The homes of the future will come with remarkably low heating bills. At least that's the hope of a Portland-based non-profit showcasing 13 super energy efficient homes in four Northwest states. The question is, can you afford to buy one of these houses?
The model homes are scattered among many of the big cities in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana. The houses don't look unusual from the outside. But all have been designed to use at least 30 percent less energy.
Builder Anthony Maschmedt of Dwell Development shows me around a modern, boxy, single family home in south Seattle. A bunch of things make this new house super-efficient, starting with heavily insulated walls, triple pane windows and a tightly sealed building envelope.
"If you can make the home airtight, then you're not spending energy heating air, then losing air out the walls," Maschmedt says. "And then spending money to reheat more air that you lose out the walls. It's a vicious cycle."
Maschmedt says an exterior spray-on air barrier hides under the siding. There's no fireplace.
"We got away from doing even gas fireplaces because there's another big hole in the exterior of your house," he says.
Since this house is virtually airtight, it requires a ventilator with a heat exchanger to circulate fresh air. There's no furnace. Instead, a tankless on-demand water boiler supplies hot water and sends radiant heat through tubes in the floor.
"You have one unit serving two purposes. There is some extra tubing, but that is minimal compared to the cost of having a whole other heating system for your home. "
Electricians wired each of the homes in the demonstration project with an array of sensors. Those will track energy use and building performance for the next year. The data flows to a group trying to raise the bar, the non-profit Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance (NEEA). It's funded mostly by utilities.
NEEA's Neil Grigsby manages the Next Step Homes project.
"You can build more efficiently and you can get to 'net zero,' " says Grigsby. "But what we're trying to do with this specification is really find that sweet spot where you are maximizing energy efficiency - before you start hitting diminishing returns with added costs."
Ultimately, Grigsby says his organization wants to put the most cost effective measures into mandatory state building codes. This concerns Jan Himebaugh, government affairs director of the Building Industry Association of Washington. She says more stringent codes could make new houses less affordable. Himebaugh favors "a market driven system" to give builders the "flexibility" to offer better windows for example to home buyers who want that.
Other communities could ask for lower cost new homes.
"Even those that are built exactly to code are much more efficient [than the older housing stock]," says Himebaugh.
She adds this analogy: "[I]t'd be nice if all had a hybrid car. They get great gas mileage and eventually they do pay themselves off - or so I'm told. I don't have one. I don't have one because I can't afford to pay the extra cost upfront right now. And it's the same thing with a home. Many people aren't capable of paying right now."
At this stage, it's hard to pin down the extra cost of building a house that's at least thirty percent more energy efficient than code. Olympia homebuilder Scott Bergford estimated a payback period of three to four years for the model home his company built. Bergford's contribution to the demonstration project is a Craftsman-style two bedroom/three bath that his company dubbed the "Inspiration Home."
"We want people to understand that a 'green' home does not have to have an enormous price tag," says Bergford.
The modern-style two bedroom/two bath we toured in Seattle cost 5 to 7 percent more to build than traditional construction according to its developer. It sold for $399,000 to Liz Bullard, a mother of three grown children who wanted to downsize. She says she doesn't feel like she paid extra.
"I looked at a lot of houses," says Bullard. "There are many, many houses with this same price tag that were much less appealing than this house."
Changing the building code "is a long term process," says NEEA's Neil Grigsby. Washington, Oregon and Idaho update their residential building codes roughly every three years. Grigsby figures his organization will hammer away at its energy efficiency goals for the next three or four code cycles.
Copyright 2013 Northwest News Network
