Built to Share

Keith Collins’ last electric bill for his home and separate 700-square-foot office and art studio was $7.62. It’s a feat made possible by the energy-efficient and sustainable BrightBuilt Barn, which generates enough electricity to power itself and Collins’ home before sending the excess to the local power grid.

His low electric bill is impressive, and the fact that Collins started this project on his own, with help from Kaplan-Thompson Architects and Bensonwood Woodworking, is a testament to his entrepreneurial spirit.

Collins, an MIT graduate, physician, and CEO of several large health plan companies, is also interested in climate change and energy sustainability. The idea he had for the BrightBuilt Barn originally began as a simple shed to house his riding lawn mower.

“Like so many other things I get involved with, this got out of hand,” he says. “I started thinking about a building and got more ambitious.”

It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

“Keith contacted me, and mentioned that he wanted to build something for his mower,” says Phil Kaplan, CEO of Portland-based Kaplan-Thompson Architects. “We started talking about it and working with the U.S. Green Building Council.”

A year of planning and $300,000 later, the shed Collins originally wanted evolved into a comfortable and livable home office and art studio titled the BrightBuilt Barn, which is now a LEED Platinum-certified building. This certification means that the building is an environmentally responsible, healthy place to work.

Although the building’s name classifies it as a barn, it’s far from the traditional structures that house livestock. It’s small, but it doesn’t feel cramped, even with a full bathroom and kitchen, a loft with a utility space, and a system that calculates the barn’s daily energy levels.

“Everything is carefully designed with sustainability in mind,” Collins says. “Part of durability is adaptability. This house was built to last for 200 years. Make it durable, adaptable, and beautiful.”

Sustainability was an important guideline during construction. Ninety percent of the building was constructed off-site in Bensonwood’s workshop in New Hampshire. Computers pre-calculate the proper cuts for each piece of wood, resulting in less wasted materials, and anything leftover is kept in the computer’s inventory for the next project. Off-site fabrication also allows for a controlled building environment, which isn’t always possible in Rockport, with coastal wind, rain, and snow.

“BrightBuilt Barn is a visible model of how buildings ought to perform and, equally important, how this benchmark could be consistently achieved through an alternative method of building,” says Tedd Benson, of Bensonwood Woodworking.

It took three days to erect the building at Collins’ home in Rockport.
The barn is strategically placed to attract the maximum amount of sunlight possible. It faces south, ideally placed for the solar thermal collectors to absorb the sun’s rays throughout the day. Plus, the roof is pitched at a 45- degree angle, which, according to Collins, is almost perfect. “It’s a rule of thumb that you want the pitch of the roof to be on the same latitude you’re on in order to catch the sun,” he says.

Two types of solar collectors on the roof generate the energy used for the barn: panels and tubes. The flat solar panels generate the electricity for the building, outputting anywhere from 3 kilowatt-hours on a cloudy day to 36 kilowatt-hours on a sunny day. On average, the barn makes 25 kilowatt-hours per day, year-round. Collins compares the solar tubes to thermos bottles. When the sun hits these, it warms the antifreeze in the tubes, and then circulates inside to the hot water heater. The hot water then goes through the radiator and heats the building.

Lights on the outside of the barn glow green when more energy is created than consumed. The utility system in the loft records the energy being made and then uploads the numbers to the Internet, where Collins can log in and view charts of the building’s progress.

“It was absolutely built with forward thinking,” says Kaplan. “It’s about how comfortable you feel. If your house is properly insulated, you can be comfortable no matter how cold it is outside.”

A typical American home has fiberglass insulation at a rating of R-19, which is approximately 6.25 inches thick. The BrightBuilt Barn uses R-40 insulation at a thickness of 10.5 inches. “In a normal home, if you add up all the cracks and the holes, you get a two-by-two-foot hole in the house that heat is lost out of,” says Collins. “We could go two to three days without sun and still have enough heat.” Not only are the walls a foot thick, the window panes are made with a type of thermal insulator called aerogel that is extremely successful in inhibiting heat transfer. Weather-tight doors also help to keep the heat in. With this superior insulation, the BrightBuilt Barn doesn’t need a furnace.

“A lot of people don’t take the steps to keep their homes insulated,” says Kaplan. “For some reason, many build with the same materials that are used in South Carolina and California. We live in a colder climate, and we need to make a change to keep our homes more insulated.”

Not only does the barn make all of its own electricity, but any excess is fed back into the local electrical grid. The first place that electricity goes is straight into Collins’ house, resulting in a monthly electric bill under $10. His old electric bill was closer to $130 a month.

Collins wants everyone to have a low electric bill­—that’s why the BrightBuilt Barn is an open source collaboration project. All the building plans and information are available online and through information packets. Anyone can follow day-to-day energy levels the barn outputs online at www.brightbuiltbarn.com. Today, a year after the barn’s construction, Collins says about a dozen people have shown interest in building their own BrightBuilt Barn. He built his because he wanted to make a difference. Others may have different motivations.

“I’ve got four grandchildren,” Collins says. “Every molecule of carbon I put into the atmosphere is one more they’ll have to deal with someday. When you start thinking that way, you change.”