There seems to be a decent amount of alphabet soup or certification “choice” when it comes to energy efficiency and measuring your “green-ness” – but realistically, what does it mean and what is it worth? We’ve already established that the mortgage industry and the appraisal system doesn’t give it a hoot, and since we’re not a builder – what the heck does any of this stuff MEAN to us? Overall, nothing. Well, that’s not entirely true – it should result in lower operating costs and a “better” home. But at what cost? What’s the payback calculation? There’s no way in Hades that we’ll ever pay for our uber windows in energy savings with anything close to the current rates for power in the US. So why do it?
Maybe we’re looking at this wrong. It’s not about the certifications, (although we believe they DO have value for both builders and suppliers of the materials for the project) it’s about building the High Performance Home. THAT’S my new personal certification – HPH. Everyone else seems to have a certification program – why not me? HPH fits a theme here – we have high performance “stuff”. My daily driver car is a 469 HP station wagon. It’s not the highest HP car out there – but in it’s class, it’s top of the heap. Henry drives a Dodge Cummins diesel dually pickup. All the wheels and all the torque – a high performance towing machine. We have a little vice in that we drive Dodge / SRT Vipers. Very high performance American muscle. This level of high performance may not be necessary, but it’s pretty cool when you can achieve it. And ultimately, that’s what we want for our house: quite simply, a house that performs to the level of the rest of our lives.
But- since HPH is not a globally recognized certification (yet), what are our options?
LEED can be regarded as being a little prescriptive and judgmental (after all – what the hell would we do with an electric car charging station? Unless I get a Tesla) and there’s a lot of focus on stuff we can’t control – we’re not an infill lot and our “walkability” score is pretty low. But then DOES cover things like Indoor Air Quality which we believe to be a real benefit to living better. LEED incorporates this measure, and also Energy Star into its rating system, so you are getting a little more bang for your buck here. And maybe feeling that you are looking at your home’ performance from a multifaceted approach, and building a High Performance Home.
But then you look at Passive House – I call this the Engineer’s certification. It’s VERY much performance based and focused on energy usage, and not wasting energy. This certification becomes very much a numbers game. Without being all that smart on Passive House – it’s close to saying that your energy usage is about 10% of something “normal” for your home’s size and location. It also says that you take advantage of passive means to heat (and cool or avoid heat) the home – so using solar warming of a slab concrete floor, for example. In this regard, Passive House is right up our alley. They are VERY interested in building envelope performance- with requirements for multipoint blower door tests and other more stringent qualifications. The other good news is that Passive House seems to be “flexible” in how you meet the requirements – and for an out of the box project like this – that’s GOOD news. So – this very much works with the High Performance Home theme. Passive House also incorporates the Department of Energy’s Challenge Home criteria – so again – more recognized certs as part of a higher level program.
With this in mind, we’re going to see if we can meet Passive House without any major design or building plan changes, as it’s highly regarded as a standard for PERFORMANCE. Once we know if we can pre-certify – we’ll show you the numbers and talk about it more and see if it really makes sense to got for the full certification process or just “built to the Passive House standard” that often gets used instead. In the meantime – let’s hope we can nail a high performance BUDGET…
If all goes well, we’ll be able to move to submit for our building permit this week – another milestone we need to make. Onward!
P.S. What do you think of the new rendering???
Honestly, I am at the end of my “playing nice” rope. Appraisal saga continues. As noted before – we had some issues in the comps – specifically the Energy Efficiency line item for comparison vs other new homes that do not appear to have any energy efficiency features AT ALL.
I would like to get back to the “fun” stuff. Some more design decisions, envisioning how we’re going to finish the rooms – bathrooms, kitchen, etc. And I would REALLY like to see some dirt moving. I think that once that happens, I will know it’s real. And it will be easier to engage with the rest of the suppliers, ask for best and final pricing, and nail down some details. It’s hard to maintain focus on the project until this financials are done and WORK starts. I know Tonic is eager to start too – and are feeling a little bit like Charlie Brown and the football.
I look at conventional 2×4 construction as “lowest common denominator” construction – while it is cost effective I find it to be incredibly wasteful and sloppy. It also has a fundamental problem that we needed to avoid to achieve our “cooler” concept of thermally isolating the inside of the house from the outside as much as possible. Every 2×4 creates thermal paths between inside and outside surfaces, thus creating thousands of holes in the thermally isolated “bucket” that we are trying to achieve.
