Energy Efficiency

The past two weeks have been overwhelming, hence the silence, and aside from meetings, we haven't anything new to show regarding our own SIPs prefab house kit. [Now, about the *other* prefab house kits being built... (claps hands over mouth) Ahem, more on these later! : ) ]

Instead, we have spent time over the past weekends exploring Richmond's James River, which we never had access to until we bought a vintage Boston Whaler. It's amazing what a little river access can do for a family! We can now hook up the boat and in 15 minutes be at the river, watching bald eagles, blue heron, turtles and fish with our children.

Any-hoo, today, the prefab architect of the net zero house kit casa ti, David Day, came to visit!

Our original plan was to visit an artist's studio he built with structural insulated panels (SIP) but we digressed and instead sat outside watching the children play.... enjoyed the day and company of each other while discussing Woodstock documentaries, green living, and off grid net zero systems.

The Obama Administration has turned into one giant experiement on how to stimulate the economy, while not over-taxing tax payers and not building more debt for future generations. Unfortuneately all three of these approaches tend to contradict each other. Still, in the almighty 'green' sector, investment now can create savings later.

Unlike other stimulus savings plans, such as a loan modification, green saving usually reward people who do not neccessarily need savings. People seeking economicly friendly building materials generally already have their economic budget well planned out, which is why they are finding ways to save moving forward, while improving the health of the environment they live in. That is why green taxbreaks don't cause controversy, while home loan modifcations, which help those who already screwed up, do.

Here are some of the ways the the Obama administration plans on helping green builders in your area through the "American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009" and other bills.

Green Schools - We've come a long way since schools were insulated with asbestos and whatever other cheap materials people could get their hands on. We can expect millions of dollars to be poured into K-12 higher education facilities, with green leanings on the forefront. If we are lucky enough, this will include the food that is served to students, as they are the ones you want to build up in the healthiest manner possible.

Public Housing- The Public Housing Capital Fund will receive billions for improvements, including priority for energy efficiency incentives and projects.

Job Training- Billions will go towards green job training for workers for jobs in energy efficiency and renewable energy sectors.

Green Federal Buildings- Green effiency requirements will only increase along with green materials. Billions are being directed towards this now.

The Everyday

The savings trickle down to homeowners who have continually paid off their homes on time. By investing in green roofs, indoor insulation and energy efficiency projects, you will save immediately through government give backs and long term on electric bills.

The Numbers

$100 million will go towards advanced buildings research that includes design, integrations and control of both new and old buildings.

$70 million are going to residential buildings which will traing workers and create 'green collar jobs'. This is intended to create a newer more advanced workforce. There are numerous tax breaks and technical assistance programs that will simply make it 'worth it' for home builders.

$72.5 million will go towards expanding Energy Star standards to accelerate energy efficient products and shift Energy Star into new areas.

$50 millions is going to higher efficiency light sources.

I remember during the election John McCain mocked Obama for his energy efficiency tip of filling up the air for your tires. Well, with just a little research, it's obvious he is attempting to do much more than that.

SAN DIEGO - April 17, 2009 - EcoDog, Inc., an innovator in home energy efficiency and monitoring will preview their new FIDO Home Energy Watchdog system at San Diego's Earth Fair in Balboa Park on April 19. Slated for launch this summer, the FIDO system is designed to give homeowners a comprehensive, room-by-room graphic overview of their energy use complete with real-time rate information and personalized saving tips based on individual usage patterns. Typical FIDO users can expect to save 15 to 20 percent on their home electric bills, but the system can also be used to identify 'energy hogs' in the home that may enable significantly greater savings.

The brainchild of the firm's founder, energy entrepreneur Ron Pitt, EcoDog's FIDO Home Energy Watchdog system consists of an easy-to-use software package along with hardware interface modules for the breaker panel and computer. "Until now, homeowners have really been left in the dark about where their electricity is consumed," explained Pitt. "We get bills that show our total use with monthly variations, but we have no way of identifying the most demanding users, malfunctioning appliances or other big contributors to ever-increasing electric bills. Our system allows users to see exactly how their power is consumed on an hourly, daily or monthly basis, and makes plain English recommendations about how to maximize savings."

