Homebuilding

I was surprised and pleased to see an article on the front page of the New York Times about the remarkably energy efficient Passive Houses. I have been following the German-born “Passivhaus” movement for quite a few years, but I hadn’t envisioned that there would be much enthusiasm in the U.S.—yet—for the extremely rigorous requirements of the Passivhaus standards. I must be wrong. For the next four days (Dec. 27 – Dec. 30) the Passive House article was the Times #1 most emailed story. During those days, I was getting multiple copies from every direction: friends, family, colleagues and even people I don’t know. It seemed that nearly overnight Passive House had entered the American vocabulary.

The Passive House (PH) concept is both brutally simple and extremely difficult. We have long known how to create an energy efficient building: face the sun; insulate, seal and mechanically ventilate. Passive House takes these rather obvious goals and establishes an extremely stringent standard for each of them, applying basic building science and its own tough formulas to set the bar at the very top of the green building stanchions. Moreover, it’s a pass-fail system; you achieve it or you don’t. It stands alone as the most energy efficient construction standard in the world. Over 15,000 Passive Homes have been built since the early ‘90s, mostly in German speaking countries and Scandinavia.

The main question I have been asked the past few days is how Zero Energy buildings, such as those (Unity House and Brightbuilt Barn) we built last year, compare with Passive Houses. The best answer, I think, is that they are perfectly complementary, not competitive. The ideal way to build a Zero Energy building is to start with a base building constructed to Passive House standards. From that platform, using renewable energy sources to get to zero (or positive) energy performance is made much easier.

Performance standards are set by the Passivhaus Institute in Germany. The building can’t consume more than 15 kilowatt-hours per square meter in heating energy per year (equivalent to 4746 BTU per square foot per year). This typically requires that the wall, roof and floor insulation must be between R40 and R60. The building can’t leak more air than 0.6 times the house volume per hour at 50 pascals of pressure, as measured in a standard blower door test. An energy recovery ventilator provides a constant, balanced fresh air supply, and may be outfitted with an electric resistant heater element to provide auxiliary heat in worst-case situations.

If the building clears the bar of the PH requirements, it no longer needs a furnace. The intention is to substitute the money spent on a heating system (along with the fuel to fire it) for money spent on insulation, careful detailing and good workmanship. Basically, it locks in heating and cooling fuel cost at zero. For the life of the building.

Why, then, isn’t everyone clamoring for it? I don’t know. We seem to have been born with a switch that allows us to turn off the memory of painful lessons that should have been learned; and with blinders that limit our ability to see that which is unsustainable when it is us. How else to explain the great interest in high performance buildings when fossil fuel costs were high only a few months ago, but now that the fuel costs have fallen, interest has suddenly waned? Is this short-term memory a defect in our species or just a peculiarly American defect? How did we come to make decisions in a dense fog, from which neither the past or future is visible?

I live in southern New Hampshire, near the Vermont border. In this area, the heart and soul of most towns are the many old houses, churches and town halls that were built 150-250 years ago. They remain in good service after many generations of use and remind us of the best of our capabilities as citizens, communities and builders. They are emblems from the past, but also beacons for a better future. If we could think and act with a vision beyond our own mortality, like the builders who constructed these enduring, defining structures, Passive Houses and Zero Energy buildings would now be much more common.

If a priority for high performance buildings doesn’t come from a social or ecological conscience—you know, looking out for the survival of our species, for instance—perhaps it would come from simple math calculations when our energy costs brutally and finally reflect their actual value.

What I hate to think about, but believe to be true, is that high fuel costs won’t really do it either. It will take a genuine crisis in which money isn’t the only issue. Just as you don’t get a new traffic light at an intersection until enough people have died in car crashes, it will take some large-scale disasters to give us the collective will to do something that is possible right now.

First, many people will have to suffer when an infrastructure entirely dependent on cheap fossil fuels completely collapses.

Then, higher standards will finally be mandated and people might at last be willing to give up flat screens and full-body showers for a home that will keep them warm and comfortable without any fuel whatsoever; in good times and bad, through decades, through generations, and on and on into a brighter future.

It's such a good idea. Why don't we just start doing it and NOT wait for bigger problems and human tragedies?

