The Green Building Advisors

New Home!

2009-03-17T19:57:00.002-04:00

Hey,
I forgot to post this message. This was our temporary holding place for blogs and content ideas while we built GreenBuildingAdvisor.com.

We built it and we've moved in. Come visit.

You'll find:

A Green Building Primer with 20 Questions and 20 Answers aboiut green building and remodeling, and design.
A Green Building Encyclopedia with hundreds of pages of articles on every aspect of Green Building
Daily blogs from some of the best in the business
Green homes -- real world examples of people building and remodeling green, including actual energy use
A Green Product guide featuring over 1,500 products deemed to be green by the editors of BuildingGreen LLC, publishers of GreenSpec.
A construction detail library with over 1,ooo construction drawings
A green building strategy generator helping you wrap your arms around how to green your particular project from the start.

We're pretty happy with what we've come up with, and we hope you will be too.

Thanks,
Daniel Morrison
Managing editor, GreenBuildingAdvisor.com

A Little-Known Wick-Stop in a Foundation

2008-10-07T15:37:00.004-04:00

By Dan Morrison

Even though I stopped working at Fine Homebuilding ten months ago, I still get letters from readers asking questions about the articles I developed. Here's one from an engineer in Tennessee asking a question about a drawing we ran in Scott Gibson's article Does Fiberglass Insulation Still make Sense? The article featured a drawing illustrating how insulation is used: in basements, walls, and roofs. It shows a good system and a better system. On both sides of the drawing there's an arrow pointing to the joint between the footing and the foundation wall with a label that says "Paint on damp proofing"

The reader wrote:

To whom it may concern –
I recently purchased the winter 2008 issue of “The
best of Fine Homebuilding.” Cover article is Energy-Smart Homes.
Scott Gibson’s article titled “Does Fiberglass Insulation Still Make
Sense?”, starting on page 26, ends on page 31 with a cross-sectional view of a
house with all of the recommended types of insulation. At the bottom of
the page there is an arrow pointing to the line between the footers and the
poured concrete walls labeled “Paint-on-damp-proofing”. Was this
intentional or is the arrow suppose to point at the outside surface of the
concrete wall? I’ve never seen anyone paint anything on top of the footers
before pouring the walls. Please clarify.
Many thanks,
Brian
Cotton
Jackson, TN

My response to Brian:

Nope, not an oversight. The capillary break staop water from being absorbed
through the footing into the wall and up to the framing. If you’ve got foam sill
sealer on top of the foundation wall then the wall framing is probably safe, but
the concrete slab can still absorb water through the footing. I know, I know,
but there’s foam under and around the slab. If that’s the case, then you’re
probably fine. But when you ask Joe Lstiburek, Bruce Harley, and Andres
Dejarlais to give you a drawing, you get plenty of belts and suspenders.

The main point is that this is a spot most people never realize is
a good wick-stop. Does everybody do it? No. Does anyone? Probably. If you don’t
use continuous rebar between footing and foundation, the building inspector may
have a problem with it because this is technically a slip joint, but using a
keyed joint (as is shown) fixes that problem.

Thanks for noticing
the little things,
Dan

Brian's response back to me:

Dan,
Thanks for the quick response.
Damp-proofing the
footer-wall boundary makes sense and is defiantly something I plan on doing
now
that I understand the reason for it.
Again, thanks for your
reply. I’ve enjoyed reading your publication and am looking forward to
reading the next issue.
Brian Cotton, PE

Always happy to help. That was some of the most fun of working at Fine Homebuilding -- getting good info to people that care.

--Dan Morrison is the managing editor of GreenBuildingAdvisor.com

The Environmental Consequences of Excavation

2008-10-02T15:02:00.005-04:00

Pete and I visited some job sites in Southern California last week. One site, a rather large home buing built to be a net energy producer, was an excellent example of how important integrated design is. Here, Peter talks with the builder and the structural engineer, Bruce King about how the team re-thought the foundation system.

One of the challenges in this part of the country is earthquakes, so most foundations need to be somewhat over-engineered. The original design was for a pier and grade beam system which required a huge amount of excavation. Bruce wondered if switching to a mat slab would be a better use of materials and on paper it seemed like it was. Once the team started moving dirt around, though, the builder asked some questions. Bruce sat back down at his desk with a fresh pencil and discovered the hidden environmental cost of trucking out dirt and trucking in gravel.

Editor's note: please excuse my cruddy video editing skills. I just wanted to slap this together for a free-lance writer to watch as background info for an article. The picture and sound quality are not what we will get once Rob gets back from Virginia and edits this thing for real.

--Dan Morrison is managing editor of GreenBuildingAdvisor.com

What’s Wrong With the Home Energy Audit Industry?

2008-09-29T11:53:00.005-04:00

By Michael Chandler

Conflicts of interest seem to abound, consumers balk at the price of an audit, and nobody is leading change.

As satisfying as it is to build new high performance homes I have to admit that if I really cared about stopping global warming and conserving energy I’d re-focus my company to perform home energy audits and work that would stop the outrageous waste of energy in our existing housing stock. The reason I don’t do this is mostly because I’m having so much fun building new homes but also because I don’t see any way to do energy audits in a way that would make a profit.

Until recently I could assuage my guilt by recommending that people in existing homes call one of the larger Energy Star raters in our area. But now they have stopped performing energy audits on existing, occupied homes. It turns out that they couldn’t figure out how to make a profit at it either. So here is the paradigm we are dealing with here in North Carolina. If you want a home energy audit performed on a home you are living in you most likely will have to deal with an auditor who is operating out of a beat up truck with a laptop and answering machine in his spare bedroom. You’ll call and if you’re lucky he’ll get back to you within the week and maybe he’ll be able to get to your house within the month and he may or may not get your report and recommendations written up and back to you with an invoice in a timely fashion.

What is wrong with this picture? How can we fix it?
Existing homes are MUCH more difficult to analyze and do meaningful blower door and duct blaster testing on than new construction. You’ve got furniture, clutter, and old plaster and paint to protect. The HVAC equipment may be 20 years old and not have any service manual. The bath fans and kitchen hoods are likely to be badly under performing and need to be tested individually. You really can’t do a good job solo. And you’re not likely to get it done before lunch. At a minimum you need to plan for 6 hours on-site with two workers in a high liability environment and another 2 hours off site typing up the report. The going rate for this is $600 to $800 and homeowners bitterly gripe about that minimal cost. Can you write a logical, sustainable, business plan that has you sending employees into occupied homes, risking knocking over lamps or tracking mud on carpets and has a coordinator to answer phones and schedule visits and follow up at this rate? The answer is no.

How did we get in this fix?
It’s the un-intended consequence of well-intentioned actions once again. Back in the Carter administration we had “the moral equivalent of war” to save energy and we sent out home weatherization teams into the homes of the poor and needy to help them stop wasting energy. We used a lot of low paid part time barely insured do-gooders who were willing to work for cheap and forgo health insurance to be “part of the solution”. And they shut down and went away once the coop subsidy dollars got thin.

Can we make a new model work where auditors actually earn $1,200 to $1,800 per audit and can afford to have a professional organization and pay taxes and insurance and grow a professional crew of home energy auditors? Hard to do in a culture that is accustomed to valuing this as a nasty job that ought to be subsidized by the government or (I’m serious here) utility companies. Let’s put Exxon in charge of retrofitting Hummers to burn less gas while we’re at it and let’s set the rate low enough that they’re guaranteed to lose money.

The market is trying to adapt. We’re seeing insulation and weatherization companies offering home energy audits. Seems logical enough, call one number and get the diagnosis and the prescription filled from the same source. But people who have no problem with the energy company doing the energy audit somehow are more likely to see a conflict of interest in having an insulation company do it. My dad used to say “if all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail” and the concern is justified.

But what we have isn’t working. The public expects energy audits to be free or cheap and we have something like 75 million homes in desperate need of energy remediation to even get close to current watered down code requirements. Additionally we have thousands of homes ten years old and less that are wasting energy despite being built in compliance with the in-adequate codes of their time. We need a new paradigm and we need it soon.

In the commercial sector companies like Advanced Energy are going into existing factories and replacing outdated electric motors with new energy efficient ones in exchange for a percentage of future fuel savings. I don’t see this working with home weatherization but we need to at least be thinking outside of the box here. Our electrical distribution system is at its limit. Even if we could build more electric plants we are losing the capacity to reliably move this additional power to where it is needed. So, as a society, our best investment is in energy conservation in our existing building stock, both residential and commercial. We’ll never get there if we ensure that building diagnosticians are underpaid and unable to make up for it by selling and installing the products they need to fix the problems they encounter.

Somebody smarter than me needs to figure out how to lick this problem and get word to the next president as soon as possible and start turning this ship around.

--Michael Chandler is a builder and master plumber near Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His website is www.ChandlerDesignBuild.com

Green Houses Guaranteed to Save Green Backs.

2008-08-30T06:00:00.002-04:00

An Oklahoma home builder puts his money where his mouth is

By Christina Glennon

There is a lot of noise in the green building world these days. With green being used by everyone from product manufacturers with dubious claims of recycled content, to all natural material advocates unwilling to accept anything but a straw bale house as green. Consumers are left feeling confused, overwhelmed and unconvinced that green makes sense for them. But Oklahoma’s Ideal Homes has found a way to stand out from the crowd with their Guaranteed Utilities program for all new houses. Ideal Homes will guarantee that energy used for heating and cooling will not go over a pre-determined amount during the first 25 months after the close.

This is nothing new to Ideal Homes, who for six years has participated in the Environments for Living (EFL) program which guarantees each home’s heating and cooling use. EFL homes must meet energy-use performance guidelines set by the program and verified by a third party evaluator. EFL collects load calculations from the third party evaluator, in this case Guaranteed Watt Saver Systems, Inc., and the house plans from Ideal Homes. Using this information a computer model simulates the gas and electricity energy required to heat and cool each home. If the home’s use exceeds the guarantee, EFL will pay the difference.

Ideal Homes has now added this guarantee to all of their new homes. According to Vernon McKown, Ideal's co-owner and president of sales, "Now the home that keeps you comfortable all year long also guarantees to save you money on heating and cooling costs . . . it gives homebuyers peace of mind and confirms our energy performance claims." Ideal Homes is making the green payback concrete, by quietly cutting through the green noise.

--Christina Glennon is an administrative assistant at Taunton Press in Newtown, CT

Greening My Home, Step 1: Biodiesel

2008-08-28T19:49:00.001-04:00

By Dan Morrison

Air sealing and insulating are a great first step, but switching fuels is a lot quicker and easier. I'll do the insulating after I get a bonus check!

Standing in the cold dark December night pouring diesel fuel from a five gallon jug into the side of my house is where I think it really clicked: Houses are a huge consumer of oil. I had always gotten up-tight about gas mileage in my cars and trucks (I had a full sized Ford pickup at the time), but it never really hit me how much our houses gobble up.

Five gallons would maybe be enough to make it through the night, but it was about 10 degrees outside and I had two young children inside. So I made a few trips to the gas station and back pondering all the gas I was chugging into the side of my house.

Thousands of people pour hundreds of gallons of diesel fuel into their house every year. Actually, we burn 5 billion gallons of fuel oil every year (or we did in 2001)

An easy way for my family to cut our carbon footprint and our foreign oil consumption was to switch to biodiesel. Even though it's a 20% blend of biodiesel, my wife and I feel 80% better about our carbon emissions.

Biofuel cost a bit more than regular fuel oil but we don't really care. Regular fuel oil is bad; biodiesel is better. Now that the price of oil has skyrocketed, the extra premium paid for biodiesel is barely noticeable. Maybe we feel 85% better now. And it feels a heck of a lot better to see the oil truck with big green leaves on the side pull up to top us off.

To find a dealer, I went to biodiesel.org and searched their listing. Hale Hill Farm was one of the closest (Bantam Fuel is closer, but they don't sell 20% blends, only 5%), so we called Hale Hill. Even though we're a little ways away, they deliver to us because they want to spread the word.

The first time the delivery driver came, he had a look at our system to make sure the fuel was compatible with our boiler, lines and tasnk, gave the thumbs up, and started pumping. The service is excellent, the drivers friendly, and the office staff pleasant.
What an interesting way to do business...

Classic Trim Details Do More Than Just Look Good

2008-08-23T06:00:00.006-04:00

By Dan Morrison

Well detailed walls push water away from the foundation with trim elements. Flares, frieze boards and foundation water tables aren't there just because they look good. Their job is to protect the house from water.

