Employees of the yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council (yRITWC) install 170-watt Sharp solar panels. The yRI TWC footed the entire bill for the Anaktuvuk Pass prototype home renewable energy systems,
both solar and wind, using a grant from the Administration for Native Americans.
Copyright © 2010 by the American Solar Energy Society Inc. All rights reserved.
hours — despite having an easily adjustable lever,
allowing the panels to tilt directly toward the sun,
at 90 degrees, during the cold season.
The home’s wind turbine, a grid-tied 730-watt
Ampair 600 ( ampair.com), is a work in progress. David Pelunis-Messier of the YRI TWC, the
installer, has had trouble with the inverter, an
SMA ( sma.de/en_US.html) Sunny Boy 700U,
converted to a “windy boy.” Pelunis-Messier
said he does not recommend this conversion or
setup, which he’s been troubleshooting for the
past six months.
Cost
Although the CCHRC missed their targeted
$150,000 budget by about $50,000, the prototype
home was still considered a bargain for a new residence in rural Alaska. A lot of the savings can be
attributed to shipping, Grunau explained. TNHA
reports show that “landed” construction materials
in Anaktuvuk Pass cost approximately four to five
times what they would cost in Anchorage.
“It was always shipping versus cost of the
product versus value,” Grunau said. One exam-
ple: The group used light-gauge steel studs for
the floor joists and the walls because they nest
together when they ship. They’re usually more
expensive than traditional wood studs, but their
lower shipping cost actually made them cheap-
er in the long run. In the end, the CCHRC was
able to fit all the building materials onto one
and one-third DC-4s, drastically reducing the
final expense.
User Feedback
The residents, who were appointed to the
house by the local housing authority, have not
reported any major problems. “They really loved
the fact that their house was warmer than everyone else’s this past winter,” Grunau said. “
Essentially, they said the only bad thing was that the
two-year-old kept walking out the door in his diapers because he didn’t know it was cold outside.”
The TNHA is happy with its investment
and is already planning to incorporate some of
the features of the Anaktuvuk Pass home into
three future developments. “We’ll try it out for
the second round and see what we learn from it,”
said Senasu, the TNHA deputy director. Senasu
added that the energy-efficiency qualities of the
CCHRC design were attractive to the housing
authority, for reasons other than cost. “It’s a green
home, and that’s what we want to do,” she said.
The three new houses are being constructed
“We didn’t want to be the
next person just to offer
another solution. We wanted
to be the group that finally
asked [the native people]
what they wanted and what
would work for them to
fulfill their needs.”
— Judith Grunau, project manager,
Cold Climate Housing Research Center
this summer in Atqasuk, a similar-sized village
near the Arctic Ocean, 215 miles to the north-west of Anaktuvuk Pass. According to the housing authority, they will run about $315,000 each
� a huge improvement from the $1 million-plus
quotes they got for a more conventional home
the previous summer.
At the CCHRC, monitoring of the prototype
home will continue. The data will help guide the
designs of future projects, of which there are
many both underway and in the pipeline. The
Anaktuvuk Pass home was the first project of
CCHRC’s Sustainable Northern Shelters (SNS)
program, conceived in 2008. Two more SNS
prototype homes are going up this summer, in
Atqasuk and Quinhagak, and the CCHRC is
either collaborating on or doing consulting work
for the construction of four more rural Alaska
buildings. It’s too early to tell, but the basic foundation of the Anaktuvuk Pass prototype home,
both the program and actual structure, could
foreshadow the future of Arctic architecture.
“No one had ever really involved communi-
ties in the way that we did,” Grunau said. “We
saw how expensive it was to build in rural Alaska,
and how very little design was in place specific
to the area and specific to the lifestyle. We knew
that there was a great need. I think that’s why we
got on this.”
For more information on the CCHRC, see
cchrc.org. Streaming live data from monitoring
at the Anaktuvuk Pass home can be found online
at gwscientific.com/cchrc/sns/anaktuvuk-pass/
index.shtml. ST