If they could, no doubt the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA) would lobby the supreme powers for snow in July. More winter would be good for business. Winter all year would be even better. If they could, they would; that’s what most organizations tend to do. They promote their self-interests without regard for larger public interests. What matters is what’s good for them, today. Under the sanctified umbrella of a larger group—acronym and all—somehow positions that would be viewed in an individual as selfish and narrow-minded morph into collective righteous causes. Baseball? Boating? Swimming? Not our problem. You can hear them proudly pronouncing: “We’ve done our research and we’re very sure that snow in July would make for a better world.” It’s easy to imagine they’d even believe it.

The problem with special interest organizations is that they get all tangled up in themselves, lose perspective, eventually become dead wrong, and often do harmful things with their accumulated influence. I do not believe the people involved have perverse intentions, but what is true and right can become groundless shifting sands when the primary purpose of the organization is to support and promote that which (they think) most benefits its membership.

As an example: The American Automobile Association (AAA) has over 46 million members (second only to the Catholic Church), nearly all of whom joined for the roadside assistance and travel services, not to support their not-so-public lobbying efforts. Yet the mission of AAA since 1902 has been to give cars and car manufacturers clout and they do so with zeal and sometimes recklessness. "For the most part, on the big ticket issues, AAA and the Center for Auto Safety are on opposite sides," says Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based auto safety group, a nonprofit consumer organization. They’ve lobbied against the Clean Air Act, against every automobile pollution control effort and lobbied against the airbag law. You sign up for more worry-free travel, but you get your personal investment in pollution and highway carnage.

Now, for today’s villain: The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) has won another important battle. It helped defeat a proposal to raise the energy efficiency requirements of the International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) and the International Residential Code (IRC). This story was reported in the November issue of Energy Design Update by outgoing editor Martin Holladay.* The proposal was affectionately called the “thirty percent solution” because it combined a number of easily and inexpensively implemented improvements to reduce energy consumption in new homes by thirty percent.

While thirty percent may seem like a lot, it’s important to understand the current regulations are pretty much on the floor. They allow the typical home to be a virtual energy sieve and a severe economic burden for homeowners when energy costs rise to reflect their real value. The millions of homes built to these standards are also a huge barrier to achieving energy independence as a country. One of our biggest problems today is to find a way to upgrade the energy performance of the existing housing stock. The answer isn’t easy because the problem is deep in the bones of the buildings, hidden between the exterior and the interior finishes. What’s usually in there—stuffed between the framing members—is loosely fitted fiberglass insulation and a tangle of wires, electrical boxes and sometimes even plumbing and heating pipes. The result is a typically abysmal level of energy efficiency and a conundrum: to fix the homes, you have to nearly demolish the interior or exterior and what’s left at that point begs the question of whether it’s worth the cost. Often it’s not.

While we wrestle with this vexing issue, the least we can do is to raise the bar for new homes, which is precisely what the “thirty percent solution” proposed to do. It was a plan endorsed by the US Department of Energy, the US Conference of Mayors, the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEE) and the Natural Resources Defense Council and many others. But the NAHB opposed it and used their huge influence to defeat it. In their view, it was too expensive for homeowners, difficult to achieve and an oversight hassle for code officials. This is wrongheaded. The NAHB should be helping its members find ways to build better homes, not using their muscle to ensure that builders can continue to be sloppy and ignorant.

The proposal they defeated primarily focused on modest increases in R-value, more stringent requirements for air barriers and that ductwork be installed within the thermal envelope or improved (no leaks!) and inspected. These are all things we learned in 1978 and have been a part of better building practice for many of us since. The biggest issue isn’t the expense; it’s the problem of teaching people how to build better. It’s like the difference between measuring and cutting to ¼ inch vs.1/16 inch. It takes exactly the same number of steps and the same amount of effort, but the result is dramatically different. In the same way, the “thirty percent solution” only asked that builders do things right and that code officials see that they do. It’s not harder, but it does require the equivalent of cutting to a finer line. It requires only that you know what you’re doing and that you care. The small cost increases would be more than offset by the energy savings, making the consumer, the environment and national security all winners in the bargain.

