Chief Evangelist in the Church of Sustainable Living

By Jerry Brown
BrownOnGreen.Net

In the Church of Sustainable Living & Saving Energy, Steve Stevens would surely qualify as Evangelist in Chief.  He preaches sustainability, conservation and frugality – and practices what he preaches.

Retired after a 35-year career at Bell Labs, Stevens has almost single-handedly turned his modest house in Golden, Colorado, from a typical suburban dwelling into a building that produces more energy than it consumes.

He’s added enough insulation – it’s shoulder high – to his attic to give it an R100 rating.  He’s adding enough insulation to his exterior walls – 8½ inches – to give them an R60 rating.  And he dug up much of the foundation of his house and added R29 worth of insulation to the outside of his foundation before filling it back in.

Stevens uses solar energy for most of the heat and electricity in his modest suburban home – in the form of 48 photovoltaic panels on his roof capable of producing 9,920 watts of electricity and a once-rotting south-facing deck he’s converted into a sun room he calls his “solar furnace.”

He says his solar furnace and the “super insulation” he’s adding to the walls, attic and foundation of his house eventually will let him get rid of the high-efficiency gas furnace in his basement.

“I won’t need a furnace anymore,” he says.  That’s a pretty bold statement for someone living in a community where below-freezing temperatures are common at least six months out of the year and below-zero temperatures can linger for days at a time.

I have no doubt he’ll succeed and his furnace will show up on Craig’s List someday.  It’ll be like one of those pristine used cars that some little old lady just drove to church and the grocery store for 10 years.

Stevens is an active participant in the Colorado Renewable Energy Society (CRES) was named CRES’s volunteer of the year for 2010.  He helped plan this year’s Denver solar-homes tour for CRES and his house was on the tour.

So, I showed up at his house expecting to have him show off the solar panels on his roof and tell me how much money he’s saving bypassing Xcel Energy.

We eventually got to the solar panels.  But they were pretty much an afterthought in my tour.  Stevens wanted to show off the other things he’s doing to his house.

What I experienced over the next 90 minutes felt like a combination of watching a proud papa show off his family and sitting in the classroom of a teacher who’s so excited about what he’s teaching that you get excited about it, too.

What Stevens is doing to his house is impressive.  What’s makes it even more impressive is that he’s doing most of it on the cheap.

“The American dinner table generally has a dog underneath to eat the scraps that fall off,” he says.  “I’m the dog on the American construction dinner table.  I’m down there as things get thrown off the edge. I see what use I can put them to.”

For example, he used glass from discarded patio doors – purchased for $15 apiece from Habitat for Humanity – for the south-facing windows in his “solar furnace.”  Most of the lumber he uses is cull lumber he buys from Lowe’s at 75 to 80 percent off.  And he has light fixtures throughout his house that he bought from Habitat for Humanity for next to nothing.  He uses 1-, 1½- and 2-watt LED bulbs in many of the light fixtures.

You’ll see some of what I saw if you watch the video accompanying this article.  But there was more.  Much more.