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They look good because their proportions are well thought out. Rules for proportions were figured out thousands of years ago by Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans.

They're worth following.

-- Dan Morrison is managing editor of GreenBuildingAdvisor.com

Making Buildings Better One Camper at a Time

2008-08-21T06:00:00.005-04:00

By Michael Chandler

One of the advantages to being part of the GreenBuildingAdvisor team is an invitation to Joe Lstiburek’s Building Science Summer Camp (that's me and him at right). This is an invitation-only gathering of 200 of the top building scientists, engineers, and architects in America. Of course builders and remodelers are invited too. I was there as a member of Peter Yost and Dan Morrison’s new Green Building Advisor project. Joe is on the Advisory team too. The experience was absolutely amazing.

Summer camp seems to be largely an indulgence-of-curiosity project for Joe. He just looks at the Building Science community, asks himself “who is doing interesting research these days?” He calls them up and offers them a chance to speak about what they are passionate about. The talks can range over a pretty wide area.

An engineer from Johns Manville talked about how the fiberglass insulation of today is different on a micro-structural basis to the fiber glass of five years ago and why that matters.

Dr. Pierre-Michel Busque talked about window leaks in Western Canada and various pressure assisted rain screen strategies that can to keep the walls dry.

Ren Anderson from the National Renewable Energy Lab talked about the reconstruction of tornado-ravaged Greensburg, Kansas. NREL is value engineering advanced energy performance into the new homes being built there. He says they have found a way to get 58% better than code performance at no extra cost. They can get to 90% better than code at no extra cost by balancing energy savings against higher mortgage payment and factoring in a 40% increase in fuel costs.

BSC summer camp lecture for 200 from 8:30 am 'til 3:30 pm each day.

A presentation by Henry Gifford was particularly earth shattering. Recently the USGBC (http://www.usgbc.org/ ) had published a report from the New Buildings Institute (http://www.newbuildings.org/ ) that showed the LEED certified buildings perform 25% better than non-LEED certified “CBECS” buildings (www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cbecs ). Henry is a building efficiency expert in New York City and he sees these all-glass LEED buildings going up and he wonders how they can possibly perform better than the CBECS average. So he downloaded the data and discovered they were comparing mean data for all age CBECS buildings to median data for new LEED buildings. He made some adjustments and was able to demonstrate that the new LEED buildings were actually performing 30% worse than other buildings of the same age. His point was that using models to predict is a good start, but until we go back and test our work, we’re not doing building science we’re doing building theory (and getting pretty close to religion if we just take things on faith).

GreenBuildingAdvisor.com is announced!
This was a great set up for Peter Yost to step in and announce that Building Green Inc. (publishers of Environmental Building News) and Taunton Press (publishers of Fine Homebuilding Magazine) had partnered to build GreenBuildingAdvisor.com. One of their (our) initiatives will be to publish case studies of energy efficient and green homes; the main difference is that they’ll get the energy bills of these houses and talk about actual energy used, rather than predicted. I’m starting with four of Chandler Design-Build’s recent homes as part of the first wave. It’s an exciting project to see how the theory really works out over time as compared with other excellent builders across the country, if a little intimidating.

Energy Star for Homes’ recent spec boost is announced!
Not to be outdone, The National Director of Energy Star for Homes, Sam Rashkin, announced the latest “version three” release from Energy Star and their newest program, Advanced New Home Construction. The version three adds new ventilation, humidity control, water management, thermal bridging, HVAC installation testing, radiant barriers, and overall size limitations to Energy Star’s specs. Sam is a guy who likes to knock bee hives with a stick, and his announcement that energy star for homes was going to get a whole lot harder set the whole room to buzzing. His announcement of size limitations drew applause from the summer campers.
He went on to show what would be required to meet the Advanced New Home Construction standard; 50% better than code, triple glazed windows, super HVAC, and size limits… Even I was thinking this will work at $10/gallon, but maybe America’s not ready to go there yet. Saying “no more Hummer Houses” is one thing but it feels like he’s taking Energy Star away from the market. It’s a very interesting time to be part of the green building movement.

After class we reconvened at the clubhouse for feasting, drinking, and science discussion until late in the evening. I was welcomed to the club house by Betsy Pettit, the renowned architect/writer/speaker who is a partner at Building Science Corp (http://www.buildingscience.com/). Betsy and Joe renovated the 150 year old Massachusetts farm house into a very energy efficient building. You can read about the process at finehomebuilding.com (http://www.taunton.com/finehomebuilding/how-to/articles/remodeling-for-energy-efficiency.aspx?ac=fp).

Is Shismaref the new Greensburg?
There was a significant Alaskan contingent who told me they are really getting hit hard by global warming. The pack ice that protects barrier islands in the northern Bering Sea is coming too late in the season. The shores, which are a composite of sand and permafrost, are exposed to fall storms that they never experienced before and the islands are melting into the sea. This is problematic when there are villages on the island.

I spoke with people who were working on the social and logistical challenge of relocating villages to the mainland. Building durable, healthy, and energy efficient homes for people who have been subsistence living on remote islands is challenging enough, the social implications are very knotty. Many of the elders would prefer to sink into the sea with the rest of their way of life. The ethical and moral complications are mind boggling and the folks who are working on them, awe inspiring. To bring home the reality of what they are dealing with they brought along a gift from the community, raw bowfin and beluga whale and seal jerky with seal oil dip. I couldn’t bring myself to sample the seal oil but the raw bow fin was quite good. The rest may be an acquired taste…

--Michael Chandler is a builder and master plumber near Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His website is www.ChandlerDesignBuild.com

Classic and Durable Window and Door Trim Details

2008-08-19T07:00:00.003-04:00

For durable window details look no farther than the oldest houses on your block. Build small roofs over windows and doors; recess them into the wall if you can. The trim details can be as simple or fancy as you want. For design guidence, look at classic houses.

I was driving through Maine last week and saw great examples of water shedding details on houses that have been around for 120-250 years.

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It's like Dr. Brusque said at summer camp a few weeks ago: "they built leaky houses 100 years ago too, it's just that the pigs have been torn down by now." What's left, is what worked.

--Dan Morrison is managing editor of GreenBuildingAdvisor.com

The Inevitable Question: Does Green Building Cost More?

2008-08-17T07:00:00.002-04:00

By Ann V. Edminster

Green building is more expensive because it’s better building. Learning curve, certification, and better construction details may come at a premium, but the cost will flatten out. The costs of not building green however, will keep going up.

When I teach about green building, someone in the audience always asks the inevitable question: “How much does it cost?” After answering this query several gazillion times, I’ve realized that it boils down to three questions:
1. What does a green rating cost?
2. What’s the learning curve?
3. What will it cost to change the way I build?

You pay for the rating, you get quality assurance
The first question is the only one with a simple answer. A green rating will cost whatever price is charged by the rater. It’s usually a small fraction of the overall cost of the project, ranging from several hundred up to a few thousand dollars. This depends on type of home(s), location, timing, and the amount of technical support you need.

What’s often overlooked is that most of the cost is for field verification. This is fundamentally a quality assurance activity – something that is all too frequently lacking in the home building industry. This is a good investment!

Learning curves: change: is inevitable – adapt or go belly-up
The second cost, while the hardest to predict accurately, can be addressed in a way that most businesspeople immediately grasp: organizations must absorb change routinely; this is simply the cost of staying in business. These ordinary learning curve costs come from developing new supplier relationships, recruiting and training new personnel, investigating new products and technologies, grappling with new requirements or regulations, and other things. But these costs drop off quickly.

What’s notable about the learning curve costs is that it’s common to attribute them to the particular green building project. However, in reality if you undertake the learning curve it’s because you’ve decided that green building is a sound business direction and will benefit your future market position. These costs are no different from continuing education, updating marketing literature, or developing a new website.

The bottom line depends on your shade of green
The third cost can be quantified, but there’s no one-size-fits-all answer – it depends on where you start and where you want to be. Building practices exist on a spectrum, from bare-bones and barely-legal to net-zero-energy and beyond. Getting from point A to point B is relative.

Consider a Hyundai producer who decides to convert the production line over to Honda. The products are generally comparable in size, weight, and look. However, the Honda is (arguably) more durable, better-engineered, and more fuel-efficient. The Honda also costs a fair amount more. If, however, you’re a Hummer producer and convert to Honda production, your prices won’t increase (they may actually go down), and you’ll incorporate dramatic performance improvements – at least from an environmental impact perspective.

Similarly, builders of modest homes who upgrade to green may experience a cost increase. (However, they also may command a higher selling price or faster sales.) Builders of large homes may find opportunities to incorporate efficiencies without experiencing any significant cost increase. For example, a slight decrease in size combined with better up-front design may be a break-even proposition, or better windows and insulation may be offset by reductions in the size of the mechanical equipment. The premiums, when they exist, will disappear as energy prices head for the stratosphere and the value of green becomes more of a no-brainer.

Green building is an investment, not a cost
Answering this cost question requires that you identify exactly what green building practices or products you will use that differ from your status quo, and cost out those changes. This process means gathering detailed data from staff, consultants, and subcontractors and then value-engineering based on the outcomes. This type of analysis may be essential if you’re working for a production builder with stockholders to satisfy.

In a smaller, more informal company, just understanding what changes you will need to make may be enough. Either way, you’ll need to understand where you are and where you want to be on the Hyundai-Honda-Hummer spectrum. And if you do decide to re-tool your product line, keep in mind that it may not be realistic to expect your product to cost the same, or to sell at the same price point. It’s no longer the same product; it’s a better one.

--Ann V. Edminster is an architect and Principal of Design Avenues in Pacifica, Calif. She is also a GreenBuildingAdvisor at GreenBuildingAdvisor.com

Are All Air Filter Ratings Equal?

2008-08-15T18:00:00.002-04:00

By Dan Morrison

Don't let your lungs pay for bad air filters. Some 99% effective filters are only 10% effective when you change the sampling method. Particle size matters, and so does sampling method.

Our final speaker at Building Science Summer Camp (Day 2), Dr. Dieter Weyel, talked about filters, filtration, and ratings. Turns out, there are some pretty important differences. Particles, like everything else, have to obey the laws of physics. It’s just that our understanding of physics is skewed because we’re big enough that gravity affects us. Gravity affects some particles too -- when they get to be about 10 micrometers. But small particles, say 1 micrometer, can fly. Sort of. They behave like algae in the ocean; they just float around obeying the laws od oceanic currents. Algae are less dense than the salt water they float in, so they float. Small particles are less dense than the air they float in, so they float around moving in response to the air currents.

Big particles fall to the ground and you have to clean them up with a damp cloth or a duster. Small particles float around and you clean them with a filter. As it turns out, lungs are excellent filters. Problem is, clean lungs work better than dirty lungs. That’s where filters come in. There are three ways to measure the effectiveness of a filter:

Count the number of particles it catches
Count the area of the particles it catches
Count the weight of the particles it catches

Dr. Weytal used 10 small particles (1 micrometer) and one large particle (10 micrometers) as an example. If the filter only catches the large particle:

Method #1 yields a 10% filter.
Method #2 yields a 92% filter
Method #3 yields a 99% filter.

For ratings, particle size and sampling method matter
HEPA filters must be judged according to method 1, counting the number of particles it catches. Counting particles isn’t very effective for particles over about 5 micrometers Weyal says, because larger particles tend to overlap.

According to Weyal, ASHRAE measures “sort of by area.” They dump particles into a duct, spray them through a filter, and probe for particles before and after the filter. They shine light through the filter; if there are a lot of particles, not much light gets through. They compare one side of the filter to the other and get a percent efficiency.

As it turns out, particles vary in density too -- a styrofoam peanut and a cork are of similar size, and they both float on water, but they have very different densities. So density matters too.

--Dan Morrison is managing editor of GreenBuildingAdvisor.com

Energy Star Raises the Bar for Home Builders

2008-08-13T06:00:00.001-04:00

By Dan Morrison
A couple of interesting announcements at Building Science Summer Camp came from Sam Rashkin, the National Director of Energy Star for Homes: New standards that raise the bar and a new program for the best builders in the country: Advanced New Home Construction.

