Entries Tagged 'planning' ↓

Last week I was getting nervous about our ability to incorporate all of the energy efficient features of the home in the most cost effective manner possible. I have also been pouring over other case study’s that contain very nice energy modeling data that I craved on our homes. I finally bit the bullet and […]

Since studying the Passive House standard of energy efficient design, we have been trying to determine what we can incorporate into our project without blowing the budget. Below are some of the ideas we have so far to improve the energy efficiency of the home after consulting the Passive House Standard.
Insulation

Increase SIP wall panels to […]

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The basic idea of a Passive House is to reduce the energy usage of a home by 90% over traditional code built homes. I grabbed this definition off of a site which will hopefully become clearer later in the post: “A Passive House is a building for which thermal comfort can be achieved solely by post-heating or post-cooling of the fresh air mass, which is required to fulfill sufficient indoor air quality conditions without a need for recirculated air.” […]

Over the course of the past few months I have been researching a number of green building and energy efficient processes and certifications. I am coming to realize that the best home in terms of sustainability and energy efficiency is most likely a result of a combination of a few different guidelines or certification methods. […]

We received the initial HERS Index scores from the Energy Star evaluations that MaGrann performed on our initial specs about two weeks ago. I have been crazy busy lately and forgot to post on this at the time. If you recall from our LEED Design Charrette, we need to hit a HERS Index of 50 […]

We all know there are not many federal government incentives for green building right now. Many states have picked up the ball and implemented some decent local incentives of their own. Unfortunately, Pennsylvania is not one of those states at the moment. They are working on state legislation to improve this, but for now we […]

So I just returned from today’s LEED Design Charrette and everything went very well. The bottom line is that we found out that reaching Platinum is possible with our design, but we have a few issues to clarify and iron out. Rob from MaGrann was extremely knowledgeable and taught us all a lot about the […]

Today is a big day for the project as we are having our LEED Design Charrette. The very first category in the LEED for Homes rating system is “Integrated Project Planning.” We are required to conduct a preliminary rating with our LEED Provider in order to target the level we want to reach (Certified, Silver, […]

It took a day and a half, but our plans have now officially been submitted to the City of Philadelphia for zoning approval. We filed for an accelerated review of the plans in order to get an answer within 5 days so if all goes well we will have zoning approval for both homes from […]

I arrived at the topic of this post in a round about way today. It started with a search for the best refrigerator for our project on the energy star website. While we obviously need an energy star model, the range of energy usage ranges from roughly 400 - 700 kWH / year on […]