The staff from the north county firm will be on hand to demonstrate the system's features in Booth #1036 at Earth Fair where they will be offering a $500 product discount for customers who place a refundable deposit this weekend. In addition, visitors who are homeowners and San Diego Gas & Electric customers will be eligible to enter a drawing for a free system.

EcoDog, Inc. is committed to designing, building and making available the tools necessary to easily and affordably take control of energy consumption to reduce homeowner's expenses while lowering demand for electricity.

EcoDog's FIDO Home Energy Watchdog: The hardware/software system provides detailed energy usage information on a room-by-room basis. 

 A Home Is Like A TomatoA home is like a tomato. When seeking one out, you just can’t go for size, you’ve got to go for taste.  There is not much that excites me as the topic of green homes does.  I mean green like quality, endurance, longevity, and functionality. If something does not do its job well, it will not be used for long.  A home that is not comfortable, useful, and affordable is a home in the landfill.  Quite possibly the only topic that could get me going more than the topic of green homes is the topic of America embracing a more thorough definition of what a green home actually is.  For a home with solar panels, geothermal heat, FSC certified wood and no-VOC furniture is not green if it has 8,000 square feet of living space for two people and a dog.  And a cat.  And four children.  It is just too big to be considered green due to the exorbitant rate of consumption of materials during construction and energy throughout its lifespan.

Getting back to me being excited, this is why I flipped over the recent article in Trim Tab, a new quarterly e-magazine that highlights green building trends published by the Cascadia Region Green Building Council. The article talks about Sarah Susanka’s book series, from which one of my favorite books comes; The Not So Big House: A Blueprint For the Way We Really Live. If you are interested in these two things, you will thoroughly enjoy this read:

1) how the design of your home effects your health and well-being

2) how the size of your home effects your health, well-being, and wallet

It conceptualizes how “The American Dream Home” has transformed over the last several decades and reveals blunt truths about McMansions, over-sized, empty boxes that are built using cheap materials and are poorly designed. In other words, a large investment that does not give a fraction of the satisfaction or longevity you expect of it and, to top it off, grossly increases your carbon footprint and energy bills. Not So Big gives solutions to many of the obstacles we encounter in the quest for a dream home, like how to get good design on a budget and how to figure out what size home works for you. It also plunges into detail about how subtle design moves are the ones that create the most treasured nuances in a home and how you can achieve them with very little space.

Trim Tab’s article gives so many great pieces of information that make your Green Home IQ sky-rocket. Not only does it steer you towards one of the most useful books regarding home design, it sums up how the issue of wanting ‘too much house’ has become grossly out of control and unnecessary. It gives statistics that show the trend in increasing square footage in single family homes and underlines the need for quality design and materials to create homes that are comfortable and long-lasting and work with our lifestyles without energy-gorging. The idea is to build smaller and smarter. It’s kind of like going with that organic, medium sized farm-stand tomato instead of the colossal, wan, peaked hybrid that was grown using chemical fertilizers and contains one tenth of the vitamins and flavor of the former.

You can find the article here in Trim Tab. It is free.

photo source: http://www.worth1000.com/emailthis.asp?entry=251912

This post was submitted by ThinkDwell. Visit Our Blog.

The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED as it is commonly called, was established by the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) to develop a rating system for green building. It is the measure for design, construction and operation of green buildings. LEED advocates sustainability through a whole-building approach in 5 areas of performance in human and environmental health. Those 5 areas are:
• Energy efficiency
• Sustainable site development
• Water savings
• Materials selection
• Quality of indoor environment

The rating system is tailored to each project and coincides with LEED specific programs. A handful of these programs are New Construction, Existing Buildings, Commercial Interiors, Core and Shell, Homes, Neighborhood Development and Schools. The rating system fosters global endorsement of sustainable green building and improvement through the “creation and implementation of universally understood and accepted tools and performance criteria.” The criterion is developed by leaders in their specific industry and ranked in 4 levels of certification; in ascending order those levels are: certified, silver, gold and platinum. These LEED certifications are directly related to the number of credits earned in each of the 5 performance categories listed above. Currently, the LEED standards are applicable to new commercial construction, major renovation, interior projects and existing structure operation. However, standards are being developed to include construction for commercial core and shell, neighborhood development and new homes.

