Thriving On Low Carbon

Habitat for Humanity MV, energy, and affordability

The Town of West Tisbury recently passed the Stretch Code at Town Meeting. It's a more stringent building code and in essence it speeds up the adoption of the next iteration of the International Energy Code. Debate was spirited. Aginners (as in, I'm agin it) made impassioned pleas about how it was just another gubmint imposed tax on those that could least afford it, the working folks. My opinion is exactly the opposite - Martha's Vineyard's tax on the working people is $4+ per gallon oil and propane, and almost $0.20/kWh electricity. A tougher energy code is the worker's friend in the long run.

Next to those designed and built by South Mountain Co., the most energy efficient houses on MV are being built by Habitat for Humanity. They are dedicated to permanent affordability for their owners. In the past, HfH often was the recipient of donated products that were sometimes on the low end of energy efficiency, such as inexpensive windows and low efficiency heating and hot water equipment. On MV, the forward thinking folks who operate HfH are, with some detailing help from SMC, building super insulated homes that are very airtight. I help with QA, testing the houses with blower door and fog machine or IR camera. The first house at Bailey Park Rd. was 175 cfm50 at the stage of windows and doors installed and most of the roughing done, but no drywall. In the next month they'll be ready for a final test. Today we tested the shell at the second house they are building there, with window and door openings poly'd off. It was just about 300 cfm50 with the air barrier being one layer of taped polyiso foam on the walls and roofs. The house is a kit, which is all T&G pine inside, a potentially very leaky strategy.

With volunteer workers, they're building a house tighter than almost all the pros do here. The beneficiaries will be the owners. The mechanical system is mini split heat pumps, far less costly to operate than fossil fuel equipment. Thanks, Habitat, for leading the way to permanently affordable housing.

 

 

 

A Proposal for Amending the Passivehouse Standard for New England

With the help of a number of colleagues involved in Passivehouse I've been working on how this standard could be amended for use in New England and similar climates in a way that would remedy the most significant deficiencies, which I see as:

- the PH std has the same annual heating and cooling demand (AHD, ACD) limits anywhere, which leads to extreme solutions in severe climates.

- the resultant focus on meeting the AHD limit in the more severe climates diverts focus from the overall primary energy consumption of the building and its occupants.

- the PH std limits are set per unit of usable floor area (TFA), which creates the perverse incentive that larger houses meet the std more easily. Perhaps more fundamentally, the PH std, as most if not all other standards, sidesteps the core issue of resource use equity.

- the PH std counts solar input from direct gain solar heating and solar thermal hot water but does not count solar electricity to be used in meeting the std.

- the PH std does not require performance reporting beyond the 0.6 ACH50 blower door test.

After some drafts, I'm ready finally to publish this proposed amendment and see where it goes. Other countries and regions of countries have modified the Passivehouse standard to suit their goals. This proposal aspires to change how people (especially New Englanders) think about minimizing the environmental impact of houses and people. Minimizing primary energy consumption and basing the standard on occupancy rather than on area will evolve an already robust standard to a more effective and more ethical level.

It is not expected that the organizations maintaining the existing standard will welcome or adopt the key aspects of this standard. If Passive House New England, which is not aligned with either PHI or PHIUS, sees value in this proposal, it may begin to develop its own certification process. At the least, the aspiration is that this proposal may guide a well-focused and thoughtful exploration of how to live ethically and effectively on this planet for practitioners and clients, rather than aiming blindly at what are ultimately arbitrary numbers despite our best intentions.

I'm interested to hear what people think! See the attached PDF for the proposal. Download PH NE amendment V3

Lineage and community

In Buddhism, lineage is the line of teachers who have passed the Dharma from teacher to student in a recurring and unbroken cycle - the student becomes the teacher of the next student. On my third post to this new blog, I was tickled to see one of the comments was from Canadian building scientist Harold Orr. Orr was one of the team who designed the Saskatchewan Conservation House in 1977, one of the first superinsulated homes. Orr was one of the first to use a fan to create elevated pressures across a building enclosure to measure and locate air leaks, the technique for which we now use the instrument known as the blower door.

I think of myself as being in Harold's lineage. This student never met the teacher until a couple of years ago at the North American Passive House Conference, but he learned a lot from what Harold did and wrote. I shook Harold's hand with considerable gratitude.

Lineage is vertical and successional. In contrast, community is lateral and evolving. To continue with the Buddhist analogy, the word is sangha. Sangha is a mutually supportive community composed of members with a shared vision and set of values. The environmental/solar/energy efficient building community has been my sangha for over thirty years. I've made a number of my closest friends from this community, and I've learned almost all I know about the work I do from it. Working as we did beginning in the late 1970s, we were learning a lot that no one could teach us, and we shared both successes and failures. A bunch of us learned and aged together over the past decades, and the journey has been a lot easier and way more fun than if we were on our own.

For some of us on this path, the most exciting thing happening now is the influx of young, smart, fire-in-the-belly folks who are the next generation of this community. They're heaps smarter than we are, and they learn what took us decades in weeks. In turn we have experience to share. If we're really blessed, the next student in the lineage appears. I can tell you, they're on their way!

Payback

Part of the intent of this blog is to lay out the process we are muddling through to take this house off of fossil fuels and towards low carbon energy sources. At some point in every workshop or seminar I teach, whether it's on Zero Net Energy Homes, or Deep Energy Retrofits, or Passive House principles, someone stands up and makes an impassioned speech about how all this is well and good but what's the payback?

I'd like to get this one out of the way up front. In the make-over of this house, I, who have never been known as one loose with a buck, am spending what is mostly my own money (with the exception of various incentives and tax credits, and let's do discuss them, but not right now). So I don't expect to spend it foolishly or without due consideration. However, here are my responses to the payback question, in order of how much I think they matter in the whole cosmic scheme of things:

1 - The quickest response I have is, if you predict the future price of energy over the lifespan of these improvements, I'll tell you the payback. My habit when pushed to actually do some financial analysis is to present it in the form of scenario planning - I'll often select three rates of energy inflation and do the calcs showing the Net Present Value of the investment in each inflation scenario. The longer you project it out, the more dramatic are the differences. The usual result of this exercise is that those who are the decision makers begin to act from a position of risk avoidance, because the highest inflation rates in fuel costs get scary.

2 - The second response is to poll the building and design professionals assembled to see how many in the past year or two had a (residential) project in which they installed a 10 kW automatic generator, or they did a kitchen that cost over $100,000. Usually most of the hands in the room slowly go up. How rigorous was the payback analysis on each of those purchases? My observation is that people spend money on what makes them feel good, and just because what makes me feels good (and fortunately, many of my clients through the years) is seeing my ecological footprint shrink. Why does that expenditure draw so much more scrutiny than the money spent on the magazine kitchen or the BMW?

3 - The serious response is that the situation with the climate is likely already past dire and to have a tolerable planet (hat tip to Hank Thoreau here) we need to cut carbon emissions by a factor of 5 to 10, so payback is irrelevant, but least cost strategies are very important. However, least cost strategies are best implemented at larger scales (let's fix the worst houses that the most people live in first, maybe) but these need political agreement, and that's hard to come by in the country blessed with the best government money can buy. Each of us can choose (without convening the US Senate) to make changes in our own house and behavior (well, now I live in cohousing, it's not quite that simple, as you'll learn) so that's where we act.

Besides - if you're not selling drugs (as the former chief probation officer of the state of MA apparently was) how great is the return on your investments otherwise? I'd rather have my dollars on the roof making kWh than playing the slots in the Goldman Sachs-supercomputer rigged casino called the stock market.

 

Are we done with payback and can we move on to more interesting things?