The new Energy Star specs include the following:

Thermal-breaks in walls -- When studs touch the inside surface and outside surfaces of a wall, they cut the R-value of a wall significantly.
Installing HVAC systems correctly -- EPA calls it “best practice installation;” Poor installations slash of the efficiency of an HVAC system by 35% (or more!)
Efficient water distribution, particularly for hot water. Hot water sitting in a tank waiting to be used, it cools. These standby losses at the tank are significant, but according to Energy Star, the standby losses in the pipes can be the same amount.
Better lighting, appliances, and plug-load management -- these loads account for over half of electricity use in homes : (major appliances: 24%, lighting: 18%, miscellaneous: 14%).
Size limits on Energy Star homes. The Home Energy Rating System (HERS), which scores Energy Star homes, inadvertently penalizes small homes by making it easier for very large homes to meet the energy efficiency requirements (not sure on the size limit yet, awaiting Sam’s answer).
Moisture control -- because tight houses have less drying potential, durability details must be well thought-out

These updates lay the groundwork for another EPA program: Advanced New Home Construction which will push the energy envelope 50% past 2006 International Energy Conservation Code. To get there, builders will:

‘Super insulate the walls -- 50% more R-value in an air tight wall with perfect insulation and no thermal bridging.
Install ‘super-efficient’ high-performance windows which can block nearly 85 percent of solar heat gain while delivering R-8 thermal resistance (typical Energy Star windows block 70% solar heat and deliver R-3).
Install air-tight air handlers with high-efficiency variable-speed fans. HVAC systems often leak 35% of the air they transport. Half of that leaks out of the air handler. And today’s fans gobble up 70% more energy than necessary. Sealed air handler units are currently available and super-efficient fans are about three years away.
Install super high-efficient HVAC equipment -- SEER 18 (rather than 13) for air conditioning, >9.0 HSPF (rather than <8)>
Install solar domestic water heating system -- most solar water heaters can handle 50% to 90% of the water heating needs of a household.

The Advanced New Home Construction program is not open to all builders; it has requirements for participation. As such, EPA is looking for “the nation’s most energy efficient builders seeking recognition as environmental leaders” to join the Advanced New Home Construction program.

To learn more about the program, go to www.energystar.gov/homes next September.

--Dan Morrison is managing editor of GreenBuildingAdvisor.com

Day 2 at Building Science Summer Camp

2008-08-11T15:51:00.002-04:00

By Dan Morrison

What did I do at summer camp? met with our advisors, learned about physics, ate food from from Alaska to Dallas, Miami to Maine. And there were cubans with cigars, too.

Building science summer camp is an invitation-only information and consumption festival held during the first week of August each year and hosted by Building Science Corp. Officially calld the Westford Symposium on Building Science, summer camp attracts the best and the brightest in the commercial and residential building fields. There is also very good food, beer, wine, and cigars.

Classes are held during the day at the Westford Regency Hotel and Conference Center, networking and feasting opportunities are at the clubhouse each night. The classes are taught by whoever Joe Lstiburek, one of the founders of Building Science Corp, wants to invite. Typically these teachers are amoung the best in their respective fields. This year was no different.

Opening remarks by Pete Consigli:
“They ate all of the whale blubber” (John Woodward brought whale blubber and seal oil for us lower 48-ers to try. I guess it was pretty good.)

Today's first speaker: Pierre Brusque
According to the official Summer Camp brochure:

Pierre Busque is an engineer with Levelton in Vancouver, BC. He has over
twenty years of experience in one of the most miserable places in the world to
build but one of the most attractive to live in - the building science version
of beauty and the beast. He will regale us with stories of metal roofing
in Whistler, curtain walls and the Qube, historic buildings, recladding of
schools in Sayward and a few lawsuits. He has so many images of building
porn that he is on a most watch list. The second most important thing to
know about Mr. Busque is that he is a talented guitarist - the band is in for a
treat.

Vancouver has had its share of water problems. The rotting condo catastrophe is the most famous, but there have been water problems in the area for a long time. One reason, according to Mr. Brusque, is that there is tremendous variation in rainfall, both amount and distribution, among towns in the area. From desert to rain forest, and from slow and steady rain to sideways gully-washers. But weather variation isn’t a problem if designers (architects and engineers) don’t try to impose their home town’s weather patterns on a different city.

When designers from occasional gully-washer cities underestimate the power of constant light rain, they can do as much damage as a designer from the desert underestimating a gulley washer. Brusque: “Small leaks over a long period of time will really cause your building to go to crap.” Big leaks followed by long dry spells are easier to overcome than little leaks that can never dry out.

There are four basic causes of building failure:

Ignorance
Carelessness
Negligence
Greed

Ignorance, according to Brusque, is the only one we can do anything about. Designers need to look at local solutions, talk to local experts, and don’t forget to talk to old trade contractors. Pierre showed us a sill fan flashing design that a roofer showed him -- without cutting the metal (Stay tuned, I’ll make a short video using paper as a model). “They don’t build them like they used to -- well, buildings leaked 100 years ago too, but the real pigs were torn down.” The good ones have remained. The guys that built the good ones know how to shed water.

He also offered four rules about windows:

Treat all windows like they are leakers, because they really are.
Storefront windows should only be used under cover (this includes residential)
Because all windows leak, a sub-sill membrane with upturned edge is necessary
Never fasten a window through the sill. Even if the manufacturer demands it. If you must break this rule, elevate the membrane at the fastener with a shim to direct water away when it leaks through the hole (this tip from Ray Moore in the audience).

A liquid membrane that Pierre likes is called Siplast, a PMMA membrane (polymethyl methacrylate).

More speakers to come!

Green Remodeling is a Process of Discipline and Discovery

2008-08-09T13:58:00.005-04:00

By Tommy Strong

Some parts are up to consumers, some are up to us. We guide the discovery process and use a disciplined construction process to boost value whatever shade of green our clients aim for.

Despite the economic upheavals in the housing market, about 8 million new homes were built last year. And we’re building them greener than ever. That’s a good thing, but improving the existing housing stock will have a much greater affect on greening America than even gargantuan efforts taken on the new construction side.

When it comes to building and remodeling, green, smart, and quality, are all the same thing.
Smart remodeling (and building) is an ongoing evolution and the notions of green are simply the next step in construction evolution. As a production manager for a remodeling company, my primary task is doing my job efficiently, in smarter ways, with value added. I don’t care how you define green, as long as you let me build smart.

Green remodeling involves a balance of products and processes; there are two areas of opportunity to influence our client’s choices during the sales process, but we are limited by their level of understanding, desire, and commitment.

During the sales process we can influence product choices
We’ve been including a free duct blaster test as a part of high end remodels and this year we started offering energy audits. We look for opportunities to tie in envelope upgrades within the scope of the current and future remodel plans. For big energy wasters, we suggest fixing them regardless of the scope of work and clients never balk (would you balk at a mechanic who ignored severely worn tires because you hired him to change the oil?).

When gauging a client’s level of green, we start by showing them low-maintenance no-brainers like durable PEX plumbing systems and healthier paints. Making sure they see the obvious benefits is easy, and once they understand, then they become curious. We ask questions, exploring their living habits, and talking about water and energy conservation, we can find out if their wishes include better hot water delivery—if so, we steer them towards tankless water heaters—or super-efficient ceiling fans, in which case we point towards one rated as Energy Star. [Some follow up about desire]. Bath fans are another easy upgrade: they are bigger, badder, quieter, and more expensive than they used to be — and worth every penny. Sucking moist or stale air out is as important as circulating air for interior air quality.

To take it up a notch we’ll talk HVAC upgrades or spray-in insulation, both of which offer big benefits, but an additional level of up-front financial commitment (we are talking thousands of dollars here). For our clients committed to maximum efficiency we go beyond conservation and look towards contribution -- think photovoltaic panels, solar water heaters, rain water collection, etc.

The main point is that by following their lead on budget items we can dial in on where to lead the conversation next. We look for opportunities to sell green building, and we want to be ready to take it as far as they want.

To go deep green, we need trade partners who are up to the task: suppliers who want to help install their products, engineers and designers who will specify them and fellow contractors who will take the ball and run with it. These specialists must know the products, or be willing to learn about them. We lean on them pretty heavily because we can’t be their technical expert, and we can’t spend all our time talking people in to a different (smarter) way of doing things.

During production (and demo) we are in control of the details
Levels of commitment to the products vary wildly among clients, but our commitment to the process varies little. The tactics may change but strategies don’t. We keep consistent quality with durability and ‘best practices’ checklists learned from 17 years of remodeling. These standards and checklists help us stay focused on whatever we can do to tighten and refine the building envelope. Things like cladding, flashing, and drainage which are conditions begging for improvement. Advanced framing techniques that increase opportunity to add insulation and cut thermal transfer. Air flow management that controls temperature and humidity, and therefore, comfort.

Our systems and practices attempt to squeeze value from every square foot, no matter how many square feet there are. We do this by examining every inch of floor, wall and ceiling space for maximum benefit. Some value choices aren’t necessarily green per se, but they’re good design. For example: it often makes sense to thicken a bathroom or kitchen wall -- plumbers and electricians like the extra room to work with utilities and fixtures; designers and architects like the extra room to play with things like built-ins and pocket doors. It costs a little more but the square foot of floor space is used well.

Our demolition approach is less like tear-out and more like surgery, with instruments and masks. The attitude is remove, re-cycle, and ReStore. Old aluminum window frames and copper supply lines don’t go to the dumpster; they go to the salvage yard. And many items we take out of a particular home can find another home somewhere else. Hardware, doors and windows, even commodes are in enough demand that the Habitat for Humanities of the world will come pick them up. And it means fewer trips to the dump for us.
Surgical demolition should be mapped out with a solid 3-point plan:

Isolate—reduce the impact of major renovations on the rest of the home by controlling security, traffic, and of course, dirt.
Protect —go the extra mile, even if means 1/8 in. at a time: I’ve pulled 300’ of shoe molding so we could better protect a hardwood floor all the way to the baseboard.
Remove — pay attention to negative air pressure and reduce dust for the people living there and the people working there.

The next big thing in the marketplace—no matter which marketplace—is always right around the corner. Despite the fog of economic uncertainty we know some things: gas, oil, and kilowatts won’t get cheaper. Quality construction is a concept that continues to evolve and we continue to roll with it. During a green remodeling project we elevate the quality and number of products whenever we can through education and options; through our processes, we maximize value no matter what selections are made. As we do, we make the best buildings we can, those that stand the test of time--the most valuable commodity we have.

--Tommy Strong (CGR, CAPS, CLC) is Vice President of Construction Services and co-founder of Brothers Strong, a design/build firm in Houston

Day 1 at Building Science Summer Camp

2008-08-06T10:58:00.005-04:00

By Dan Morrison
What did I do at summer camp? Met with our advisory team, learned about physics, ate food from from Alaska to Dallas, Miami to Maine. And there were cubans with cigars, too.

Building science summer camp is an invitation-only information and consumption festival held during the first week of August each year and hosted by Building Science Corp. Officially calld the Westford Symposium on Building Science, summer camp attracts the best and the brightest in the commercial and residential building fields. There is also very good food, beer, wine, and cigars.

Classes are held during the day at the Westford Regency Hotel and Conference Center, networking and feasting opportunities are at the clubhouse each night. The classes are taught by whoever Joe Lstiburek, one of the founders of Building Science Corp, wants to invite. Typically these teachers are amoung the best in their respective fields. This year was no different.

Each day opens with a rundown by the chef, Pete Consigli, on the menu.
Summer camp participants do their best to out-do eachother each year with their native cuisenes: The Alaskans bring halibut and salmon, the Texans bring a steer and slow roast the brisket, North Carolina barbeque, Maine clams and mussels... Pete's opening comments this year: "The food at summer cam can be summed up three ways: Best quality, huge variety, and a hell of a lot of it."

Even smart people get confused.
Dr. Lstiburek likes to say that he's not a consultant, he's an insultant. Dr Anton Tenwold added another layer to the title game: Confusant.
After recently retiring from the USDA Forest Products Lab, physicist Anton TenWolde has discovered that what he thought he knew, is really stuff he doesn’t know. Dr Tenwolde's eyes lit up when someone raised a hand during his presentation to say "I'm confused."

