Archive for the ‘General’ Category
List of ARRA Qualified Energy Efficiency Upgrades
Thursday, March 11th, 2010Home deadline for energy efficiency improvements tax credits under The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (“the stimulus package”), has been extended until December 31st 2010. The stimulus package authorizes a whopping 30% write-off on eligible improvements (up to $1,500 combined for almost all improvements—with some important exceptions). So what qualifies? Here’s a list (for more information reference URLs are at the bottom):
- Insulation, so long as it meets the 2009 IECC guidelines. (30% credit with a $1,500 ceiling)
- Doors and windows, including skylights and storm windows and doors. (30% credit with a $1,500 ceiling)
- Roofing, both metal and asphalt, so long as they’re Energy Star® qualified. (30% credit with a $1,500 ceiling)
- Heating and cooling (HVAC) of nearly every type, including replacement of the main air circulating fan to one that uses no more than 2% of total furnace energy use. (30% credit with a $1,500 ceiling)
- Water heaters with an Energy Factor greater than or equal to 0.82 or that is 90% efficient. (30% credit with a $1,500 ceiling)
- Heat pumps that meet Energy Star® qualifications. (30% credit with a $1,500 ceiling)
- Biomass Stoves (i.e. a wood burning , pellet, or “corn burning” stove) with a thermal efficiency of at least 75%. (30% credit with a $1,500 ceiling)
- Geothermal Heat Pumps that meet Energy Star® criteria. (30% of the cost, no ceiling)
- Solar Hot Water Systems that are Energy Star® rated, with the restriction that 50% of the hot water generated used must be generated by the installed system. The installed system must be certified by the Solar Rating and Certification Corporation (SRCC), and must be placed “in service” before December 31, 2016. (30% of the cost, no ceiling)
- Photovoltaic Systems for residential use. Must be placed “in service” before December 31, 2016. (30% of the cost, no ceiling)
- Residential Wind Energy Systems that have a “nameplate capacity” of not more than 100 kw. Must be placed “in service” before December 31, 2016. (30% of the cost, no ceiling)
- Fuel Cells for residential use. Must have an efficiency of at least 30% and a capacity of at least ½kw. Must be placed “in service” before December 31, 2016. (30% of the cost, up to $500 per ½kw of power capacity)
Visit EnergyStar.gov for complete information about the Federal Tax Credits for Energy Efficiency program. The site has FAQs on all the above programs as well as links to tax forms, IRS notices, and the Tax Incentives Assistance Project (TIAP), an organization dedicated to making government policies such as the Federal Tax Credits for Energy Efficiency comprehensible and accessible to us normal people.
If you need any assistance with your energy efficiency improvement project(s), don’t hesitate to contact us.
Is Over Regulation Creating Abandoned Homes?
Friday, March 5th, 2010Late last week I got a call from a long time customer who wanted me to give them a second opinion on what needed to be done with the 110 year old farm house on their property. To renovate or rebuild, that was the question.
As usual, another contractor had given them the sage advice: All you gotta do is leave one wall standing and you can put up a new house and call it a "renovation." He then proceeded to tell them that it was going to be cheaper to replace the old house (as a renovation) than to repair it. And as usual, the real answer wasn’t that simple.
In fact, the answer was so complex that, as I drove away from my final meeting with the client, I began to wonder if this complexity (complete with its inherent cost) is the reason so many old houses are simply abandoned; left to rot, rather than being restored or removed.
A thorough nondestructive inspection of the house revealed that it was pretty much as you would expect a house that old to be. The foundation was shot but the old, virgin redwood framing was as solid as a rock. The roof was also shot, as was the siding, the back porch, and many of the soffits and fascia boards. Wiring was, of course, an add on and electrical outlets were sparse and all over the place. The one and only bathroom had been built on top of the back porch, indoor plumbing being another afterthought.
It was a classic case of code requirements causing a cascade sequence: Leveling the house meant it would also have to be bolted to a concrete (or masonry) stem wall, which in turn meant the exterior walls would have to be opened up. That, in turn, would trigger energy efficiency requirements which effected insulation, heating, and the windows. Removing the siding would trigger the need to install shear panels. Replacing the roof would trigger installing roof sheathing. Modernizing the electrical system, of course, meant not only meeting code requirements for electrical and lighting, but opening up all the walls and ceilings to facilitate doing so.
