(upbeat music) - Hi, I'm Paul Kriesher.

For the past quarter of a century I've worked to create more energy efficient homes and buildings.

I'm fascinated by the technical aspects and cutting edge ideas from people who are pushing the boundaries in their projects.

Equally important to me is the why behind the plan.

What's the motivation for these individuals to make the effort, take the time, pay the additional money to take on sustainable and regenerative design and construction in their projects?

We're gonna take you on a journey to explore three unique construction projects, a church remodel commercial building, an innovative single family home, and an exceptional multifamily building.

Explore the design and the desire for each one to be examples of creating the buildings of tomorrow today, and to leave the world a little better than how they found it.

When we recorded this video, we were four months into the U.S. response to COVID-19.

Shortly after restaurants ben to open, but steps were still being taken for social distancing.

And you'll see me and interviewees occasionally wearing masks as we move through these buildings.

These precautions were done to protect the wellbeing of others and reminded me as to how we are all connected and need to truly care for one another as we move through life.

This connection between all of us is the fundamental reason for our videos.

To showcase buildings which provide for our and all of creation's greatest good by using less resources while delivering optimal performance for the occupants.

May we all be well.

First Universalist Church members in Denver are a great example of living their values through the renovation of their building.

The whole congregation got together and decided to shoot for zero emission, not an easy or cheap goal, but one they truly believed in.

Let's head inside and find out more from these amazing people.

We're talking to church members John Bringenberg and Milt Hetrick, Reverend Dr. Elaine Peresluha, and communications coordinat, Jessica Montgomery, about their goal to design a zero carbon footprint buildi.

(upbeat music) And while this green light has nothing to do with sustainability, it's a very cool design feature.

Find out what it is a little bit later.

So Milt, if you'd be so kind, you have a brilliant mind in implied engineering in helping this project come together.

But tell us a little bit of your background, all the good street cred that you had through the schooling and work that you've done before quasi retiring and then working on a project like this.

- Well, I got my degree, engineering degree in aerospace, and I spent probably the first 10 years in aerospace, left the industry and went into the oil and gas field for about three years.

I was involved in some oil shale technology.

Then ended up going back to aerospace where I retired.

And in the meantime, I also got a degree in physics.

So little did I know I was going to be applying it to a church project.

(chuckling) - And you did great work with it.

So related to the church project, obviously, can you tell me briefly why you, the congregation, the people working on this, chose to do such a high performance building instead of simply meeting co, like so many other projects?

- Sure.

This project, we have to kind of go back and recall that it got started around 2015.

And at that point in time, the global community as you know is becoming very concerd about the climate crisis, global warming.

And that was the year actually of COP 21 and the Paris Agreement, where a global community made an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit global warming to one and a half or two degrees.

So that was the large, the big picture that was going on at the time this project got started.

Now, if we come down a little bit, our religious denomination, the Unitarian Universalist Association, they had published what we refer to as statements of conscious.

Within this church we had a small group of environmental activists that we called ourselves the Green First Task Force.

We were concerned about the growth of our congregation and that we needed more space, more classrooms, a bigger sanctuary.

And so we initiated a building renovation project.

And one of the members of our task force, John Bringenberg, who got himself positioned on the building committee and made sure that we had sustainability perspectives as design requirements for this renovation project.

- You know a lot about this building, about the whole process.

But what I'm really fascinated by in this project was the why people came together to do this great project.

- When you have a church community, you have a unique people environment to make decisions of this ki.

We of course have to think about the economic impacts of energy decisions when we're redesigning this building.

But being in a church community, you have the opportunity to bring in another dimension, something that maybe it doesn't exist in a normal commercial business, for example.

And in our case, that's what we call our seventh principle.

- This amazing building is a manifestation of many beautiful principles and values that come from the Unitarian Universalist Church.

And I'd love to learn more about that.

- I would say the general value of Unitarian universalm is to live your faith, to live out the principles.

And we have seven of them.

And they are about democracy, about how you treat one another, the dignity and worth of every human.

But the one that's important to this project is the seventh principle.

And that one is we are all pt of an interdependent web of all life.

And that we are to recognize our equity with all other beings, sentient and not, and the earth, and to care for the earth as stewards.

- Well, early on, we did our homework and tried to define what I'll call the harm that we were doing to our planet and quantified it in the context of tons of CO2 that this facility was introducing into the atmosphere.

And what we learned was kind of shocking.

We learned that because of the electricity that we bought from our utility company, Xcel Energy, they in turn were dumping about 50 metric tons of CO2 a year into the atmosphere.

And we were buying natural gas from them and burning that onsite in 10 different gas furnaces and dumping ourselves another 50 metric tons into the atmosphere.

We also were aware that there are alternatives to doing that.

- Can you tell me a little bit about the story and the process of how people came together, especially around the funding portions of this project to make it happen?