But there's a lot to learn from the stuff Dr. TenWolde doesn't know. Here’s what I learned:

A lot of water in houses comes from people, but it isn’t all from respiration (breathing). A lot can come from transpiration (sweating) too -- up to 3 lbs of water per day per person. Coupled with respiration, a family of five dumps up to 33 gallons of water into a house every day.
Foundations add a lot of water to a house too: .4 kg per square meter per day (about a gallon per 44 square feet) evaporate from bare soil in a crawl space.
It takes six weeks for a sliver of wood to come to moisture equilibrium with its surroundings. And then Lew Harriman asked if we could all undlerline that in our notes: SIX WEEKS for a teeny piece of wood to come to equilibrium with its environment through sorption. So the oak flooring probably ought to be in the room for more than a couple of days before installation.

Houses can be a huge part of the solution to our energy problem
Ren Anderson works at the National Renewable Energy Lab and is interested in Net Zero Energy Houses. It's pretty well known that we can use a lot less power in houses, today he talked a lot about the challenge of syncing up local power generation with grid demands. Many houses can generate a lot of power with PV, but can they provide electricity to the grid when the grid needs it most -- during the hot part of the day when everyone flips on the AC?

I learned:

Today’s houses are much bigger than houses from the fifties and they use much more energy.
While today’s big houses use less energy per square foot, it’s total energy use that’s important because we don’t make power by the square foot, we make power by the kilowatt.
Small houses are more efficient at space heating than large houses -- they use a smaller percentage of total energy for space heating.
Large houses get better RESNET scores than small houses because RESNET is based on performance per square foot. For this reason, it (and Energy Star) are biased towards larger houses (but the Energy Star bias may be changing).
It is very cost effective to slash home energy use by 50%. The second 50%, to get to zero energy, is less cost effective at current energy prices. If energy prices go up (which they may) higher efficiencies will be very cost effective too.
PV panels on houses can provide peak power needs to the grid if they’re turned to face west rather than south because their generation curve will be shifted an hour or two later in the day -- just when houses need the most electricity.
80% of the houses in America are built by 20% of the builders. Production builders risk going the way of GM if they don’t lead the world in energy efficiency.

At the clubhouse, I learned that more and more regional green building programs, such as Earth Craft House from Atlanta and Earth Advantage from Oregon, are expanding. Earth Craft is in six southeastern states and Earth Advantage is moving towards New England. This may mean that the big National programs need to get their acts together and start making sense.

--Dan Morrison is managing editor of GreenBuildingAdvisor.com

Annette Stelmack's Green Story

2008-08-04T16:38:00.004-04:00

Immigrant parents, hard work, and frugality formed my character, a child put sustainablity into context.

I first learned about sustainability from my parents. Both of them emigrated from Germany after World War 2, my father when he was just 17. He arrived at Ellis Island with little more than a small suitcase and a sponsor (his aunt) in Colorado. I grew up with the mentality that you didn’t throw anything away. We used things until they fell apart.

That was not all my parents passed on to me. My father was a bricklayer and later moved into building homes, my mother was a seamstress. During the year I would work for my mother, who did work for interior designers, which is how I was introduced to the trade. During the summer I would get to spend some time with my father at his drafting table looking over blueprints or out at the jobsite mixing mortar, helping with the rough carpentry, hanging sheetrock, and painting. Between my father in the construction industry and my mother’s connection to design it was as if I were destined to be involved in making the home a more beautiful and nurturing place as an interior designer.

After years of focusing on my interior design career my son was born. This changed the way I looked at everything! In particular, it made me realize just how much waste there was in the world and in particular the building industry. I started recycling and doing all that I could at home, but it just wasn’t enough. I needed to do more to make the world a better and cleaner place, not only for my son but all children.

Shortly after this, in 1998, I attended EnvironDesign2. It was here that I was first experienced firsthand inspiring speakers such as Paul Hawken, Ray Anderson, Sim Van der Ryn, William McDonough, Michael Braungart and Bill Browning. This was a pivotal moment in my life -- I decided that this is what I had to do. I was so moved that I came home from the conference on a Sunday afternoon, sat at my computer and typed all of my notes right then and there. That weekend launched the formal greening of my career and it wasn’t long before Associates III, the firm that I was co-managing, had fully embraced green design too, going so far as to form teams to implement green in all we did companywide. I was so passionate about green that I ended up being on most of the internal task forces. After completing our book “Sustainable Residential Interiors” with my colleagues at Associates III, I knew it was time to focus exclusively on sustainability. I have recently started a sustainability consultant company - working with designers, architects, manufacturers, homeowners - supporting their green journey. I also volunteer for the USGBC CO Chapter chairing the Green School Advocacy committee and am the incoming chair for ASID’s National Sustainable Design Council. My next venture will be grassroots outreach programs for kids on green issues and environmental stewardship.

What does green building mean to me?
When I look at green building and design, at its core level it is about the synergy of the project team. The key to success, no matter the type of project or effort is having a common alignment of vision, mission and goals with sustainability as the primary focus.

--Annette Stellmack is the incoming chair of the sustainablility committee at the American Society of Interior Designers

Free Means You Don't Have to Pay

2008-07-30T16:28:00.003-04:00

By Dan Morrison

My home state of Connecticut has figured out that the projected budget surplus, which became a projected budget deficit, will actually be a surplus again. That’s pretty good news. Maybe it went from projected deficit back to surplus because they cut a few million here and there after the initial surplus projection was scaled back. And I suppose, that’s the fiscally responsible thing to do: when it looks like my paycheck will be a little short for the month, I don’t generally whip out a credit card, I look for places to cut back. Working from home is my favorite option, but sometimes the wine and beer budget just has to take a hit.

A rainy day fund looking for an umbrella
Now that Connecticut has a little extra cash, they’re (we’re?) looking for ways to spend it. Naturally, the folks who got trimmed want some of their money back. This seems fairly reasonable. One thing that the legislature and Governor are talking about is home heating aid for low income families. They want to give folks money to buy heating oil (or gas, or electricity) this winter because the price of energy is so high and Connecticut gets cold in the winter. On the surface, this sounds like another reasonable idea -- poor folks ought to be able to keep from freezing. But what it really amounts to is a big subsidy for big oil companies -- “Raise your prices all you want, the government will foot the bill so that people continue to pump oil into the side of their houses.”

A radical idea: use less oil and gas
CT spent over $24 million last year on energy assistance (more than $13 million came from the Federal Government) Will it happen again next year? Yes. Is it likely to happen indefinitely? It’s a good bet. $24 mil is quite an annual gift to the oil and gas companies (The Feds donated $450 million last year). We’re spending millions of dollars every year on energy Band-Aids. By spending money once on home energy audits, air sealing, duct sealing, and insulating, we could cut the energy use in CT homes by a bunch -- 40% isn’t unreasonable at all. It would reduce our dependence on foreign oil, put money in people’s pockets (or rather stop pulling it out), lower air pollution, decrease oil spills (did you hear about the 400,000 gallon oil spill near New Orleans last week?) and create green jobs to boot. Everyone’s a winner. Well, almost everyone.

If we’re going to dig our way out of the energy mess we’re in, we need to look long term and weigh options honestly. Home energy assistance programs may help families in the short term, but they keep families, states, and our country (Land of the Free) shackled to big energy bills in the long term.

Free means you don’t have to pay.

--Dan Morrison is managing editor of GreenBuildingAdvisor.com

Do Window Shades Save Energy?

2008-07-28T11:18:00.003-04:00

By Peter Yost

While theoretically impossible to actually "save" energy, interior window shades can indeed keep summer heat out and winter heat in. The real question then becomes How well do they perform, and under what circumstances?

In the summer, shades keep out heat, but also light
Interior shades can reflect back out light energy that would otherwise be converted to heat energy. According to the authors of the best resource on the topic, Residential Windows (Carmody, Selkowitz, Arasteh, and Heschong), “drapes can reduce the solar heat gain coefficient of clear glass from 20 to 70 per cent.” That's a pretty big range -- how well they exclude heat depends on the shade's color (silver would be the best, black would be worst), and their proper use. They can’t block anything if they are not closed, and when they are closed, you of course can’t see anything out the window, and you need to turn on a light inside (so, Laws of Thermodynamics notwithstanding, are they really saving energy?).

Exterior shading, on the other hand, performs better all around: it can deflect 100% of the direct solar gain, does not depend on occupant operation, and does not eliminate views. So, interior shades do work to reduce direct solar heat gain, they just do it rather poorly in the grand scheme of things.

In the winter, shades let reduce radiant heat "loss"
You will see claims of up to R-8 by some manufacturers of interior shades in terms of reducing heat loss. Just as with insulation in a wall cavity, the insulating value of a window shade depends on a continuous air barrier being right next to it. How many of these interior thermal shades have an airtight seal around their perimeter? None that I have seen; instead, convective currents short circuit their thermal performance. It is hard to say just exactly what their performance is, because there is no standardized third-party testing of window shades, as there is for windows. But be happy with a couple or so “R”s, not R-8. And once again, you have to operate the shades to get their best performance. Leave them down or closed on a day that turns sunny, and you have a net loss of energy. Open or up at night—oops.

Interior shades can make rooms more comfortable; they have been shown to boost thermal comfort (raise the mean radiant temperature) by as much as 5°F. But just as with overall energy efficiency, improvements in thermal comfort with interior shades depend on how well the windows work to begin with. Improvements are highest and most noticeable with older, poorly performing windows. That bears repeating: Improvements are highest and most noticeable with older, poorly performing windows. Or put another way, good windows work better than shades.

So, interior shades can keep your house cooler in the summer (during the day) and warmer in the winter (at night). But for real energy savings and overall performance, go with high performance windows and exterior shading, and relegate interior shading to handling privacy. After all, you put these “holes” in your walls for the views and the free light!

--Peter Yost is Director of Residential Services at BuildingGreen

Why Do You Build Green?

2008-07-24T16:43:00.005-04:00

Last May I asked builders, designers, and other folks at NAHB's National Green Building Conference why they build green. Here's what they said:

More to come after West Coast Green and GreenBuild...

--Dan Morrison is managing editor of GreenBuildingAdvisor.com

Are Heat Pumps Green?

2008-07-24T14:43:00.006-04:00

By Dan Morrison

An article in the Home and Garden section of the New York Times "Time to Worry About Heat Bills" By JAY ROMANO (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/garden/24fix.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y) talks about a winter heating option that will save you money: electric heat pumps. With the price of gas and oil skyrocketing, the article reasons, an electric heat pump will be a money saver this winter and eventually end up "paying for itself."

But is it green?
Not if you're getting your electricity from the grid.

Coal plants have an efficiency of about 31%; put another way, almost 70% of the energy contained in a lump of coal is lost as heat when it's burned at a coal plant.
And along with that heat, tons of carbon dioxide are dumped into the atmosphere when the lump of coal is burned.
And strip mining for lumps of coal leaves a mighty big footprint on the land.

I sure wish I could convince Henry Gifford to let me publish his manuscript on why heat pumps are not such a great idea.

--Dan Morrison is managing editor of GreenBuildingAdvisor.com

What’s wrong with this picture?

2008-07-17T11:40:00.005-04:00

a) The rim joist is too heavily notched.
b) Using framing cavities as duct runs frowned upon by codes and professional associations.
c) This passed the framing inspection.
d) All of the above.

The answer is d, all of the above.

While it appears that this rim joist isn’t structural (there are studs below it), The Engineered Wood Association says that when cutting multiple holes in a rim joist, the spacing between the holes should be at least twice the length of the longest side of the longest rectangular hole. And according to Joe Lstiburek, the photographer, this also passed the framing inspection.

This leaves option b, “Using framing cavities as duct runs is a bad idea”. This photo shows both stud and joist cavities being used as return air ducts. In their duct design guide Manual D, the Air Conditioning Contractors of America (ACCA) recommend not using panned joists for return ducts, and the 2006 IRC and IECC codes prohibit joist cavities for supply ducts. It’s too bad that neither does both.

Framing cavities make bad duct runs because the leak and they’re connected to every part of the house via framing gaps and holes for wire and pipe. These leaks suck in air from unintended sources (outdoors, attics, garages, and crawlspaces). Along with this unintended air comes humidity, mold, dust, and whatever else is in these spaces (radon, carbon monoxide, gasoline, paint thinner, pesticides,). Not only does this poison the indoor air supply, but it increases the heating and cooling loads while decreasing the efficiency of the mechanical equipment. A bad idea all the way around.

— Bruce Harley is technical director of Conservation Services Group and author of Insulate and Weatherize (Taunton 2002). Photo by Joseph Lstiburek

Got a dumb building picture? Send it to dan [at] buildinggreen.com

Green Products Don’t Make It Green

2008-07-08T12:28:00.003-04:00

By Matt Golden
A green house can be built with un-green products and an un-green house can be built with all green products. Its about process first, then products.