When I was a young builder in the early 1970s, I joined the NAHB with a sense of pride. I thought joining the “club” was a way of signaling my legitimacy and hoped it would also provide me with support and guidance in my new business. I quickly learned that the NAHB provided more support for the largest builders and were therefore far more concerned about quantity of homes built rather than their quality. Still, I remained a member, hoping to find something through their publications and research that would be of use. In the early 1980s, I discovered that they were fighting against changes in the code that were intended to improve the safety of stairs. The allowable standard at the time was an 8 ¼ inch riser and a 9 inch tread, but studies showed that there were too many stair accidents with that configuration. (Stairs are the most dangerous place in the house. There are literally tens of thousands of falls and thousands of fatalities that happen every year as people are navigating the stairs in their own homes!) Therefore, there were proposals to reduce the riser height to 7.5 inches and the tread width to 10 inches. It made sense to me, but I was shocked to discover that the NAHB was fighting against the change. Their argument wasn’t sophisticated; it was patently selfish, but was couched in terms that sounded like they were fighting for the consumer: It would eat up floor space. Stairs would cost more. Homes would cost more. Fewer people could afford the dream of owning their own home.

It was hogwash. I wrote futile letters in protest, but eventually just cancelled my membership. This kind of negative effort is shameful. How could an association made up of homebuilders use its resources to fight against safety improvements in homes? There’s no reasonable excuse. It beggars belief.

From the EDU report, we now know they will fight with equal determination to prevent improvements in energy efficiency. What’s next? They will apparently fight for anything that makes it easier for their member-builders to put up low quality buildings with the least amount of structural, energy or safety requirements.

Despite the NAHB efforts, eventually building codes do get more rigorous and stringent. Structural improvements get enforced after earthquakes, hurricanes and other natural events prove the existing standards are inadequate. Energy efficiency improvements will come about when the cost of energy is unaffordable, perhaps when people start freezing to death in their homes. Safety improvements will finally happen after enough people have died in preventable accidents. Structural improvements happen after enough homes have been destroyed by one natural event or another. The phrases for every code improvement seem to need the names of disastrous events or multiple human tragedies attached to them. Things get better, but it always comes the slow, hard, painful way because progress is consistently retarded by the diligent, resourceful efforts of the NAHB minions to keep padding the floor instead of raising the bar.

Unfortunately, the NAHB is winning for now. All these years later, the stairs are not safer and energy efficiency isn’t better. And the code minimums are always the maximums for the average American home. A higher performing, safer house is what people deserve for their investment, but they’ll continue to get far less because the battles being fought by the considerable lobbying weight of the NAHB, in defiance of conscience and common sense, are systematically killing a once-proud industry.

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*Energy Design Update (EDU) has long been one of my top sources for up-to-date information from the frontlines of efforts to improve energy efficiency in housing. EDU is quick to report about new systems and products, but it is equally quick to debunk overzealous marketing claims. Martin Holladay will be missed. I always looked forward to reading his reports, as they were typically carefully researched and objective, but came with a refreshing tinge of impatience. As much as anyone, Martin knows that dramatically improving the energy performance of our housing is as easy as making it a priority; there are no technical or economic barriers.

...to work on your hair, but be prepared for a fool on your roof.

One of our clients, whose new home is currently being assembled on site, is unusually qualified to critique and comment about our proposed construction details because he not only has personal experience as a builder, but has since spent many years as a university professor, teaching courses in building materials and construction technology. We are gratified that he and his wife have faith in us and we’re thrilled that, as a result, we’re also getting a very motivated professional consultant.

In any event, he wrote to me the other day about some concerns he had about the roofing details on his home being done correctly. His descriptions of his preferred solutions were clear and instructive and then he ended the message by saying that his real problem is with roofers. “I have had terrible experiences with roofers over the years,” he lamented.

I wrote back in sympathy and support. What I wrote back to him was this:

“I agree with your comment about roofers. I have the same attitude about foundation contractors: almost always both ignorant and ignorant of their ignorance. So what supports the house at the bottom and what protects it at the top are at the risk of bad attitudes, low skills and completely inadequate training. Most states require training, apprenticeship, certification and licensing for a person to become a barber or a hairdresser even though if they make a mistake, the head will self-correct the problem in days or weeks. But to roof a house, where any mistake can fester into ever-increasing damage for years, you generally need only a ladder, a hammer and little fear of heights.”

Now, I realize this overarching condemnation isn’t fair to those many subcontracting companies that do good work and have good knowledge about the materials and technology of their field, but I will stand by the (unsubstantiated) opinion that way too many in these trades are pretty clueless about the science that ought to be associated with their craft. Why is this so? Well, to make the point, whoever you are, however much you know about these trades, tomorrow you could do business as a roofer or a foundation contractor (or many other building trades).

