Charlie Hamilton of Suncrest Homes has been building in Southern Oregon for 23 years. Before the recession hit, Suncrest was rolling out 40 homes a year, mostly in sub-divisions. Though they were profiting from the housing bubble, Hamilton had a hunch the pace wasn’t sustainable.
At the Showcase Home in Shady Cove, Oregon
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The Showcase Home in Shady Cove, OR provides an excellent example of how to build a cost effective, energy efficient home. Alternative and affordable construction techniques used in the Showcase Home will save the future homeowner money and increase the comfort of the home.
The builder used advanced framing techniques of: 24” on center studs, insulated headers and raised heel trusses all of which significantly increased the insulation levels of the thermal envelope. This strategy not only saves energy but it reduced cost of materials by using less wood.
Read More »Over the years green building certification programs like Earth Advantage, ENERGY STAR, LEED for Homes and EarthCraft have evolved with the building trade. As builders incorporate more green building practices as standard, green building programs have always had to evolve to stay one step ahead of the curve (and/or the code).
Read More »With the downturn in the housing market many builders and developers are looking for creative solutions to weather the storm. This has resulted in a number of different tactics by builders including a focus on the remodel market, building at the lowest possible cost, building green or high performance homes, or just getting out of the industry all together.
Arguably, one of the most interesting approaches builders have used to differentiate themselves is embracing transparency, allowing the homebuyer to truly understand what they are purchasing. Builders have begun to use green building certifications and energy performance scores as tools to achieve this more transparent message. By bringing progressive construction features into the foreground, builders are creating a new set of buying criteria not seen before in the residential market. The measures they are highlighting -- that improve energy efficiency, durability, and improve air quality -- should be important to consumers. Many of America’s leading builders, such as KB Homes, are making this case to their buyers every day.
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A morning inspection at a home built by W. A. Hughes home -- Oregon High Performance Home, Energy Star, Earth Advantage Gold Certified |
Being an Earth Advantage field technician requires juggling. Not the flaming sticks kind, but close to it. The team has to be highly proficient in time management, building science and above all, communication skills. With hundreds of new homes to verify each year, field techs need to distinguish what type of job they are inspecting -- Earth Advantage New Homes with ENERGY STAR energy features, ENERGY STAR-only home, a LEED for Homes project or a basic home that only gets an Energy Performance Score (EPS). Once this is recorded, the tech then needs to look at project location (Oregon or Washington) to determine what set of inspection criteria to follow.
The EAI field techs start their day by downloading specific job files assigned to them from the EA New Homes Scheduler. Once the files are downloaded, they plan out a geographic route that takes them to all of their jobs and hopefully ends up near their home or close to the office to end their day. This can become challenging depending on “windshield time” (miles to drive) and in what direction and/or if any of their inspections are time-sensitive. We strive to finalize scheduling within the 1st hour of the work day so we can “escape” before being pulled into other office functions that are not necessarily related to inspections. A delayed departure can cause extra stress on the field tech as they know they have a certain amount of work to perform at each site that can take anywhere from 1 -3 hours depending on the type of inspection.
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Would anyone think it’s wise to put a V-8 engine in a Vespa scooter? Well, I can think of some suicidal television talent that might think that was cool. With the famous last words -- “Watch this!” -- they would ride into oblivion. But, most of us aren’t showing off for the camera.
We’re more or less rational, so applying unnecessary power to a problem seems wasteful. But that’s standard practice for most new homes built with forced air systems. With today’s modern energy standards, a forced air furnace is typically oversized. For example, a new, 2200 sq. ft. home built to the current Northwest ENERGY STAR (2008) standard would have a design heat load of about 28,000 btu/hr. That’s the amount of heating capacity needed to keep the house comfortable in the coldest expected conditions for western Oregon and east of the Cascades.
Read More »Here's a great example of how to properly insulate the furnace supply and return plenums. At Sage Built Homes, West Haven, near Sylvan.
The advantages of insulated ducts are numerous:
Improve Comfort: Duct insulation minimizes conductive heat losses and gains, allowing supply air to be delivered closer to desired temperatures. In winter, leaks of heated air will be reduced in rooms supplied with long duct runs. This can result in quicker recovery from night-time setbacks and a more consistent level of comfort throughout a house.