'Cause it's a great story.

- It is, yes.

We had a capital campaign for the building renovation well underway and working with the architects when a member-driven initiative, a very bold one, came up to add a sustainable energy system and also add cost for sustainable energy system.

- It's challenging for several .

First off, it added more than 10% to the cost of the total building project.

- And being understandably debt avoidant the church just asked, "Can we go ask for additional gifts specificaly for the sustainable energy system and then close the gap as needed with a member loan?"

- So the community, as I heard it, came together and said, "We're not going to try and get the maximum dollar out of the church that we can.

We wanna give a gift, but we need to get our money back, plus get 1.5%," you said, "interest on it?"

- Right.

- In exchange.

That sounds like a beautiful win-win.

- Yeah, we thought that was a rather unique approach because going in, the first response we got, from just about everybody, was, "We can't afford that."

- Yeah, member-led, member-driven effort, we exceeded our goal in the additional member gifts, specifically to add the sustainable energy system to the building project.

And then with the remaining funds members came together and formed a general partnership, The Seventh Principle Partnership.

And that bold move paid off and we were able to see the project completed.

- You were heavily involved in many of the technical aspects of this project.

And I had the pleasure of working with you guys and being involved with doing air tightness inspections and blower doors and things, but can you tell me a bit about what you chose to do, let's say starting with the envelope of the building?

- Okay, great.

This was a retrofit.

So there was about 20% new square footage added to an existing building which was restored and rebui.

But in doing so, we were able to get nearly the entire building envelope with new insulation, including a skim coat of foam on the outside, fiberglass insulation to bring us to about an R30 value in the walls.

- Which is great.

- We have a flat roof for most of the roof on the building, including the original parts of the building.

And we were able to really beef that up.

And we went from having about two inches of solid foam insulation to having about six inches, bringing us to an R value above 50.

- Which is really amazing cae yeah, your beginning levels, you were closer to like an R 14 or 13 maybe.

And yeah, to be above R 50 up there is just outstanding.

- In the design of the envelope, air tightness, making the building tight was really the first parameter.

And the R value was really a secondary parameter.

We employ for the first time in this building five ERV units.

And those ERV units work hand in glove with the envelope being as tight as it can be.

- Yeah.

And one thing I can share since I did the testing is that the building came in at a test level of 0.188 CFM per square foot at 75 pascals, which is amazg 'cause code for new construction, not a remodel but new construction, is 0.4.

So you were less than half, as far as that standard goes for new construction.

So you guys did some really good stuff with that part of it.

If I may, I want to ask you to get a little more in depth about the Ground Source Heat Pump system, the technology, because it's a new enough technology.

I mean, it's been being used in the Midwest for a decade or more and in other cases.

But it's still an exception.

We don't see it in enough projects.

And so you were quite innovative to bring it in.

- Well, if this were a new construction and we didn't have a parking lot paved and landscaping in, we probably would have selecd a so-called horizontal installation of these heat exchange pipes.

- Right.

- It's the cheapest way to do it, but because- - How shallow or how deep would that have to have been?

- Well, they probably go down six or eight feet.

The alternative is to drill five inch diameter holes down and insert black plastic pipes in a vertical manner.

- The materials that you have in this building, the pumps, the piping for it, even the air handlers themselves with the water connecting back into the air handler from the ground source loop field, all look, and they are, just really off the shelf.

I mean, they're just common to all projects.

There's nothing that's like incredibly innovative with that part of it, which is great.

It makes it easy for repairs and things like that going down the road.

So you were an integral part of having solar PV, photovoltaic, put onto this building to power a tremendous amount of this building's need for energy.

So can you tell me a bit about the system you chose and how much it's helping offset right now for you guys?

- Yeah, thanks.

We knew that being able to generate electricity on site was key to our goal of having a zero carbon footprint building.

We planned a system that was designed to cover approximately 100 to 105% of our projected energy needs.

- Yeah, that's great.

- And we used about, I would say about 80% of the space on the roof to accommodate that.

So we knew that we had a little bit of room to grow if needed, and that we have a system that is about a 58 KW system.

It generates between, we'll call it 80,000 and 85,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year.

And we're now finding after over a year of usage that we may be a little shy of 100% and we have space on the roof to be able to increase the size of that system to make sure that we are at 100%.

- And that's being given serious consideration that you may add to it in the near future?

- That is correct because we set out and the congregation agreed to a goal of being carbon neutral, and that's part of that equation.

- So John, tell me what this great performance boils down to in dollars and cents for you on your utility bills on an annual basis.

- Our historic bills on the building which was a little smaller before was over $20,000 per year.

We are now spending about 20% of that amount with the new systems in place.

And I would say that the vast majority of those charges are considered base charges and demand charges.

- That's fantastic, that's really fantastic.

