OFF THE GRID

Laura and Rutherford’s EcoManor shows you can save big bucks with small changes in your home

A LOT OF US HAVE FATHERS who patrolled the house when we were young, turning off the lights in unoccupied rooms and imploring us not to waste energy and money.

But for Laura Turner Seydel, that fatherly lesson was taught by Ted Turner, the billionaire philanthropist, environmentalist, and founder of CNN.

“He didn’t believe in wasting money,” said Laura, still blond, blue-eyed, and youthful at fifty-one.

She’s now a mother of three and an environmental advocate and speaker who lives in one of the nation’s most environmentally friendly and healthy houses. But more on that later.

First, I want to share with you a few of Laura’s stories about growing up as the daughter of Ted Turner, and how that has guided her life and career.

Laura said growing up after the Great Depression strongly influenced her father’s attitudes.

“Dad always said he didn’t get rich by wasting money. He got rich by spending it very wisely and saving it as well. So anything that was considered wasteful, like leaving lights or televisions on when not in use—or turning up the thermostat instead of donning a sweater when you were cold—was just not acceptable.”

Laura remembers regularly picking up bottles and cans with her dad and taking them to the store to be recycled. And once, while they were visiting Machu Picchu in Peru, Laura said Turner surprised an eco-guide by reaching down to pick up a piece of trash.

The guide told Laura, “In all my years of taking these celebrities through, I’ve never seen somebody of his status bend down and pick up somebody else’s trash.”

In the 1990s, Turner created the cartoon series Captain Planet and the Planeteers, in which the world’s first and only eco-superhero, Captain Planet, taught children about crucial environmental challenges and other issues of global importance, including war, AIDS, and the threat of land mines.

Captain Planet ran for six years as a new series, a total of 113 episodes, and was rerun for years afterward. It was seen in more than one hundred countries and translated into twenty-three different languages.

After the merger of Time Warner with AOL, Ted and many things that he cared about were jettisoned, including the green-lit full-feature Captain Planet movie, the cartoon series, and the associated Captain Planet Foundation. The Foundation was offered to Turner, who didn’t have the time to take it on. But Laura did, and two decades later, she continues to chair the organization.

The foundation, which has given grants for more than twenty years to schools and youth groups in all fifty states and in twenty countries worldwide, provides hands-on environmental-service learning projects such as recycling programs, testing and monitoring water quality, gardens of every type, renewable energy projects, wetland restorations, and tree plantings, to mention a few.

“You name it, we’ve done it, and there are some very impactful projects we’ve supported,” Laura said.

In the early 2000s, an act of God spurred Laura and her husband, attorney and Atlanta Hawks co-owner Rutherford Seydel, to create one of the nation’s most environmentally friendly houses. The house, known as EcoManor, is so innovative that it has its own website, EcoManor.com. It was the first house in the Southeast and the second in the country to be certified under the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED program (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design). Rutherford and the other Hawks owners also gained LEED certification for Philips Arena, the first NBA and NHL LEED EB (for existing buildings) arena in the world.

But EcoManor might not have been built had it not been for a fallen tree.

Laura and Rutherford had lived for sixteen years in a house that was built in the 1920s. They had made some energy-wise improvements, such as replacing the heating and air-conditioning system with one that was more efficient, adding insulation, and wrapping the pipes. But there was only so much they could do with the house, and there weren’t really any nationally recognized environmental standards to follow. (The best standard at the time, a local program called EarthCraft, was primarily for building new houses in a way that was moderately energy- and water-efficient.)

The couple bought a house adjacent to their 1920s house and was planning to renovate it and resell it.

“But days after we bought the house, a terrible storm came through—one of the new developments of our heated climate—and a tree was blown down from our neighbor’s property and destroyed half of the house.”

After a long fight with their insurance company, the house was declared a teardown, and Laura and Rutherford, who had heard about a new environmental certification for houses, set out to build the first house to secure the new designation.

“We would have been first if not for a broken pipe and resulting flood in our basement that set us back several weeks, which was just enough to let somebody else in California get ahead of us,” Laura said. “But we did make it first in the Southeast, and I can’t even begin to tell you the amount of interest in our project on behalf of the media because it was so new.”

Everything about the house was designed to conserve energy and water, from the cistern that collects rainwater from the roof and pipes it to the toilets; to the system that allows gray water from the showers, sinks, and laundry to percolate back into the ground; to high-efficiency appliances and LED and compact fluorescent lighting.

“I really like all the natural daylight,” Laura says as she walks through her front door, cell phone to her ear, and describes what she sees. “I love that I can come home to my house, like I just did, and there’s not a light on in the house. Even when it’s overcast outside, there’s plenty of light, and it always feels good.”

