2. March 2009 by gleearch.

No, I’m not talking about what it’s like to live in a sustainably designed home. I’m talking about what a hot house cucumber feels like.

If you have been to the city lately you will notice a plethora of high rise residential buildings. Part of the recent (& fast decaying) boom in urban housing. The types of units range across the board but my focus today will be on the popular two level townhouse or loft units.

There are plenty of splashy modern multi-family buildings popping all across the urban fabric. Many of them look great. There are in fact many good architects who design these buildings and for the most part the people who live in them, love their homes.

However, once awhile, you get these two level units with floor to ceiling glass facing south (or southwest). Yes, dead on exposure to the sun all year long. Day lighting is great, don’t get me wrong, but not when you’re facing due south with no sun protection or shading. Forget window blinds and heavy curtains. Once the solar radiation gets past the glass, anything it touches heats up. You have to stop that particular wavelength before it gets into the unit or you may as well call up the local botanical society and offer your home as a green house for growing any number of tropical plants.

So you have all that great glass and fantastic views but you keep your blinds and curtains drawn most of the year because that air conditioner will be struggling to keep the unit just a shade close to comfort levels in Death Valley. How do I know this? Well I live in one such lovely building (though I did not design it). It looks great and I rarely ever have to use the heater in the winter but I do know how a hot house cucumber feels in the summer.

I have designed a few multi-family buildings in the past and I believe you can integrate climate responsive elements even in modern and high tech designs. Daylight should be invited into a home and the same with solar gain but the design should control it. Light and space can be poetic but not when it feels like a convection oven. Architects really should experience the buildings they design on a regular basis. It will make them better designers for it.

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23. February 2009 by admin.

This continues where the last post left off…

Ok, so you didn’t have a house designed to work with the site or the climate.  What do you do?

Well get somebody to analyze your house or building.   Where are you losing heat from and vice versa.  If you have more heating days then cooling, you need to find where you are losing the heat from to lower your energy costs.

Simple steps like caulking or using weather stripping helps.  Then step it up if your budget allows and replace windows or doors.  Look at the insulation in your attic and if you have any under your floors in a crawl space.  If you have a slab on grade, consider insulating the perimeter of the slab if at all possible.

Look at the insulation in your walls.  Does it have any? Remember though that it is always better if the house was built with high efficiency building components in the first place.  If you decide to refurbish your home after the fact, you need to carefully research what you put in the home.

There are plenty of businesses out there that will happily pump your wall full of insulation products.  Not all good for you.  You need to check the types of insulation and if it will off gas volatile organic compounds (VOCs) into your home for months or years after the installation.   You also need to find out if by adding the additional insulation you inadvertently cause the dew point (where condensation occurs) to fall somewhere within your wall cavity.

Huh? Why?

Well, moisture occurring in your walls helps mold thrive.  People tend to forget that they live and sleep in their homes.  If they don’t see anything, it’s not a problem.  Just because its built doesn’t mean it’s right.

Ok, that went off tangent a little, so let’s get back on track.  Button up your home (but do it right).

Consider other measures like planting deciduous trees that shade the house in the summer but allow in sunlight in the winter.   Build a trellis on the south or west sides of your home to shade it from the summer sun and reduce your cooling load.  If you are going to replace you roof because it just happens to be that time, consider using roofing materials that are lighter in color.

Then look at what you have in the house.  Replace old and inefficient appliances.  Your mental calculator is going off right now.  Well, if you consider the costs of installing a PV system, most of these efforts will costs far less and still save you money.  It’s far better to save money then to spend it if you are getting the same effort.  In today’s economy, we need all the help we can.

For the most part measures like these will help reduce the heating or cooling loads on your central air conditioner or furnace.  Compare your utility bills over a number of years to see if you have actually achieved any savings.

Now after all these efforts, if you still want to install the PV system,  you’ll find that it will probably be sized smaller than before you initiated all the other efforts.  Which in turn will costs you less.

That I guess was the whole point of this post.  Do whatever you can to make your building more efficient before throwing technology at it.  Sometimes simple measures can save you a lot of money.

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23. February 2009 by admin.

Just the other day somebody asked me about incentives for installing photo voltaic (PV) panels on their home.  It appears there was a sudden surge in their energy bill and coupled with everything else that is going on, they felt that it might help to offset their utility bills with some sun power. Apparently many people were seeing that with the recent cold front.  Couple this with the news that a portion of the stimulus plan has incentives for green technology or renewable power and suddenly it seems like a good idea.

Using renewable energy to get your home or building off the grid or partially of the grid is a good goal to have.  We could go on about how using renewables will help limit this country’s dependence on foreign oil but there are plenty of experts to talk about it.  That’s not what I’m going to focus on.

Before anyone heads out the door to buy and install a PV system on their home, they need to take a hard look at their home or building.  This post isn’t to discourage you in your effort to install a PV panel system or a wind turbine in your home or building.  It is about things you should consider before doing so.

So let’s look at a single family residence as an example.  Your electric/gas/ heating oil bill is high because of your heating or cooling  loads in your home.  So you think installing a PV system (or wind turbine) will help offset the utility bills.  Great, except even with all the incentives, rebates etc, it still uses hard earned cash to put one up.

Unfortunately for most people, their homes are regular tract homes built to a series of similar plans and laid out to maximize the number of homes in the development.  Which means that for the most part, they are not designed with the site or climate in mind.

You say, what’s the big deal? It has windows and insulation in the walls and all the other homes are the same way.  Fair enough.

If all your windows are facing west and go floor to ceiling, then you’ll know how a hothouse cucumber feels all year long.  You can have triple glaze windows with low-e coatings and you’ll still cook in that house.   If your air conditioner was sized the same way as all the other houses, well it’s going to have a heavier load to deal with.  For most people living in older homes, it’s likely they have single glazing in their windows.

Truth of the matter is that you can throw all the technology in the world at a building but if it wasn’t designed to work with the climate then you are over sizing all that equipment to compensate for the failings of the design.  Not a problem when gas was cheap.

Continued on the next post….

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