Faces of Sustainability: Rick Matthews

“My house is my toy,” Rick Matthews, associate provost of information systems, said. His Faculty Drive home, built in 1984 may well still be the most energy efficient structure on the block over 20 years after its construction. Matthews uses super insulation to make his home comfortable year round.

A former physics professor and chair of the WFU Physics Department from 1998-2007, Matthews wanted to build his home to be as energy efficient as possible to minimize cost and maximize comfort. Matthews considered passive solar heating but rejected the popular method because of the hot Carolina summers. “The problem is that it tends to work all the time and we have some very hot summers. Plus, passive solar uses glass, which is your biggest heat leak,” he said.

The solution? “Simple, inexpensive, highly predictive, super insulation,” he said. Matthews simple designed a home that has thicker walls, wider studs placed farther apart, and twice the amount of insulating material of standard homes. This keeps his home cool in the summer, but warm in the winter.

Other more scientific features of his home include an air-to-air heat exchanger that allows his very tight home to receive fresh air without losing heat. The warm air from the interior passes through a narrow hole where it warms the cool air that is entering the home from outside, minimizing heat loss by as much as 80 percent with a more commonly-used exhaust fan.

Matthews also has a special energy meter from Duke Energy that enables him to take advantage of time-of-day rates for energy. During peak energy hours (7 am-noon in the Winter and 1 pm-7pm in the summer), power plants meet an increased demand for energy by firing up the coal plants to supplement nuclear reactors.

This makes energy not only more expensive, but less environmentally friendly as coal produces CO₂ and other pollutants when burned. Because his home is hyper-insulated, he can turn the heat of the house off during peak energy hours and his overall household temperature will decrease by only a few degrees, even if the temperature outside lingers in the teens. This amounts to an overall monthly energy cost of 2.6 cents per square foot of his home.

Matthews frequently preached the benefits of a well-insulated home to his physics classes throughout his teaching tenure at the university.

“So often people think of living sustainably as having to sacrifice something, but this doesn’t feel like a commitment,” Matthews said of his home’s forward-thinking construction. “The only sacrifice we (he and his wife) make is that we don’t wash clothes during peak hours. We don’t even notice if we turn the heat off for five hours.”

“It’s nice to be able to be virtuous without having to sacrifice,” he said.