Any approach to improving the quality of homes must include a way to improve the process, including a system in which proper education and training is an integrated and ongoing ingredient. One of the principal advantages of prefabrication is that our tradespeople are always here and we can always know that we are executing the right details, with the right material and equipment AND with the right training.

So far, though, we haven’t been prefabricating foundations or roofs, leaving those two critical trades to local subcontractors. If only they had as much training as a barber!

This has been an incredibly busy couple of weeks. Blog posts have been few, but buildings going up have been many. When this much work gets done in a short period of time, it’s not magic; it’s about coordination, planning, smart work, hard work, and really good people.

Unity House, OPEN_2, is up, and the exterior is completed, thanks to the efforts of Phil Henry, Paul Boa, Joey Szuch, Hans Porschitz, and Caleb French. The Chronicle of Higher Education and Residential Architect carried the story.


This week the interior finishes are underway and will be installed by Kevin Bittenbender, Paul Tuller, and Drew Kurimay. Last week, the woodworking team was very busy preparing the millwork, and gave a good demonstration of our flexibility and craftsmanship as they created some prototype finishes for an exciting, contemporary home that breaks new ground, both inside and out.


With the work teams dividing up the responsibility and with orchestration by Kevin Bittenbender, most of the work was accomplished very quickly. Scott Bosworth, Josh Conley, and Collin Clifford are building the interior doors, while Scott Frazier and Mike LeBlanc are doing entry doors. Joe Szuch and Dave Chase made the wainscot and wall finish panels. Paul Tuller, Randy Roberts, and Nick Kranowski ran the window trim and ceiling system materials. And it’s no surprise that Skip Singer is masterminding and building our innovative, removable wall.



Our This Old House project is completely enclosed, roof is going on, siding is being completed, plumbing and electrical systems are ready for inspection, and finish work is underway. It continues to be great fun to work with the TOH team!



Tom Silva, Norm Abram, and Rich Trethewey are the “real deal” professionally, while also juggling TV requirements; whereas we are building professionals, only, and are pretty clumsy about the demands of documenting the process for the show. But they are patient, thankfully.



We had a couple of good TV sequences when we attached the ceremonial evergreen bough on the ridge, after the last rafter was placed, and again when the cupola, copper roof and all was picked into place, literally topping off the home and completing the enclosure.



Stair design

Pete Favat (homeowner) wrote a wonderful blog post about the tree ceremony. He recites a story I told him about the death of my brother Stephen, who was also my original business partner. I’ll make you read Pete’s story, but I will say here that I will always do my best to carry the spirit of Stephen with me, especially in celebrations of our achievements, because that’s when I miss him the most.


Our on-site crew for the Weston project has been Jay Lepple, Mark Roentsch, Luke Marcum, Dennis Wright, Toby Wandzy, Duane Beiler, John McElroy, and Kevin Stowell. I also helped a little, but these guys did a mountain of work, in some very challenging circumstances. Our architect on this project is Chris Adams; the project manager is Tony Poanessa. Heroes, all.



Tuesday of last week, Norm Abram and I were filmed doing a tour of one of our homes on Squam Lake in New Hampshire. It was fun, but I’ll keep my day job. Norm is more than a consummate woodworking craftsman; he’s just a fine person and we're privileged for both reasons to work with him. Here’s a sneak peek at home we visited. The filmed tour will be a part of the first show in a sixteen-part series on This Old House, starting this fall.





Our team also completed the enclosure of the BrightBuilt Barn in Rockland, Maine. You can see sequences of photos that show the raising and assembly process, which was completed over the course of just a few days on the BrightBuilt Blog. Our team on BrightBuilt was Project Manager Lovell Parsons and crew members Jesse Gallagher, Seth Ashworth, and Daniel Wirth. It has been a pleasure to work with Kaplan Thompson Architects. We plan to follow them wherever they go next.

Meanwhile, Duane Beiler, Eric Selmer, and C. J. Brehio completed work on an addition for a home in Harvard, Massachusetts, which was engineered by Fire Tower Engineered Timber. It was demanding work, as it always is when new construction attempts to match up with old buildings. Connections and interfaces need to be very precise, but in a random, distorted, non-planer way.