In our common vernacular, “green” has come to mean many things, and at the same time nothing at all. It has become the de-facto term for environmentally sound – dealing with everything from healthy living to energy consumption and global warming. Clever marketing has people choosing hair products and hybrid cars based on their green status.

Greenwashing 101
By watering down the term to mean expensive products, we promote the idea that we can buy our way to greenness without delivering real solutions to the environmental issues we face. This is greenwashing folks, and it has a very real potential to derail the positive effect of the green sector. We run the risk of alienating consumers as they become jaded by marketing claims that don’t represent reality.

When we really analyze the choices and products being offered by the green industry, it seems that we are starting at the wrong end of the spectrum. Almost everything that is fed to consumers turns out to be the most expensive and often the least effective measures.
Installing solar electric panels on a house will cut the coal we burn and lower the electric bill, but it’s not the best place to spend your money first. We’ve been building bigger, more power hungry homes for years; do we really think the answer lies in yet another big purchase?

What matters are results, not products
If we really want to reduce pollution, stop global warming, and minimize our dependence on fossil fuels, we need to be honest and clear about how we’re dealing with consumers’ wants and needs, and frame “green” by results.

Housing is a great place to start. There are more than 125 million existing homes in the United States. According to the US Energy Information Administration, these buildings represent 21% of the total US carbon footprint. Clearly, we can have an immediate environmental impact by improving the efficiency of these existing homes. Solar panels, hybrid cars, tankless water heaters, bamboo floors, and no-voc paints are great products, but when you approach a building as a system, you realize that individual products, no matter how high tech, can not replace proper fundamentals like tight duct work, good insulation, and weather stripping. By making smart improvements and working with the basics (which are often less expensive) we can make houses work properly so that they become healthy, comfortable and efficient – at a fraction of the cost.

We need to focus on solutions to people’s problems, whether it is energy costs or allergies. Once we have identified the core of each problem, we can address the real world issues and make a real difference when it comes to reducing the carbon footprint.

Tips to avoid greenwashing
As we in the green building world market our services and solutions, there are some clear guidelines we can follow to ensure we are not engaging in greenwashing.
Get the big picture - Understand all of the environmental impacts of your product across its entire lifecycle and share that information with your customers.
Be honest - Don’t overemphasize benefits to hide shortcomings.
Walk the talk - Keep improving your environmental footprint, and encourage your customers to join you on that journey.
Prove your point - Draw on respected standards and certification programs for legitimacy of environmental claims.

We are not lacking the technology to get the job done. The solution lies in helping consumers make smart choices, and thinking in terms of entire systems not simply the latest products.

Related article: The Six Sins of Greenwashing

--Matt Golden owns Sustainable Spaces in San Francisco, Calif

Energy Value Housing Award -- Chino Valley, Arizona

2008-06-30T10:35:00.007-04:00

An academic pursuit providing real world results

This luxury house won an NAHB Energy Value Housing Award (Gold) while also complying with several sets of standards including LEED, Environments for Living and ALA HealthHouse. It was designed to be healthy, durable and affordable - as should be the goal of any sustainable building. Every detail was carefully considered, making the home efficient to build as well as live in. Pre-manufactured components sped construction; thoughtful planning minimized site disturbance and preserved existing vegetation; meticulously installed insulation, a tight building envelope and a rainwater collection system minimize energy and resource demands. Methodical preparation and execution are likely responsible for this project’s high marks, but something else also makes it unique - it was built by university students.

At Yavapai College, in Prescott, Arizona, the Residential Building Technology Program immerses students in both the theoretical and practical sides of high performance homebuilding. Director Tony Grahame leads each class through every stage of design and construction to the completion of a marketable home. The students learn not only about the necessary integration of a building’s parts, but also about the cooperation that is necessary to make that building happen.
Although its source of labor may be atypical, this project is a great example of how smart design can facilitate increased sustainability within a typical budget. Some of the methods and materials used might have been new to the RBT students, but the guidance they received gave them an edge over experienced contractors without green building training. This point was clearly made by an NAHB Energy Value House judge’s comment - “if only every house built in the U.S. could have the oversight of this project - all of our houses would be energy efficient and durable.”

Team:
Builder: Yavapai College Residential Building Technology Program, Tony Grahhame Director
Architect/Designer: Yapavi College Architectural Design Students and Staff

Specs:
Location: Chino Valley, Arizona
Completed: 2005
Cost ($/sf): $90/sq.ft (not including cost of student labor)
Size: 3202 sq.ft.

Construction:
Foundation type and R-value: Combination - slab on grade xps foam at edge (R-5), crawlspace ICF (R-16), basement integral XPS and blown in cellulose ((R-26.5)
Wall construction and R-value: 2x6 @ 24” o.c., 2” XPS and 5 1/2” unfaced fiberglass batt (R-29)
Windows: Double pane, low-e, argon filled. SHGC = .30 - .59; U- factor = 0.30 -0.35
Roof construction and R-value: Engineered trusses, blown-in cellulose (R-38)
Garage: Thermally and pressure isolated from living space

Energy specs:
Conditioning equipment : 14 SEER AC system, 56,672/80,960 BTU dual stage direct venting gas furnace
Water heating equipment: Solar domestic hot water
HERS Rating: 90.5 (5 star +)

Water efficiency measures used in this project
· Low flow toilets, faucets and shower heads
· Water conserving dishwasher
· 1250 gallon rainwater collection system
· Gray water distribution system
· All hot water taps within 30ft. of hot water storage tank

Energy efficiency measures used in this project
· Whole-house Energy Star interior and exterior lighting package with CFL bulbs.
· Extremely tight building envelope (blower door test 0.96 @50 Pascals)
· Roof overhangs optimized for summer window shading and winter solar gain.
· Energy Star appliances including dishwasher, ceiling fans and ventilation fans
· Sealed ductwork, leakage measured at 0cfm @ 25 Pascals
· All ductwork is located within the conditioned space

Green materials and/or resource efficiency used in this project
· Decking, ICFs, wall and ceiling insulation all include recycled content
· Recycled cardboard and metal construction materials

Indoor air quality measures used in this project
· Balanced whole house air exchange system with MERV-10 and HEPA filtration
· All construction materials contain low or no VOC
· Low formaldehyde content in particleboard cabinets

Alternate Energy Utilization
Photovoltaic power: 2 KW
Solar water heating: 40.9 sq.ft. panel, 80gallon storage tank

--Rob Wotzak is Assistant editor at GreenBuildingAdvisor.com. Photos by Tony Grahame

Ann Edminster's Green Story

2008-06-23T22:12:00.003-04:00

By Ann Edminster

Architect by accident, advocate by design.

When I was about 11 years old, I volunteered at my town’s first, newly opened, recycling center. A couple of years later, I helped clean scores of seabirds that had been fouled with oil from the 1969 spill off the Santa Barbara coast. That summer, I had my first (glorious!) back country experience, in the High Sierra near Lake Tahoe. Many more backpacking trips followed that one, summer after summer. Those early experiences, an innate abhorrence for waste, and parental influence (I was the child of two activist English teachers – my father a far-left radical and my mother a deeply committed social welfare advocate) forged in me a reverence for nature and a powerful drive to protect the natural world that has never been far from the surface.

In college I studied architecture. However, by sometime early in my third year, or maybe sooner, I was pretty sure I didn’t want to be an architect. I had no clue what else to do, though, so – knowing that a B.S. in architecture from Cal Poly would be a good meal ticket – I stuck with the program. My salvation was senior year abroad, in Florence, Italy. There I acquired a deep appreciation for development patterns that worked, in marked contrast to most American cities, and started to become aware of the huge negative impact of the automobile on human settlement.

After my Italian year and graduation in 1978, I found I had little interest in practicing architecture (the only architecture firm at which I interviewed designed gas stations!). And so I stumbled into technical editing and then writing, where I stayed for a number of years. I moonlighted, too, doing occasional remodeling projects, getting jobs by word of mouth. I never interned, never earned an architecture license. Over the years, though, I did learn quite a bit about how houses go together. I also became troubled by the amount of waste in my industry.

In the late 80s I began to hear about healthy building and ecological building, and eventually resolved that was where I belonged. Knowing that without external structure I wouldn’t acquire enough knowledge, quickly enough to suit me, I went back to school, enrolling in the Master of Architecture program at UC Berkeley in 1993. Since then, I’ve been completely immersed in green building (which, back then, really didn’t have a name).

My first job in the field was researching and writing for the Wood Reduction Clearinghouse, a project spun out of the Rainforest Action Network. From there I went to the Natural Resources Defense Council, where I wrote a book, Efficient Wood Use in Residential Construction: A Practical Guide to Saving Wood, Money, and Forests. Shortly thereafter I was tapped to be part of the USGBC’s effort to develop a national standard for residential construction – LEED for Homes. After two years chairing the LEED for Homes Materials & Resources Technical Advisory Subcommittee (MR-TASC) I became the co-chair of the LEED for Homes Committee, a seat I held for four years, until the program went into pilot. At that time I stepped down (while continuing to serve on the committee and chair the MR-TASC) in order to devote more time to implementation efforts. In the two-plus years since the launch of the pilot, I have taught hundreds of people about the LEED for Homes program and consulted to the LEED for Homes Provider in CA and to scores of developers, homeowners, production and custom builders, local governments, private investors, product manufacturers, and others who have wanted to better understand how to tackle the complex field of green building. It has been – and continues to be – a wild, exciting, and vastly rewarding ride, above all because of the amazing caliber of individuals with whom I work, and their remarkable unity of purpose.

Life Cycle Assessment is a Tool, Not a Silver Bullet

2008-06-23T16:36:00.010-04:00

Are steel studs greener than wood? Is plastic pipe greener than copper? And is vinyl siding green?

By Peter Yost

There are few green building topics that produce more frustration and uncertainty than claims about the environmental footprint of particular building materials. Life Cycle Assessments, such as the ones listed below, seem like the perfect tool for summing it all up, but Life Cycle Assessments fall short for many reasons.

Getting reliable data is difficult at best
A life cycle assessment starts with a life cycle inventory. This means identifying and quantifying the inputs and outputs of a product from “cradle to grave” (mining, manufacturing, moving, installing, service life, and disposing of). This is no small task. And because much of the information comes from product manufacturers, the data can be incomplete -- manufacturers may not have all of the information or they may be unwilling to share it. When all products in a Life Cycle Assessment database are not scrutinized equally, conclusions drawn from the information may be misleading.

You can’t predict how many people will actually get cancer, only that a product could cause it
After the life cycle inventory is put together, it must be translated it into actual environmental impacts: global warming, human toxicity, ozone depletion, rainforest degradation, etc. This is called life cycle impact assessment (LCIA), and it gets pretty hypothetical. Many of these environmental effects require assumptions, such as how many lives will be lost from a particular cancer-causing output. These assumptions are impossible for normal people to evaluate, so we have to rely on someone else’s professional judgment.

They make apples to oranges environmental comparisons
The environmental impacts associated with a product are wide-ranging and measured in many different ways. For example, biodiversity may be gauged by the number of species going extinct and global warming by world-wide temperature rise. But how do we compare the two in relative importance? Again, it’s hard for normal people to evaluate the relative importance, so we must rely on trustworthy experts to weight each impact category in essentially an “apples to oranges” process. Is ozone depletion twice as important as the acidification of lakes? Pick your poison.

Setting boundary conditions is subjective and fuzzy
In any analysis, deciding what is on the table and what is out of bounds or beyond the scope is an essential first step. What does this mean in environmental life cycle assessment of building products? Three vexing examples provide valuable insight:

Open cell spray foam appears very green -- it insulates and air seals, it has no VOC off-gassing, uses water as the blowing agent, and it has proven to quite durable. But when considered in the greater context of a building, its excellent adhesion makes recycling or reusing the wood to which it is stuck difficult or even impossible. Should the insulation/air sealing properties be evaluated alone or should the effect on other building materials be considered?
Burning PVC is very bad -- when burned in uncontrolled conditions, PVC creates a serious environmental hazard. But if PVC waste from construction is rarely involved in uncontrolled burning, should this issue be included in the environmental profile of PVC plumbing pipe? Should burning be included in other PVC products, but not those used in construction?
Environmental regulations in other countries are often more lax that ours: A global manufacturer of paints has a good record of environmental compliance in the US, but a lousy record in countries with lax environmental standards. Do we consider the environmental degradation in other countries if we know the paint we are using is produced in the US?