But the building codes, agree with them or not, were simple and straight forward. Then there was the maze of non-building related land use regulations:
The house sits on an old river delta, or "bottom" that, for over a hundred years, has been farm land. Prior to early settlers re-routing a river in the late nineteenth century, it had been a wetland and was, to some, still considered to be so.
So, the house was defacto sitting in a flood plane and, putting a new foundation under it, or building a new house, meant a "hundred year flood elevation" would have to be established. A process that, unless you’re lucky enough to find an established flood elevation close by, can cost $30,000 or more! (Never mind that it’s 110 year flood-free condition is empirical evidence that it has survived all prior floods and earthquakes just fine, thank you.)
The house also sits in the "local coastal zone" and perhaps in a "wetland." Therefore, replacing the house would trigger a whole complex set of reviews and hearings called the CEQA process that would involve four different agencies with associated direct and indirect costs. Going through CEQA can take a year (or more)—and that’s if there’s a project manager on board to keep the process moving. Left unsupervised, CEQA projects can die a slow death from neglect.
Nor is demolition (or deconstruction) a cheap alternative. Because of the location (coastal zone, wet land, etc.), even that option would trigger a CEQA review.
Before I left, the client told me that their accountant had suggested buying another rental property "in town" could be a cheaper alternative. He may be right. And if that’s the course they choose, then yet another old house will be left to rot away in place thanks to the maze of regulations and their associated, astronomical costs.
So the question is: Have we gone too far? Is it time to begin to rethink some of our regulations, or at least the process? Is it time to simplify, to consolidate? Is it time to give more consideration to the growing burden these regulations place on property owners?
What do you think?
ClimateGate The Best Thing to Happen To The Green Movement
Friday, February 26th, 2010You’ve probably heard all about it: The infamous emails that started it all, the gallons of ink spent telling everyone what it meant, the grudging admission of Phil Jones, the head of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit at the time (the scandal forced him to step down), that there has been no “statistically significant” warming for fifteen years. For awhile it seemed it just went on and on and on, all to the great consternation of green movement activists.
Ironically, I think this might be more of a boon than a bane to the green movement if, and only if, they remember the function, and the limitations of activism. Activism is a catalyst. Without it, society wouldn’t change. But activism is not change. It’s only the catalyst. From the very founding of the American colonies slavery had been a divisive issue, thanks to abolition activists. And there was much celebration when President Lincoln finally eliminated it. By that time, slavery had already been abolished in the North, thanks to the hard work of activists, who had done an excellent job of changing the social consciousness. But their over-reach in trying to force the south to come along was, to a great extent, what started the War.
In the South the social consciousness had not changed. The population in the southern states was not ready for abolition. So despite the seeming activist victory in getting the President to sign a law abolishing slavery once and for all, institutionalized slavery was simply replaced by the Jim Crow laws and all they wrought: Institutionalized discrimination that fairly served the same purpose. It would take nearly another hundred years for the social consciousness to change enough to put an end to it all, and another very rocky fifty years after that to have the whole mess far enough behind us to elect a black president.
Compared to the span of a human life, social change happens very slowly, at a generational pace. Those with open minds learn the benefits of the change and pass that on to their children. When I was a child, not only were African Americans still routinely referred by the N-word, I was taught the racial names for some equipment and only the racial names. I wouldn’t discover the equipments’ real proper name, and that the name I was taught was racial, until I reached adult hood. But my children, who are now grown, don’t quite grok some older people’s problem with other races.
Alas, when it comes to environmental issues we are not anywhere near so far down the evolutionary path. And just as over-reach by the abolition movement galvanized resistance to racial change, so too have I seen the same kind of resistance to environmental change. The public has become numb to the cry of wolf. Most of the population has now been told the sky is falling for most of their lives. I’m probably showing my age, but I remember how the gas crisis of the ’70s was going to end the world as we know it. I also remember when we were supposedly staring the next ice age right in the face. (A global cooling crisis preceded the current global warming crisis.) One more appeal to “change or the world will end” now elicits more yawns than it does panic.