The house has a series of solar tubes—basically mini-skylights—that redirect natural light to windowless places such as closets and bathrooms.

And the house was designed to take maximum advantage of the sun.

“We had built the frame of our house,” Rutherford said, “and I went over there many nights at sunset and many days, mornings and in the middle of the day, to see if I was right about how the sun was going to come up and how it was going to come through a room and light it up. And we changed some things around so that in the morning the sun would come in one way and in the afternoon it would come in another way.”

They widened openings and changed door and window locations to allow in more natural daylight.

EcoManor consumes less than half the energy, per square foot, of the average U.S. home built from 2000 to 2005, according to Southface, a nonprofit dedicated to sustainable construction.

EcoManor, which includes approximately eight thousand square feet of space, has a 6.5-kilowatt rooftop solar array that reduces its conventional electricity and gas use. The Seydels are planning to add more solar capacity for 2013.

Laura says she loves the aesthetics of the house, including the rugs that were made from natural fibers and the plank flooring that was milled from downed trees. Because her concerns extend beyond energy and water efficiency to indoor air quality and toxicity, she loves that the paints used to decorate the house do not emit volatile organic compounds. She also uses natural cleaning products rather than harsh chemicals that could harm her family’s health and find their way into the local water system.

Outside the house, Laura and Rutherford planted drought-tolerant indigenous plants so little water is wasted watering them, and they use no chemicals in their yard or veggie garden. These practices earned EcoManor another coveted certification given by the National Wildlife Federation for managing their yard in such a responsible way.

They also used a type of vine called Virginia creeper to help shade the brick on the southwest side of the house.

“During the summer, this wonderful, leafy, beautiful plant goes up the brick wall. But most of what it’s doing is acting like a big shade tree. It’s shading the brick from getting heated by the sun. In the winter, when it’s gone, the brick warms up. So it’s a great natural way to provide shade for that side of the house.”

The couple also grows food for the family in their garden, and has four chickens to provide a regular supply of fresh eggs.

“I give them away to neighbors because we produce more eggs than we eat. It’s fantastic,” Rutherford said. “Then the chickens walk around the yard and help fertilize so we don’t need chemical additives.”

He says besides the red wiggler worms that turn their food scraps into nutrient-rich compost, they’re the best pets he’s ever had. And they all help with positive net cash flow! In addition, the hens thankfully coexist well with the Seydels’ beloved cocker spaniel, Boo.

Laura also set up a beehive on the property, hoping to help the increasingly threatened pollinators. But that ended up in disaster. The cause was the overuse of weed killers and pesticides in Laura’s affluent Atlanta neighborhood, which found their way into the hive.

“The beekeeper who was helping me said she’d never seen anything like it before in her life, and she manages thirty different beehives around the city. She said the honey and the pollen were so toxic that the bees actually encapsulated it because they couldn’t remove it from the hive. So they formed this shield around it.”

But it didn’t work. “It was a sad day for me when I learned all the bees had died.”

The beekeeper said the most successful and best honey-producing hives are in low-income communities because they don’t have the discretionary income to spend on lawn and garden applications.

“And the worst case she’d ever seen was in my neighborhood, which has all these big homes and these perfectly manicured lawns and not a weed in sight.”

Laura’s growing awareness of toxic chemicals poses some unique challenges to Rutherford. She has cautioned him about buying jewelry because of the toxic chemicals and heavy metals used in the mining process. Diamonds that could be related to armed conflict zones are out as well, as are cut roses, which Rutherford said are often grown with the heavy use of pesticides.

So what’s a guy to do for a Valentine’s Day or anniversary gift?

“I can go out in the backyard and cut something and make a nice bouquet and give it to her,” he said. “And chocolates are still on the list.”

But for their most recent Valentine’s Day, they gave each other an enhanced purification system that helps oxygenate and alkalize tap water and turns it into “live water” for our 65-to-70-percent H₂O-based bodies.

Of course, being a stringent environmental advocate can sometimes get discouraging. Rutherford recounts the story of the great Jacques Cousteau, the French scientist and explorer who studied the sea, telling Ted Turner that he was becoming increasingly negative about the future of the world’s reefs, whose ecosystems were breaking down.

“Ted looked at him and said, ‘Wait a minute. You’re a scientist, and every scientist has a degree of probability that you could be wrong.’”

So even if that chance was only 1 percent, it was enough to work to try to change things, Rutherford said.

