It was 20 degrees out last Thursday, but 74 indoors with no heat running, in a 3-bedroom passive solar design in Englewood’s ‘Evanston-Broadway’ neighborhood centered between the Swedish and Porter Hospital complexes. “I get plenty of solar,” said architect Bence Kovacs…despite the fact that the house he designed for himself at 3055 S. Ogden is on a north-south street with lots of trees to block the sun.

Keller Williams agent Larry Champine (left) joins his client, Hungarian-born architect Bence Kovacs, beside the passive solar home Kovacs created in old Englewood, between Swedish Medical Center and the University of Denver.

Sure enough, at 3 p.m. the low winter sun was still peeking over the top of the 2-story house next door, filling a family room that has massive concrete floors (with radiant back-up heat) to absorb the solar gain. Kovacs, who works for Fentress Architects on projects surrounding the new airport for San Jose, Calif., and the new city hall for North Las Vegas, took a totally ‘green’ approach indoors: engineered ‘paralam’ beams, OSB-type flooring, and Xeriscaped yard for low water use.

He’s also added something that would have been very, very expensive to have done 30 years ago, when passive solar was the hot trend in Colorado architecture. The home’s roof has 2.4-kilowatts of photovoltaic panels, enough according to the manufacturer to provide around 50-75% of Kovacs’ electric needs. That was a $23,000 add-on, but after credits and rebates, Kovacs says the final bill was $8,000 -– a sum that should pay back in five or six years.
Kovacs, trained at the Hungarian University of Arts and Crafts with a follow-up degree from DU, discovered the neighborhood after having lived a mile closer to the campus. “What I like about it is literally no traffic, much quieter,” he told me. He moved into an old, 650-foot house on site…had intentions of preserving more of it than he did…but ended substantially scraping it for the 2,600-foot new structure. You can still see a hint of its original roof angle beside the large solar windows on the south side.
The new home, priced at $699,000, also shows a very contemporary fireplace (“I didn’t want gas logs, I’m not trying to look like something else,” Kovacs said), bedrooms that have Japanese-style sliders that throw open to join the interior spaces below, and plenty of ‘green’ design accents to match the energy package: a bright green column and moss shades in the finishes of kitchen and family room.
His Xcel bill, by the way, ran $20 for a mid-summer month, $120 last month. The home is west ofS. University on Dartmouth one mile, two blocks past Downing, to Ogden, then right.
-
WHERE: Passive solar home with solar electric system, 3-bed, 2,600-sq. ft. 3055 S. Ogden St., Englewood; from S. University, take Dartmouth west, 1.2 mi., past Downing, 2 blks to Ogden, turn right.
PRICE: From $699,000
PHONE: 720-291-4227

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 4:15 pm and is filed under Renewable Energy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.