Green Houses Guaranteed to Save Green Backs.

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

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

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

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

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?

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?

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:

1. Count the number of particles it catches
2. Count the area of the particles it catches
3. 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