So there's some beautiful things that you did with daylight in here.

- The architects that helped design the building placed a high value on daylighting and did their very best to be able to bring daylighting into every common space in the building.

That was very challenging in the lower level, which prior to the remodel was a typical church basement with very small, edge windows.

But they were successful in getting some daylighting the.

Some of it comes through Sonotubes from the roof.

Some of it comes through some clever arrangement and enlargement of windows in the lower space.

But there are other places in the building where daylighting is even more dramatic.

The space that we're in right now we call Friendship Hall, it's a gathering space.

And then our sanctuary has, maybe the most important architectural feature, we call it the Oculus.

It beautifully brings in light with north-facing windows.

And it really does a great job of lighting the whole sanctuary space.

For this building, it's our wow factor.

- I'd love to hear from you because I know it was part of...

I see it as being part of your vision to be very conscientious about reusing and using recycled materials in the building.

Can you tell us a bit about those elements?

Like what got reused?

What parts of the recycling elements that you're proud of?

- Sure.

The chairs are one of many elements that we reused.

So the green chairs that you see were our original chairs in our sanctuary, and we simply cleaned them, and as much furniture and other elements we could reuse, we did.

In our hospitality center, the ceiling panels.

So that whole space was the sanctuary, as you may know, and that was the entire ceiling.

And so they took them down and carefully preserved them.

There were other materials, right, that were...

It was probably much more work to do the demolition in order to be able to preserve them.

- I think if I was gonna pick one thing that symbolizes the intentions and the fulfillment of those intentions very much is the beauty of the wood.

- In the sanctuary, we have a dramatic effect from Beetle Kill Pine wood which is an inferior species, but there's a lot of it.

- So often, people think if you're gonna use recycled or you're gonna be environmentally sound, it's gonna be ugly.

And I don't think you have to compromise anything.

And this building is a statement of the beauty that can be created being environmentally conscious.

And I think that's the most outstanding piece for me.

- You literally wrote the book on this project.

And it's a fantastic book with great graphics, great data details, great descriptions of the process of how the community came together on the financing side as well as the technical decisions.

And I know you have this available through the church.

But we're gonna have it available at our Heart of a Building website so people would get to a link.

- Thank you.

And it was a team effort, just like this project was.

So we had this small group of dedicated people, and I just happened to be the reporter and document it.

But we did go through a lot of lessons learned and it wasn't all, how should I say, roses along the path.

So we wanted to document some of these things that we learned in the hopes that it would make it a little easier for the next group that comes down the same path.

- That's a beautiful gift.

(upbeat music) Remember that green light from the beginning of our story?

It's from a solstice window across from the Oculus, one of just a few dozen in the United States.

Four times during the year a small light appears during solstice and Equinox events.

A beautiful touch on this awesome building.

For every effort that brings change in our world, a champion is required.

A person or persons who see the vision inside of themsels and then shares it with othe.

In the case of First Universalist Church there was a community of people envisioning the need for their building to serve as an example of a structure that is in harmony with nature, and they succeeded.

A huge thank you to First Universalist Church for sharing their beautiful remodel with us taking us through the design and their heart-centered reasoning behind it.

You can learn more about the technical details about this project by watching the technical video and seeing documentation at e Heart of a Building website.

Now let's head to a single family home that's truly on the cutting edge of efficiency.

When it comes to innovative single family construction Con Frank is at the top of the industry.

These all-electric homes, both net zero energy and net zero emission are try built from the perspective of demonstrating independence from fossil fuels.

Passive solar design, insulated concrete forms for construction, energy star windows, Ground Source Heat Pumps for heating and cooling and so many other cool features show just what is possible in the future of home building.

We're lucky enough to get a tour from the owner of this impressive home.

So let's go take a look.

I need one of these.

We're talking to homeowner Wes Geary, and builder and designer Con Frank about what makes this home so cutting edge.

(upbeat music continues) And what do a set of keys have to do with testing the envelope in a home?

Find out a little later in this program.

Con, I definitely want to pick your brain on many things today.

This amazing house that you designed, built, it was your vision to put this here with such great features, passive solar features, great insulation, great air ceiling.

Why did you choose to design and build a home with these features?

What was the driving force for you?

- Well, I've been in the business since 1978.

Built a lot of different this for a lot of different people.

And we've explored a lot of different types of equipment, types of processes.

This is accumulation of all of those things kind of put together.

- As I've known you Con, you really, the title or term I put to you is you're an inventor, somebody who invents things in buildings by experimenting and doing things with them.

Tell me a little bit about...

Going back to when you were a young lad, what did you do?

Who were you?

Where you the bane of your parents' existence taking apart the toaster and doing stuff like that, or what did you do to learn this stuff?

- I've always been pretty curious and I grew up on a farm.

It was a pretty big farm.

