Green Building Elements

Did you know that if you install a Biomass Stove – wood, pellets, etc. that you can nab a  30% tax credit ($1,500  max) up until 2010? Who knows that homeowners can get a 30% tax break for installing Solar Hot Water Heating until  2016? Maybe the new American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) which was signed into law by President Obama in February 2009 isn’t as complicated as the IRS tax code but does anyone really want to delve into the 400 pages of legislation to figure all the ins and outs about how to qualify for the green tax credits available to homeowners?

In a Cliff’s Notes version of the myriad incentives, rebates, and tax incentives GREENandSAVE has created a Federal Tax Incentive Decoder and condensed the material to 11 bite sized pages. Best of all, this resource does not cost a dime and can be downloaded at: http://www.greenandsave.com/homecheckup/free_federal_tax_incentive_decoder

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Given the climate change coming to most regions of the US, this new roof idea is a great passive cooling solution worth looking at even if you don’t live in the desert regions… now.

Because, by century’s end; you might.

“Summer temperatures in Florida could rise by 10.5F, with the heat effect multiplied by decreased rainfall under the higher emissions scenario. There would be increased hurricane intensity and rising sea levels leads to loss of wetlands and coastal areas.”

“When you’re out in the desert, shade is gold. It’s the most valuable asset you have, so to make more shade was [the] strategy,” says Lloyd Russell of this house he designed to withstand both the scorching heat and the cold of the desert for a client in Southern California.

Russell’s very low carbon way to cool a home is another example of how creatively some architects are thinking out of the box and in the process creating an entirely new design vernacular - architecture for zero energy use in a carbon-constrained, hotter, wilder new world.

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Even in a Greencentric city like Berkeley, locals and Bay Area visitors would be Green with envy when they see the just opened David Brower Center. It feels healthy just to walk through the Green down-to-the-bones building which combines advanced technology along with simple recycled materials.

When entering for their housewarming party we had a difficult time not noticing the soaring concrete walls which made us think more dot com than gallery. The fact that in creating a building with an oh- so-feathery carbon footprint (when compared to most structures) Principal Architect, Daniel Solomon included up to 70 percent slag in those walls. Read the rest of this entry »

We are by now accustomed to measuring carbon emissions in terms of “taking X many cars off the road”.

We know cars are responsible for carbon emissions. So we are used to sneering at hoggy cars that wastefully emit so many tons of carbon per year:

(In fact, measuring carbon footprints in these terms is by now such a cliche that the measure:  carsofftheroad will probably wind up as a regular metric that kids learn in school, just like feet and pounds are now: Phrases like I took 15 carsofftheroad last week installing 3 kw of new solar will be as readily understood as I lost 15 pounds last week running the marathon.)

But this week; doing a pre solar (thermal) efficiency analysis for an apartment complex - I noticed a surprisingly huge source of wasted energy that has thus far escaped notice and ridicule (well, mine, anyway) and that is: swimming pools.

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Instead of usual colors that we associate with wine such as white or dark red, our color paradigm might shift to say Gold. With the CADE Winery just about to open, this solar powered and organically farmed winery, hopes to garner LEED Gold status and if so, would be the first Estate Gold LEED certified winery in the Napa Valley.

When visiting a winery, people’s olfactory system normally goes into overdrive but instead of inhaling the aromas of vanilla, rosemary, oak and sage here we took deep breaths of the air. As in indoor air quality. No stuffy AC here as the building relies on natural ventilation. While others admire the wines, we admired the other green aspects. CADE will utilize 100% solar power and organic farming methods which both sound tasty to us.

From top to bottom, we got our buzz from the other building features like the concrete composed that contains a generous amount (30 percent) of fly ash, steel made up of 98 percent recycled material, FSC glass and wood, as well as blue jeans for insulation and its own concrete mass for cooling.

The Green aspects just don’t stop at the building. It’s too bad that we didn’t bike or drive our electric car (we did carpool) because the winery offers a plug-in base for hybrid electric cars; and bicycle racks. Even better, they offer a shower (hopefully with low flow showerhead) so cyclists can clean up before tasting or event.

One the eating side, they will have a full-time chef on site who will focus on organic, sustainable cuisine grown on site. We haven’t had the chance to sample some of the sustainable cuisine but we’ll report back when we do.

We, like many people, wondered about the name. The winery name CADE derives from a Shakespearean term used for an oak cask or barrel, — comprises more than 60 acres, 23 of which were planted as vineyards in 2003. Of the remaining land, 28 acres will be protected in a land trust to ensure that they will always remain open space.  Now there should be a big “Cheers” to that fact.

Sometimes being green means taking on the “less is more” philosophy. Such would be the case with the Cavallo Lodge over in Sausalito. For the recently opened lodge, about half of the current lodge rooms they converted from the previous officers quarters, military barracks and the like. But don’t think of this place like Full Metal Jacket but rather Organic Cotton Robe.

