MARCH 18, 2010 ISSUE
Taking Green to a Gold Level
First NAHB-Certified Gold Home Built in the High Country
The future home of M-Prints owners Stuart and Bonnie Mangum, this house was rated a gold project level in the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) Green Building Program. This is the first gold-level home built under the code in the High Country. Photo by Corinne Saunders
Last Friday, Travis Thompson of T-Square Builders, Inc. took members of the High Country Homebuilders Association’s green building committee on a guided tour of the gold-certified house he built in Sugar Grove. Photo by Corinne Saunders
In a time when even green builders admit that all the facets of and options for green building programs are confusing, it cannot be argued that the newly constructed, soon-to-be home of Bonnie and Stuart Mangum, M-Prints owners, marks a first for green building in the High Country.
The house, located on Laurel Creek Road in Sugar Grove, was rated a gold project level in the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) Green Building Program.
Built by Travis Thompson of T-Square Builders, Inc., the two-story, approximately 2,700-square-foot project took more than a year to complete and includes a number of green features, he said.
“Green building is so new,” said Thompson, vice president of High Country Homebuilders Association and a member of its green building committee. “There’s so much confusion. Everyone has a program; it hasn’t really shaken itself out yet.”
The idea behind green building under any name, though, remains the same—to “build a better house and have an independent third party verify that it [has been done properly],” Thompson said.
Sam Zimmerman, president of the High Country Homebuilders Association, built the first house in the High Country under the NAHB Green Building Program code last year, Thompson said, adding that the project was rated “a high silver.”
Thompson said he chose the NAHB Green Building Program because getting certification through LEED “is a lot of administration” and comes at a higher cost.
“LEED targets the top 5 percent of builders, [while] NAHB is trying to get every builder doing it, at least up to a bronze level, which is basically [achieved by] getting Energy Star [certification],” he said. “You can build an equally good home under any program…find one that works for you.”
The NAHB certification “wasn’t a lot of money beyond Energy Star,” he said, explaining that Energy Star tests the efficiency of a building for heating and cooling purposes—“typically the biggest cost of a house and [its] biggest environmental footprint.
“Green building to me is, at its core, best practices of construction,” he continued. “At times, it doesn’t have to be any more expensive than regular new construction.”
Three collectors on the roof contribute to the house’s solar-thermal system, which is “slightly oversized to help out with heat in the wintertime,” said Travis Thompson of T-Square Builders, Inc. Photo submitted
Features That Made It Gold
Thompson’s project reached a gold level with a score of 472 points, where 395 are necessary to be certified gold.
The house features a solar-thermal system, which heats the domestic hot water and also assists with the radiant floor heating, Thompson said.
Solar panels on the roof take the sun’s energy and use it to heat coils at the bottom of the
boiler/solar tank, located in the lower level of the house, which in turn, heats the water at the bottom of the tank.
The middle and top of the tank are always kept hot, by a 96-percent efficient propane unit on days when the sun is not out.
The solar-thermal system should heat 100 percent of the domestic hot water in the summertime, Thompson noted.
The house does not have air conditioning, and its radiant floor heating eliminates the need for a central air system. Because the house is “extra airtight,” an Energy Recovery Ventilator (ERV) was installed for bringing fresh air into the home, Thompson said.
The ERV draws a specific amount of air into the home, and “we can temper it for temperature and humidity for healthy indoor air quality,” he said, adding that if, for example, the homeowners were to throw a party, they could increase the amount of air the ERV brings into the home.
Panasonic bath fans in the bathrooms and an effective oven hood send moisture generated by the occupants outside, but ductwork is already in place within the walls, just in case the homeowners determine sometime down the road that they needed a whole-house dehumidification system, Thompson said.
“This is definitely the tightest house we’ve ever been associated with,” Thompson said of his company. “There are kind of a lot of unknowns with a house this tight.”
The “typical, leaky house loses three of the volumes of the house [in air] in an hour,” he explained.
“To reach Energy Star levels, [the home must test at] .35 air changes per hour,” he said, adding that this house’s estimated air leakage under natural conditions tested at .05 to .06—the equivalent of the house having just a six-inch by six-inch hole.
With four-foot-by-10-foot cement panel outside walls and spray foam insulation, the walls are about R22 and the ceiling is R31 to R32, Thompson said.
Heat-treated decking is another green feature, because it contains no preservatives. Instead of chemically treating the decking (for rot resistance), the decking was cooked, to bake all the sugars out, since sugars are what insects would feed on and mold would grow on, Thompson explained.
Overall, the benefits of building green include “much higher energy efficiency,” which translates into “lower energy bills for the homeowner [and] much less pollution—less carbon dioxide generated because of it,” Thompson said.
The house also incorporated many elements in the vein of water efficiency.
“I, like many people, think [water] is going to be the next energy crisis,” Thompson said.
Standard, low-flow fixtures can be found in the bathrooms, and the toilets are “ultra-low-flow,” meaning they use 1.28 gallons per flush instead of the low-flow standard of 1.6 gallons per flush, he said.
Also, a hot water recirculation system features buttons in the kitchen and downstairs guest bathroom that can be pushed for hot water to be available in about 20 seconds, he said.
“A typical system circulates hot water through the house 24 hours a day,” Thompson said. “The problem is a tremendous amount of energy loss through the pipes.”
With this particular system, however, the water does not need “to run and run” for hot water to be available, and it also does not result in huge amounts of energy loss from constantly flowing through the pipes.
A rainwater harvesting system collects rainwater from the roof and stores it in a 2,400-gallon tank, and this water will be used for outdoor landscaping and gardening, he said.
The Homeowners’ Green Aspirations
“We were pleasantly surprised. It was as good as we hoped for and better, in some areas,” homeowner Stuart Mangum said.
He and his wife Bonnie obtained the certificate of occupancy on December 31, but with consistent, ill-timed winter storms, the couple has not yet moved into their new home. They currently reside at the bottom of the hill upon which the new house is built, and they plan to move in the next two weeks to a month, he said.
“We wanted as much green as we could afford, [and] as much energy-efficiency as could be built,” he said. “[Building green] is something everyone should do if they even remotely can afford it.”
Electricity and fossil fuel prices will only continue to rise in coming years, he said, and making a difference starts with individuals doing the little bit they can—with a difference resulting from “a lot of little bits.”
Although Mangum said he thinks the home cost about 20 percent more than it would have in the absence of the green features, “the payback on it should be fairly quick.”
He estimated that in only seven to 10 years, the lower utility bills will compensate for “the additional cost we incurred.”
The kitchen countertops of broken beer bottle pieces are an eye-catching testament to the green nature of the house. They are 85 percent glass, “and of the glass, 85 percent is post-consumer, recycled glass,” Mangum said.
“We were researching possibilities for countertops, [because we were] looking for as much green stuff as we could put in the house,” he said. “We couldn’t find anything that we would consider greener than that or had the appearance of that.”
Also, the owners wanted concrete floors and radiant floor heating from the beginning, Thompson said.
“For healthy indoor air quality, many green buildings turn to smooth floors,” Thompson said, explaining that carpets tend to retain moisture and air contaminants such as pet dander and dust mites.
In the future, Mangum said he hopes to add even more green features to the house, such as active photovoltaic (PV) units.
“PV is coming down,” he said. “There is a lot of potential for adding PV to the roof.”
Mangum would also like to add capacities for harnessing wind energies, if the payback becomes reasonable, he said.
“In an ideal world, we’d generate more [energy] than we’d use,” he said, adding that the house is estimated to require 60 percent of the energy a typical house uses.
Community Interest
News & Notes
Events
Arts & Entertainment
