Green Homes Go Modular | Green Energy News

July 1, 2009 – Vol.14 No.15

GREEN HOMES GO MODULAR.
by Bruce Mulliken, Green Energy News

This I know from personal experience: Building a stick-built home – a home built of wood onsite – is not a resource-efficient process. I’ve helped build houses from scratch: been there, done that.

Bad weather, days of rain, snow or even excessive heat can slow construction or stop crews altogether. Human resources can sit idle waiting for weather to improve.

Stick building means cutting most parts onsite: Piles of waste wood, drywall, roofing, and packaging materials end up thrown in a landfill: a waste of resources, natural and man-made.

However, homes built indoors in the controlled climate of a factory, and shipped to a site, eliminate much if not all of the wasted time and resources of stick built homes. And, modular or prefabricated factory-built homes can be built better too. In a controlled situation, parts such as studs and joists can be cut to great precision and fastened together with the help of tools, jigs and fixtures not available on a job site. Since they have to be built strong enough to be transported over roads, modular homes can be stronger as well.

Now the efficiencies of building homes in a factory are combining with energy efficiency and renewable energy.

Epoch Homes of Pembroke, New Hampshire offers its line of Eco Collection prefab homes that incorporate efficient building structure and systems to comply with Energy Star (R), a joint program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy, as well as the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) and International Code Council 2009, National Green Building Standard (ICC-700), Silver Level.

And Epoch Homes is not alone in the prefab, modular, green home business.

Literally taking modular green homes to the road, All American Homes of Elkhart, Indiana has recently completed construction of the Living Zero Home for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) “Living Zero Home Tour” that will travel the country and make 17 stops, including NASCAR races, from now until late fall.

The Living Zero Home features:

--- Icynene (R) foam insulation in 2 X 6 exterior walls that can reduce heating and cooling bills by as much as 50 percent;
--- Solar panels for electricity;
--- Low flow plumbing fixtures to cut water usage and save the energy needed to heat it;
--- ENERGY STAR light fixtures with compact fluorescent or LED lights;
--- ENERGY STAR-rated appliances;
--- Tankless water heaters;
--- Bamboo floors;
--- High-performance fiberglass windows;
--- Zero energy use day lighting systems, and;
--- Fiber cement siding.

The home will also feature an all new, whole house, high-tech energy management and home monitoring system called the Smart Living System(tm). This feature, soon to be available in every All American home, is designed to save money on utility bills while keeping homeowners more comfortable. It will also alert homeowners to potential problems like water pipe leaks with an automatic phone call when a leak is detected.

DOE selected All American Homes (R) for the Living Zero Tour because of its leadership role in building low to zero energy homes: All American constructed the Smart Home: Green + Wired for the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago; it offers its Solar Village (R) low to zero energy use homes; and the company has constructed of over 1 million square feet of LEED Silver compliant military barracks for the U.S. Army. (LEED is a rating system for green buildings from the U.S. Green Building Council.)

With its line of Solar Village homes, All American includes a 2.5 kilowatt solar system, R-21 insulation value exterior walls with R-49 in the roof, along with energy-efficient windows, lighting, heating and cooling.

The first stop of the Living Zero Tour is the Taste of Chicago from July 1 - 5, 2009 and concludes on November 22, 2009 at the Denver Zoo in Colorado. A complete list of events and dates is available at the company website.

Those who want to dream of the possibilities in green, solar homes should take a trip to the Nation’s Capital this October. There, anchored on the National Mall, will be 20 self-sufficient solar homes in the Solar Decathlon that were designed and built by teams from the U.S., Canada, Spain, Puerto Rico and Germany.

Those homes, though not in production (but could be), were built modular for shipping to Washington. The Solar Decathlon is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy with help from industry.

Links:

Solar Decathlon
http://www.solardecathlon.org

Epoch Homes
http://www.epochhomes.com

All American Homes
http://www.allamericanhomes.com

All American Homes Living Zero Tour
http://www.allamericanhomes.com/livingzero