It been a long time coming!
August 23, 2009
It is beginning to dawn on me that I may have started building energy efficient housing and historical renovations 30 years too soon, but better late then never. Somewhere in Valhalla, lucky for me, the Supreme Being ordered up a world I envisioned 30 years ago and said, “Bob, go to it!” I believed that $5 a gallon of gas would have occurred in the late 70′s and by the end of the Century we would have been paying close to $10 per gallon. Many people are, just not in this country.
I believed us American’s would have demanded strict energy efficient laws, designs and practices in the construction of buildings and houses back in the early 80′s. At the very least that cars and trucks would have been required, at a minimum, to get over 30 miles to a gallon of gas. What happened? The great despisers of the establishment(Us Boomers), became the establishment and the most dedicated Capitalist’s and consumers the world has seen. The sons and daughters of the “Greatest Generation,” the group that put their lives on the line for a better world for the future, sold out for luxury, consumerism and short term goals. We gave up going to the moon for going on vacation. We could have done both.
I did my first passive solar house in 1977, my first super-insulated house in 1979, my first solar thermal system in 1980. My reputation and building business was predicated on this belief in energy conservation. Never in my wildest imagination did I believe it would be back-seated for 25 years. Frankly I have never built, renovated or designed a home or older building without paying strict attention to energy, particularly insulation. But I was certainly in the minority.
Now the demand for competent, practical and knowledgeable practitioners of Sustainable, Energy Efficient, High Performance , Green building exceeds the supply. Actual builders and individuals who know how to apply these methods in a cost effective manner are few and far between. This situation will only worsen over the next couple of years as individuals and business entity’s continue to jump on the Green Bandwagon. The real caution here is that many will only have enough knowledge to get them into trouble. In other words their mouth will exceed their ability. There are going to be many horror story’s and litigation issues over the next few years as the industry continues to evolve.
While their are many dedicated Green Building advocates–there are minuscule amounts of individuals who can take classroom blackboard theory to applied, practical reality. There are even fewer who recognize that in order for the “Green” movement to become main-stream, which it struggles to do even now, that practical cost vs. value added decisions have to be made. I mean who is going to put in a building system that has an 80 year payback? It may be the right thing to do, but the reality is not everyone can afford what is right.
Somewhere along the line, we have to accept a new standard for evaluating buildings. We have to leave behind the thought that Initial Cost is the primary consideration of judging a building or home. We have to begin to look at “The initial cost plus the occupancy/operational costs over the course of a buildings life” is the true cost of a building. Investors in multi-family and commercial buildings have long looked at a building in these terms. Let’s all join the party.
Modular Building Sense
August 21, 2009
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- Putting 2nd Story in Place1
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- Raising the roof!
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- Adding a Dormer
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- Ready to Move In
Modular Home Construction unfortunately gets a bad rap. Any house made in a controlled environment(IE a factory) is referenced all too often as a Modular Home, especially by the sales people who don’t want to call their HUD code homes by their correct name– Trailers, Mobile Home or Manufactured Home. This is not slur on HUD code, Trailers or Mobile Homes. My first house was a mobile home, trailer put on a foundation. It was a great home. It was a great place to get my feet wet in home-ownership after leaving the Army.
A Mobile Home or trailer is built to a specific code called a HUD code. It is not built to local building codes. It takes special zoning to allow this house to be put on a site. Just because a mobile home is put on a foundation, doesn’t make it a modular or permanent house. The one true way to tell if a home is built to a HUD code is it always has chassis under it, so wheels can be attached and it can be moved. These homes have improved 1000 of % in quality and structural stability over the past 10-15 years. They are being used in many redevelopment areas and the uninformed person could never tell it was a mobile home. Some of them are two stories and quite stately.
What the majority of consumers don’t understand is a Modular house is built to the local building code. It is built to the same standard as that stick built-on site-home we are all familiar with. Instead of assembling all the parts on site, it is built in a controlled environment(no rain, no snow, no freeze). It is built out of the same components as on-site built housing, both single and multi-family, only better and stronger. The United States Navy builds its AirCraft Carriers, the big boys, by modular construction practices. If it is good enough to withstand the storms of the North Atlantic and Pacific, it is strong enough to sit on a building site and last. Modular constructed homes have been shown in Florida to sustain hurricanes substantially more intact than stick built homes. The quality? Come on, there are multi-million dollar beach and mountain houses being constructed modularly by people who don’t have to worry about money or budgets. See “Modular Mansions” by Sherri Koones or “Prefab Green” by Kaufma & Remick. They have come a long way baby.