And so when my folks would go to town, we would find things to play with.

(Paul laughing) And so we took... - Play with, right?

- Took things apart.

Sometimes we got it all back together again, sometimes it didn't.

Started building, 1978 is when I got my first contractor's license and went on my own.

And we did a lot of energy efficiency stuff.

We did a lot of solar- - Tell me, why'd you do a lot of energy efficiency stuff in 1978?

- We had gas shortages, gas lines, all kinds of stuff like that in the early '80s.

I grew up in Dickinson, North Dakota where we had an oil boom going on and people came in and it gets cold there.

And so some of the people came in, were engineers for the oil companies and they wanted better than normal housing.

And so we built earth berms homes, we built super insulated hom, we built all kinds of stuff.

And that was before we knew about the indoor air quality and polluted the hell out of those poor people.

And had to go back and correct things and do whatever as we'd learned.

- I've always been interested in modern homes modern technology, modern new things.

And so when my aunt Maxine was here visiting from Texas, we went and looked at some really expensive homes because just for fun.

And some of the homes down all around first in Quebec were being built with a geothermal and things like that.

And the people were happy to tell you all about the features of the home.

And they were 1.4, $1.5 million homes.

- Yeah, well, that's really nice.

- Get out of here quick.

But I got interested in this home again because it was in the neighborhood, it was so different.

And watching it being built, I was just always curious about it, you know?

- Yeah.

So, how did you and Con finally connect?

Did he bump into you, you call him?

- When the home went up for sale, when it finally finish, I got the nerve to come up and come in and look at the house.

And they had a they had an open house one day, and Con was here, I'd never met him before.

He told me so much, it was over my head.

But I could tell he was really passionate about number one, the environment, but number two, people's health.

He was really concerned about people's being able to breathe well in a home, be comfortable, but also live economically.

He's just passionate about all the good things you could do with a house.

- So Con, in the case of this home, if you don't mind sharing, it can be ballpark-ish.

But a typical home is about 450,000 in this size.

Where, where did this home come in for you?

Or maybe the other homes, maybe not Wes' home, maybe the other home across the street that you built exactly the same way.

How much would that sell for, if you, if you can share?

- I think this one was five and a quarter, right Wes?

The one across the street was just under five but we didn't finish the basement.

- What you did in this home, we're taking some old principles that have been around for a long time, Mesa Verde down in Southwest Colorado to use passive solar was there but you also used a lot of advanced technology to what you're doing.

So when you started building the home for the envelope, so the thermal envelope for , tell me some of your choices and why you chose them.

- We evaluated the conventional construction which everyone has done for many, many years.

We evaluated some of the SIPs panels stuff.

We did the ICF - So an ICF, insulated concrete form.

It's gonna have, in your case, it's got four inches of foam?

- Two and 5/8 on each side.

- Two and 5/8, okay, on each side and then concrete in the middle.

poured in on-site.

- Right.

And so we're insulated concrete forms all the way to the trusses.

We have high heeled trusses.

And so we sealed all the trusses from the concrete up to the baffles, up to the airspace, for ventilation in the attic with foam.

So that is all sealed because that's the biggest culprit in air infiltration in the house.

Heat transfer and air infiltration.

And so we kind of covered all these little details.

I've been working with energy raters like yourself and people through the many years and with their cute little infrared cameras and when we do the studies and we do the air blower tests and see many different things over the years.

And so we've pretty much put all that together in one package.

(doorbell ringing) - Hey, Paul, come on in.

- Hey, Wes, thank you so much.

Good to see you again.

I've come back following the interview to do a quick blower door test, which is always done with energy audits and more commonly done for energy code compliance these days to quantify the air tightness.

And today I'll do it for Wes's home.

So if this home had been built to code it'd be like 2,500 instead of down in that range.

Now tell us about what you did with the windows and how you decided to orient the windows and orient the house really for the passive solar benefit.

- We set up the houses in the whole subdivision to best access our southern access.

We use triple pane windows with argon-filled gas.

We use special window bucks compared to what most ICF builders even use.

We personally build those and we insulate them because a lot of them will put the wood window bucks in and in 25, 30 years from w all that condensation has collected in there.

You slam the door, the window falls out.

It leads to a lot of, a lot of thermal bridging.

It leads to a lot of air infiltration around there, which we've eliminated.

- Do you happen to know the U value of the windows that you install?

- The fixed glass in here were 0.20.

- Okay.

That's great.

- The operating glasses were like, 0.21 and 0.23.

- Extremely good.

And then as I understand it you did some different solar heat gain coefficients with the glass on the south side versus other sides of the home.

Is that correct?

- We very specifically picked glass that will allow solar gain for us in the winter.

- Nice.

- And so we can have quite a bit of solar gain, BTUs both solar gain in wintertime and in the summertime.