We visited there a few months ago for the Going Green conference but we didn’t get a chance to survey the property much. This time, we got to stay over and even check out the spa. (Life is tough) The lodge, waiting for LEED Silver certification, offers new rooms and the classic ones. Even though the new ones offer radiant heating and the hot water comes via tankless water heaters, which reduce the energy consumed by those dinosaur era traditional water heaters. They installed photo-voltaic panels on 12 of the 14 new buildings’ south-facing, standing seam metal roofs which produce about 75 percent of the electricity necessary to run the buildings.

We cozied up in one of the existing building rooms which offer more charm (like the tine roof ceilings and the detailed antique radiator). By reusing the existing buildings, they already considered their carbon footprint. We can only be impressed by the fact that the brains and money behind the lodge used nearly 100% of the building shells and retained or repurposed roughly 75% of the building cores. We applaud these efforts as they not only extend the life cycle of existing building stock, conserve resources, and reduce waste but it also retains cultural and historical resources.

Although we couldn’t see the insulation we knew that they used blue jean insulation in the contemporary lodging and a portion in the Healing Arts Center. Speaking of the Spa, they constructed the floors and ceilings from rapidly renewable materials such as bamboo, wool or cork. Besides green building attributes they offer creativity by repurposing plastic dry cleaning bags (that come off site) for spa guests to take home their wet bathing suits.

Almost no other plastic can be seen on property and the staff couldn’t be nicer (as well as pretty well informed about the green aspects. Now if they could only get rid of the few incandescent bulbs (in the spa and the lodge) then we would be that much more pleased.

Photo by Kodiak Greenwood

American Honda Motor Company presented its new Micro-sized Combined Heat and Power (MCHP) Deluxe co-generation unit at Greenbuild 2008 in Boston, Massachusets.  The unit has been around for a while (in Japan since 2003, and here in the US since 2007).  The system provides home heating or water heating along with power generation in one package.  It also includes a generator to provide power during an outage.

When installed in combination with a furnace system such as ECR International’s “freewatt,” homeowners can expect to save between $500 and $1,000 per year on their power bills.  This is achieved through the power-generating capabilities of the MCHP, plus the fact that the “freewatt” system provides additional electricity as a by-product of its heating process.

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Mostly when we talk about LEED certified buildings we think about office buildings or government centers but here we scope out another first. The Advanced Data Center building in Sac-town already became the first data center to be pre-certified LEED Platinum. Surprised? You bet. Most people think that these data centers with all of the computers are huge energy hogs, and they’re right. That’s why the firm had to work extra hard to create efficient cooling systems. They designed a cooling system called an “air-side economizer” that reduces energy use through careful airflow, and water-flow design and to utilize outside air because the temperature and humidity reamin in the correct range for 75% of the year.

Besides being so cool with the air side efficiency, we like their H2O technology savings effort. They utilize recycled (grey) water from a local municipal water system and captured roof rainwater for landscaping, restrooms and cooling tower backup. They even went so far as to install low- and even better no-water fixtures in restrooms.

Someone was either thinking about LEED points, just doing the right thing or perhaps tax breaks but the fact that the ADC built the location on a brownfield in the former McClellan Air Force Base shows some real foresight and green thinking. It didn’t even scare them that the site contains polluted groundwater 350 feet below the building.

Perhaps the military should take a clue from companies such as ADC when considering how to use (or abuse) the land that they seem to be protecting.

Home automation systems (such as Colorado vNet and Control4) are becoming a necessary amenity in any high-end home, but are they also a new tool in our fight to reduce energy use and global warming? After all, these systems are designed so that you can control your high-end AV components, home security system, lighting and HVAC from one device (or via the web from somewhere else), so why not add energy conservation to the mix, right?

The idea is that these high tech systems will minimize or eliminate the wasted energy from lights left on by accident, vampire loads from home equipment in the “off” state, thermostats set too high or low for usage patterns or climate conditions, etc - the automation systems themselves will set things right even if you forget. We’ve certainly written about how important it is to kill of these wasteful elements, but are they big enough to warrant buying one of these systems just to reduce them?

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As we walked into the mammoth PCBC (Pacific Coast Builder Conference) at the Moscone Center in San Francisco we couldn’t help but notice the hanging banners with the words - Power. Forward. Sustain. Of course we could see Power and Forward, as we wouldn’t expect Weakness and Backward but then - Sustain. That omnipresent word like Green that has seeped into the mindset of builders and developers. Or has it? Is it part of the green spin or are things starting to move forward in a powerfully sustainable direction? We decided that “both” loomed as the right answer. For this installment, we decided to cover some of the unexpected and the questionable lower profile “green” products. Sorry about the ” ” around the green but you’ll see where we go with this idea.

We totally got buzzed about something so innocuous that we almost walked passed it because it didn’t have a bunch of Green banners proclaiming its greenness. This Verve living system offers what they called a living control system which in simple terms operates like a whole house lighting system. We’ve seen these before but this one operates on battery free, self sustaining technology or what they call energy harvesting radio frequency technology. Pretty scientific for us but the little gizmo works in a panel that reduces the power so that certain switches can come on at certain levels and times. The systems extends bulb life and new homes don’t need copper wiring installed if they use this system. We even like the parent control which operates like the driver’s control when it comes to locking and unlocking car doors. We’re locked for this system.

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