Living the dream

Couple's Victorian house cuts down on water and energy use. The home near Roscoe Village cost more to build, but the extra cost should be recovered in lower utility bills.

Joe and Sara Shacter's dream house is a green house.

The couple's 3,700-square-foot Victorian near Roscoe Village is decked out with water-conserving toilets and shower heads, energy-efficient appliances and power-saving tankless water heaters.

The floors are made of eco-friendly bamboo. Non-toxic paint colors the walls. A green roof on the garage covers their only car: a Toyota Prius hybrid.

The Shacters figure their green touches tacked an additional 5 percent onto the cost of building their home. They say that's a small price to pay for the money they'll recoup in lower utility bills, not to mention the payoff of feeling like they're doing their part to preserve the planet -- something that took on added importance after the birth of their 3-year-old twins, Benji and Jason.

"I think about their future and what the world will be like 50 years from now," Sara Shacter said. "If everyone waits for someone else to do something, nothing will change."

Whether the motivation is global warming and Al Gore, healthier living or rising energy costs, green houses aren't just for plants any more.

•      A nationwide survey representing 220,000 U.S. builders found that more than two-thirds of them are expected to be moderately or heavily involved in environmentally responsible home-building this year, vs. less than one-third of residential builders in 2005.

•      The same survey predicts that 2005's $7.4 billion green-home construction market will climb to $38 billion in 2010.

•      Green residential-building guidelines and certification programs are booming. The city of Chicago, for example, expects to launch next month a Green Homes program that will rate "green" homes with one to four starsbased on how many environmentally friendly features they have.

"Green home building is not a fad but a trend, and one that is increasing at rapid rates," said Harvey Bernstein, a vice president of McGraw-Hill Construction, which conducted the survey with the National Association of Home Builders.

Consumers seem willing to spend some green to be green. A recent American Institute of Architects poll found that 90 percent of registered voters surveyed said they'd pay up to $5,000 more for an energy-efficient, environmentally friendly home.

Frank and Lisa Mauceri will pay more than that to build their green house, which will double as an office for the couple's independent record label -- Smog Veil Records. When their gut remodel in Bucktown is finished later this year, it will include wind turbines, solar panels, a geothermal heating and cooling system and a 1,900-square-foot green roof. The terrazzo floor will be made up of recycled glass and tiny pieces of roughly 2,000 record albums -- leftovers from the Mauceris' music business. Frank Mauceri estimates that building green will cost him an additional $25 a square foot, compared with traditional construction.

The Mauceris' project boasted enough environmental perks to qualify for one of the city's first green home permits, which streamlines the bureaucracy that typically goes with new construction. The special permits are one of many carrots Mayor Daley offers in his well-known quest to make Chicago the greenest city in the country.

Mauceri said he doesn't think of himself as a tree-hugging environmentalist, but he is a fan of sustainable design. "I can't wait to live in a building where I don't have to pay for electricity," he said.

By anyone's definition, the Mauceris' home will be a deeper shade of green than most. But what constitutes a "green" home is largely a gray area.

"There's tremendous confusion in the marketplace about what 'green' means," said Jay Hall of the U.S. Green Building Council.

To clear up that confusion, more green building guidelines and certification programs are cropping up. The council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, certification is given to office buildings and other structures that meet an array of environmentally friendly criteria. That certification will be expanded this year to single-family homes.

Joe Shacter knows his house could be greener. He has regular carpeting, not recycled. There's no compost bin in his garden. But he knows that the steps he took -- especially when it comes to energy efficiency -- are working.

"Our electric bills this past summer were lower than when we lived in our condo, which was half as big," said Shacter, former president of the Notebaert Nature Museum who's now a senior policy adviser for the Environmental Law and Policy Center advocacy group.

Using less electricity doesn't just help the Shacters' bank account. The Midwest gets most of its electricity from coal. Burning a ton of coal produces more than two tons of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that's a main culprit in global warming. The process also sends mercury into the air and eventually into the water, contaminating the fish we eat.

"When we flip on a switch in the Midwest, it produces anywhere from two to four times more pollution than if we flipped that switch on the coast," said Bruce Nilles, who heads the Sierra Club's regional clean-energy campaign.