The R value or the, the, the glass reflects it off and we don't get much gain out of it.

- I'm gonna guess, tell me if I'm in the ballpark, I'm a bet the windows on the south side are letting in 55 to 60% of the sun.

- 56.

- 56.

Good.

I'm in the ballpark.

That's good.

Good.

And then on the other sides of the house, probably only 25, maybe 30%?

- I think we're at 31 or 32.

- Okay.

I like the way that they designd the, this side of the home to be cool in the afternoon.

So my patio is such that about four o'clock, five o'clock there's a shadow there where the way they shaded the home, I said, "That's so smart."

I used to have a retractable awning at my other house, I don't need that here.

- My fascination, in having known you and worked with you over the years is what you've done in alternative ways.

Once you've built a great envelope to heat and cool it.

And you've done some really good things here that aren't done commonly.

You have a ground source heat pump system.

So I'd love to hear about th.

And then I'd also, I'm gonna ask you about how you went about sizing it, 'cause that's part of the beauty of what you do with your projec.

- Ground source heat pump is the most efficient system that, the EPA determined that many years ago, that ground source heat pump is the most efficient way to heat and cool any building that there is.

- Tell me a bit, on this one, did you, how did you choose to install the system as far as the bore field went and some of those details?

- In order to size any kind of bore field for any system you really need to do a good heat loss calculation.

I've worked with many mechanical engineers already over my lifetime and they will do the heat loss calculations and you'll be double of what they really actually are.

- As far as the size of the equipment.

- As far as the size of the equipment.

And so by putting in oversized equipment you take away efficiency.

It's like taking your little car and putting the biggest motor you can stuff under the hood and punching it at every stop sign.

That's the same effect.

- What's the size of this system, approximately as far as the tons?

- Two ton.

- Two ton cooling for a home how big?

20?

- There's 1,970 square feet per floor.

- So a two ton system.

I've done enough load calculations I bet software I would use say at least, even with your good envelope, at least a four ton is what I bet I would have gotten from the calculations.

- That's about right.

That's what the, that's what the software comes up with.

- Yeah.

Then for safety, you need the ERV.

So tell me about some of the cool design features you have built into this house so you have air moving through this home, especially underneath the basement floor deck and some things like th?

- We have a unique situation here where we had some expansive soils.

And so we have a foundation that has lifted actually six feet off the dirt, and it sits on stilts.

- Wood floor, right?

- No, it's concrete.

- Oh, concrete.

Okay.

- It's concrete and it's lifted six inches off the di.

And so we had a void space under there.

In that void space I have air flow that is connected to the HRV.

And so we have constant temperature air from the mechanical room, which is where warm stuff is, water heater, furnace, you know, things like that.

So we pull that warm air from that mechanical room where we really don't need it and we pull it underneath the slab and we pull that stale air underneath the slab with all the radon and all that wonderful ugliness that happens down there and we dissipate it outside.

- So the ERV itself that you chose, who was the manufacturer, why'd you choose it?

And then how do you have it ducted in and around this ho?

- It's actually a Broan HRV.

- It's an HRV.

- And we have, we choose the HRVs because once you seal up something that's tight and mama starts cooking for Christmas and making a hell of a bunch of steam in the house, or whatever, you need to dissipate that moisture.

- Right.

- And so that's why we chose the HRV.

And so we have sensors in each one of the bathrooms, the laundry room and the kitchen.

That's where you make your pollution mostly.

doing laundry, doing cooking, going to the bathroom, taking showers, whatever.

And so the HRV runs at a continuous flow of like 68 cubic feet per minute flow to keep the air fresh in the house.

Once you step into a bathroom, or the kitchen, or laundry room, it'll ramp up to 200.

- So Wes, as an accountant, I love this about you, you've been tracking the data on your utility bills and tracking how your solar PV system has been performing.

- My other home was about half the size of this one, maybe a little over half, but that house had about a $100 a month average utility bill.

And this house, in 2019, had a utility bill of about $260.

- For the whole year?

- For the whole year.

- That's fantastic.

- And I get cooling in the summer.

Whereas the other house was hot in the summer.

- Tell me a little bit about this electric air source heat pump water heater that you put in.

- It comes from Germany.

They have been using them in Europe, in Japan for 25 years because their electric rates are three times as what ours are.

And since we were going all electric in this house I explored quite a few different manufacturers.

And I came up with this syst.

But they don't sell the airflow kit in this country.

They only sell the water heater.

And so we had to make up our own airflow kit.

- And the airflow kit, just to interrupt, it's because yours was a water heater.

Okay.

It's a booster fan?

- All it was was a booster f. A very noisy, holy crap, hold on to your hat booster fan.

There's a high return at the ceiling.

We're pulling the warm air off the ceiling where you never need it.

