April 17th and 18th, 2010

A community event to celebrate green innovations through education in sustainable building and inspired living.
This year’s tour will showcase the greenest homes and buildings in our area that incorporate significant use of solar or other renewable energies, new and reclaimed materials, low energy consumption and water conservation technologies, and sustainable design techniques.
Educational sessions will be held at various locations and feature real life topics on how to build and live greener. See our website for more details – www.SouthSoundGreenTour.com The site will be running by January 1, 2010

The Cooper project that we have been building will be one of many homes and businesses that will be open to the public for the weekend. Mark your calenders and join us, it should be a great time

The Northwest Eco Building Guild is an alliance of builders, designers, suppliers, homeowners, and partners concerned with ecological building in the Pacific Northwest.

A vital organization, our mission is to provide leadership in education to transform the built environment and build a sustainable society.

South Sound Green Tour is looking for participants and sponsors. If you are interested in either contact me at info@laupenhomes.com. After January we you will be able to contact us directly at SouthSoundGreenTour.com

The Cooper Water Fall

The water is first collected from the roof with normal rain gutters. From there each rain gutter down spout is connected to a series of drain pipes which carry the water to a filter. As water enters the filter, the first twenty five gallons runs right through the filter and into the ground. By allowing the first twenty five gallons go into the ground we get rid of any bad things the water my have picked up from the roof. Once that occurs, the ground around the filter is saturated and the filter begins to fill up with water. When the water reaches a certain level in the filter it begins to drain into an out feed pipe and is carried to the 1000 gallon tank.

The tank is just a hole we dug, which we then wrapped with a heavy rubber liner. Inside the liner we stacked crates similar to milk crates which provide the structure for the tank. We then wrapped the top of the crates with the liner to provide a continuous cover. Also in the tank next to the crates is a pump chamber were the pump that runs the water fall is located. There is an over flow drain on the tank to allow water to escape once the tank is full.

After the tank was complete we poured a concrete walkway right over the top of it. Since the creates are incredibly strong, you can actually drive vehicles over them if you choose. Our concrete is part of a walkway that takes you from the street to the front door of the house. We plan to install a bench at this spot in the walkway so you can sit and watch the waterfall if you choose.

The city of Olympia bases homeowner’s sewer bill on how much water they use. They get the numbers from the water meter. By using water from the roof for irrigation you not only cut down you water bill but also you sewer bill. Imagine the savings if we could use this same water for the toilets inside the house.

5. Air-tightness: Air-tightness is an extension of the ventilation requirements. Passive houses don’t make use of any HVAC systems – only a HRV system. Thus, it becomes very important that air doesn’t pass through the house in any other way, otherwise, the HRV systems will not be able to perform optimally. Passive houses are therefore super air-tight, much more than conventional houses. The building envelope is sealed thoroughly, and so are any service components that go through it.

6. Space Heating: This is a pretty novel concept in the passivhaus technique. When all the previous measures are not enough to heat a particular house, passive houses use heat generated within the house due to electrical appliances, lights, human beings and animals to heat it. Other than this, some houses install a small or heating device (running on renewable energy) that is integrated with the ventilation system. Some houses also use a micro heat pump that can recover heat from the air escaping through the ventilation system. Together, all these ideas make a conventional heating system quite unnecessary.

7. Electrical Appliances: Passive house use low wattage electrical appliances, CFLs and intelligent installation to minimize the use of electricity.

1. Passive Solar Design: This entails using naturally available sunlight, the suns’ daily and annual cycles to maintain a comfortably warm home without using other heating and ventilation system. This is done by building compact structures, window orientation, using lightweight materials and other techniques.

2. Superinsulation: The walls, floor and roof of a passive house are highly thermal insulated to prevent heat from escaping. Most houses have some form of insulation, however, they will depend on traditional temperature control devices to maintain constant temperatures throughout the house. Passive houses are superinsulated, such that the walls themselves are made up of insulating materials. Because of this, there are no thermal bridges, and there needs to be no external insulation of any kind.

3. Advanced Window Technology: Windows play an important role in designing passive houses. Window placement, size, alignment, material and design help to increase natural lighting in the house without adding to the heat or using electricity. Windows for passivhaus are differently manufactured and are made with extremely thermal resistant. The glass also is generally filled with argon or krypton gas which reduces heat transfer either ways and absorbs UV rays.

Passivhaus is a building technique, or rather a set of building principles which result in creating a house that is extremely efficiently heated and cooled without the need for any external cooling/heating system. To make things simpler – imagine your current expenditure on heating and cooling – in terms of the system/equipment, the energy usage and the maintenance. Now bring this expenditure to almost 10% of its cost – this is what the Passivhaus technique looks at achieving.