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Common Sense, Energy Efficient, Green Building
August 20, 2009
Builder Bob Sounds Off
I haven’t blogged in a year. I had no desire or purpose. I used to sporadically blog, but I couldn’t determine what it was I was trying to accomplish. I am considered by virtue of age and experience, some type of expert regarding “Green Building.” I was, have been and continue to be inundated by people and organizations wanting information on home testing, weatherization, Energy Star, LEEDs, LEEDs for Homes, EarthCraft Homes, BPI, NAHB, Solar, SIPS, and the list goes on and on. There is so much information, much of it redundant and of no value in real applications. Literally one could make a full time job just keeping up, which isn’t the purpose, the purpose is to get the practical, cost effective technology into buildings. For me something had to change. I had to get my mind wrapped around what is really happening and where I fit.
I get extremely irritated by all this recent jump on the Green building, it your duty to save-the-planet bandwagon. I am real tired of all the “Do this and Do that,” promising all kinds of savings and immediate rewards—with no substance to back it up and no one tracking what really has occurred. I am exasperated by the guilt laid on people for not incorporating all the latest technology into their buildings without regard to budgets and payback times of the application of a system. Or designers and architects who want to create impractical monuments to “Star Wars Concepts,” before perfecting a non-leaky thermal envelope. Sure everyone likes the glamour of solar or geo-thermal, but they may be step 12 in a 14 step process. A Payback in 80 years may be good for the planet, but it isn’t reality. When something is to costly to make sense, it doesn’t get applied!
Green is being hawked from every street corner, the web is inundated with it and before long people are going to reject major portions of it because the results don’t match the promises. Or the current stigma surrounding Green, that it is too expensive, will win the day. Many advocates have lost sight of the goal or object. I am reminded of my high school basketball coach asking us what the object of the game was? He got answers ranging from playing defense, to learn how to dribble, to learn how to shoot. Finally he asked a noted gunner(a derogatory comment from one who some people think shoots too much)me, and I said: “To score points by putting the ball in the basket.” He was ecstatic. That was the object of the game, to put the ball in the basket. On offense things are designed to make it possible to get the ball in the basket and the defense is designed to stop the ball from being put in the basket.
So what is the objective of Green Building? or is it “High Performance Building?” or is it “Sustainable Building?” or is it “Energy Efficient Building?” If I have confusion over all these names, imagine a builder, developer, municipality, government organization, non-profit or home-owner’s confusion in just getting by the name. How do potential implementers of Green Building swim their way through this over-whelming amount of information and decide what it is they are trying to do and how to do it?
The object is to get Green Buildings built. Only by getting Green Buildings built do we learn, progress and move towards winning the battle. The better people get at building Green Buildings, the more cost effective and practical they become. Pretty soon they become common place and no one thinks of building anything else.
We are not going to save the planet in a day or discover a cost affordable alternative energy source this week. It has taken us decades to get in the precarious position we are in and it will take decades to get out of it. That means we have to crawl, then walk, then run. You do this by getting people to buy into the concept by showing them the practicality and cost effectiveness of applying Green–not the pie-in-the-sky, Utopian concepts, but the real deals.
I believe today, with what we know, that we have run out of excuses for not applying cost effective, green, energy efficiency systems to all new construction. I also believe these systems should be incorporated, after cost evaluations, into the renovation of existing buildings, when it is time to do so. I don’t believe you should arbitrarily do an energy or green retrofit just to do it, without substantiated financial reasoning.
I have discovered my purpose and it is to be the trumpeter of what I call: ”Cost Effective, Common Sense, Energy Efficient, Green Building.” CECSEE-Green.
My objective is to get Green Buildings built and they don’t have to be state of the art BMW’s, but can be reliable, efficient Volkswagen Beetles at this juncture.
As a consequence of this exercise I have answered my own question of “What do I bring to the table?” And why would anyone want to read my opinions or utilize my expertise? Because I deliver the message of common sense and practical applications. That is the objective of Zia Energy’s Web Site and Builder Bob’s Blog. To bring common sense and cost effectiveness to Green Building. To paraphrase my old coach, my objective is to get it built.