Green building and remodeling

Tristan Schmid, host, List-en Up!))
Schmid: There are as many reasons to go green as there are ways to do so. One of the best ways to save money and reduce your impact on the environment is to build an environmentally friendly house, or remodel your current home to fit within green guidelines such as the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design — or LEED — program.

Formed in the 1990s, the USGBC is an organization of architects, builders, government agencies, and other professionals, that has just rolled out LEED certification for new home construction, as well as LEED guidelines for remodeling. Several other groups, like the National Association of Home Builders, offer similar third-party green-building certification; you can read about the programs in the Green Building Issue of Angie’s List magazine, online now at magazine.angieslist.com.

Everyone has his or her own reasons for going green. Sam Miller is a LEED-accredited professional and member of the American Institute of Architects. As owner of Solstice Architecture in Indianapolis, he focuses on incorporating sustainable design in his buildings and tells us why he decided to go green with his career 18 years ago.

Sam Miller: Two things happened: one was my son was born and I realized that by having a child I voted for the future and so I really couldn’t sit idly by as I learned more about how architecture and building affected the environment. And then the other thing I learned, almost simultaneously, was how much energy and resources buildings take from our environment. And as a result I realized I had to begin a process of learning about it, being an activist and trying to educate people about the fact that we have a lot of changes to make and a lot of work to do.

Schmid: Lilian Kuri hopes to receive a Gold or Platinum LEED certification on her family’s Cleveland home, and says it’s especially important to consider going green if you live in an urban environment.

Lilian Kuri: Investing in cities is a really important part of that, where there’s already infrastructure, a kind of diverse experience for your family and children. We have two little kids, and it’s really how we wanted to raise our kids and live our life.

Schmid: Tony Kucia, executive vice president of Blossom Homes in Northeastern Ohio, says Blossom’s green work is a family tradition.

Tony Kucia: When I was creating Blossom some time ago, my father had a green thumb - I lost him a couple years ago - but I told him there is a way to give back, and that payback is through less usage of things, recycling of things. Historically builders waste, and they’re always consuming because you’re using products from the environment.

(interlude)

Schmid: Though you can go green without following a particular system of guidelines, it’s often helpful to work with home contractors who have experience with green-building certification programs such as the National Association of Homebuilders’ new Green Building program or the USGBC’s LEED program.

Mark Price, a LEED for Homes certifier for Conservation Services Group, says there are basic components of third-party green building certifications.

Mark Price: In each of the green building rating systems, there are several sections: indoor air quality, site conditions, location and linkages. So, how automobile dependent is your building? Do people that live and work there have to use an automobile to access the building all the time or is there public transportation, etc. Proximity to community amenities such as the bank and all that stuff. Site conditions: how are you treating your site? Are you preserving existing buildings or existing trees and landscaping on the site, or are you wiping the whole site clean and starting with a clean slate? Obviously one has a bigger environmental impact than another. Education and awareness are also a component. These are the sorts of building blocks that all of the green rating systems have.

Schmid: Jeff Rodgers, owner of a platinum-certified LEED home in Massachusetts and owner of a green building supply store called New England Green Build, says there are many ways to gain points in the LEED system.

Jeff Rodgers: There are point thresholds to achieve different certifications levels. No two houses are alike, so you can get points from different places. You must meet a certain level of energy efficiency, for instance, but then for every unit more efficient it is, you get a point. There are many different ways to achieve it.

Schmid: Walter Cuculic is director of strategic marketing for Pulte/Del Webb Homes, which has been involved in green building for about eight years in areas across the country, including Las Vegas. He says the LEED certification program has helped the company take their green building to the next level.

Walter Cuculic: It’s really the first green building brand that looks at all aspects of the building process, from site development to water efficiency to indoor air quality to energy efficiency to materials and waste, and even homeowner education.

(interlude)

Schmid: If you’re new to the green building revolution, the tech terms and sheer number of ecological and efficient products might be overwhelming. The Angie’s List magazine website, magazine.angieslist.com, is a great place to start your research. For even more info, though, head over to buildinggreen.com, which has green building information as well as a database of over 2,000 environmentally preferable products, from flooring materials to appliances to landscape products. Alex Wilson is president of BuildingGreen, and says that the company, like the LEED program, prides itself on an objective approach to green building.

