Green Energy Times is a bi-monthly publication chronicling the latest sustainability news in New England and New York (and beyond!). In 2016, SWA will be contributing a column for each issue. To start the year, SWA’s Heather Breslin discusses how and why the affordable housing market is beginning to embrace the Passive House Standard. The full article is featured below, or on page 27 of the February edition of Green Energy Times. (more…)
Passive House: At the Crossroads of Sustainability and Affordability
Game Changers in Building Science
Thank you to everyone who stopped by our booth last week at Greenbuild 2015 in Washington, D.C.! By all accounts, this year’s event was a great success. In case you missed it, our fearless leader, Steven Winter, spoke at the GAF booth on Wednesday. As an architect who has been practicing building science for the past 50 years, he shared insights about some building science innovations that he thinks have been “game changers” and have intrigued him: they are changing the way we design, build and operate buildings.
Here are the highlights:
When Did Building Science Become Energy Efficiency?
If nothing else, people are adaptable. While something might be an annoyance at first, we often figure out a way to manage it and move on. Unfortunately, we all too often do this when it comes to our greatest life investment…our homes. Whether an existing or new home, we almost always are not comfortable in our home or at least portions of our home. One, several, or even the entire home may never be at desirable conditions, but we learn to cope with it by putting on layers of clothing or adding small electric heaters to cold spaces, or supplemental fans in hot ones. So we are not comfortable as we allow our conditioned air to easily escape our homes and our utility bills continue to be high. The simple question is…why?
“People have all sorts of misconceptions about the sacrifices that they feel they have to make in high performance homes and it is completely untrue. It is exactly the opposite. The even temperatures, the lack of drafts, the feeling of warmth, comfort, and right levels of humidity and fresh air…they are unrivaled. Comfort is something you have never experienced properly in a home until you have a high performance home.” – Michael Trolle, BPC Green Builders
(Source: CT Zero Energy Challenge 2012)
CT Zero Energy Challenge (Part 1) – How Low Can You Go?
There were 11 projects entered into this year’s CT Zero Energy Challenge, sponsored by EnergizeCT. The single- and multi-family homes taking part in this competition are designed and constructed utilizing innovative techniques in order to try and reach the illustrious goal of net-zero energy-use.
I’m excited to report that SWA worked with 4 of the homes entered into this year’s competition, including the first- and third-place winners! For each of the three winning projects, EnergizeCT has created a video to showcase the story behind the homes, and to highlight some of the most notable features.
Today’s video is about the first-place winner, a single-family home in South Glastonbury, CT, constructed by Glastonbury Housesmith. The owners, Carl Benker and Elizabeth Wegner are first-time homebuyers who wanted to be able to live as close to “off the grid” as possible. Check out SWA’s HERS-rater extraordinaire, Karla Donnelly, discussing the competition, and how this home came to achieve an amazing HERS Index Rating of a -23!
(Right-click and select “run this plug-in” if you cannot see the video below)
The project also won the 2015 RESNET Cross Border Challenge for lowest HERS score with photovoltaics (PV)!
You can read more information on SWA’s project here.