The Shirey's Zero Energy Idea House opens today!

October 15th, 2009 - Posted By: Brad Liljequist

The Zero Energy Idea House, built in Bellevue by green building pioneers Riley and Donna Shirey, opens today to much fanfare.

This home, which will be the Shirey’s personal residence, is exactly what it says it is – it provides ideas to the building and home buying audiences for advanced energy saving technologies which are part of a potential zero energy strategy.  It includes such advanced technologies as structural insulated panels, (R-24 walls, R-40 roof), solar hot water heating, LED lighting, a reverse chiller for heating, a helical wind turbine, and a 2.5 kwh photovoltaic panel array.  The combination of all these technologies will most certainly help the house get much of the way to zero net energy usage – resulting in one of the most advanced homes built regionally to date from an energy standpoint.  The WSU Energy Program projects the home will have net energy bills of about $500 a year, quite an achievement.  I suspect given how green the Shirey’s are, they are likely to do even better than this in actual usage.

As wholistic green builders, the Shireys have also included a number of other cutting edge green components.  Extensive green roofs and native landscaping will help reduce the roof rainwater runoff.  A 3,000 gallon rainwater cistern provides irrigation.  Lots of neat green materials, like FSC floors, recycled plate glass counters, and concrete countertops show green homes can be incredibly beautiful.

I have had the pleasure of knowing the Shireys for a number of years.  They own and run Shirey Contracting, located here in Issaquah, WA.  They are true green building pioneers, and were some of the first builders regionally to draw the important connection between building and sustainability.  They have been builders for several decades and were early users of structural insulated panels, which can result in tight, energy efficient walls and quick construction timelines.  Donna was instrumental in starting Built Green, the green building program for King and Snohomish Counties.  In addition to the Idea House, the Shireys are also building a home in Florida which will be LEED platinum – two truly cutting edge homes.

A great 13 minute educational video of the home was made by King County GreenTools – don’t miss it.  Also, the Zero Energy Idea House will be open Saturdays and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. through Nov. 8 for self guided tours.  It is most definitely worth checking out – it is a truly inspiring home.

EcoCool Source for Green Remodels & Retrofits

July 24th, 2009 - Posted By: Brad Liljequist

zHome inspiration: Hockerton Housing Project

June 16th, 2009 - Posted By: Brad Liljequist

Another amazing zero energy project in England is the Hockerton Housing Project.  This project was built in the 1990s by five pioneering families, who wanted to radically reduce their environmental impacts.

I visited Hockerton in 2005 during my same trip as my BedZED visit.  Hockerton is way up north by Southwell, in the Midlands.  Incidentally, Southwell has a gorgeous Romanesque cathedral, promoted to cathedral status just at the end of the 1800s.

Even though zHome and Hockerton share the same core paradigm of low impact living, they go about it in completely different ways.  Hockerton is completely passively heated – relying on solar energy completely.  A solar atrium in the front of the homes heats during the course of the day, and this heat radiates back into the homes.  The main part of the homes is super insulated, and then covered with earth.  The earth acts as a heat sink, retaining heat energy over the course of the summer, and then radiating that heat back into the homes over the winter.   The result is interior temperatures which rise and fall on a sine wave, peaking at 75 degrees at the end of the summer and dropping to 62 degrees at the end of winter.

This is just a quick snapshot of the project, please see their great website for more information.

Sustainable Connections conference

February 23rd, 2009 - Posted By: Brad Liljequist

Project manager Brad Liljequist will speak about zHome at the Sustainable Connections conference in Bellingham, WA on Friday, April 17.  For more details, see the web site.

Mountaineers Climate Change class – March 9

February 23rd, 2009 - Posted By: Brad Liljequist

zHome project manager Brad Liljequist will speak at the Mountaineers climate change class on March 9 at 7 pm.  Please go to http://www.mountaineers.org/policy/eic/ for more details.

A fantastic resource for ultra-green remodels – Now House

February 23rd, 2009 - Posted By: Brad Liljequist

I was out for a run and started to daydream about turning out house into a zero energy remodel.  And then, I kid you not, within five minutes of getting back I found this fantastic site.   These folks in Toronto have done a near zero energy remodel.  Way cool!

zHome inspiration: BedZED

January 19th, 2009 - Posted By: Brad Liljequist

BedZed sits like an island in the south London suburb of Beddington (BedZED stands for Beddington Zero Energy Development).  The day I visited it, I did the long walk from the local train station, along a fairly busy, not very attractive arterial.  Suddenly, there it was – a sort of Earthbound naturalistic UFO set amidst the dreary backdrop of run of the mill flats and commercial buildings.

BedZED is mixed housing/office development, with about 100 townhome units and about 13,000 square feet of offices.  But that benign, run of the mill description doesn’t really give you any sense of it.  My visit to BedZED is perhaps the single most hopeful day in my life, environmentally speaking (except for my visit to Hockerton – more on that later).  BedZED is one of a handful of buildings planet-wide that has what is at least close to a truly sustainable footprint.  Like zHome, BedZED established a number of environmental benchmarks, shown below, along with how well they’ve actually performed (the community was completed in 2002). What BedZED shows us is that radically more sustainable buildings are possible, and within reach now, not some indeterminate time in the future.  Here is a chart of the environmental specifications for the project, along with how it’s actually performed:

The energy component of BedZED is what I think is most compelling, and I am really taken with the technologies they used.  What is most interesting to me is that many of them are completely different from zHome, even though the climates are quite similar.  This gives me a lot of hope because it says there are a lot of technological pathways to achieve zero net energy/carbon buildings.