With the war in Afghanistan now in its ninth year and no immediate end in sight, many of us have pushed the mission out of our immediate consciousness as something that’s happening “over there.” Occasionally we will be reminded of the violence by a particularly heinous or tragic event. Yet in our numbness we are prone to forget the real cost of the war in lives lost and lives changed, both military and civilian lives. As deaths and casualties continue we can expect to see the cost increasingly brought home to our own communities.
Already as many as 3,420 soldiers have been seriously injured in Afghanistan, not including the 31, 882 who were injured in Iraq. These wounded soldiers who volunteered to serve their country are now steadily returning home to their families and hometowns. After coping with physical healing and rehab, these men and women must now face re-integration into a society that is largely ignorant of what they went through, and deal with the more mundane but difficult stress of providing for family and functioning normally in society.
Read More »The Unique Advantage of High Performance Homes
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One of the biggest challenges builders face is the inventory of existing homes for sale. The financial crisis has raised this issue to a critical point because much of this inventory consists of foreclosed homes that the lenders are selling at a deep discount. Realtytrac expects 1.2 million homes will be repossessed in 2011, which is 20% more than in 2010 and would signal the peak of this current foreclosure crisis. These foreclosed homes on the market are known as the “visible” inventory. Unfortunately, the housing market will not bounce back until most of these units have been sold, as consumers are hesitant to buy if they think prices will continue to drop. Another threat is the “shadow” inventory, which are homes lenders have foreclosed on, or will soon, but are withholding from the market because they don’t want to further depress prices. Corelogic estimates that as of August 2010 the shadow inventory consisted of 2,100,000 housing units! The other component of existing inventory, speculative new home construction, is at historic lows. As of last November there were approximately 197,000 new homes for sale nationwide, the lowest since March 1968. Therefore, a new home builder is much more likely to be competing against an existing home than a new home.
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An unprecedented number of architects, contractors, and real-estate related professionals in Oregon are currently unemployed or underemployed. It’s no secret that the housing industry has been one of the hardest hit sectors of the U.S. economy since the 2008 recession. Despite the dark clouds that have surrounded the housing industry over the past two years, a silver lining has emerged.
Read More »By Guest Writer Jordan Palmeri, Oregon Department of Environmental Quality
Are you aware of the Accessory Dwelling Units concept? An ADU (Accessory Dwelling Unit) is a second dwelling unit created on a residential lot. The second unit is created as a smaller auxiliary to the main dwelling.. These homes represent a tremendous opportunity to improve a community’s environmental, economic, and social well being. From an environmental standpoint, small homes use fewer materials, less energy, create less waste, and increase density. Initially, they can also provide a more feasible scale for incorporating reused and natural building materials, and achieving green building standards such as Passive House and the Living Building Challenge.
Read More »In a typical year, millions of houses are built. Each house will last 50 to 100 years. Today each new house encumbers society with a debt of energy required to operate it over its life. The vast majority of houses built today are old-fashioned energy hogs and each one is a missed opportunity.
Energy visionaries have set their sights on homes that create more than they consume. In ten to twenty years, every new building could be a “zero-energy building,” Or “net zero.” The technology exists today, all we lack is the proper motivation.
Read More »It’s more than bamboo floors and low-VOC paint. A green home contains a collection of design elements, materials, and equipment assembled with careful attention to detail.
The global economy is about to enter the zero-energy generation. Over the next 2 decades, residential buildings will evolve to a point where they generate as much energy as they consume over the course of a typical year. Because it is generally less expensive to conserve energy than it is to generate energy, this “net-zero” energy approach starts with the outside shell: floors, walls, and ceilings. It’s like an overcoat and requires as much insulating value as can be accommodated in the walls, ceilings, and floors. Air leakage must be restricted as much as possible by sealing every opening, crack, and penetration with caulk, gaskets, or expanding foam sealant. Windows lose 7 to 10 times more heat than walls, so the windows must be oriented to maximize or minimize heat loss and solar gain as appropriate to the local climate and building design. The building shell has no moving parts and should last the life of the house, so it pays to make it as efficient as possible at the outset.
Read More »While fewer new homes were built in the past year in the Portland metropolitan area than in the previous year, the market share of third party certified homes increased. Twenty three percent (23%) of all newly constructed homes in the Portland metropolitan area sold between May 1, 2009 and April 30, 2010 received a third party certification. This finding is based upon data reported by the Portland area RMLS to Earth Advantage Institute.
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