Alex Wilson: We approach manufacturers’ claims with a lot of skepticism, and so we’re constantly trying to get independent verification of performance and look at products very objectively. There’s a lot of greenwashing going on, and we pride ourselves on the info we use to accept products into the database. That said, we’re not a Consumer Reports with a testing laboratory. We rely to a significant extent on what the manufacturer supplies to us, and we try to dig deeper. If they’re vague about the flame retardant in foam insulation, we’ll do some digging and try to find out what it is.

Schmid: You might be thinking “green building sounds great, but how much will it cost me?” Many estimates we heard while researching the Green Building Issue of Angie’s List magazine were only about 3-5% higher than a typical home’s construction costs. Jeffrey Rogers says building his platinum-certified home didn’t break the bank.

Rogers: You had to be efficient with materials, so in that aspect there was savings involved, but the project on a whole was close to what a normal project would cost. With any additions, you had to consider the payback period. For example, the heating system cost about $5,000 more than if I bought a fossil fuel system, but that will pay off in five to six years. A lot of aspects of the green house have a pay back period so you have to consider that if you’re going to do an apples to apples comparison.

Schmid: Mark Price agrees.

Price: It comes down to customer preference. Let’s say you want to save money on water because in your town it has become a huge issue so you want to install dual-flush toilets, which cost $100 more. Well, if you were measuring the installed cost, that’s a cost increase, but measuring the cost in water savings over the next two years will be a cost decrease. You can spend $300 extra in toilets, but you’ll save $700 in water costs over the next year. It requires a mind shift. If you’re a builder who’s building for a real estate agent, you don’t care about the operation savings, but if you’re Jeff Rogers, it’s a no-brainer. You’re going to live in that house for 10 years, and you’re raising children who run in and out of the bathroom and flush the toilet because it’s neat to listen to.

Schmid: Amy Levin, owner of a soon-to-be LEED certified row house in Washington, D.C., recommends you do your research if you’re interested in building or remodeling a high-efficiency home, whether it’s to save money, decrease your impact on the environment, or both.

Amy Levin: My advice would be to really sit down and look at your budget and figure out what’s going to have the biggest bang for your buck for what you’re concerned about, whether that’s your footprint or your dollars.

Schmid: Interested in learning more about green building and remodeling? You can find helpful links at our podcast website, angieslistpodcasts.com

Until next time, this is Tristan. Thanks for taking the time to list-en!

Energy audit


Angie Hicks, founder, Angie’s List:
Angie Hicks: The Angie’s List campus on the near-Eastside of Indianapolis consists of a variety of old, unique buildings. My desk is in the Marble Building, which was previously home to a marble-countertop business. Just like any older building, it has its pros and cons. After moving in a few months ago, we’re more comfortable here, but the noise from the updates took some getting used to.

The Blue House, home of the Angie’s List publication department, is also a unique old building. Built in the 1890’s, it has a lot of charm, but with that charm comes unfortunate energy inefficiency: the House’s energy bills have hit $700 in some months. Tristan Schmid has more.

Tristan Schmid, host, List-en Up!))
Schmid: Last year, Angie’s List magazine celebrated Earth Day with our first “Green Issue,” featuring stories about how you can be environmentally friendly and still live comfortably. This year, we follow that with our second “Green Issue,” in which we focus on efficient building and renovation practices.

As we researched this topic, we realized there are some simple things we could do to become more ecologically friendly here in the Blue House. Sure, we recycle our office paper, use programmable thermostats, and set our computer monitors to automatically turn off when we’re away. But we decided to go a step further and turn the Blue House into a “green house.” We’ve replaced our plastic dishware with the reusable kind, improved our recycling system, replaced all 60 of our incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescents, and we’re considering the installation of a composting toilet as well! We even hired Thermo-Scan, a Carmel, Indiana-based building-inspection firm highly rated on Angie’s List, to examine the Blue House and tell us why it’s so inefficient.
Sue Wiltz, (out of frame) to Eric Hartz and Liz Vernon: Meet the energy-audit person who can tell you how much cold air is seeping into your windows.