BedZED starts with the same hyper-insulated wall section that zHome does – that seems like a basic constant in our climate.  But BedZED uses masonry (brick and concrete) walls – typical of European residential construction – rather than wood stick frame.  BedZED has also wholeheartedly embraced passive solar heating of the homes, with a solar atrium sitting on the south side of the homes, unlike zHome.  This solar atrium has glass with a high solar heat gain character, allowing it to heat up dramatically. Once this atrium has warmed up toward the end of the day, the residents open an inner set of highly insulated triple paned French doors to allow the heat into the units. This solar heating provides the majority of the required heating for the units. Hot water, and supplemental water based hydronic heating, is provided by means of a combined heat and power unit for the whole project. This is essentially a large boiler with a turbine attached to generate electricity. This system was designed to run off wood waste, but when I was there it was running off of natural gas. The passive solar heating system heats the homes well enough to only need one heating element in the homes: a heated towel rack!

My favorite view of BedZED is across the soccer pitch, with BedZED, and a neighboring project which was built at the same time, in view next to each other. The BedZED architects (Bill Dunster Architects) nicknamed the neighbor BedHED, for Beddington High Energy Development. It’s a pretty amazing image – two projects, built at the same time, with the same essential building structure and technology, but one which uses radically less resource and emits radically less CO2. Smart, thoughtful design, coupled with innovative technologies got them there – Yes they did – and Yes we can! (Forgive me, I couldn’t help myself, it’s Inauguration Day tomorrow).

Here is a link to the official BedZED website.

Detailed zHome benchmarks: design integrity

January 19th, 2009 - Posted By: Brad Liljequist

zHome is being built in accordance with stringent environmental benchmarks.  These are actually contractually established between the City of Issaquah and Howland Homes.  You can  read the benchmarks here if you would like to delve into these further (all 14 pages of them!).  You can see for yourself exactly what design criteria have been established for the project.   

So why benchmarks?  To me it goes back to the graph shown on the Why Green Homes? portion of the site.  In big picture terms, zHome is about looking at the cold hard numbers of building’s hefty environmental impacts, and taking those numbers as close to zero as possible.  There is something pure about a numeric driven design process:  set your goal, and let the design process figure out the most efficient way to get there.  It’s not that dissimilar to a gas or carbon tax – get aggressive, and then get out of the way and let the people involved figure out how to respond.  I also think there is something powerful about giving a number to what you’ve achieved, as opposed to some more qualitative measure – I think your average person can get it better.

And then there’s accountability and integrity.  The zHome benchmarks are all subject to verification by the City.  In some cases our other partners are involved in this process as well.  For example, Howland Homes’ energy model (done by Stantec) has been vetted and reviewed both by the City and the WSU Energy Program.  We feel that if you’re going to make strong claims (such as the project is achieving zero net energy), there should be integrity and transparency behind those claims.  Very few of the projects that are claiming zero net energy have actually undergone energy modeling to verify the claim, and fewer still have been verified by outside parties.  And many projects and builders that use the term “zero energy” are actually talking about it conceptually, in terms of it simply being a goal or good idea, or being part of a long term program to achieve zero net energy sometime in the future.  I feel that that dilutes the power of the name because it implies this very difficult goal is being met regularly.  Certainly our goal should be zero energy, but when it comes to individual projects, zero energy terminology should be used carefully and transparently.

zHome inspiration: The Sensible House

December 18th, 2008 - Posted By: Brad Liljequist

I have come to believe that innovation rarely occurs in a vacuum, with a mad scientist coming up with something that noone else could see or envision.  Even with radical jumps in design, there are prototypes, predecessors, and context.  We all stand on each others’ shoulders – there are very few if any islands out there.

And so it is with zHome.  In particular, there are several of specific zero energy or close to zero energy projects that inspired it – specifically, the Sensible House in Seattle, and BedZED and Hockerton in England.  I want to highlight each of these projects, and this will be the first of several posts on this subject.

The Sensible House was built by a friend and mentor of mine, Jon Alexander of Sunshine Construction.  Jon is one of the very earliest builders in Seattle to get involved with green building, and is truly a pioneer.  He began thinking about and applying principles in the 1980’s.  He is also one of the founding members of the Northwest Eco-Building Guild (www.ecobuilding.org).

The Sensible House was built as a personal residence for Bob Scheulen and Kim Wells, who were directly involved in its design and construction.  Bob himself has had a long time interest in green building, and maintains a great web site  dedicated to the house and how it works.

I first visited the Sensible House just as it was finishing construction about five years ago.  It remains in my mind as one of the greenest, if not the greenest single family home in the Seattle area.  It includes double wall construction, a structural insulated panel roof, very cool triple paned windows from cold Alberta, as well as a hybrid water based heating system with solar hot water pre-heating.  According to a presentation that Bob gave a couple of years ago, the house isn’t quite achieving zero net energy – but it is darn close, within 15% of zero or so.  Lots of neat green materials are included throughout the house as well.  The web site is a great technical resource, and Bob has added additional information about the home over time.

I was in awe of the house when I first visited it, and continue to be – it is a very early pioneer locally of ultra-sustainable housing.  It is safe to say that the Sensible House is a direct inspiration and parent to zHome.  I want to recognize and honor Jon, Bob, and Kim for their trailblazing in green, low carbon building – without you and other projects such as BedZED, zHome would have been much more difficult to envision and design.

Extended KUOW interview with Brad Liljequist, zHome project manager

December 1st, 2008 - Posted By: Brad Liljequist

Jeannie Yandel of KUOW’s Sound Focus interviewed me about zHome, and some of the English projects that inspired us – BedZED and Hockerton.  It was fun to do a more in-depth interview and get into some of the deeper themes on the project. 

KUOW Sound Focus interview

Click on the audio link on the KUOW site and interview starts about 30 seconds into the show. The show ran on November 21, 2008.