Life Cycle Assessment is not a waste of time
Does this mean that Life Cycle Assessments and trying to compare the environmental profiles of competing products is a complete waste of time? Does it really matter which products we use from an environmental standpoint? The answer is that the environmental footprint of a product matters, but It should be put in the proper context:

Product selection should be among the last of the green building priorities. The energy efficiency, water efficiency, durability, and safety to human health of the building should be the top priorities.
Use building products manufactured and/or assembled locally and optimize the use of all construction materials (use fewer studs, design in 2 ft. modules, etc.).
For the more complex LCA issues, go with product recommendations from a 3rd party, transparent, expert-based system such as TK.

Dive deeper:
Life Cycle Assessment for Buildings: Seeking the Holy Grail
Environmental Building News, March 2002.
Life Cycle 101
US EPA Life Cycle Assessment Research

Life Cycle Assessment tools:

A Sampling of LCA Tools (sidebar to the above EBN article)
BEES -- Building for Environmental and Economic Sustainability tool published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology
The Athena Institute Environmental Impact Estimator
Pharos Material Evaluation tool

--Peter Yost is Residential Program Manager at GreenBuildingAdvisor.com

Manual D is not (necessarily) Green

2008-06-20T09:47:00.007-04:00

Manual D is about comfort, not energy efficiency. Its requirement in LEED-H makes green certification too expensive to justify the benefit.

By Michael Chandler

I've been building solar and green for thirty years and have built homes that Energy Star certify at 76% more efficient than code and score gold on our North Carolina Green Building Program as well as NAHB’s green building program but I have never built a house that would qualify for even basic LEED-H certification and it doesn't seem likely that I will unless I get a client who specifically requests the LEED-H program over the alternatives. The reason for this is that my homes use oversized ductwork with air flow controlled by butterfly dampers and the LEED-H program requires that airflow be controlled through implementation of ACCA Manual D duct design.

What's the difference between Manual D and Manual J?
There is some confusion in the market about the difference between Manual D, which sizes ducts to best match the equipment and needs of the rooms served, and Manual J, which sizes the equipment to match the actual projected load of the home (and is a basic minimum requirement of Energy Star and most Green Building Standards including the NAHB/ICC National Green Building Standard.) The Manual D duct design standard forces HVAC installers to use 4" insulated flex for smaller rooms and 6" for medium sized rooms and 8" for larger rooms. In my market it’s calculation and implementation adds significant cost to the HVAC system especially on smaller, one-of-a-kind homes that LEED-h is hoping to encourage (the “top 25% of the most environmentally conscious builders” and all that). It is a good system and certainly worth rewarding but doesn’t really fit with the “mandatory minimum for green” in that it is more oriented towards optimizing comfort than saving energy, enhancing durability, or improving indoor air quality in the types of homes that would be reaching for LEED-h certification. It’s a comfort standard, not a green building standard.

The green home I'm building now won't pass LEED-H
We're building an aging-in-place home with a Hybrid Solar-Propane radiant floor heating & domestic hot water system with 15 SEER heat pump for AC and back-up heat that is better than 30% more efficient than code. The house scores gold in NAHB's Model Green Home Building Guidelines and North Carolina's Healthy Built Homes, but it will not qualify for basic LEED-h due to a "lack of comfort" in the AC design that will be used at most two months out of the year. If not for this requirement I think the house would likely be LEED-h Silver but I'm not going to pay to have the house scored when I know that it will fail because of this single requirement.

Seems like a missed opportunity to me.

NAHB is taking advantage of that opportunity
Last summer as we worked on the new NAHB-ICC National Green Building Standard the group discussed following LEED’s footsteps on this issue and decided that we shouldn't disqualify a house for a green rating because the bathrooms and bedrooms might occasionally be slightly less comfortable than the living room. So we awarded points for Manual D implementation but didn’t make it mandatory. The issue is to step lightly on the planet, not to assure that everybody is optimally comfortable at all times regardless of the additional cost.

--Michael Chandler is a home builder and master plumber in Mebane, North Carolina. His website is www.chandlerdesignbuild.com

The Greenest Beverage? Tap water. But What About Adult Beverages?

2008-06-16T10:02:00.012-04:00

In a quest for discovering the most environmentally benign beverage for back yard bar-b-ques, one builder sifted through the options to help us drink greener.

I have nothing against water: I make coffee with it, paddle a canoe in it, and I even drink it every day. But it's not always what my empty hand is looking for when I settle down in the back yard and fire up the bar-b-que. Beer sort of hits the spot at these times. To determing whether I should be drinking cold beer in a can or cold beer in a bottle, I called my local recycling coordinator who wasted no time in telling me that tap water was my best choice.

Tap water wasn't what I was after, so I refined my query
Listening to NPR on the way home from work one day I heard that recycling 30 beer cans saved the equivalent of a gallon of gas. How many beer bottles, I wondered, would be equivalent to 30 beer cans. So I asked my local recycling coordinator He did some research and we ran the numbers. It turns out that 385 beer bottles has the equivalent embodied energy of 30 beer cans. He pointed out that there was some minimal adjustment needed to account for the transportation cost of imported beer so this calculation would be most accurate if applied to domestic beer in both bottles and cans. Ah-ha! I said, this gives me an environmental rationalization for buying that nice local microbrew!

Does this mean I get to "invest" in a kegerator?
Actually he replied, the kegorator idea is a no-go due to the carbon footprint of the refrigerator (regardless of the impact of the increased beer consumption). However, if you consider that there are 22 shots of bourbon in a bottle that likely has the embodied energy content of two beer bottles this gives you an environmental justification for drinking bourbon on the rocks (or mint juleps). If a single beer can equals 12.83 beer bottles it is roughly equivalent to six bottles of bourbon in terms of its carbon footprint.

As a dedicated environmentalist I find his logic irrefutable.

--Michael Chandler is a builder near Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His website is http://www.chandlerdesignbuild,com/

[Ed's note: for some fun recycling facts go to http://www.oberlin.edu/recycle/facts.html]

Jeff Medanich's Green Story

2008-06-13T20:56:00.004-04:00

The summer I turned sixteen years old, two major events occurred that would impact my life. I got my drivers license and my first job as a carpenter’s helper. The first made me mobile and the second provided me with a means to afford this mobility. I had the good fortune to be apprenticed to two “old school” craftsmen who were happy to share their knowledge and skills with a green kid. I realized right off that I had found something I really liked to do, was somewhat proficient at and that paid better than pumping gas or waiting tables which is what my buddies were doing.
Thirty-five years and many variations of homebuilding, remodeling and carpentry jobs later, I’m still in the building business and consider myself extremely lucky to have found a profession I thoroughly enjoy and that has always provided me with a means to meet the needs of myself and my family.

I first learned about energy efficiency in the late seventies. I was working as an apprentice carpenter and I knew a guy who was starting a business using a new insulation material, polyurethane foam. We were doing retrofits on existing homes and my job was to drill a two inch hole every sixteen inches around the perimeter of the house. He would then fill the stud cavities with foam and I would plug the hole. This was after the oil embargo of the mid seventies when everyone suddenly became energy conscious. After awhile, oil and gas prices dropped and miraculously there was seemingly no more energy problem. I knew in the back of my mind that there was something to this tight construction idea and began employing what are now called “Green Building” techniques on all my projects whenever I could.

Almost twenty years later, again I had the good fortune to go to work for one of the pioneer production green builders in the country. The founders of McStain Neighborhoods had been employing sustainable building and development techniques before they were referred to as green building but always had the environment in mind. This is where I really got the opportunity to research and develop cutting edge building technologies related to highly sustainable, high performance home construction.. I have also realized that much of what those “old school” guys that I worked with all those years ago taught me about framing, flashing and details to make buildings last longer is now a part of what we refer to as Building Science.

Green building has become a passion for me and I am of the opinion that there is simply no other way to build. In order to construct environmentally responsible, healthy, long lasting structures, you must take a holistic, systems approach to design and building.
I live in a house that is almost one hundred years old and it is still a safe, comfortable place to live and promises to be for many years to come. We have the ability to create buildings that people will be saying that about several hundred years from now. That’s exciting to think about and we owe it to our grandkids.

--Jeff Medanich is Vice President of Harvard Communities in Denver, Colo

Jim Sargent's Green Story

2008-06-13T11:10:00.008-04:00

I got off on the right start in the ‘70’s building energy efficient homes when the US went through the oil embargo. But in the early ‘80s I went to the dark side for a bit, building the pretty parts and ignoring the fact that they were gas guzzlers. It was in 1985 when my first son went off to college that it really hit me: I need to build ALL my homes to support the kind of world I want for my children and grandchildren.

It's all in the details
That year we decided the only way to really understand home energy performance was to monitor their energy consumption. We tracked the monthly utility bills for every home we built from 1985 to 2000. Along the way, I learned as much as I could from as many sources as I could about energy and resource efficiency, all this long before the terms healthy or green building popped up. And I learned that the buzz words don’t mean that much, especially if they are not backed up by attention to detail. I can build a home of sticks, or SIPs, or ICFs and all three homes will perform about the same, so long as we are all paying attention to details during construction. Picking the strategies, systems, and technologies is the easy part; putting them all together on site in the right way is the hard part.

To me, green building is about “passing it on.”
I have spent a lot of time teaching both builders and high school students how to build well, sharing with anyone who will listen what I have learned about energy and resource efficiency over the years. I worked hard on the adoption of the International Residential Code (IRC) in Texas, when most said it could not be done. It won’t work if just some of us change the way we build; it is going to take all of us working together on this one.

--Jim Sargent is a green custom builder in Dallas, Texas
www.zeroenergyhomedallas.com
www.andersonsargent.com

Five Things You Can Do Right Now to Cut Your Utility Bill

2008-06-06T15:22:00.006-04:00

Green building has become a poster child for everything from solar panels to bamboo flooring. While all aspects are of green building are important, the first step towards a green home is to get the core systems working properly. With energy costs skyrocketing, it's a great place to start.

By Matt Golden

At Sustainable Spaces, when we work with homeowners to develop a roadmap for retrofitting their houses, we emphasize getting the basics, or the infrastructure, done right. It might not be sexy, but it is the core of the house. After looking at the basics, we focus on major systems, such as heating systems, water heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning. Once the house is operating efficiently, with good air quality and comfort, then we look at properly sized renewable energy systems such as solar and wind. These systems will be much smaller (and more affordable) because the house now uses much less energy.

But what can a homeowner do right now that will have an impact on their energy load, without involving a major home remodel? Here's my top five list of improvements anyone can make to get on the path of energy efficiency, at a reasonable cost.

1) Get a home energy audit - Start by evaluating your entire house as a system. It’s not about products; it’s about results. A building science-based audit will help you create a plan to fix your home based on what will have the maximum results. And PG&E will even help underwrite this audit! See EnergyStar.gov for more info

2) Reduce air leakage - Heated or air-conditioned air leaks out through gaps, cracks and holes in your home’s walls and ceilings and means your energy dollars are floating away. Sealing these penetrations is the most cost effective way to save energy. Most leaks are between your house and your attic. Read a Fine Homebuilding article on the topic here.

3) Seal your ducts - In California, the average duct systems (the tubes that move heat from your furnace to your house), has 30% leakage. When you figure that 40% to 50% of your home’s energy goes through this system, you can see that it has a huge impact on your bill. This system is also responsible for your home’s comfort and indoor air quality. Leaky ducts bring in dirty air from all the worse places to replace the air that escapes. Poor design and leaks mean that there is imbalanced distribution that results in cold and hot rooms, and general discomfort. When sealing duct work, use mastic not duct tape.

4) Add insulation - Adding insulation should happen after you air seal (or air sealing becomes very hard to do later). Generally adding insulation to the attic is the easiest and has the fastest return. You should have 10 inches of insulation or R-30+. We recommend using blow-in cellulose (recycled newspapers). If you want to do it yourself and use batts, try to get blue jean batts – but remember that you must install the insulation very carefully, as most insulation only performs at 50% of its rated value due to air gaps, compressions, and other installation defects. When adding a layer of batts to an attic, lay it perpendicular to the first layer to help reduce air gaps.

