A straw house sounds like a pretty chilly place on a Saskatchewan winter day.
 

However, a man near Aberdeen, Sask. lives in one, and it's very cosy. Lynn Oliphant used straw bales to make his home. And he uses renewable resources to heat it.

"We've got a hot water solar panel that provides hot water for our floor system. We've got a water jacket on our wood-burning stove that supplies hot water for our floor system. And our final backup is our electric water heater," Oliphant said.

The house looks like any other acreage home. He built the house himself, and has been living in it for eight years.

"The straw bale walls here go up rather quickly but the finishing work is very labour intensive and it takes a lot of time and so it's not cost effective if you're going to have it built by a construction crew," Oliphant said.

"If you're going to build it yourself, it becomes much more cost effective because the techniques are very forgiving."

The house has lots of south-facing windows to light and warm it on sunny days. The stucco-covered straw insulates the interior.

The walls are either 35 or 45 centimetres thick, depending on how the bales are placed.

A compostable toilet keeps water use down to a tenth of what a regular toilet would use in the Oliphant home.

The 63-year-old says he made the house to cut his energy bills in half and to be kind to the Earth. He calls it a "physical demonstration of an alternative home."

As other homeowners face climbing heating bills with the rising price of natural gas, Oliphant's solar panels, large windows and a wood stove keep his heating bill down. His average monthly utility bill for his 162 sq. metre home is about $150.

"Given the rather radical climate we experience here in Saskatchewan, we wanted a well-insulated house — both in terms of keeping cool in the summer and keeping warm in the winter so that we wouldn't have to have outrageous utility bills," Oliphant explained.

Oliphant knew that insulation was important, and he did his research. All insulation is rated according to its resistance to heat flow, measured in units of R-value. The higher the R-value, the better the insulating properties.

"We were exposed to the straw bale building that gives you a R-40 wall down in Arizona and decided that that would be a good building material for Saskatchewan," Oliphant explained.

He acknowledges that the only pitfall of a straw house, is the work that it takes to build.

CBC News