How's this for a utility bill?

[Meerkat]

A Real 'Green' House: No Heating Bill for 25 Years (http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/space/sc_space/storytext/newarchitectureinspiredbylivingcells/19938856/SIG=120k866r4/*http://www.livescience.com/environment/060421_green_house.html)

http://images.livescience.com/images/060421_green_house_01.jpg

[PeterSibley]

I remember the newspapers were full of this stuff 25 years ago ...how common is it in the US ? With the amount of energy you guys need to heat your homes in the that frigid climate there must be quite a few around ?

[brad9798]

Hey, if the Mall of America can run smoothly (warmly) with NO heating system AT ALL, then the average should be able to do so.

Unfortunately, I am an energy luddite, and so is my house ... If I'm not spending at least 200-300 on combined utilities per month, then I am doing something wrong. :o

And that includes about four to five months a year with minimal utility use (say $50 bucks) ...

I need those solar panels ... a sistern ... and a wood stove!

[George Roberts]

"with the heat from the woodstove"

I guess some people lie and cheat.

We never paid our oil heating bill either. In the past we used a wood stove - 3 years of heat for $400. We had electric baseboard heat $50/month. We have a heat pump now $25/month (???). A lot of our heat comes from the computers, TVs, and lights.

Our electric bill peaks at $100/month but that includes 4 business computers and my shop.

[shamus]

Here's a link to a couple of photos of a house built by a man named Grote Reber in Tasmania.

http://www.nrao.edu/archives/Reber/reber.shtml#TitleDates

Grote was an ex-patriate American, who built the very first radio telescope. He came to Tasmania because it is a very good place to do radio telescopy apparently.
In the first oil crisis he got interested in solar houses and electric vehicles. I had the privilege of working for him in the electrical engineering lab at Tas Uni in the early seventies doing his donkey work testing various electric motor arrangements and drawing a lot of load curves for him. This house produced way more heat than he could use most of the time. The heat was stored in a large volume of road surfacing style gravel, or "blue metal" and extracted by means of water circulation.

[Stiletto]

Woodstoves have their limitations in an urban context, even the cleaner burning ones require an amount of maintenance that busy city people are unable or unwilling to provide.