Hartz: I already know how much: a lot!

Wiltz: This room gets cold, particularly these guys against the windows and the wall.

Schmid: Thermo-Scan Inspections performs inspections nationwide, and has rated more than 10,000 Energy Star homes in the last decade. They’ve also won the Energy Star achievement award two years in a row.

Allison Senninger, our inspector, gave us a full report on the Blue House’s energy efficiency, along with some great tips on how to save energy — and, consequently, money!
Sue: Has the energy-audit business been jumping recently?

Senninger: We are getting a lot of calls. We get a lot of reference from utilities. With the cold weather and the prices going up, a lot of people are calling the utilities looking for ways they can save on their bills, and then they refer them to us.

Senninger: These pipes are wrapped – that’s a very minor thing we’d recommend. This insulation is good, but that insulation probably should be replaced.

Schmid: Thermo-Scan and other energy auditing companies work with homeowners to determine a building’s energy efficiency. They do this by taking various measurements of the house, inspecting heating and cooling systems, and using tools like infrared thermal scanners and blower doors to find problem areas.

Senninger: Typically when we do an existing home, there is a specific problem that we’re called in for, like they can’t keep their upstairs cool in the summer or their downstairs warm in the winter.

Schmid: It took Allison a few hours to inspect the 3100-square-feet of the Blue House, though I’m sure it would’ve taken less time had a small Angie’s List mob not been following her and asking questions (we are reporters, after all!)

A few days after the inspection, Allison emailed us a detailed report, which included descriptions of problems she found, as well as images from the thermal scans (this one shows that the seemingly ancient window above my desk, and the wall next to it, aren’t much warmer than the outside winter temperature — NOT good!)

Allison also provided a detailed “improvement analysis report,” which showed we could cut our heating and cooling costs nearly in half by taking various steps — some quite simple — towards energy efficiency.

The audit gave the Blue House a score on the Home Energy Rating System Index, a system established by the Residential Energy Services Network (RESNET) in which a home that uses no net purchased energy scores an index of 0. The typical existing American home has a rating of 150; the Blue House failed the audit with a miserable 192.

The most glaring problems with our house are the windows and insulation. The Blue House doesn’t have adequate insulation in many of the walls, and parts of the attic have no insulation at all, buffered from the outside weather only by the uninsulated roof.

Senninger: Any wall that’s adjacent to an attic space like this, the backside of the wall should be insulated – there’s nothing in here.

Schmid: Allison recommended we have new, more environmentally friendly insulation installed in the attic, walls, and basement.

Senninger: We still see, in new construction, a lot of fiberglass. (There’s) a new glass product (that) isn’t itchy: it’s white and feels more like cotton. There’s also cellulose, which is recycled newspaper. It’s treated, but it’s the most environmental thing. We also see a lot of spray foam. That has a very high R-value per inch when it’s sprayed on, plus it also acts as an air sealer. If you sprayed that along the walls or rim down here, you would reduce air infiltration and add insulation R-value.

Schmid: Allison also said that the windows, which were found to be the main source of air infiltration, should be repaired and have new storm windows installed, or be replaced completely.

It was also recommended that we replace our old, inefficient boiler with a gas furnace, or better yet, a heat pump.

Though some of Thermo-Scan’s recommendations would be quite costly up front or take considerable time, many of the recommended steps we take in the Thermo-Scan report will likely pay themselves off over the long haul.

So if you’re paying more than you think you should for your home’s heating and cooling, you might want to have an energy audit performed on your home. Many energy utility companies offer free or discounted audits, so contact your local utilities to find out if this is possible in your area. If your utilities don’t offer discounts, expect to pay between $250 for an expert inspection with a blower-door test on a small home, on up to $750 for a larger home with air sealing and weatherization.

Even if you do have to pay, the investment will be well worth it if you find a well-rated energy auditor on Angie’s List and implement some of their recommendations

Until next time, this is Tristan. Thanks for taking the time to list-en!