We have yet another crew out working on a local project designed by the architectural firm Weller & Michal, engineered by Fire Tower Engineered Timber. Our collaboration with these firms has always produced excellent, remarkable buildings. Our crew on this one was Chops Polcari, Dan Rennoldson, Jesse Gallagher, and Guyton Ash.






While Norm Abram and I were doing the TOH filming last Tuesday, another crew was putting up a new steeple on a church in Brattleboro, Vermont. The original was demolished by lightning about this time last year. It was a very quick, but dramatic raising: one steeple, one crane pick. The photos from the local paper show the steeple, but not the remarkable framing underneath.






Here’s a CAD drawing of the timberframe.


Last, but not least, this past Saturday some of us were a part of a volunteer project to put up a timberframe for a local automobile repair company whose shop was swept away in the Alstead, New Hampshire, flood of 2005. The trees for most of the timberframe were donated by a local farm and timberframers from around the Northeast contributed labor for cutting and shaping the individual pieces. Our company donated salvage timbers and labor for one of the tall central wall section…and LOTS of people came out to help with the raising. Here’s a link to the Keene Sentinel story, NHPR coverage, and a couple of photos. Chris Carbone (Bensonwood engineer) designed the timberframe and provided information to all those who donated their work, and Mark Roentsch masterfully orchestrated a smooth and safe raising day.

Onward!

At a party over the July 4th weekend, I had a conversation with one of our clients. Not unlike probably every other holiday gathering in the U.S. this year, one of the topics we talked about was the high cost of fuel. While all of his neighbors and friends are panicking about heating their homes next winter, my client (and friend) said he had no worries. It was gratifying to hear his enthusiasm for his home’s energy performance. “You and I were smart,” he said, “to build a house in response to the energy crises. It just works! On the few occasions when the house gets chilly, I just use the woodstove. Even in the coldest weather, I rely only on the sun and a little bit of wood.”

The energy crisis my client was referring to was the one that happened in 1979-1980, not the one we are experiencing now. We built his house in 1981. It’s interesting how thrifty and wise we get when energy costs are high. It’s also interesting how silly and wasteful we can be when the cost is low. We built many of our most energy-efficient homes in the ‘70s and ‘80s. The energy crises of 1973 and 1979 made us (including the government, through subsidies and tax incentives), extremely creative and very willing to make better energy performance a higher priority. After that, oil costs fell back again and houses quickly grew in size, insulation shrank in importance, and some great energy-conserving methodologies were soon forgotten.

I can tell you without embarrassment that our energy strategies in 1981 weren’t very complicated. Step #1: Go to site, find sun; face it. Put more glass there. Step #2: Add and improve insulation to thermal envelope…and then a bit more. Step #3: Design a compact and open floor plan with public areas south, functional things (stairs, baths, laundry, entry, etc.) north, and bedrooms up. Step #4: Don’t deviate.

Back then, I was our company’s principal designer. Knowing my amateur limits, I was conservative and habitual. The running joke around the office was that you could go to Tedd with any crazy home design ideas you might want, but you’d likely come away with a story-and-a-half cape. Today, we have a team of good architects who create livelier architecture, lots of engineering support to detail the various systems, and a whole lot of new information and technologies. But much of what we do today to create energy conserving buildings, still leans on following the basic steps, learned many years ago. Eighty percent of achieving energy stingy homes is as simple as turning your face to the sun, your back to the north wind, and putting on a good coat. None of us should need a set of instructions for that!

We are doing a series of remarkable projects right now, each a demonstration of cutting-edge, energy-conserving design and technologies. All of them start with the basics. Unity House and Brightbuilt Barn have R-40 walls and roof; the Weston house (featured in the upcoming fall series on PBS', This Old House) is R-35; all three face south with logically-oriented floor plans. Having done that, Unity and Britebuilt are striving for net-zero and LEED platinum, while the Weston project will be a more sensible alternative to the gargantuan 6,000 to 10,000 square foot energy guzzlers in its neighborhood. Additionally, all of these highly efficient homes will have photovoltaic arrays, thermal hot water, and some sophisticated heating, cooling, and ventilation systems. The last twenty percent is difficult and expensive; the rest ought to be common sense.

I’m proud to say we knew it and applied it in 1981. Then again, so did every other civilization that has lived in cold climates, up until cheap fossil fuel made us stupid. In an already precarious world, this gives us something else to watch out for: fossil fools.