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
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Monday, September 29, 2008
What’s Wrong With the Home Energy Audit Industry?
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
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
Saturday, August 30, 2008
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
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
Thursday, August 28, 2008
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...
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...
Saturday, August 23, 2008
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.
(Click the "comments" icon to turn on or off the photo caption)
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
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.
(Click the "comments" icon to turn on or off the photo caption)
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
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Making Buildings Better One Camper at a Time
By Michael ChandlerOne 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
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
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.
(You can click the "caption" icon to turn captions on and off)
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
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.
(You can click the "caption" icon to turn captions on and off)
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
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