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

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

Energy Star Raises the Bar for Home Builders

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 1 at Building Science Summer Camp

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

Free Means You Don't Have to Pay

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?

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

Are Heat Pumps Green?

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?

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

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

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