SunDesign's blog

How will Obama’s energy polices affect our homes? We won’t really know until his proposals are debated and enacted by congress, but we can get a sense of what might happen from his campaign’s position statements. From his campaign website’s fact sheet his stated position on building energy efficiency is as follows:

“Obama…will establish a goal of making all new buildings carbon neutral, or produce zero emissions, by 2030. [He] will also establish a national goal of improving new building efficiency by 50 percent and existing building efficiency by 25 percent over the next decade to help us meet the 2030 goal.”

This is straight from the playbook of Ed Mazra’s Architecture 2030 Challenge. As evidenced by the following quote from the 2030 website, the 2030 Challenge is predicated on climate change and the reduction of green house gas emissions associated with the Building Sector.

for more go to: http://sunhomedesign.wordpress.com/2008/11/10/theobamaenergyplanandourho...

There are two ways to store heat and even out the diurnal or daily temperature swings in buildings. One is with massive material's like stone, brick, and concrete the other is with phase change materials or PCM's.

A material is said to “change phase” when energy is either added or removed to cause it to change from a liquid state to a solid state or from liquid state to a gaseous state. For example, it takes a considerable amount of energy to transform ice into water and in the process the temperature remains at 32° F. This energy storage capacity within the phase change is called “latent heat” and when harnessed allows for the storage of heat energy in a fraction of the volume required by materials like stone or concrete.

For building applications, you want this phase change to occur at or near the desired room temperature, so custom wax formulations are usually the material of chose. As the cost of energy has increased, interest in PCM technology has also increased.

In 2005, Oak Ridge National Laboratory teamed with Advanced Fiber Technology and BASF, demonstrated that a 2x6 wall insulated with cellulose insulation seeded with 22% PCM reduced the surface heat flow rate by 40%.

PCM seeded insulation is not yet commercially available, however BASF has developed a drywall product called SmartBoard™ that is available in the EU that incorporates microscopic polymer spheres filled with wax. Applying this 15-mm (0.59 inch) thick drywall product is the equivalent of adding a 9-cm (3.54 inches) thick layer of concrete. SmartBoard™ is supplied with a choice of two “switching” or PCM melt temperatures, 23°C(73.4°F) and 26°C(78.8°F) designed to accommodate both heating dominated and cooling dominated climates.

For complete article go to: http://sunhomedesign.wordpress.com/2008/05/19/phase-change-materials-%e2...

I received an email last week from Scot Horst , who chairs the LEED Steering Committee. He describes the behind the scenes narrative that has been going on since work began on LEED 2009.

Person A: “Global warming doesn't give us much time.”

Person B: “But we can't address much of anything, let alone global warming, if we're only dealing with a small fraction of the entire built environment. We need to get everyone involved.”

Person A: “Yes, but why get them involved in a system that doesn't take them far enough to save us from ourselves? We need our buildings to be restorative.”

Person B: “LEED can't save us from ourselves. LEED, as a tool, can engage the market in transformation. That transformation is about people. It is not about LEED credits.”

Person A: “You're missing the point. We have to be tougher. We have to go beyond.”

Person B: “No, you're missing the point. We have to find ways to engage a market that has never thought about these issues before.”

Persons A and B: “Let's find a way to do both.”

This is an engaging and very important narrative and perhaps the most important point is that LEED is a “tool” that helps to raise consciousness and “engage the market in transformation.” My personal view is that we must “go beyond” and that much of what we currently do in the green building movement, however well intentioned, is nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic. The global warming mentioned in Horst's narrative has provided the catalyst for both LEED and Architccture 2030, but focusing solely on warming misses the point. Warming is a symptom and not a cause. It has prompted us to take some action, but not to “go beyond”.