In the summertime you're getting radiation through the insulation even, so you've got all this warm r stacked at the ceiling and so when the water heater needs heat it starts pulling that warm air off the ceiling, runs it through the water heater, extracts six degrees of temperature and deposits it into the return of the furnace.

- Okay.

- There's refrigerated coils that go around the tank in the water heater and so thats how it exchanges the heat.

- Yeah.

All these things are amazing, in my opinion, in this home.

And you've built an all electric home that is affordable.

Tell me a little bit about why you did this?

You know, why an all electric home?

- To prove that it can be do.

- Okay.

- People were saying, they were telling you that you couldn't?

- Everybody, everybody says that in order to do what we're doing it's gonna cost several hundred thousand dollars more.

- So Wes you've shared enough with me over time that we've known each other about how you care about many big picture things, whether it's connected to your church, things with working with underprivileged youth, seems like that's part of your decision-making in getting this home.

Am I right?

- You're right.

I hate to admit that, but yes, you're right.

That was part of the decision-making with the home.

I've always felt like if you could use less resources you're gonna help the environment.

And I went to an energy conference at First Universal Church, at First Universalist I think it is, and really learned more about the impact that using energy here has in other places, you know, in poorer countries.

And so I didn't realize how much of what we enjoy hurts others when we're irresponsible about it.

So that also had an impact on my decision to do this, because I didn't need a house.

I had a house paid for, I was retired.

- Value is beyond the, beyond the legend sheet.

- Probably gonna lose my CPA license.

Yes.

There are valuable things besides money.

There's people's lives and their wellbeing - I'm deeply impressed by the passion of this builder and this buyer to have high levels of sustainability in this home that is attainae for middle income people in our country.

(gentle music) Remember seeing me drop my set of keys at the beginning of the story?

When performing a blow door test the HVAC system and the domestic hot water system has to be turned off.

I leave my keys on the floor so I remember to go back and turn the systems back on.

I don't want to leave a homeowner sweating, or freezing, or without hot water after I leave.

Well, we tested Wes's home and now so I don't leave him in a home that's gonna eventually start warming up we're gonna turn the cooling back down.

There we go.

The house actually cooled down by a degree while we were operating the blower door which is pretty fascinating.

(gentle music continues) Wow.

Thanks to Wes for allowing us in his home and sharing some of the wonderful design features and to Con for taking us through his thought process.

Thanks to both for sharing their"why" behind sustainable living.

Up next we're headed to a multi-family project currently under construction to get a first look at their sustainable design elements.

Come on, let's go.

This multifamily project is going up right now in the city of Longmont, Colorado.

There's some very cool design and specification features which the performance consultants, Cody and Lisa Farmer at Mainstream Corporation, and the developer Gary Kinsey, are really focused on getting the thermal envelope, that's the air tightness and the insulation values, to be far closer to the Passive House performance than near building code.

Let's hear their why's and let's go check out this great building under construction right now.

Mainstream Corporation's office is a converted barn in the shadow of Longs Peak.

It's turned into a Passive House compliant building because of a sealed envelope and a mechanical ventilation system that purifies the air.

Find out just how quickly the air is purified later in the program.

The two of you are doing some amazing things when it comes to making buildings more airtight, encouraging the whole Passive House standard.

Why are you leaders in moving this forward?

- I think Lisa and I, you know, founded Mainstream to make things better, to fix things that we saw that were wrong.

And so the why is simply because we see that the current building stock is wrong and because we have kids, we're building for the future for them.

- You guys have several projects but we're focusing on this under construction, Green Spire project.

- Yeah.

The owner's amazing and it is, it's a project that lit up Mainstream's interest level.

- When I met Cody, he enjoys this, and when he saw what I was doing, I mean, it just excited him.

He was just all for it.

- Finally, we had somebody who was receptive to the science, who asked the right questions, who's doing it for the right reasons.

And yeah.

- Right, probably something that really, really made me work on it hard is I told a lady at our church that it was impossible to build a 450 square foot unit that was just, you know, the restrictions would be so great and the expense would be so great that it just was impossible.

She got us a project through the city called the Micah Homes, that are affordable, through a group called The In-between which provided that type of housing.

- Transitional from homeless into some sort of housing.

- She did so much to help affordable housing.

She broke the mold.

Because mine are 300 square feet and when she started the city required 450.

- Okay.

- So she has helped, and so this is my, this was something that I needed to do for her.

- Is this project going to help people coming from homelessness into transitional, or is this meant to be more of a market rate?

- We are tied in with the city with 10 affordable units that meet, that we have to meet certain requirements.

- Okay.

- But because of the way they're designed, they're only 300 square feet, they are all well below the city's requirements.

- Okay.

- And I mean, that is the secret to affordability.

- Okay.

- Is, it's size.

- It's the size.

