pay for itself, but it's not really about saving money, Foos said.

"We've got kids, three and six years old, and we want to give the world to our kids in good shape," she said. "I'm in the military, and I see people dying around the world for gas, and somebody's got to do something to stop that.

"When we started planning to build a house, we had in mind that we were going to make it energy efficient. We're not peacenik, hippy kinds of folks; we're really conservative politically, but we care about the environment. We can't solve the world's energy problems, but we do what we can within reason."

Foos, a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserves, works as a nurse at the pediatric clinic at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Her husband, Doug Lapchynski, works as an electrical engineer for Preco Laser Systems in Troy. They did their research on the energy efficient home they wanted to build while living in a conventional house in Bellbrook.

And Foos said building a house that consumed less fossil fuel was not much more expensive than building any other custom home. "If you were trying to add components to an existing home, the cost would make some of the things we did impractical," she said. "But if you plan ahead and do things as you're building, it's not that bad."

The couple choose to build their house from 7-inch logs mostly for aesthetic reasons, but the logs also are excellent exterior insulators. Their unheated basement features 10-inch thick walls to decrease heat loss into the ground.

Foos and Lapchynski built in the countryside where no natural gas pipelines were available, so they decided to heat their house with propane. They cut their heating and cooling costs by adding a geothermal heating system.

They were already digging a well to supply water to the house, and they added a second pipe 105 feet down to draw water for the heating and cooling system. Water is drawn through the pipe into a heat pump that draws heat from the water in winter and transfers house heat to the water in summer. After going through the heat pump, the water travels through a pipe back outside where it is released to sink back into the ground.

Foos said the system keeps their propane consumption reasonable in winter, but it's particularly effective at keeping the house cool in summer. "The water that comes out is warm in the summer but not hot, and it doesn't make it to the stream near the house before being soaked into the ground. We didn't want our air conditioning to affect the stream, and it doesn't."

The 2,500-square-foot, two-story house is oriented so that sunlight comes through lots of windows on the south side to help warm the house in winter. The argon-filled, low-E Anderson windows reduce the heat gain in summer.

And the family uses mostly compact fluorescent lights that use less electricity than standard incandescent light bulbs.

After being in the house a few years, the couple was able to secure a grant to help pay the cost of adding a wind turbine to generate electricity. With the grant and doing the most of the assembly work themselves, the couple spent about $45,000 for the turbine with 31-foot blades on a 120-foot-tall tower.

While the house was under construction in 2001, Lapchynski and Foos said the wind was so fierce that it ripped tar paper and shingles off the incomplete roof a couple times.

"But, of course, as soon as we got the windmill built the wind stopped blowing," Lapchynski said.

According to wind maps, the property should have average winds of about 13 or 14 miles an hour at 50 meters above the ground, and the couple says their experience their first few years in the house leads them to expect faster winds than they've received since starting to monitor their turbine in January.

But they're already beginning to see benefits, Foos said. She said she used an online energy guide to calculate that a 2,500-square-foot house like hers would consume $2,308 in electricity per year if built normally. She said the family's actual costs were $1,611 per year before installing the wind turbine, and are projected at $1,229 with the turbine.

"The next thing we're thinking about doing is adding some solar panels," Foos said. "We're never going to be completely independent from DP&L, but we're consuming a lot less than we used to."

Contact James Cummings at (937) 225-2395.

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