As a premise for action it has been useful, but is easily attacked on it's “scientific validity”. It is one of the canaries in the coal mine, but there is very little discussion of the coal mine. We need to expand the narrative and take a broader view. Borrowing from basic premise of ecological economics, once you picture the built environment as a mere subset of our closed ecosystem, then your conceptual framework regarding sustainable building is forever changed. It means you have to accept that there are limits, and that we are not going to be able to grow forever. It implies the built environment must have some optimal size and level of consumption relative to the larger ecosystem. It means you cannot grow beyond that optimum without threatening man's survival within that ecosystem. Out of this stream of thought flows a long list of very troubling questions: How do we stop growing? What are the limits? What is optimal? Does climate change tell us they have already been exceeded? Do we face a kind of built environment armageddon when fossil fuel production peaks and begins to decline? Is a zero energy standard imperative now? What do we do? How do we do it?

Our very survival depends on how and when these questions are answered. LEED does not provide the answers, but it does help us to prepare.

Solar water heaters are one of the most commercialized renewable energy technologies in the world and yet on a per capita basis, U.S. implementation ranks 28th in the world behind relatively undeveloped countries like Albania and Slovenia. China leads the world with an installed base equivalent to 52,500 megawatts of energy, more than 30 times the installed base of the U.S., and other developed countries like Germany, Japan, Switzerland, France, Austria, and Australia all rank far ahead of the U.S. in per capita solar hot water implementation.

Why does the U.S. lag so far behind the rest of world in solar hot water implementation? The answers are many and include consumer concerns about ascetics and cost, a fragmented supplier base of relatively small companies, competing technologies that make make buying decisions confusing and difficult, and the resistance of vested interests. Perhaps the biggest reason for the U.S. lag in implementation are national and state energy policies that are both incoherent and inconsistent.

[The petroleum industry] "probably has larger tax incentives relative to its size than any other industry in the country"

Donald Lubick, U.S. Department of Treasury's former Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy

“In 1946, when the American post war housing boom started, the average house was 1100 square feet and housed 5 people. Fifty years latter, in 1996 the average house would grow to 2200 square feet and house 2.6 people and by 2007, fueled by easy credit, the average American home would would become the equivalent of a Hummer, “weighing in” at super-sized 2,400 square feet.”

In 1934, during the depths of the Depression, Congress passed the National Housing Act to strengthen a deeply troubled housing market. This act created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) which was amended in 1938 to create the Federal National Mortgage Association (Ginnie Mae) – an entity designed to help mortgage lenders gain access to capital for mortgage loans. An important element of this legislation was to make mortgage funds available to more Americans by protecting lenders from the risk of default. In its earliest days, Fannie Mae nationalized the mortgage industry by creating the first mechanism in America for selling individual mortgages (backed the U.S. government) into a secondary market.

When the FHA and Fannie Mae were created, the housing industry was flat on its back:

• Two million construction workers had lost their jobs.?
• Housing finance was a fragmented, inefficient and illiquid. Mortgage rates varied considerably from region to region. In some economically distressed regions there were simply no funds available.
• Terms were very difficult to meet for homebuyers seeking mortgages.?
• Lending institutions would issue a mortgage, collect payments, and file the mortgage away until the principal was paid off. A lack of available, consistently priced capital put a hard ceiling on the number of new mortgages that could be issued.
• Mortgage loan terms were limited to 50 percent of the property's market value. Borrower's were faced with a 50% down payment and a repayment schedule spread over three to five years and ending with a large balloon payment.?
• America was primarily a nation of renters. Only four in 10 households owned homes.
• Homes were NOT considered as investments and refi's and equity withdrawals were rare events.

To continue go to: http://sunhomedesign.wordpress.com/2007/12/03/how-our-homes-became-the-e...

“The inventions of central heating and air conditioning coupled with cheap and apparently abundant fossil fuels would free building designers from considering the external environment and allow them to use brute force heating and cooling solutions to overcome building designs totally inadequate for their local climates.”

HOME HEATING IN AMERICA

For the first 100 years home heating in a heavily forested America was dominated by biomass (wood) and it was not until 1885 that the nation would burn more coal than wood. Prior to 1885 the majority of homes in America were heated with wood burning brick fireplaces and derivatives of the cast iron Franklin Stove invented in 1742.