The members of the USGBC recently approved a revision to the LEED rating system that will be effective in March. This update, known as LEED 2009, hopes to bring about more consistency within the family of LEED rating systems, more focus on energy and climate issues through the use of more scientific benchmarks and an evaluation of building technology. The point system for all LEED programs will consist of 100 points with a possible 10 point “bonus.” Previously the system was based on 64 points with a potential for 5 bonus points. A sliding scale was created to earn marks for optimizing energy efficiency, with a maximum of 19 points, as compared to the former maximum of 10 points. With changes like this you can see that the projects hoping to be LEED certified will need to have a much heavier focus on energy performance. Some of the other changes reflected in the LEED 2009 rating system are:

• 20% reduction in water-use is now mandatory for certification; previously you would have earned 1 point for water-use reduction.
• The “Sustainable Sites” category will contribute to almost 24% of the maximum score, this is about 4% higher from the old rating system.
• LEED 2009 offers bonus points to those that put an emphasis on their regional environmental goals (to be published in March).
• The “Energy and Atmosphere” category now makes up nearly 32% of the total score; formerly it was approximately 25%.
• Access to public transportation earns 6 points as opposed to 1 point prior to the revisions.

I would venture to believe that USGBC anticipates applicants to shine their spotlights on energy use and renewable energy sources – as that has been a driving force as of late.

Some of you reading this may already know that it’s not easy being green (thanks Kermit) and in order to obtain LEED certification you have to put yourself to the test through the USGBC’s certification process. The USGBC’s website has a multitude of information about the process, helpful documents and guides, a listing of professionals that are LEED accredited and schedules for LEED training workshops and conferences. The certification is performed by a third-party who will evaluate the building to ensure that it meets the highest standards of sustainability. If you’re uncertain as to whether or not your building has the potential to be LEED certified, take a moment to review the LEED checklist.

Going through this process has incredible rewards for not only for the environment but from a financial standpoint. When your building is LEED certified you qualify for special tax rebates, zoning allowances and benefits in hundreds of other cities. The federal economic stimulus package also provides existing buildings the opportunity to take advantage of these benefits by properly retrofitting current equipment and structures. As you can see, LEED is the yardstick by which the green building industry is measured through its efforts to champion environmental friendliness and efficient use of energy. In my final installment of this series I’ll discuss how sustainable building should stay afloat amidst the economic downturn – yes some industries will thrive during this and I believe sustainability is just now gaining popularity. Until our next discussion, go green!

See more at www.acreageanywhere.com

Well, the elation of seeing our gorgeous off grid house construction progress was tempered with the anger that sometime yesterday, on Thanksgiving, people felt they could saunter onto private property and enjoy our house kit, eating and discarding snack food bags and soda cans in our environmentally friendly home. I know it was none of our neighbors, all whom have farms and homesteads and respect and care for each other. I suspect it was the deer hunters in the hunt club that are leasing property behind us, who travel over 2 hours to this pristine area then loose their dogs and run amok regardless of people's legal boundaries. Our neighbor across the street has already had confrontations with these men, one of them berating their teenage daughter when she boldly started writing down trespassers' license plates... Obviously whomever littered and lingered in our future home had no regard for family or private property, no matter how many "no hunting" signs you post. It is something we, as a community and neighbors, will have to aggressively address to protect our privacy and ensure there are no unknown bands of rifle-toting trespassers about thinking any movement might be deer. (Yes we wear blaze orange. But stupid people who feel they can loiter on land that's not theirs certainly don't have the brain to distinguish between a fleeing buck or a playing child.) Anyway, while I stew on this, here's a new 360 picture of the interior... if you can't see it then you can see the full posthere on my blog. (FYI you can arrow up and down and all around... have fun!) [Still thinking about the fact that trespassers littered and loitered in our future home. Stupid landless poacher deer hunters...] Ok, fine, on to gorgeous house kit environmentally friendly passive solar design! (Heh heh... believe me... I will be much better equipped to deal with trespassers by next week... love my scouting cameras and er, some other tricks up my sleeve!) Honestly, aside from the initial shock (but really, not a big surprise especially as our neighbors had just been telling us what a problem non-neighbors were during deer season), it was a lovely day. I asked Ron for his guest blogger comments, but he smiled and said there were no surprises. We took an old friend out with us, and I am looking forward (hint, hint Tony!) to hearing his thoughts and sharing them. He loved the house kit, loved the placement of the house on the site, the window/lighting... and had some great ideas of what to do in landscaping along the north side that borders the field... To actually walk around the interior... these photos do not do it justice. Natural light, high ceilings, the flow, the views while maintaining privacy... it all seems so much *more* than a small footprint home would seem to feel. I would have taken some videos but the Amish were working and I didn't want to worry them about a camera (we took all these pictures after they had left for the day, hence the dusk feel of the light). Speaking of the Amish, it was really nice to meet the crew- and one of them I knew! We both smiled when we saw each other: For years, we stop right outside the town at "The Amish Children's Stand." There, various siblings man a booth where they sell jams, relishes, bread, cookies, and vegetables in season... Anyway, there's always a older child or two, maybe 2 middle children, and one young child there. It turns out that one of the eldest is now old enough to start doing some more kinds of work... like being on the crew of building a modern off grid house kit! It was a funny moment. By the time we would pull up to that Amish childrens' stand we would have been traveling with 2 (very young back then) whiny children, two wild dogs (one who was usually on my lap)... and we'd tumble out to get our bread, etc. for the weekend and this same child would gape at us... I'd explain we had traveled far to be there, that we were camping, had no shelter, but hoped to one day have a home, how much we loved the area and community... And here he was, now all grown up, building my home. : ) "Well," I said to him, "Now you know where the Crazy Family lives!" And he laughed. : )

