[For Earth Week this year I've lined up a number of East Coast Guest Posts to discuss a variety of topics. Cokebaby and I purchased a 1950's bungalow style a few years back and have been going through the process of upgrading the place to be a bit more environmentally sound. This first guest post looks at the trials of creating a "green" house from scratch.]
By Jeff White
For the past year my wife and I have been working through the process of designing and building an ecologically-friendly home for our family. I’ve been blogging about it since September or so at Building the White House (side note: cute blog names like this just ensure you end up with a ton of bounced traffic when people are looking for the real White House).
We bought our property in a fantastic community called Three Brooks. It’s a very natural area, and the people who live there pride themselves on living in harmony with nature. There are rules about tree cutting and landscaping needs to be kept as natural as possible. Awesome.
The lot is defined by natural rock outcroppings, mature aspens, spindly birches, tons of huge boulders and a ridge on the right side. We’ve been wanting to build a passive solar house for years, ever since we spent a few hours in a friend’s Don Roscoe-designed and built house.
For those who don’t know, passive solar houses don’t use any active solar systems like solar panels or heaters. Instead, they do their best to face true south (about 20 odd degrees off magnetic south). Construction materials are generally shifted from a traditional home so that you don’t have a basement, most of your glazing faces south, and you might have an air recirculation system to distribute warm air throughout the house. The south face of the house uses overhangs to ensure that you capitalize on winter sun while keeping the house cool in the summer. It’s a brilliant model because presumably you’re just rearranging the standard materials, which shouldn’t cost too much more than a normal house, right?
Think again.
First of all, no ‘normal’ builders even have a clue how to do this. Ask the Ramars and Scotian Homes of the world about this and you’ll just be greeted by a blank stare. They’ll recommend R2000, but this standard is totally different and takes the opposite approach to passive solar. It uses active systems and a super tight envelope. Which generally means that you’ll need a specialty builder. Add some serious costs for this.
Secondly, most builders don’t get the passive idea and will try to push an active system on you for secondary heating. Which isn’t a bad idea, just in case something goes wrong. You know, if the sun ever fails.
Design © 2008 Monica Sweetapple
Since normal builders don’t understand the process, you’ll need an architecturally designed house. This has substantial costs as well. House designers and architects we spoke with have professional fees of $10,000 – $100,000. This is on top of your construction, your lot, permits and everything else. In addition, insurance companies don’t understand passive solar so they have a hard time quoting on it.
But, isn’t the government offering rebates for new home builders to design and build more energy efficient homes? Sure they are! If you build a house and achieve an Energuide rating of 83 you can get a whopping $750! Wow, that should help buy a few cases of whiskey to get through the stress of spending this much money.
You’re actually better off renovating an existing house than building new, at least as far as the government rebates go. When I spoke to someone at Conserve Nova Scotia he told me that it was irresponsible to build a new house if the old one wasn’t energy efficient enough. It’s no wonder that builders have no incentive to build in a green way. There’s absolutely nothing in it for them.
Until our government sees the importance of building new houses in an eco-friendly way, new homes are going to continue to go up with insufficient insulation, poor lot siting (even a change of 30 degrees in position means the loss of 75% of passive solar value!), and inefficient heating sources. Sure, geothermal and solar panels are coming down in price, but you can still expect 20+ years before the costs of these systems start to pay for themselves. This is no incentive for those on moderate budgets–unless you’ve got unlimited funds, most of us will continue to build normal houses that aren’t very efficient.
Is there a bright side in this? Absolutely. More and more people are looking to green building technologies. However, most are going to find that it’s simply not worth it at this point in time. As much as I love the idea of building green, my wallet simply can’t support it. The industry has no interest in making progress in this way, and the government isn’t offering realistic incentives to help people make the switch.
While it’s gotten easier in the last few years to buy energy efficient vehicles, it’s very difficult at this time to truly take advantage of green heating and construction for your home. Until this becomes less of a niche market for green materials and processes, I don’t think we’ll see much progress in this area.
We need to start lobbying the government for better incentives. Until more people start buying solar panels, residential windmills and geothermal units, the prices will remain high. New home buyers also need to pressure their builders to consider greener building procedures and they need to educate themselves on the benefits of passive solar building. Once this happens, we’ll be on a much better path to saving the earth from us.
Jeff is the founder and president of Brightwhite Design, a boutique interface design and development shop, located in Halifax. A veteran designer and social media participant, Jeff brings nearly 15 years of pragmatic experience to numerous clients from small and medium companies to public sector and multi-national corporations.
Kimberly Walsh is a social media and online community manager. You can follow her on Twitter @AliasGrace.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Wow… I had no idea the incentives were so crappy for new eco houses… That’s kind of ridiculous.
Terrific stuff to think about. I wonder about adding extra southern windows to an existing house and building overhangs. I thought this was interesting…”When I spoke to someone at Conserve Nova Scotia he told me that it was irresponsible to build a new house if the old one wasn’t energy efficient enough.”
Shelagh,
South facing glazing with overhangs is one thing, but if you don’t have a large thermal mass such as a concrete slab floor or masonry wall to store the heat for later release as the house cools, it won’t really function as passive solar.
- jeff
HEre Here!
Nova Scotia – and indeed Canada – is behind the game for Alt. energy in household design and alt. energy as a general philosophy.
Not only does this lack of vision hamper people like you in your efforts to be efficient, but it will leave us far behind places like the US and Europe in the next economic boom which will occur in alternative energy innovation.
I have written to our provincial government expressing these thoughts – more than a year ago – and have yet to receive anything back. My fear is that they truly don’t understand the language of alt. energy or the alt. energy economy.
Pity because Nova Scotia has the potential to be a centre of excellence for Alternative energy RnD and design
Gifted: We did a number of upgrades to our 1950s bungalow style house. I’m not sure how the previous owners survived winters in the place. But you’re right, there aren’t very many incentives out there and the upfront cost can be prohibitive to many people despite the longer term savings. Pity that the government can’t see the bigger picture in this regard.
I have never heart of passive solar houses even though I have read many articles about eco-friendly architecture. Anyway it sounds like quite good idea. I hope you overcome all the issues you describe and be successful lobbying the government for better incentives. You have my support.
As your post suggested, green homes are still part of a budding field, as opposed to the advances being made with cars of late, though it will only be a short matter of time until that is corrected. It will have to be done out of necessity, and hopefully incentives and prices for different elements of green homes will change.
In the meanwhile, it’s good to see groups like NAGAB (National Association of Green Agents and Brokers) starting to gain momentum here in Canada to take it out of its niche category.
Thanks for your post. Good luck in all of your future green endeavours!