By the end of the 19th century the invention of low cost cast iron radiators would bring central heating to America’s homes with a coal fired boiler in the basement delivering hot water or steam to radiators in every room. At about the same time, in 1885, Dave Lennox built and marketing the industry’s first riveted-steel coal furnace. Without electricity and fans to move air, these early furnaces transported heat by natural convection (warm heated air rising) through ducts from the basement furnace to the rooms above. These two methods would dominate home central heating until 1935, when the introduction of the first forced air furnace using coal as a heat source used the power of an electric fan to distribute the heated air through ductwork within the home.

To continue go to: http://sunhomedesign.wordpress.com/2007/10/26/a-brief-history-of-heating...

". . . to be considered sustainable by any rigorous definition, buildings must become energy neutral and either be built or converted to a “zero energy” building standard”

If we accept that “sustainable” takes its meaning from “sustainable agriculture“, or “the ability … to produce food indefinitely, without causing irreversible damage to ecosystem health”, then the definition of sustainable building must take on a more precise meaning. A more rigorous meaning that is quite different than what typically passes for a “green” building. (See Difference between Green and Sustainable)

What exactly might that mean? To answer that question it’s helpful to have a basic understanding of “carrying capacity”. Generally speaking, “carrying capacity” is the supportable population (animals, plants, trees, people, etc.) in a closed system, given the resources (food, water, energy, etc.) available within that system.

...to continue go to:

http://sunhomedesign.wordpress.com/2007/09/11/more-musings-on-sustainabl...

The idea of energy efficient, healthy buildings has been around for a long time, so why is just now that the concept of "green" or "sustainable" building is entering the mainstream and catching the attention of fortune 500 companies like Wall Mart, Dupont, and Home Depot? There are probably several reasons; Global Warming, rising energy costs, the growing awareness and liability costs associated with "Sick Building Syndrome”, declining oil reserves, and concerns about our limited water supply. The list goes on, but whatever the reason or reasons, sustainable building is a concept whose time has come.

Which begs the question, what is IT? The ultimate definition depends on how one defines "green" as opposed to how one defines "sustainable".

My personal definition of "green" is relatively simple. A home's design is “green” if its serves to reduce many of the harmful impacts buildings have on our environment and our home's inhabitants. So "green" home design revolves around four key issues:

1. Designing for energy efficiency including the use of renewal energy sources such as wind, geothermal, and solar.

2. Creating a healthy indoor air environment with adequate ventilation and making material choices that minimize volatile organic compound (VOC's) outgassing within the home.

3. Specifying building materials and resources that are sustainable, have low embodied energy, and produce a minimal amount of upstream environmental impact.

4. Providing for the efficient use of water via appliance, faucet, and shower head choices and in arid climates by zeroscaping and recycling grey water and capturing rain water for landscaping and other non-potable uses.

However, the words "green" and "sustainable" are often used interchangeably, and sustainable has a more precise meaning that is often obscured, distorted, and dilluted by the commercialization and marketing of the green "movement". In the context of our built environment sustainable takes its meaning from "sustainable agriculture", or "the ability ... to produce food indefinitely, without causing irreversible damage to ecosystem health".

If we accept this as the basis for the definition of sustainable building everything changes. For example, a 5,000 SF home with a HERS index of 70, bamboo floors, and Energy Star appliances may be "green", but it is NOT sustainable. In the context of Global Warming and even the most optimistic projections of Peak Oil and Gas, only a home that meets zero energy standards can be considered sustainable.

Borrowing from A. A. Bartlett's Laws of Sustainability, here are my own Laws of Sustainable Housing.

1st Law - U.S. urban sprawl and the growth in home sizes and the associated energy and resource consumption is not sustainable.

2nd Law - Retrofitting over 100 million (energy inefficient) homes in American to a condition of sustainability will be a monumental task.

