Earth Advantage's Top 5 Certified Homes' Series rolls on with the 4th highest-scoring home. This home, built by WA Hughes Construction and designed by Andre DeBar, is the result of half a decade of planning. Dubbed 'Nishiki Gardens' by the homeowners. the rooftop solar features are the only hint to vistors that there might be something more to this house other than the beautiful Japanese details.
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.
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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.
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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Rivermark provides bike/walk-up teller access supporting alternative modes of transportation. |
The new Rivermark Community Credit Union on SE Hawthorne has been certified!
Rivermark is at the top of our leadership list, since this is the first building to achieve certification under the Earth Advantage Commercial pilot program, and it was the first to enroll. In addition to numerous energy efficiency and green features that helped it meet certification, this building is just plain elegant! It is designed by Baysinger Partners and constructed by LMC Construction.
The building's energy efficiency measures include a high performance envelope, efficient HVAC with economizer cooling and night flush capabilities, and a lighting system that uses 35% less energy than code. The project also adopted an acceptance testing protocol for all HVAC and lighting systems, and as a result, Rivermark was able to implement a number of post completion optimizations.
Read More »Design Team-Friendly, Family-Friendly
After several years as a pilot program, the LEED for Homes Mid-Rise rating system was officially launched by the USGBC near the end of 2010. We now have several projects that have been enrolled in the program and are now under construction.
The Mid-Rise program is designed for multifamily projects in the 4-6 story range, including those that may have a mixed-use component. It can be seen as a hybrid program between the LEED for Homes low-rise rating system and the LEED for New Construction program for commercial projects. Major differences in the Mid-Rise program from the standard LEED for Homes program include full unit-compartmentalization, measures that address the nature of larger multifamily projects such as bicycle parking, increased compact development, and tobacco smoke reduction. One other big difference is that the energy pathway for mid-rise projects will require the project’s energy performance to be at least 14% better than the ASHRAE 90.1 standard.
January is a time we all look forward to because the new year holds such promise. We believe it's going to be a promising year for the green building industry -- despite flat market conditions for conventional homes, we've seen market share for high performance homes increase from 18.5 to 23 percent in the Portland Metro area alone. In both Seattle and Portland 1 of every 4 new homes is certified. Clearly the time has come for energy efficiency, and with it, healthier green homes.
In keeping with the spirit of renewal, we are releasing our annual green building trends for 2011. The trends, which range from “affordable green” to lifecycle analysis of materials, were identified by Earth Advantage Institute based on discussions with a range of audiences over the latter part of 2010. These sectors include policymakers, builders, developers, architects, real estate brokers, appraisers, lenders, and homeowners. We encourage you take a look, cogitate and comment...
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Earth Advantage Institute is a nonprofit organization that works with the building industry to help implement sustainable building practices. Our mission is to create an immediate, practical and cost-effective path to sustainability and reduction of carbon. More »
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