Now admittedly, I live in a part of the country that’s rather dyslexic. Part of the community is made up of old-time lumbermen. Another part is very progressive. But in my career, I can count the number of jobs I’ve sold on an environmental pitch on one hand. The other green jobs were sold not on the basis of green, but of personal gain: Increased energy efficiency, lower electric bills, lower water bills, lower maintenance costs, better indoor air quality. “Green” never entered the conversation; environmental conservation was not a part of the discussion. But they sure loved the results, which encompassed all of those green, environmentally friendly things. (Or pieces of them, in some cases.)
And there in lays the key. Rather than continuing to try and pitch “the sky is falling” to increasingly skeptical ears, the green movement would be better served by focusing on the personal benefits: No more electric bill, no more fuel oil bill, no more rot in the walls, no more drainage problems that flood the basement, no more toxic off gassing that make grandma’s asthma worse. Those are arguments everybody understands, whether they agree with “green” or not.
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The Deep Seated Problems Behind LEED and the Other Green Building Programs
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010The following article, written by Michael Anschel, is reprinted from Remodeling with both their, and the author’s permission:
Ah HA!It came to me over a series of tweets. An epiphany of sorts, if you will.
The problem with all these green building programs (including the one I helped create) is the thought process that the user is asked to engage in. No amount of revisions or point adjustment will solve this problem. LEED, NAHB, EarthCraft, Build It Green, even the amazing MN GreenStar are all handicapped by the same thing, and this handicap may be part of what is keeping them from getting the deep market penetration they all want.
Here it is:
The programs are written kind of like a building code. Do this. Don’t do that. Test those. Guess at what that is supposed to really mean. (The funny thing is that first NAHB and now USGBC are trying to emulate a codes-style process for writing the standards as well!)
Codes are good for certain things, no question, and they are a critical part of our building process. They keep the unscrupulous in check and provide a minimal thinking path to allow construction to continue in a mildly safe manner.
But codes don’t get their users to think.
Likewise, codes, rules, and regulations are good for finite tasks – usually single component or micro-system components such as bearing capacity requirements, nailing patterns, smoke detector locations, handrail heights.
But codes are horrible at addressing complex systems. What made us think we could take a system as huge as nature and bottle it up in code?
If we are asking people to think about how everything is connected, how everything goes somewhere, how their actions impact other people, and about their relationship with nature, then why the hell are we telling them to check their brain at the door and pick up a code book? It is almost as moronic as suggesting the LEED AP test (an exercise in minutia), or the NAHB Certified Green Professional test (a joke) have the ability to turn someone into a green expert!
Green building requires you to think. In green building, there is no easy path or one-size-fits-all solution. The sooner everyone understands this, the sooner we can get back to the business of green building.
Michael has hit upon many of my pet peeves about the various green building certification programs. What he doesn’t touch upon is cost: The cost to me as a design builder in jumping through their various tests in minutia to get certified; the cost to you to have your project certified silver, gold, platinum, or whatever the rating scheme is. And for my money and your money, you’re not guaranteed to get any better performance out of your building than if you hadn’t paid to have your building certified, or I to be certified. (As recent articles about LEED rated building performance have shown.)
I also agree with Michael that green building makes those of us who do it think (which is what I like about it). But there’s something else at work here too. Something that not only cannot be defined by check lists or green building codes, but also can’t simply be thought: You have to want to design and build green. You have to like designing and building green. It has to be important to the designer and builder. It has to be a part of who they are and how they think. The old saw that “I can design/build whatever you want” doesn’t work with green building. Often times green building doesn’t begin with the building; sometimes it doesn’t even begin with the site! It might begin with a good history lesson, sometimes followed by lessons in the biology, forestry, ecology, and hydrology of the ecosystems surrounding the building site. All necessary to understand how the building and site must work together to fit seamlessly into the local environment. All concepts completely foreign to main stream designers who see this site no differently than the last dozen sites: Land to be re-arranged to their liking so that their vision will work.
To be done correctly green building has to be important to the project team; it has to be a part of who they are and so be the yard stick by which they value their craft.
To paraphrase Michael’s closing sentence: The sooner we get the right attitudes in place, the sooner we can get down to the business of green building.
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