3rd Law - In the context of Global Warming and even the most optimistic projections of Peak Oil & Natural Gas, new and retrofitted homes should only be built to net zero energy standards.

4th Law - The size of population that can be sustained (the carrying capacity) and the sustainable average size and resource consumption of our homes are inversely related to one another. In other words, if the population increases the size and resource consumption of our homes must decrease to achieve a sustainable balance.

5th Law - The U.S. cannot sustain average home sizes that are more than twice the average size of other developed countries.

6th Law - All countries cannot simultaneously be net importers of carrying capacity(fossil fuels, etc.).

7th Law - The importation of such a large percentage of our energy carrying capacity makes the current U.S. standard and pattern of building extremely vulnerable.

8th Law - The benefits of suburban sprawl accrue to the developer and auto companies; the benefits of poor energy efficiency and standards accrue to energy companies and utilities; but the costs are borne by us all.

9th Law - Inadequate U.S. building energy standards are contributing to a rapid depletion of our natural gas and other fossil fuel resources. This is true not only within our borders but via our high level of imports, it is true worldwide.

10th Law - Net zero building energy standards will be necessary to slow the depletion of fossil fuels in a pre and post Peak Oil and Gas world.

11th Law - Converting our existing housing stock to a much higher energy standard will be completed negated by even a modest growth rate in new homes, however energy efficient those new homes may be.

12th Law - Smart residental growth is an oxymoron.

13th Law - Building should restricted on prime agricultural land. The highest and best use of land is for agriculture, especially to local food supplies.

14th Law - Energy shortages due to peak oil and gas will slow and then eventually stop housing growth and force the transformation of our existing housing stock.

15th Law - People living in slums don't care about sustainable housing.

16th Law - The addition of the phrase “sustainable housing” or “sustainable development” or “green building” to our vocabulary is not sufficient to ensure that our built environment becomes sustainable.

17th Law - The current state of our green, sustainable building “movement” may amount to nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

The growth of civilization has been intimately linked to our ability to harness energy since man's discovery of fire. Our reliance on biomass (wood) and eventually, the wind and hydro power of mills would limit our growth until the use of coal and the invention of the steam engine would launch the industrial revolution. However, it was the discovery of energy dense, crude oil in 1865 that would catapult us into a whole new age of growth, mobility, and abundance. What is “sustainable” is based on carrying capacity, and every human advance in the use and amount of available energy would serve to increase both the population and economic carrying capacity of the earth.

The shear abundance of cheap oil over the last 150 years would change the face of architecture and built environment. Architects and building designers no longer had to consider local climate conditions, they could let their imaginations and ego's run wild and rely on brute force heating and cooling to save the day. Architects like Phillip Johnson would build their design fame and fortune with glass homes in Connecticut and glass skyscrapers in Houston. Buildings that reply for their very existence on cheap and abundant energy.

more>>> http://sunhomedesign.wordpress.com/2007/08/

“People cannot stand too much reality” - Carl Jung

I’ve been musing lately about exactly what it means to be sustainable in the context of residential building. Since words are the symbols we blogger’s use to communicate, I checked my American Heritage dictionary and found that “sustainable” in today’s lexicon means “capable of being continued with minimal long-term effect on the environment” as in “sustainable agriculture”. That didn’t quite do it for me. It’s the kind of feel good definition that allows people to build 10,000 SF homes with bamboo floors, dual flush toilets, and a HERS index of 85 and call themselves “green”. So I continued looking and found that one of the definitions for “sustain” is “to support from below; keep from falling or sinking; or to prop.” Since our built environment has been “propped” up and shaped by cheap oil for about a 100 years, I found that definition more on the mark.

Getting back to our friend Dr. Jung, our not so sustainable residential lives are about to be turned upside down by three major reality checks. At the risk of being labeled as a “crazed and raving doomsdayer”, let just say, it is going to be painful.

...for the complete text