- Well, at the original, you know, two and a half, three years ago, 450 down to 300, that is, you know, that's 30% smaller and that lowers the cost 30% for rent.

It's, size is a factor.

I didn't have 44 of these built without knowing what one looked like.

So I built one in my basement.

I built this unit in my basemen.

- That's awesome.

- Because you just don't want 44 of them there.

- Until you tried it out how it would feel to live in them.

- Yes.

Yeah.

So, you know, we had several principals.

It had to be viable economically and investment wise, it needed to really do something about the homelessness, and to me it had to be 21st century.

The code is so far behind and technology is moving so fast ahead.

- I have to interject, is that you at one time were a building inspector, right?

So you know the code really well.

- You know, I spent 11 years in code review and stuff like that and building inspection and it just wasn't, it's not keeping up.

- Right.

- So I wanted a 21st century building and renewable energy.

- Okay.

- I do not want to face my grandchild knowing the mess that I've left him.

I'm responsible.

No, you're responsible.

- We are responsible.

- We're all responsible.

And we've, you know, I've got a few years left, maybe I can correct a little bit of it.

- Now before meeting Cody and Lisa had you heard of Passive House before or had you not even heard of that previously?

- Not Passive House.

- Passive House has its own modeling software.

Passive House Planning Package is how it started, internationally they still use it.

And then with all the climate zones in the United States, the United States Passive House Institute created WUFI Passive.

So that's the software program - - What does WUFI stand for again?

It's W-U-F-I.

- Yes.

- I'm sorry, but it's in German.

It's in German, right?

- It's probably safer if we just and leave it at that.

It's a hydrothermal model that's perimetric and is attached to the elemes of the Passive Modeling Program.

- Okay.

- So it does what other a manual J softwares do as far as heat load calculation, but it's more accurate.

It takes air tightness seriously.

It incorporates into heat gains.

A lot of just when you get down to the micro loads, this is the software that we should be using.

- She likes gritty and language and spreadsheets and fancy graphs and she's very good at it.

But beyond that, she gives our clients an opportunity to just ask anything they want about their building.

For example, "What if we switch the insulation because this insulation is more friendly to the environment?"

Or, "This insulation is chear and I can use it recycled form."

- Right.

- And all those questions can happen on a phone call away.

- So Lisa, you've told me rus of thumb for Passive House.

You know, the idea of an R40 underneath, an R50 on the walls, R60 for the ceiling or attic.

For Green Spire you're really close to that but what do end up using, and then why?

- We are, we are very close.

We're about a R38 where the floor meets the crawl space.

And then the walls we did push for a little bit more rigid insulation than we got.

So we landed at a R30.

We have two inches of rigid foam on our framed walls.

And then the roof itself is R60 as well.

And then each of the units is airtighted itself from each other.

- Trying to stop the smell of people's food drifting over to the place next.

- Yes.

Yes.

- Very nice.

- Lots of design meetings taking those details into specific consideration.

- This team has already done more on this airtight detail then you'll see on the average construction site.

We'll come back in here and button it up even tighter, 'cause, you know, we went Passive House air tightness in each of these 300 square foot units.

So a quick air barrier inspection that Mainstream would do would be to come in and see what is the continuity of the air barrier and that means is everything connected properly on all six sides of the building or the area that we're in?

So, (indistinct), yeah, move on over here.

You know, we use ProClima vapor open tapes and the reason is because people sweat and they breathe and they cook and so we don't want anything getting trapped in our.

- And then the walls... well, you got two inches of rigid.

So XPS, is that correct?

On the outside?

- EPS.

- EPS, okay.

Expanded polystyrene on the outside.

- Yes.

- So good.

So that's like about an R8?

- Yeah.

- On the outside?

Then what do you have in the wall cavity?

- Cellulose.

- I think the cellulose argument's a really good one and that's something that can change in the field.

I mean, it's common that as Passive House we'll expect cellulose or something and we'll end up with blown in fiberglass or something.

We like cellulose 'cause it's a recycled material and it's very anti-rodent and buggy.

- I agree.

Yeah.

- But we'll see what that- - Fiberglass, rodents don't have a problem with, but cellulose, they don't like .

The borate that's on there.

Yeah.

So that's good.

- But dense packing it in, then it'll surround all the wiring and everything which is why, you know, it's very tempting on this, you know, you'll see bats in normal situation, to go in and slap them in.

But then you have little air pockets and that's the other part of our science is we don't want any air pockets in any of our assemblies.

This is how we do it.

- Yep.

That's excellent.

- And then for the windows, actually.

- Yes.

Yeah, for the windows.

- We started within the design process but then now we have Gherkin windows in there.

They are less than 0.2, this one's 0.5, it's fixed.

The operable one is- - 0.17.

Those are excellent win.

Like energy star in our area requires about a 0.3.

- Yes.

- So much better than- - Less than 0.2 is where were targeted.

