Green Homes Sell For More: Confirmed!

Before joining Earth Advantage Institute (EAI), I moved to Bend, Oregon and built the greenest house that I could afford. I just sold this house in a down market. The asking price was $30,000 higher than the market value and I received a full-price offer less than twelve hours after the ‘For Sale’ sign was planted out front.

Build It Tight, Ventilate It Right: Part 1

What is the difference between air tightness, air infiltration, & air leakage? People often make the mistake of thinking that an airtight building is a ‘stuffy’ building. This is not necessarily the case nor is it the intent of creating air tight structures.  Airtightness is NOT the measurement of the amount of fresh air available to the occupants, but rather is the measurement of how much air will leak into and out of the home through undesirable locations, such as small cracks and holes in the building shell. 

Eavesdropping for Efficiency

My office, as one of EAI's Education Specialists, is quite close to our classroom. Naturally, the classroom dialouge tends to drift over the walls, so I've become pretty adept at tuning it out. Every once in a while though, something catches my ear. The most recent example of this was a statement made at our Sustainability Training for Accredited Real Estate Professionals (STAR) class a few months ago. 

Affordable Green Home Plans from a Certified EA Professional

Recently an Earth Advantage Institute certified Sustainable Homes Professional, Bruce Butler, wrote to us to let us know how our training paid off for him. Bruce has developed sustainable house plans for stock plan purchase.

I'd like to add that the pay-off is really for all of us. These aren't your ordinary stock plans! As we move toward more sustainable building, we need designers like Bruce to make house plans available to builders and consumers.

Changing Multifamily Tenant Behavior after Energy/Water Retrofits

K-Station is a multifamily project located in Portland, OR working towards LEED Platinum certification.

This summer Earth Advantage invited Fiona Hoffman Harland, an intern from Hamilton College, to assess multifamily energy and water retrofits. Her study is one of relevance to everyone involved in the multifamily market. How do you encourage tenant engagement and use of energy efficient living systems?  Fiona discovered that “after tenants and staff understand the importance of saving energy and know how the newly installed technologies work, systems must be in place to support those involved and allow them to act on the new behavior for an extended period of time.” 

Cost Effective Energy Efficiency

At the Showcase Home in Shady Cove, Oregon

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.

What’s the Energy Performance of Your Home?

With the downturn in the housing market that has resulted in a new economic environment in the building industry, many builders and developers are looking for creative solutions to weather the storm.  This has resulted in builders using a number of different strategies, including focusing on the remodel market, building at the lowest cost possible, building green or high-performance homes, or just getting out of the industry all together.  

The State of the Union, Clean Coal Ads, Green Jobs , Energy Efficiency and Van Jones.

Best quote of the week: In a discussion of building energy efficiency and building performance labeling, and making an analogy to the current requirement to provide miles per gallon information when selling a car, Van Jones proclaimed: “It’s criminal that we don’t provide Energy Performance Scores on all our buildings.”

Worst quote of the week: In online ads interrupting the State of the Union address: “Clean Coal.” Courtesy of the American Coalition of Clean Coal Electricity 

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of joining Van Jones in a roundtable discussion preceding his lecture hosted by the University of Oregon on “The Next American Economy.”  Van Jones is a leader in the clean energy economy and social justice movements, a senior fellow at the Center For American Progress, a senior policy advisor at Green For All, and is the author of the NYT bestseller The Green Collar Economy.  What I enjoyed most about the conversation with Jones was his emphasis on Efficiency First, both as a policy approach, as well as a personal approach. In fact, he suggested that everyone should have a “house tune up,” just like we schedule our regular car tune ups.  As a green building non-profit, EAI focuses specifically on energy efficiency, but as Jones points out, it should be a priority for everyone.  Why exactly, you ask? What about renewables?