Twin Cities energy efficient homes

Yesterday I rode all over the cities with my pals Bill and Moira to check out some of the cool abodes on the Minneapolis Saint Paul Home Tour. I was delighted to find so many great homes that were making great strides to include solar power and other energy efficient practices to reduce their footprint while still living in quite remarkable homes.

Here were a couple that were most notable:

Efficiency evangelist

I have to start with my favorite and our last stop on the tour. David Boyce and Lee Olson had essentially built their entire home living lifestyle around efficiency. They made sure to point out every unique choice they had made to reduce their energy needs. They had simple solutions like power strips to prevent phantom charges (the electricity drawn from appliances even when they are "off"), super efficient kitchen appliances (their SunFrost refrigerator was most interesting to me.), a slick black biodiesel mercedes (run on http://www.tcbiodiesel.com/">Twin Cities Biodiesel Consortium fuel), and a solar system that was regularly feeding energy back to Xcel Energy while we were there. Very nice family to...including their super cute kid Maya.

Hand made graphs

Despite being a fabulous woodworker and cabinet maker this homeowner had built an awesome workhouse out back complete with living roof (for growing tomatoes), solar panels feeding electricity to the house, and intricate hand drawn graphs going back several years to prove that small scale cheap solar energy production is a reality.

more soon...