And we went from a fiberglass to a UPVC.

And the budget was significant enough.

The other thing that we learned- - That's for the framing of the window?

- Yeah, UPVC versus Alpine's fiberglass.

- And do you know with all of this we were almost certifiable for Passive House.

- Yeah.

- The heat load is the one that I kept fighting and I couldn't really like nail down how to lock it in.

But even the primary source energy, we meet the threshold for Passive House criteria, under 6,200 kilowatt hour per person per year.

- Right.

- And that I will attribute to the solar hot water.

- Okay.

One thing I'd like to ask is about technical detail in the project.

The solar water heating parts o.

Some people think that's an older technology, but boy it's working for your project.

It's gonna work for your project as I understand.

- Well, you're correct.

It was old technology and I'm kind of, you know, "It's old technology."

The inspiration came from the fact that the number one heat load in those units is hot water.

- Okay.

- Now I also knew that I could use a renewable energy through the city and my own solar and I could just pay for the resistance heat.

But when you started looking at the hot water that comes out of the shower and goes down the right drain and is gone, was just amazing.

It's just way too much.

And so we attempted to recover that.

There's no designs.

You have to, you have to think it up yourself.

And then again, through Cody and Lisa, the solar hot water, solar thermal, and when we got the information on that.

- And so we introduced Laurent Meillon from Capitol Solar, he's a great French accent, he's a super intelligent, wonderful guy.

He was perfect for the project and honestly that introduction was like exactly what Gary needed was, "Hey, this is that cherry that's gonna take this project from an almost and to something else."

- Yeah.

And that's what's beautiful is the pairing of a great envelope, you know, and then simpler mechanical systems and then bring renewables in.

You know, like you said is really what helps on that carbon footprint side, you know, energy use per person side.

So that's beautiful.

- So this is a huge negotiatn of using like off the shelf, cheap resistance heat.

But wait, if we go this cheap we can afford this huge solar thermal system that's gonna do all the heavy lifting anyways.

- Yeah.

So that's, that's a great way.

And it takes smart people, educated people, working with smart, curious, educated builders and developers to make that happen.

One of the smart ways Gary is preparing for the future of electric utility policies is by placing demand control meter boxes in each unit.

- In the future every place will have a demand meter throughout all units.

Each unit has one of these.

It will shed loads to keep the total demand below a certain level and probably save as much as $2,000 a month.

- Well one of the fun things that we think we found on this one, I mean, you know, we go back and forth trying to get it to be this certified Passive House building, this apartment building, and it fought back, the resistance was hard and the force was windy and all this stuff.

But what we learned was that multi-family's a lot easier to take Passive House to certifications.

Every time we have the opportunity to take one to the matter, to take one full Passive, you know, it's always like, well- - We run it through the gauntlet.

- Yeah, run it through the gauntlet.

- Full ringer.

- This one has bothered me just because, you know, you want it to be certified.

Colorado needs it.

- You need a multifamily?

- We would like to be the company that helps make that possible.

But on the same token, it's an amazing building, it's almost Passive, it's got all the big Passive elements in it.

- It's gonna serve a big need.

- I'm dying to do another one because I, there's just so many things I'd like to do just a little bit better and get to that Passive House, and a little past.

'Cause I, you know, I see th, you know, just with a little bit of thought you could hit that every time, easy.

- Yeah.

- And I'm excited about that, but not til this is done.

I gotta get this on on the books.

- It's amazing what purpose can do to you, in the morning to get out of bed and chase it.

And I will tell you that when you're in a Passive House or you're in a space like this where it's very comfortable and even and it nourishes your soul, it's purpose.

You know, some people find purpose in money, some in family, I certainly do in family.

But beyond that, it's making the world a better place.

Fixing something that you know is broke.

(upbeat music) - Remember when we wondered just how quickly Mainstream's Passive House office purified the air.

Let's let Cody tell us.

- Almost half the room is purified within one hour, without hearing it.

- Yup.

- Which is- - Thanks for bringing that up.

- No, it's wonderful.

(upbeat music) I hope these stories have truly inspired you as much as they've inspired .

I look forward to seeing how Cody, Lisa and Gary's project comes together and revisiting them for an update after residents have moved in.

I also look forward to meeting and interviewing other creative designers and builds and developers who apply the cutting edge designs shared in our videos to create more and more regenerative structures until they become the norm, rather than the exception.

Also watch the technical side of each project in our accompanying video and see the documentation on the Heart of a Building website.

We look forward to sharing more stories like these because buildings are one of the very few things we build which lasts longer than a human lifetime.

Many of us understand the first half of the equation, building a profitable structe which provides shelter, but exploring the other half, the why behind the design, blends our hearts with the wisdom of our minds to create buildings of the future today.

See you on our next episode.

(upbeat music)