5) Replace light bulbs / appliances / plug-loads - Compact Florescent Bulbs (CFLs) use 25% the energy for the same amount of light. Replacing a 15 year old refrigerator with an energy star model can cut your bill by 60%. That's a pretty substantial amount in two steps. Plug loads can be negated with a power strip plugged into a switchable wall outlet.

Not everyone can make their home 100% green and zero energy in the ﬁrst-pass, but by creating a comprehensive plan homeowners can begin the path towards sustainability and see real results on almost any budget.

And remember, a green house does not necessarily mean it is full of fancy new technology. There’s usually 30% to 40% waste just in these fundamental issues that don’t need fancy solutions to resolve them!

--Matt Golden is president of Sustainable Spaces, a home energy performance company in San Francisco, Calif

Michael Chandler's Green Story

2008-05-29T20:55:00.007-04:00

I come from a long line of engineers and people who work with their hands.
Collectively, my Grandfathers and Great Grandfathers invented a way to explode dynamite under water, worked on the Panama Canal, figured out how to mount naval artillery on flat beds leading a cadre of iron workers into battle during WWI, engineered earthquake resistant buildings after the San Francisco earthquake founded MIT, and climbed up the towers and out the cables of suspension bridges to test them for metal fatigue. My father sailed to the Galapagos Islands at 13, and got into computers when they ran on tape drives and took up entire rooms. He was constantly inventing stuff in the basement that became part of our lives: intercoms, burglar alarms, and a heating system for our house that still amazes me.

I still own and use his tools and tools from both grandfathers.

I didn’t have much choice in my direction: the family videos show my Dad and me (two years old) walking on the second floor joists while our house was being built. We did two additions to the house while I was growing up, designed by a family friend. When I was 16, I spent an afternoon with R. Buckminster Fuller. He was 87 at the time, I sought him out then because I was interested in affordable homes, elegant design, and excited about the future.

I still have the drawing (at right) he used to illustrate our conversation dated June 9th 1972.

In college I interned with Moore-Weinrich Architects in Rumford, Maine -- riding my bike to work each day. They were working on an architectural contest (which they won); the founder, Steven Moore, is now a green architect teaching at UT Austin. From there I went on to intern at Design Works in Carrboro NC and to co-found Space Builders which as now celebrating its thirtieth year as an employee owned business. As part of that start-up process I took a workshop with the New School for Democratic Management which was one of those little nudges that pushed me in just the right direction at just the right time.

Before that nudge, I saw the business end of building and designing as a necessary evil; afterwards, I saw business as an important part of the craft. I was enjoying the great game of business long before Jack Stack wrote the book.

I left Space Builders when I realized that consensus decision-making made me crazy. Traveling around North America in a ‘65 Dodge van, working in California and Maine helped me to build my carpentry skills and people skills. Somewhere in there I learned about the work with Thermal Photography and the air tight drywall approach that Joe Lstiburek was doing in the Canadian R-2000 program. The idea that Building Science could be a legitimate field of study made me happy.

We look back on those days now with bemusement and regret. The double envelope houses, underground air pipes for cooling, trombe walls, and solar salt boxes that were way too tight and just plain ugly.

My business thrived and faltered, but my marriage failed. I focused on the business and joined an NAHB builder 20 club. Along the way I instituted profit sharing and an employee centered way of doing business and in 2002 and 2003 our company was named one of the top 50 builders to work for in America. We went on to win the 2005 NAHB seniors housing council Best Aging in Place Design for New Custom Homes and to pick up second place at the National Green Building Awards in 2006 and 2007 for Best Green Custom Home and to win a Pacesetter Award at the 2006 NAHB Custom Builder Symposium for "sustainable business management". Somewhere in there I fell in love with a client, got married, and she is now my designer and business partner (she drew all the award winning houses). Nowadays I get to spend a lot of time writing and teaching about green building in addition to running the business with a really great crew.

In the next five years we're splitting the design and building business and giving the building business to our employees using an incentivized stock-option plan. They'll get a debt-free company, but will pay a portion of their profits over the first five years during which time I'll be their employee and mentor. The great game of business is pretty fun, if you play it right.

So how did I get into home building?
I received a degree from Dartmouth in sculpture only because they didn't have an architecture degree. Once I graduated it seemed more likely that I would draw a regular paycheck as a builder than as a sculptor.

How did I get into Green Building?
I was always drawn to architects that were pushing the envelope with passive solar design and innovative engineering. It just seemed a whole lot more fun than just throwing up boxes, and I had done some of that working in government subsidized housing for the elderly. I also come with a strong preference for egalitarian workplaces and the people who were building solar were more ideologically aligned with me.

I’m a bit of mad scientist; green building best-practices and their refinement is interesting and fun for me.

What does Green Building mean to me?
To me it's all about refining the definition of what is best practice in building homes for people to optimize comfort and health and minimize the impact on the environment. I like to also optimize value because that's a fun part of the game. It's also easier to make a profit if you can provide great value.

And I like the homes to be beautiful because life is to short to waste time building ugly homes.

--Michael Chandler owns Chandler Design/Build near Chapel Hill, North Carolina

We are Everywhere!

2008-05-29T20:26:00.001-04:00

Except the northwest and mid west. The map shows who is where. I made the map unlisted, so other folks shouldn't stumble accross it, and it should be editable by any of us, so if you want to fill in stuff to your bubble or move your push pin to a different location (like your home or office, for example) go for it.

View Larger Map

Eric Doub's Green Story

2008-05-06T12:23:00.005-04:00

I grew up with a father who studied Taoist texts in the original Chinese while waiting in foxholes in the Army in Germany in the 1950s. He protested the H-bomb in that same decade. As a Girl Scout leader in the 1970s in Boulder, Colorado, my mother retrieved a road kill deer and had her charges skin the animal, tan the hide by traditional methods, and make moccasins and drums. She also studied outdoor survival skills and spent 10 days in the Idaho back country with only a pocket knife. When it came to suburban survival, however, she drove the car my father claimed to have no ownership of (“It's Nancy's car!”). My father rode his bike, took buses and trains and walked, and never used the word car that I can recall: He would always say “Pollution-Waste Machine” or “Stinking Metal Box.” Car drivers were “Oil Spill Lovers” or "Emphysema Lovers."

With parents like that...
I could have either run the other direction, or followed in their worldview footsteps. I did the latter. In Junior High, I would get angry at seeing lawn sprinklers over spraying onto the sidewalks and streets and wasting water. I made up a flyer and put one on every car parked at the local recreation center: “Did you have to drive here to get exercise?” As a teenager I believed I would never own a car. Lo and behold, it started with a motorcycle...and our family now has the average American number of “Pollution-Waste Machines.”

In my college application essay in 1980, I started off with approximately this:

“It's something to consider. The Swedes are not freezing in the dark, and their
per capita energy consumption is about half of Americans’.” The rest of the
essay went about as follows: “…studying nuclear energy for a school paper “has
been an initiation into energy research, and a synthesis of goals – of self
preservation and academics – that may be the most important thing that’s
happened to me yet.
Current events make it desperately clear: We’re in
transition to a post-petroleum civilization. War in the Middle East, the arms
race, revolution in Third World countries all point to a reorganization of the
planet’s resources. And American lifestyles and consumption are at the center of
the crisis. When good, obedient, middle-class Americans – those who guard the
system – cannot buy gas or pay the heating bill or get enough to eat, our
society will turn upside down. Historian Howard Zinn calls this the Revolt of
the Guards. When this happens I want to be a citizen who knows, who has
researched, who has hope: for a sane, decentralized, democratic energy system
where the power is in the hands of the people and in biomass, efficiency, hydro,
wind, solar, and co-generation.”

When I did get into Stanford, I took all the energy-related courses I could: “Small Scale Energy Systems.” “Soft Energy Paths and Non-Nuclear Futures…” My undergrad degree? I called it “Sustainable U.S. Resource and Security Policies.”

Just another run of the mill bachelor’s degree.

--Eric Doub is president of EcoFutures Building Inc., Boulder, Colorado's leading Zero Energy Home builder.

Peter Yost's Green Story

2008-05-06T11:53:00.004-04:00

They say it's better to be lucky than smart. I got into home building out of dumb luck, but it turned out to be the smartest thing I ever did. Teaching high school in my early 20’s, I needed a summer job. My two oldest brothers had a busy construction business, so I was a hired hand— staining clapboards, hauling drywall, getting coffee. I had no idea that I would actually like the work or make a career out of it. Something about working with both my head and my hands, and particularly working with wood, struck a chord.

Green building just came naturally. I’m from a family of thirteen, raised on a minister’s salary. My Mother grew up a fisherman’s daughter in a house several feet below sea level with a rooftop rainwater catchment system. She knew more about resource efficiency than any Nobel Laureate in economics. And she taught the thirteen of us all about it.

I distinctly remember the day I started to think differently as a builder. They closed the local dump in one of the towns where we built in Seacoast New Hampshire with no warning. Just one day we were dumping demolition debris close by and for free, and the next we were off to a
regional landfill 35 miles away paying $65 a ton. The first time I drove into that landfill I drove a half a mile from the tipping scale DOWN in elevation to the "active cell" where I could dump my load.

But that wasn’t the actual day that I began thinking differently as a builder, because for the next few months we worked in towns that still had a local dump. The next time I went to that landfill with a load of job waste, I drove a quarter mile more past that first “cell” and drove UP what seemed like 50 feet to the next "active cell." That was the actual day I began thinking seriously about a different way of building, a way that several years later would come to be called green building.

To me, green building is all about process; it's a mix of thinking and building that continually evolves better ways to design and build. I have come to think of green building as the way that quality, resource-efficiency, and durability fit together in a home with the smallest environmental footprint possible.

But stay tuned—I think we still have a lot to learn.

--Peter Yost is Director of Residential Services at BuildingGreen and technical director of GreenBuildingAdvisor.com

Lynn Underwood's Green Story

2008-05-06T11:00:00.003-04:00

I grew up on a farm and ranch and learned to conserve materials, avoid waste, and to respect the soil that sustained our family’s livelihood. While these concepts weren't rooted in environmentalism (they were rooted in conservation) they went along with a respect for nature. We avoided over-taxing the land. We were cautious about garbage and waste. We knew it was the right thing to do.

During a tour of duty in the U.S. Marine Corps in Viet Nam, I saw the results of a poverty-stricken country embroiled in war. Waste was unheard of there. South Vietnamese citizens scraped their Earth for simple survival. After three years, I left the Marine Corps, returned home to New Mexico. and started college. That's where I met a young woman who suffered from an ailment caused by air pollution. Together we organized the first ever anti-pollution effort with consciousness-raising. I even got the local mayor in Las Cruces, New Mexico to sign a proclamation declaring it to be Clean Air Week in 1972. Within a few years, my friend passed away because of that ailment, but she left me with a zeal for environmental health.

In 2000, as a Senior Plans Examiner in Pima County, Arizona I had been asked by the Building Official to coordinate a training event that would facilitate a dialogue between promoters of sustainable design and building safety professionals. I started by recruiting David Eisenberg, Director of the Development Center for Appropriate Technology in Tucson, Arizona. Together we sponsored the first-ever Alternative Building Materials/Technology Exhibition in Tucson, Arizona. With a little over a month of planning we attracted over 1000 attendees who were able to learn about sustainable design and green building materials from nearly 40 vendors. There were over a dozen separate classes for the public with topics that ranged from how to install adobe blocks to installation of insulated concrete forms to green roofs to photovoltaic technology. This got my juices going. I wrote an article describing what we did and it was printed in the Building Standards Magazine published by the International Conference of Building Officials (July-August, 2000).

To me, green building means leaving a small environmental footprint while providing a safe, durable building that will endure natural forces such as wind, seismic and flooding. Green building means beginning at the design stage with thoughtful consideration for the all of the elements that provide a safe, comfortable home. It means making use of renewable natural resources. It's smart site selection and proper orientation. It's selecting the materials that provide the most durability while bringing the least harm to the environment. While there are many shades of green, all green homes are better homes. Green homes consume fewer natural resources and deliver high energy efficiency while avoiding unnecessary damage to the site. They last longer and live better because they're designed to meet your needs, instead of being designed to be large.