Artists Frances Whitehead and Jim Elniski hope that once their home in West Town is finished, ComEd will be buying electricity from them. Photovoltaic solar panels on their roof harness enough of the sun's energy to power the equivalent of two refrigerators. A silently whirling wind turbine on order from Chicago inventor Bil Becker will be added to the roof, generating enough electricity to feed an additional six fridges. If all that produces more power than needed, the electric meter runs backward and ComEd becomes their customer.

The former storage facility that Whitehead and Elniski have turned into their home was carefully designed to require as little energy as possible. Nothing achieves that goal more than their geothermal heating and cooling system, which uses the earth's temperature to keep their house comfortable.

Wells were drilled down to the bedrock, 65 feet under the home's foundation, where the earth maintains a steady temperature in the low- to mid-50s. In winter, a heat pump in the basement sends hot water from those wells circulating through a network of pipes in the home's cement floors, radiating heat upward to warm the inside. In summer, that 50-some-degree water is converted into cool air, which gets blown through the house the same way a conventional air-conditioning system works.

"It's the single biggest energy-efficient thing you can do, and it's also the biggest-ticket item," Whitehead said.

Their geothermal system cost more than twice as much as a conventional heating and cooling set up, "but it should pay for itself in about five years."

Energy isn't the only thing the couple doesn't want to waste. A lot of the home's finishes are made of recycled materials, including ceramic tile in the bathroom, brick pavers in the courtyard, cellulose insulation made from old newspapers and plastic lumber on the deck.

Whitehead didn't just pay attention to what she bought but also where she bought it from. She tried to stick within a 500-mile radius of Chicago to avoid the pollution that goes along with transporting goods from far away.

"I thought about bamboo floors, but those get shipped all the way from China," she said. "So our wood floors are salvaged elm trees from Chicago that had to be cut down for various reasons. I'm all about local -- except for my Danish refrigerator. They don't make this kind of energy-efficient model here."

Whitehead's Danish fridge exemplifies a common quandary consumers find themselves in when trying to be green. What's more important: Saving energy? Buying locally? Being made without toxins?

"There's no absolute green in this world. There are always tradeoffs," said Ori Sivan, co-owner of Greenmaker, a building supply store that opened over a year ago on North Pulaski.

Greenmaker's showroom is full of environmentally friendly building products, from insulation made of recycled blue jeans to water-conserving toilets and non-toxic paint -- a big hit with expectant parents looking to decorate their nursery.

The store uses symbols to identify a product's green features -- locally produced, recyclable, non-toxic -- so customers can pick what's most important to them.

"We want to make it as easy as possible," said Joe Silver, who started Greenmaker with Sivan, his childhood friend. "We also want to prevent 'greenwashing.' Some products out there claim to be green, and there's really no basis for it. You might think you're doing good buying a low-VOC can of paint, and then the store adds regular colorant to it, and you've defeated the purpose."

That's the kind of pitfall the Shacters worked hard to avoid while building their green home. It wasn't always easy.

"This still isn't mainstream enough where you don't have to do your homework," Joe Shacter said. "But I'm glad we did, because it's the right thing to do."

Some sources for information and supplies to make your home green:

Head to jump.suntimes.com for more about living green at home

GREEN BUILDING SUPPLIES
Greenmaker -- (773) 384-7500, www.greenmaker supply.com.

Rain barrels (City of Chicago has sold out of its $20 barrels this year, but some stores stock them):
Grand Street Gardens -- (312) 829-8200, www.grandstreet gardens.com.

WIND TURBINES
Aerotecture International in Chicago -- (312) 829-3240, www.aerotecture.com.

GREEN ROOFS
City grants usually available annually.
Chicago Department of Environment -- (312) 744-7606, www.cityofchicago.org /Environment.

LOW-FLOW SHOWERHEADS
Niagara Conservation -- (800) 831-8383, www.niagara conservation.com.

RECYCLED LUMBER (FROM THE CHICAGO AREA)
Horigan Urban Forest Products -- (847) 729-1023, www.horiganufp.com.

ENERGY AUDITS
Informed Energy Decisions -- (773) 463-6767, www.energy detectives.com.

DUAL-FLUSH TOILETS
Bathhaus -- (847) 277-1313, www.bathhaus.com.

MORE ABOUT GREEN BUILDING
Chicago Center for Green Technology -- (312) 746-9642, www.cityofchicago.org /Environment/GreenTech/.