Category Archives: building

Financing the Energy Efficient Home – Saga Part 2

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How can you get your Green Home the credit it deserves?

How can you get Green Home credit?

So – what’s next?

After doing a bunch of internet research, and trying to learn as much as I can about the appraisal process by pouring over old appraisals, we’re trying again.

One site, Green Building Advisor, had a wealth of knowledge about this process with one blog, especially helpful – not only in the content, but also in the comments.  This guy seemed to be having the same issues I had.  More research, more info, more education.  Appraisers are generally reeling from the mortgage / banking mess as well, as banks try to look for a convenient scapegoat for “over valuing” homes.  Granted, there were some appraisers that may have been unethical, but the vast majority of them are only comparing homes to other sales – so once the avalanche over snowballing prices starts, they just need to keep up with the numbers.

Appraisers are all about “comps“.  Comparable properties that are close enough to your property that they can, through a series of additions and deductions for features and specifications, determine a “value“.  Realize that in new construction this is a complete crapshoot.  Add in a “green” home and you have entered into the world of a complex appraisal, and this requires someone with some specialized training.

The governing professional organization of appraisers is the Appraisal Institute.  And, because of the growing issue with “green” valuations, they have developed an addendum to the standard form that is amazingly thorough in outlining the features of a green home.  Everything from your thermal envelope, to blower door tests, to indoor air quality.  In order for an appraiser to fully utilize this form, they NEED to have specialized training.  Too many appraisers just crunch the numbers with little understanding of the real differences in systems and other features, instead putting “typical” in the area on the main 2 page comp sheet.  To be blunt, they need to be able to understand that HERS is not the opposite of his…

ai-residential-green-energy-effecient-addendum

Another vestige of the housing mess, is that banks can no longer have a direct relationship with the appraisals.  In order to remove cronyism and the ability to target a “certain” appraiser, banks now need to use clearinghouses that assign appraisers from a pool so that you never know who you will get and, supposedly, this adds integrity into the process. Couple this with the fact that the homeowner is likely kept as far away from this process as possible, when you are doing a house this cutting edge, you are relying on the mortgage person to convey this to the appraiser.

The good news is that you CAN require some training when you submit the request to the clearinghouse, you CAN insist that the 820.04 addendum be used, and you CAN approve the appraiser that the pool assigns.  I guess since you are writing the check, they give you SOME input.

SO – because of the help and the research on the Green Building Advisor site, we’re trying this again.  We’re providing our preliminary HERS rating, and our expected LEED Platinum status, as well as a ton of other documentation.  I am meeting with the appraiser at the property Tuesday (due to the fact you cannot just drive by and access the property).  Hopefully, having an educated appraiser will help us get to where we need to be and we can start this project in July still.

Stay tuned for Part 3 – I hope it’s labeled SUCCESS!

The Thermal Envelope

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If you can’t tell – I’m the ‘She’ in the About Us page.  I am not the technical engineer.  I have a good solid understanding of mechanics and more technical things based on my career, experience and the fact that I can be a little bit of a gearhead with the cars.  However, I am also a sales / marketing person at heart and I am a firm believer in “Do not let Perfect be the enemy of Good”.  I am an 85% is FINE – get it done person.  So – I blog.  I write.  I am the extrovert.  I am the one usually spinning out of control and scurrying around.

I share this because you will see some posts from the ‘He’ here shortly and just in case you couldn’t tell – I wanted to let you know you’d see several authors.  Also – if you want more of the nitty gritty technical stuff – it’s coming.  Trust me.

At a higher level – I may be focused more on aesthetics than performance, but I do appreciate a high performance ANYTHING.  I also appreciate that our current house was overbuilt and outperforms all the other houses in the neighborhood.  We’ve already been familiar with geothermal heat pumps, alternative types of insulation, better sealed envelopes and windows with argon filled sealed spaces and low e coatings.

After we selected the wall system – it became apparent that we were onto something – one product – several functions.  It begged some thought and discussion about how to carry this “theme” to other areas.  Hubby had said early on as an “architect test” that he wanted a house with no 2×4’s and no sheetrock, and it appeared we could get that for the walls by using concrete sandwich panels.  Also, with steel, concrete and glass being our mantra, we had a lot of flexibility on materials.