WE HAVE A ROOF!!!!!
: )
I can not *begin* to tell you what this feels like.
It was so amazing to walk around this weekend, with the wall panels up, taking our silly amateur videos, experiencing the walls of our *dream* finally there, solid... reality.

So imagine how I feel seeing pictures of our modern house structure with a roof.

THANK YOU Ron Bernaldo and Daniel Esh and their crew (um, guess Daniel won't be seeing this since Amish don't have email... :) )- and I look forward to thanking them all in person.

[Much less throw a big party!]

Please welcome again Ron Bernaldo, fabulous contractor.
His voice, I just type. : )
(BTW Ron, er, nice Arnold Schwarzenegger impression there!
Hahahaha!)

"The good news is... if the structure isn't high out of the ground, at least the 16/18 out of the ground, the roof panels are being set with a 4 man crew, because they're light enough they can be set by hand without a forklift or crane. IF it's close to the ground.

The assembly is easier on the roof panels than the walls.

Wednesday we won't get all the panels set because that side of the house (framing structure of the south side with all the clerestory windows, although the windows are on the north side) is more complicated than today's low north side.

I think we can wrap this up by Monday.
IF I'm right, and we wrap up (tomorrow is an Amish wedding and Bear Hunting Day. One Amish is going to a wedding, the others are bear hunting) on Monday, then we will be a day UNDER what I was hoping for.

The Amish driver and I are going to load up and install windows and doors on Friday while the other others are working on the roof panels on the south side."

Copeland's note: "Sigh... our dream is becoming reality!" : )

More modern design, passive solar house kit updates... We headed out to the land today... It was cold, but beautiful.

You could see the sun on the foundation, demonstrating it's passive solar house energy efficiency even before it was weather tight. It was amazing to walk around there, realizing that is 1,200 square feet of efficient, happy living. There is nothing we need. And we can have all our friends over. For all our stages of life. The one thing you need to note in these pictures/video is that some of the interior braces will be removed, there is storage/systems space in there but they did that to quickly allow for the roof panels they will add tomorrow.

For some reason my 360 pics won't show on Building Green, so if you would like to see them you can go here: See 360pics on my blog here.

Here's the latest house kit update from Ron, our wonderful, money-saving contractor:

I started the call mentioning how dramatic the sky looked in the pictures he took.

His reply? ; )

"I didn't even see 'em, I was looking at the house.

All the outside walls were up, within 2 hours of what I had hoped.

We have no crew tomorrow because of the Amish wedding, Thursday we'll put the top plate in and build a bearing wall in the middle.
Friday we're out...

We won't set panels until Monday morning."