Passivhaus achieves such efficiency by the inherent design and plan of the building itself, ambient and incident sunlight and weather conditions like windiness, cloudiness and sunshine. The principles of passivhaus are rigorous and strict ensuring that the structure built is extremely air-tight, optimally utilizes ventilation, super-insulated, and can remain at constant temperatures regardless of outside weather. Most of all – passive houses are sustainable, minimizing usage of energy and creating extremely healthy indoor air quality. Any energy, is required is produced with the help of solar systems – further reducing the carbon footprint and cost.

And contrary to what you might think, passive houses are as normal looking as regular homes and also not as expensive to build as others.

When it comes to going green, remodeling your home is your best bet. Remodeling is a little more intensive that renovating, which just means changing the look of the house; and a little less intensive than rebuilding, which changes the house altogether. Remodeling essentially changes the way the house works. This could also include changing the way the house looks or at times even changing the build of the house. Largely, however, the focus is on changing (for the better) the functioning of the house. And because the house is changing for the better, green is the only way to go!

Remodeling has efficiency and efficacy as its goal. Thus, the purpose of remodeling could be better utilization of space, better lighting, lowering consumption of electricity or better insulation. While trying to achieve these, remodeling pays careful attention to the prevalent weather conditions, the needs and comfort of the homeowners and the current plan of the house. A full fledged remodeling will change the heating and cooling system, the lighting and electric system, insulation, the plumbing system and if required, will also change the current plan of the house.

Green remodeling incorporates green building practices while introducing all these changes and is one of the best ways to ensure the home is entirely green. For green remodeling make sure your designer/builder is well-versed with green building techniques, preferably someone who has hands on experience with green building.

Often though, creating a completely energy efficient requires extensive remodeling, in order to take care of heating, cooling, lighting, plumbing, insulation, electrical appliances and other things. This may not be feasible for everyone, and sure enough, isn’t, for many of our customers. Therefore we generally suggest homeowners who want to shift to an energy efficient to start by just adding solar panels, and a simple solar electric system. This takes a lot of burden off the environment and also your own budget in a threefold manner:

1. You are no longer using electricity produced fossil fuels to power your home (which is not very energy efficient either)
2. Although your home is still inefficient when it comes to energy, at least you’re using clean, renewable and home-made energy to power it.
3. You’re taking some measures to introduce energy efficiency without burning a hole in your pocket.

The ORO coating complete

August 13 2009

“When you start looking and keep your mind open – you’ll be amazed at the number of options you really have.”

This is something we learned on one of our custom homes projects. With green building, one really finds many viable and better alternatives if one looks long and hard enough. Take the case of this current project. One of the issues builders always face while building or remodeling is how to ensure stability of the house in a seismic zone like the one in Olympia. Using quality building material is, of course, a must — but not enough. Conventionally we’ve been using cement-based stucco to go apply an exterior finish to ICFs, (insulated concrete forms) but since it is cement-based, it normally tends to crack in the event of movement which happens to all houses here in all the Northwest. We found the answer in Oro coating.

Oro coatings is a synthetic stucco system, that can be used in place of traditional stucco to provide great coating, finishing, stability, adhesiveness and pliability which makes it the perfect stucco system for homes that are prone to damages during settling, due to seismic shocks and due to thermal expansion. However, most of all, 48% of this system is made from recycled or reclaimed materials and is 100% acrylic resin-based with no cement. One of the four components of Oro coatings is reclaimed rubber which contributes to its pliability. The entire system consists of a base, prime and top coat in 24 different colors, three textures and custom colors. We realized later that using Oro coatings also helps us gain credits for LEED certification. Our designer Tessa Smith had us router some clover details on the walls, which look absolutely fabulous with the Oro stucco. To know more about the Oro coatings, you can visit their website: http://www.orocoatings.com

The other great thing we learned on this project was related to insulation. Traditionally, attics are hardly ever heated. With this home, the attic was quite small with a shallow sloping roof. There were three things that needed to be taken care of. First, the heat recovery ventilator was to be installed inside of the attic, which meant additional insulation for its duct work. Secondly, because the attic was small, it would be impossible to have use blown in insulation due to  limited access. This meant we would have to use batt style insulation installed between the bottom cords of the trusses. No matter how good of a job your installers do, with this type of installation you always get air gaps, which allows heat to escape. Thirdly, if the framing members, ( 2 x 4 bottom cords) are not covered completely, (which is always the case when you use batts), a thermal bridge is created. In the absence of proper insulation, heat escapes easily through the wood member. We solved all three problems together using 2 lb foam spray insulation on the underside of the roof deck. This created a conditioned space within the entire attic. Thus, there is no need for insulating the duct work for the ventilator, since the entire ventilator now lives with in the conditioned space. Next, it takes care of the gaps that will result out of the batt style insulation, since the foam expands as it is applied and  penetrates into every gap in the framing members thus eliminating  all air gaps. Thirdly, since it is five inches thick, it covers all of the plywood roof sheeting and the top cord trusses member thus eliminating the possibility of thermal bridging. All in all, we have a very tight house that should be very inexpensive to heat.

In the next few weeks the drywall gets installed as well as the exterior hand rails and window sills.

The Red clovers really add to the look of the house