Roofing traditionally is metal or membrane or shingles.  Since we had rejected the flat roof purely out of functional paranoia, a single sloped roof was in order.  However, I was 100% in love with the flat roof “look” and it fit so nicely into my mind’s eye of the mid century look I was trying to get.  Enter the insulated roof panel.  Initially developed for refrigerated buildings, we could easily now get R-50 in a LONG panel that was totally thermally isolated and that gave us the inner and outer surfaces, as well as some great insulation.  Several companies provide this type of panel, but we found a local installer and a fairly local manufacturer.  Metl-Span had just what we needed and Metal Roofing Corporation is an amazing partner and dove in helping us fully utilize the benefits of the product for both our roof, as well as the extensive shading structures we have to manage the summer sun.

red roof

The roof helps with LEED (insulation factor, airtight, no thermal paths, and solar reflectivity – not to mentions “local” material within a few hundred miles.) and provided the look and feel we were going for.  The inside of the roof will sit on our open bar joists (for a loft like look) and provide the finished ceiling.

Next – we’ll see how International Precast was able to help us connect the roof to the wall insulation as the cooler building (ha! pun!) continues.

We’re building a cooler.

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A cooler what, you ask?  No, a cooler.

The reason a cooler works so well at maintaining the temperature of the things inside it, is that it fully insulates the contents from the ambient temperature.  For the most part (except for the opening lid) there is no thermal path that connects and conducts outside temp to inside temp.  Therefore, your beers stay icy cold!

coolerWhile we might not want to be icy cold, certainly the thermal envelope of any building is the single most important part of the building process, and minimizing the thermal paths, from outside to inside is paramount (as is sealing it up, but more on that later).

Conventional construction – whether 2×4’s or 2×6’s or even 2×8’s have wooden thermal paths every 16 to 24 inches or so.  Therefore, you can stuff some high R value insulation in those spaces, but your still fighting those paths.  Folks have gotten around that but essentially building a house within a house and offsetting the studs, but that seemed, to us, to be a little complicated.  So – what will we use for a wall system?  What can minimize these thermal paths, and is durable and cost effective?  SIP panels?  These are a really good product to minimize the thermal paths, but still very conventional and you still have to put something on the inside of them for walls, and then something else for your exterior finish.

We’d heard about some concrete panels with insulation – essentially the Superior Walls method, but that still wasn’t the answer.  Finally – we found the concrete sandwich panel.  3 inches of concrete, 4 inches of insulation, and then 3 more inches of concrete.  What this did, was allowed the panels to provide our exterior finish (remember – we like the minimalist aesthetic), our insulation, and our interior wall – which we can paint, adorn, or leave in all its grey glory.

Interestingly, this “all in one” material started us down a path for a couple of themes, including one material providing finished inside / insulation / finished outside and also working to minimize the subcontractor on the project to try to contain costs.

So – we now have the walls for our cooler – and we’ll talk about how the insulation could be continuous around the house…..

What do we want?

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questionsSimple question, right?  But the answer isn’t the simple.  We knew we wanted an energy efficient home, but “how” energy efficient?  We knew we wanted a Modernist home, but how Modern?

We knew we wanted one level.  Having lived in our current home that is essentially 3 levels – and really only using one – it’s apparent that the other floors are somewhat wasted.  And – since we have dogs – old dogs and blind dogs – accessibility is important.  Having elderly dogs and vision impaired dogs help you learn about things like “aging in place” and accessible (or universal) design.

I am probably more into the aesthetics and the design process than my husband.  He’s definitely into the performance and the materials.  Not to say that he’s not quite particular about design, because he is – he just sees more beauty in a functional design and I might be swayed by anything ‘shiny’…

In working with tonic design, we knew they had recently done a LEED Silver home.  What’s cool about that is that it is the was the first Modernist LEED home in NC.  With basic tenets of modern architecture being lots of light / windows / volumes, it becomes an additional challenge to make these types of homes energy efficient.  It’s pretty easy to make a box with tiny windows LEED Gold or so, but not so easy when you want to use materials like glass, steel and concrete – historically pretty horrible insulators.

As we worked through the design process, we focused on the house and the shop and how we could build efficiently, and how we could make sure that the buildings related to each other correctly and to the site correctly.  The “shop” portion of the project is important to us, so it needed to be fully integrated into the plans.  It was not going to be an ‘outbuilding’ or anything that spoke a different language than the house.

The result is ShopHouse.  A study in glass, concrete and steel that also ends up being LEED Platinum.  Getting that to happen is going to require the right materials and the right team.