Passive solar house saves money, naturally

OREANA — There’s a lot to be said for just tucking your house into a bucolic hillside and allowing Mother Nature to come fill up your senses.

Such is the building style of Doris and Ed McKay, out in the wilds of rural Oreana. Their chalet-style home is wedge-shaped, the southern end cedar-faced and laced with a bank of windows giving full view of the woodpeckers and hummingbirds frequent the wildlife preserve that is their front yard.

The back of the house, the sharp end of the wedge, buries itself deep into the earth so the far northern edge of the sloping roof that covers it all is just a few feet off the ground at the rear. This design is called passive solar subterranean, and it’s aimed at slashing heating and cooling costs. With the way it seamlessly blends into its landscape full of birdsong, it also appears to embrace the latest thinking in “green home” concepts.

Except that this residence was built 26 years ago and designed by Doris McKay, a former teacher and a stay-at-home mom in those days, who dug up her green housing knowledge at the Decatur Public Library with kids in her lap. Her inspiration was this overwhelming need to raise her family in a home that didn’t have to guzzle fossil fuels to stay warm in winter and cool in summer.

“Even back then, we’d gone through the energy crunch of the’70s,” she said. “I wanted to do something.”

What she did first was rack up lots of library fines by constantly going back and overstaying her borrower’s welcome on the few how-to books that could help her. But the library didn’t just take her money: “One thing about Decatur Public Library, they pay attention to circulation figures,” said Doris McKay, 55, now a consultant and Web master for the Rolling Prairie Library System. “The range of books in the area I used kept getting bigger.”

By 1977, the family had the site for their house purchased, and construction began in 1981. Ed McKay wasn’t so sure how all this would work out but has learned to take risks based on the quality of his wife’s judgment.

“I had a lot of trepidations,” said, Ed McKay, 70. “But I went along for the ride, just like I did more recently when she bought one of those hybrid cars, which I had a lot of trepidations about, too. But buying it turned out to be one of the smartest things she ever did, just like building our house.”
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