The building code can halp you build green. There is a long history for my profession of accepting and embracing the movement toward green building and environmental sustainability. It appears to be a well-kept secrtet, but it's there nonetheless. You can see it in black and white on page 2 of the 2006 International Residential Code:

R104.11 Alternative materials, design and methods of construction and
equipment.The provisions of this code are not intended to prevent the
installation of any material or to prohibit any design or method of construction
not specifically prescribed by this code, provided that any such alternative
has been approved. An alternative material, design or method of construction
shall be approved where the building official finds that the proposed design
is satisfactory and complies with the intent of the provisions of this code,
and that the material, method or work offered is, for the purpose intended,
at least the equivalent of that prescribed in this code. Compliance with the
specific performance-based provisions of the International Codes in lieu of
specific requirements of this code shall also be permitted as an
alternate.

Because I'm so interested in helping people build their house the way they want and with the materials they desire, this section is like music to my ears.

As building safety professional, I believe it is my duty to embrace green building and support acceptance of these principles into the Code itself. Building Officials have always known that innovations and improvements move faster than the Building Code, so section 104.11 is a great tool for helping us to accept new methods and materials. This is the part of my job that I love; helping people getting what they want as long as they’re safe doing it!

--Lynn Underwood is Chief Building Official for the City of Norfolk, Virginia

Bruce King's Green Story

2008-05-06T10:36:00.007-04:00

For as long as I can remember I've had this edgy, powerful dislike of waste, and so as a little boy was the butt of many jokes in my family for pulling things out of the trash because “they were still useful.” As it turned out, I also had an aptitude for science and math, and so like Dilbert was probably fated to be an engineer. I found that in engineering, as in math, the equation must always balance — nothing is thrown away. This is no trivial abstraction, as it turns out that Nature also works that way. My odd childhood obsession was thus vindicated and articulated by biology and ecology. Nothing is thrown away because there is no “away.”

A quarter of a century ago I started my business as a structural engineer, and found myself part of an industry that is not merely wasteful, but often seems to systematically destroy as much as possible. Energy, water, and materials are routinely squandered in construction. Less obvious, but far more widespread and destructive, is the waste of knowledge and common sense; we’ve learned a lot about how to build well, but don’t. Even less obvious are the effects in faraway places that our industry has: the open pit copper mines in New Guinea that displace entire cultures, the clearcut arboreal forests of Siberia that strip away species diversity, the horrible cancers that afflict workers in PVC plants around the world. We even throw ourselves away! As an engineer, I began to wonder how to bring my training and experience to the dawning “green” movement to improve on the way we build.

My big chance came in the early 1990’s when asked to engineer the Real Goods Solar Living Center in Hopland, California. That project was hugely successful for a number of reasons: a talented and mutually-respectful team, an ever-evolving and joyful sense of the design, careful and lovely use of reclaimed land and water, and novel (at the time) use of materials such as straw bales, sustainably-harvested lumber, recycled tile, fly ash concrete, and all sorts of “old junk” turned to good use. Most exciting was the complete energy-independence of the building, which passively keeps itself cool in summer and warm in winter, while providing more power than it needs with solar cells and wind turbines.

I remember one particular and signature moment during that project. It was a broiling hot summer day during the framing phase. We had just completed a long session working through many details for the complex, curving structure, and we were all pretty used up. The contractor—an “old boy” from the area and by no means a “greenie”—walked up beside me, put his huge arm around my shoulder, and blurted out “Wow! I had forgotten that building is fun! ”

This engineer had found his niche.We always built “green” before the Industrial Revolution in that we only used local materials, water and energy. But with the subsequent rush of fossil fuel energy we've become giddy and hurried. Climate change and peak oil will soon change the way we build, whether we like it or not, and we will once again have to rely on our smarts, local resources, and our collective experience to build well. And so to me green building means making every effort now to smooth the transition to the world our children will inherit. It’s the least we can do.

Also, green building is fun.

--Bruce King, P.E. is a structural engineer and founder of the Ecological Building Network in San Rafael, Calif.

Mike Guertin's Green Story

2008-05-06T09:59:00.004-04:00

Without realizing it at the time, I began my 'green building career' in the mid-1960's when I was 7 years old. My parents tackled the ultimate DIY project, designing and building their own home. While most kids were building tree houses, I drove subfloor nails, spread stone for footing drains, provided general labor and tended the plumber's lead crucible (hence the brain damage). The house was simple in design, efficient in resource use and sported state-of-the-art energy features: R-11 insulation, double insulated windows and glass doors, and had a ‘compact’ / ‘hot roof’ design with asphalt impregnated fiberboard ‘insulation’.

In the late 70’s we made an active solar hot air heating system made from salvaged materials: steel roofing panels painted black, storm windows, an old furnace fan and a massive pile of stone. Soon we added a solar hot water system - again from salvaged parts. By the early 1980's we super-insulated the house to an unheard of R-45 by over-framing the exterior with local-cut 5/4 rough pine boards. The passive solar gave way to a active solar system with semi-automatic summer shades and hand-filled tubes of 'phase-change' salts. Thank goodness for those early tax credits and a penny-pinching father.

My ‘chosen’ career path was teaching. This lead to stints at an environmental education center and high school science department but neither gave me the satisfaction I got working with my hands framing, roofing and siding houses during my college summers. So I left teaching for construction.

My partner and I never set out to 'build green' we just did what made sense. Advanced framing techniques made sense, extra insulation made sense, air-tight construction made sense, better performing windows and doors made sense, better building practices made sense, minimizing site impact made sense, avoiding noxious stuff in building product choices made sense. All that stuff is stuff we did on most of our projects since the late 80's. We tried out new techniques and materials as we learned more and as better systems became available. Clients were thrilled with the results – lower energy bills, great comfort and a fresh bright indoor environment. High performance homes set us apart from other custom home builders in the doldrums of the early 90’s and we found ways to deliver them at the same price as run-of-the-mill homes. Reducing global impact has never been my primary motivation for building green; it's always come down to dollars and sense.

To me, green building is business as usual.

--Mike Guertin is a builder, remodeler, mountain climber, and contributing editor to Fine Homebuilding among other things. He lives in East Greenwich, Rhode Island

Jennifer Corson's Green Story

2008-04-26T19:39:00.008-04:00

My great grandfather was a stone mason who moved from Italy to Canada with his two brothers. Together they built some of the most significant structures in their small Canadian town. If I had made the connection to my building roots, I would have gone straight to the construction trades to gain experience. Instead I followed some wise(?) person’s suggestion to combine my interests in math and the arts and enroll in an architecture program. One thing led to another and next I knew I was building earthen structures in West Africa on a thesis term. The proverbial ‘light bulb’ moment occurred, standing in remote Guinea, realizing that the nicest places to sleep is built with local materials (not being able to afford or access things from afar), cooled with natural ventilation (simple holes in an earthen wall), and designed with whatever creative details that can be done with simple materials and your hands.

Back on North American soil, these ideas of ‘local’, affordable, recyclable and renewable and beautiful have stayed prevalent in my design work. Although no longer building earthen structures, our design company’s mandate is to design green – always, and without question.

My second official title is as ‘salvager’ (which I believe is the Scottish side of my family lineage). A client’s design job reignited the salvage-minded approach that I witnessed in Africa. In designing a solar-oriented, energy-efficient home, the added request was to have it look 100 years old upon completion. It seemed ludicrous to me to specify new wood and beat it up to look old. I went ‘dumpster diving’, talked to contractors and realized there was the opportunity not only to salvage enough doors, flooring and hardware for this project but to divert tons of materials that was otherwise going to the landfill. The result, now 14 years old, is Nova Scotia’s oldest all used building material facility.

Green building to me refers to an ultimate goal, still intangible, that we have yet to achieve. It is a lot of fun and hard work learning how to design and build ‘green buildings’ (a term that is already over- and inappropriately used). Every project we touch gives us a learning experience that we use on the next project to help us get to that goal.

Being a parent of two youngsters has influenced the pace that I want to get towards good green building. It seems imminent that our natural surroundings are changing, species, habitat and view-lines disappearing with screwed-up examples that are anything but green.

--Jennifer Corson M. Arch. is an architect with Solterre Design and president of Renovators Resource Inc., an architectural salvage and dismantling business in Halifax, Nova Scotia

Matt Golden's Green Story

2008-04-26T18:23:00.004-04:00

I grew up around building. My dad was a developer, so I got all the really horrible jobs! I started my adult career in high tech, but my interest in building remained. I began studying architecture, but part of the way through I realized I couldn’t draw. I made the jump to the solar industry just after the first net metering regulations were passed in California, which really was the genesis of the solar industry as we know it today.

I’ve always been committed to living a sustainable lifestyle and being conscientious about my personal impact on the environment. I decided in 2001 to align my career goals with my environmental goals and became an energy consultant focused on commercial and residential solar power. In this role, I worked with homeowners and businesses to develop solar power systems, but I soon realized that what I was doing only offered a point solution; it didn’t really help people to make their homes and lives more sustainable.

In the United States, residential housing accounts for almost 21% of the carbon footprint. Even if every home built from here on out was a “green building,” we still have all of this existing housing stock that is not efficient, and will continue to leave a huge carbon footprint. I realized that even if we implemented solar power systems on existing homes, we still were not attacking the underlying issue of maximizing a home’s performance by properly sealing ducts, or installing insulation that would help lessen energy loads to make solar systems more efficient.

In 2004, I developed the concept of Sustainable Spaces. Our focus was to use science and technology to qualitatively and quantitatively upgrade and retrofit homes to help homeowners improve the comfort, efficiency and health of their existing homes. We work with homeowners to create a roadmap for improving their home’s performance. Not everyone can make their home 100% green and zero energy in the ﬁrst-pass, but by creating a comprehensive plan homeowners can begin the path towards sustainability and see real results on almost any budget.

To me, green building means beginning with the basics and fixing what we already have. Building new, efficient housing is not the greenest thing we can do if we aren’t already working to improve what we already have.

--Matt Golden ownes Sustainable Spaces, an energy retrofit company in San Francisco, Calif.

Dan Morrison's Green Story

2008-04-26T18:16:00.008-04:00

I've completely stumbled into almost everything I've ever done. Except maybe college, I stumbled out of that. After graduating college with a biology degree, I worked as a field biologist in Oregon and on the Bering Sea. Living in the woods or spending half the year on a fishing boat aren’t exactly conducive to family life, so I looked into a more local career choice.

I had stumbled into a piece of land in the mountains near Drummond, MT that needed a cabin, so I got a job as a laborer on a framing crew. Because I was good at math, had good balance, and wasn’t worried about heights, I stumbled into being a decent framer.

My college training focused on ecosystems biology and conservation biology, so my interest in environmental conservation is pretty well developed. As it turns out, most of the problems with ecosystems were because of people doing dumb stuff (whether they realized it or not). After building houses for a while I stumbled into this thing called building science. It addressed questions that had been occurring to me as a framer and remodeler: how can the roof venting requirement possibly be the same for a high mountain desert, like Montana, as for a warm, humid climate like Tennessee? And what about crawlspaces, why are their venting requirements the same for both places? These rules seemed dumb to me, and because of my scientific training, I was wary of dumb stuff.

Studying building science satisfied my curiosity about the dumb rules. I stumbled into the fact that building houses to work better allowed me to charge more money, so I dug in.

I suppose working on a framing crew in Nashville and watching guys cut up and burn slightly-used 16 ft. 2x4s to keep warm stumbled me closer to what’s now called green building. Those 2x4s had lumber stamps from western Montana, where I had come from, and that bothered me quite a bit.

Green building to me is a pretty simple concept: don’t do dumb stuff.

Don’t build a house out of stuff made with poison.
Don’t build a house that will rot before it’s paid off (don’t build one that will rot, period, but certainly not before it’s paid off).
Don’t use more wood to frame a wall than you need to use (those walls are heavy to lift).
Don’t burn 16 ft 2x4s to keep warm when pulling the nails out of them and stacking them will make you warm, save money and save wood.
Don’t design an ugly house that nobody will want to live in or maintain.
Don’t hire subcontractors that do sloppy work because it’ll lower the quality of the house, increase the cost, and trash your reputation.
Don’t run your business on a shoestring because you’ll be of no use to your customers if you go out of business.

After a bad day on an icy roof, I stumbled into a job at Fine Homebuilding magazine and I never stumbled back. Over the holidays last December, I snuck into the office to pick something up hoping that I wouldn't be spotted and forced to work. I was spotted and offered a job building a Green Building product for Taunton Press and BuildingGreen with Peter Yost, a guy I stumbled upon a few years ago...

--Dan Morrison is managing editor of GreenBuildingAdvisor.com. He lives in Torrington, Conn.