Enertia gains momentum

It's taken twenty years, but the world seems to have caught up with Michael Sykes.

After winning the top prize in a History Channel contest last month co-presented by the National Inventors Hall of Fame Foundation, a special exhibit opened yesterday at the U.S. Patent Office in Washington featuring the North Carolina homebuilder's super energy-efficient work.

Sykes' small company has borrowed from biomimicry, designing homes leveraging the natural heat retention and insulating properties of solid wood, the temperature stability of the earth and natural convection to require virtually no energy for cooling or heating.

The materials he's using today are advanced. The building techniques involve prefab construction and low on-site impact. Even computer pioneer Steve Wozniak, who Sykes recently met, now wants a house from him. But it wasn't always this way.

And nobody was using the term biomimicry when he first got the idea as a teenager.

"I was racking tobacco in the old tobacco barns of North Carolina, and I noticed the barns made of pine logs were always cooler than the others in the summer, and warmer than the others in the winter," he told the Cleantech Group.

Sykes got motivated to get into the log home building business. Upon testing timber types to learn which were more efficient and why, he found the secret was rosin.

"The rosin in wood is capable of crystalizing and decrystalizing at a nano scale at around room temperature, and that means it stores more energy."

Recognizing that more wood used in construction meant better storage and release of solar energy, Sykes' company Enertia now builds homes entirely out of milled glue-laminated ("gluelam") wood sandwiches.

Unlike logs, which warp or crack, gluelam components, which Sykes describes as "not that different from Lego blocks," are used for every structural element of the building, including interior walls. They assemble quickly with electric drills, and obviate the need for drywalling or painting. They're more versatile to work with than logs and allow for contemporary designs. And they can be built out of scrap lumber, with attractive veneers on the outside and inside.

Gluelam-based houses by Enertia >>

And by digging a foundation into the ground and designing a second false wall into the north side of each building, Sykes' Enertia designs create a natural airflow within the structure that moderates its temperature through hot and cold weather throughout the year, with virtually no heating or cooling costs.

The house itself becomes a heat pump, without any CFCs, a microcosm of the natural cycle of the planet's atmosphere, as the company puts it in promotional literature.

Sykes acknowledges his Enertia homes are 10-15 percent more expensive than conventional constructions, but says the price should fall.

"Right now we're paying top dollar for our materials. But our gluelam method is so much less labor intensive that if we can bring the cost of wood down, this has the potential for lowering the cost of housing. You don't have to insulate that wall, you don't have to sheetrock it, you don't have to put up any siding, you don't have to put up a Tyvek layer."

"When it arrives on the truck, you get your crew and in about 10 days, you've got yourself a house."

Sykes patented his convection loop approach in 1986. When the patent expired, he received another in August last year that refreshed the original idea, and protected his intellectual property around the storage properties of rosin, and his plans to infuse his gluelams with extra rosin.

"Lots of wood is thrown out by furniture makers as defective. Furniture makers don't want these knots, but I do, because they have the most rosin in them. And the papermaking industry has a disposal issue with millions and millions of gallons of rosin. That's something we could use."

But while they promise even higher efficiencies, the rosin-infused gluelams are on hold. Making them would require specialized equipment and facilities, according to Sykes.

Enertia is a small operation in Wake Forest, North Carolina. It offers dozens of designs, but only builds some 20 homes a year. Sykes says he's looking for additional capital to grow his local operation, and would like to expand westward by licensing his technology to potential partners.