Laura sees a big source of encouragement in the Planeteers, nearly six hundred thousand Millennials who grew up watching Captain Planet on TV and who are now, as young adults, communicating with one another on Facebook.

“Now they’re young career professionals and college students, but they are saying what an impact the cartoon made on them,” Laura said. “They’re organizing in their communities. They’ve also made career choices based on the ethic that was developed watching the cartoon. We are starting, at the [Captain Planet] Foundation, to get grant requests from these formalized groups of Planeteers, including groups from Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Ghana. It really was the gift that kept on giving, that cartoon, and it really matters what kids grow up watching.”

Both Laura and Rutherford work hard to get people to change their energy-wasting and polluting ways. Rutherford knows that he is privileged and is humbled to live in a house like EcoManor. But he thinks there is huge potential for more meaningful, healthy improvement in any apartment or dwelling.

That improvement, he says, will come from more and more people making millions of incremental but efficient changes.

An environmental group they started installs rain barrels on even the most basic houses. And Rutherford says it’s relatively easy now, and inexpensive, to buy such things as high-efficiency dimmable compact fluorescent lights and low-flush toilets and to use paints and cleaners that do not emit volatile organic compounds.

“There’s lots of options,” he said. “When we built our house, there weren’t lots of options, and that was seven or eight years ago. We didn’t even have smartphones back then. The world has evolved and people will always want to save money and live a more healthy, better quality of life . . . so there is hope.”

What can you do in your home right now to make it more energy efficient?

Find your entry point into savings.

• Rutherford describes monthly utility bills as a “utility mortgage,” because they must be paid and they drain cash from a house’s owners. “I don’t know of anyone that sits around and says, ‘I can’t wait to pay my utility bills,’” he said.
• But where do you begin reducing what you pay? For most of us, a good basic starting point is changing your lightbulbs to CFLs (compact fluorescent lightbulbs) or the even more energy-stingy (light-emitting diode) LED bulbs. They might cost more up front, but they’ll save you a lot over time.
• Another basic entry point to savings is your windows. Don’t change them thinking that you’ll get a payback; caulk them instead. Weather stripping will also make a big difference.

Get a smart programmable thermostat.

• Programmable thermostats can reduce heating and cooling costs in your home by 25 to 30 percent. But it’s hard to get excited by this device that your dad probably loves.
• Enter the Nest Learning Thermostat, which was designed by a former Apple executive and borrows the clean, minimalist design of the classic iPod click wheel. The Nest uses algorithms and artificial intelligence to learn your living patterns and figure out when to bump the temperature down a few degrees to save you money.
• It can be self-installed if you have technical ability or you can hire a local installer who will also sell you the unit. Retailers carrying the Nest, which sells for around $250, include Amazon, Best Buy, and Lowe’s, among others.
• I’ve now tried the Nest at my home and am very happy with its performance. I’ve found it reduces my energy bill by about 20 percent. Visit Nest.com for more info.

Reduce your water consumption.

• I had a low-flow toilet put into my house that took us from 3.5 gallons a flush to 1.1 gallons a flush. The toilet actually has two buttons—one that delivers 1.1 gallons and another for 1.6 gallons. This is a G-rated book, so use your imagination to understand when to use which button!
• Consumer Reports gave its vaunted “best buy” check mark to two toilets that both sell for about $100—the single-flush Aquasource AT1203-00 (available at Lowe’s) and the Glacier Bay Dual Flush N2316 (available at Home Depot).
• In addition, try installing a low-flow showerhead that uses a blast of air to simulate a strong stream of water. You might qualify for a rebate if you outfit your home with water-efficient devices. Check with your municipality to see if they participate.

Insulate your attic.

• If you have an attic, be sure to insulate it. You can either pay a professional to do blown-in insulation, or if you do it yourself, be sure to wear proper gloves and a mask.
• Joel Larsgaard, my associate producer, whom you read about in the Homes and Real Estate chapter, recently did it himself at his new house. He got free rental of an insulation blower with the purchase of twenty bags of insulation ($11 a bag) at a local big-box home improvement store. Then he grabbed a friend to help him.
• “It took us roughly an hour and fifteen minutes to blow twenty-three bags of cellulose insulation into my attic, and it was actually kind of fun doing it,” Joel told me. “Bonus, I looked like the Snuggle bear afterwards with a thick coat of lint all over me.”
• The real bonus is that Joel got a reimbursement from his local power company. They covered half of his $274 total bill for the job! Visit DSIREUSA.org (Database of State Incentives for Renewables & Efficiency) to see similar incentives that might be available where you live.
• Meanwhile, you can follow Joel’s adventures in money saving at his blog, SaveOutsidetheBox.com.