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Unlike the more common energy recovery ventilators often used in Passive Houses and other high-efficiency houses, the CERV incorporates a small heating and air conditioning system. From the Newell Instrument’s website:
The CERV detects when outside air is “nice”, and maximizes fresh air flow into the house, but with the added advantage that it filters the fresh air and then delivers it to the living areas of the house, while purging and exhausting air from the bathrooms, kitchen and laundry areas of the house. When outside air is not so nice, which is most of the time, the CERV continues bringing in fresh air at a level required by the ASHRAE 62.2 ventilation standard for residences, ensuring high quality air in the house at all times.
The CERV “conditions” the fresh air before delivering it to the house. If the air is too cool, it is efficiently heated. If the air is too warm or too humid, the air is cooled and dehumidified. Additionally, the CERV determines whether or not “energy recovery” is beneficial.
For three years, the Newells have been piecing together and testing prototypes at the company’s lab in Urbana. For the last few months, they’ve used the Equinox House to test a version that’s fairly close to the model they plan to take to market.
Ty Newell hopes to get Underwriters Laboratories to certify the CERV in time for it to be included in this summer’s U. of I. Solar Decathlon entry. And then, Newell says, they’ll be ready to sell and install CERVs — at a cost he expects will be less than $6,000 per unit.
Equinox House itself is a whole other potential product line. Newell’s been tracking the house’s temperature, humidity, solar energy, energy use, carbon dioxide, volatile organic compounds, rainwater collected, rainwater usage — everything in fact, from the water used by some 1,500 toilet flushes to the extent to which the house’s roughly finished concrete floor regulate moisture. The results, he declares, are to his liking.
“What we’re predicting and what we’re seeing are in good agreement with each other,” he says, adding that such good performance bodes well for another goal of his: “We’re also interested in designing and engineering dwellings.”
Ty and Ben are designing a more conventional-looking, two-story house with many of Equinox’s features, for possible construction near Minneapolis. But Ty Newell is clearly partial the home he built and inhabits in Urbana.
With its horizontal, modern lines set on the flat Midwestern terrain, it looks to be a cousin of the Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Style homes. Wright is something of hero to Newell. He’s particularly drawn to the great architect’s effort to create a well-designed, customizable line of affordable, modular homes. That 1930s project was known as the “Usonian House,” and it never fully caught on. But in an era of environmental limits, Newell sees the Equinox House as something of an update.
“The Usonian concept was that it would be a house that could be affordable, that it was for everyone, that you could have a less expensive direction by simplifying the construction process,” he says, before confiding that he’s not the perfect “everyone.”
“I’m just not a good independent unbiased source. My wife’s viewpoint is what dictates whether it’s working,” he says. “And a pretty good indicator that the house is comfortable is that she’s living here also.”
The "New Usonian" Equinox House is designed to be affordable and super-efficient. Photos by Ken Edelstein
One-foot deep window casings hint at Equinox House's thick walls and ceilings.
Forty solar panels out back, totaling about 700-square-feet, provide scenery, as well as electricity.
In a tight attic space, Ty Newell shows of the Conditioning Energy Recovery Ventilator, a device he hopes will revolutionize high efficiency homes.
The real test, Newell says, is whether his wife was willing to live inside his experiment. She's a gourmet cook, so it helped that the Newell's designed a high-end, but also highly efficient, kitchen.
Watch of video of Ty Newell describing in detail how the CERV works.
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