Editor’s note: We’re very pleased to publish the first post from our newest content partner, Smart HomeOwner magazine. SMO will be contributing regular posts to Green Options, and we’ll be contributing regular features to their print and web editions.
High-Performance Home
by Michele Dawson
The Paterson Showhouse Project brings together the best building practices, materials and technologies available today. On an empty lot in an existing neighborhood in Paterson, N.J., a prototype for the future of urban homebuilding is taking shape.
In late June, ground was broken on a 2,900-square-foot, three-story demonstration house that will show how to use state-of-the-art building technology and innovative products to create an affordable, energy-efficient, ecofriendly structure. “When it’s completed this fall, the Paterson Showhouse project, as it’s called, will serve as a clinic for homeowners, builders, architects, government officials and other parties, who will be able to tour the home to explore its green design features and advanced, yet economical, building techniques,” says Gary DeSantis, corporate architect for BASF - The Chemical Company, which is spearheading the construction of the home as part of its global Better Home, Better Planet environmental initiative. “This is a vision I’ve had for quite a while,” DeSantis adds.
Built as a template for the city’s aggressive 3,000-unit urban- renewal project, the home will have another purpose as well. Once the construction and demonstration phases are complete, it will be donated to St. Michael’s Housing Corporation, a Catholic charitable organization, which then will turn it over to a local quadriplegic boy and his family to occupy. As a result, the home is not only being designed with green and energy-efficient features, but also will include a number of accessibility elements to accommodate the boy’s special needs, including an elevator, an accessible porch and a wheelchair-friendly backyard.
Building With Foam
More than 50 companies affiliated with BASF, as well as local and national research and design teams, will donate the products, building materials and services required to construct and furnish the home, which will have features designed to reduce energy consumption, take advantage of renewable energy sources and generate supplemental energy.
One of the home’s most unique aspects, according to DeSantis, is its building envelope, or exterior wall structure. To upgrade the envelope and improve the home’s energy performance, as well as spotlight innovative products, the home’s builders will use three insulating foam technologies:
- Basement walls will be built using ICFs, or insulating concrete forms, from American PolySteel, an Albuquerque, N.M.-based company that has been manufacturing ICFs since 1978. Each insulating form consists of two panels of expanded polystyrene (EPS) rigid insulating foam connected by steel ties. Once the ICFs are in place on the building site, concrete is poured into the space between the foam panels, which hold the concrete in place while it cures and remain in place afterward to serve as thermal insulation. A PolySteel ICF wall has an R-value of 30, although it can perform as high as R-50 or more in some areas of the country, contributing to a home s energy savings.
- The Monotech Building System, developed by Houston-based Monotech International, is being used for the Paterson home’s first-floor walls. Rigid EPS insulation is used as the core of the Monotech panels. Once the panels are in place, a one half-inch layer of a fiber-reinforced polymer-enhanced blend called Monocrete is sprayed or troweled on both sides of each panel. The Monocrete, which has been specifically designed to bond to the EPS foam, is then finished into the desired texture or style, creating a rigid structural skin.
- The home’s second floor and roof will be constructed using structural insulated panels (SIPs) from Insulspan, a Canadian company with U.S. offices in Blissfield, Mich. The Insulspan SIP system consists of solid, onepiece, pre-cut panels that are ready to install as wall, floor or roof components. Each SIP consists of a core of molded EPS insulation with engineered oriented strand board (OSB) laminated to the top and bottom faces.
All three types of building materials the PolySteel ICFs, Monotech panels and Insulspan SIPs use Styropor EPS from BASF, which provides the best cost-to-R-value ratio of all thermal insulating foams, says Jack Armstrong, business manager for BASF’s Styropor EPS business in North America. Styropor is increasingly being used in construction applications like SIPs, ICFs, wall sheathing and roof-building systems due to their beneficial, sustainable attributes over the life cycle of a structure.
In addition to being energy efficient and recyclable, the foam building systems have other benefits. They reduce construction time for the builder in the field, thanks to their efficient installation with low-skilled labor, are durable, do not provide nourishment for mold or insects, and create quieter, less drafty homes.
Smart Technologies
Beyond the building envelope, the Paterson Showhouse will incorporate a number of other smart building techniques and technologies. For instance, it will employ Zero Energy Housing (ZEH) concepts developed by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. A zero-energy home uses solar panels and other alternative energy sources to generate as much energy as it consumes.
As a result, the home draws zero energy from the power grid, and in some cases can even feed electricity back into the grid. This turns the home’s electric meter backward, which is known as net metering. By generating excess electricity and selling it back to the utility, homeowners can offset installation costs for solar and other alternative energy equipment.
To generate electricity and hot water, the Paterson Showhouse will have two solar energy systems integrated into an Ultra-Cool coated metal roof by Englert. The solar systems are the result of the coordinated efforts of a number of companies, including ECD Ovonics in conjunction with DC Power. GridPoint/Equinox Energy Solutions is providing the solar electrical roofing system and Dawn Solar Systems is providing a building-integrated solar thermal system.
Steven Winter Associates, an architecture, engineering and building-systems research and consulting firm, is coordinating the installation of the home’s HVAC and mechanical ventilation systems.
“We’re helping to integrate the various parts and pieces [of the home],” says Bill Zoeller, senior architect with Steven Winter Associates. “We’re determining how different systems will work together. That s no small task, given the number and complexity of the home s technologies and systems.” The list is extensive and includes:
- A REHAU radiant floor heating system integrated into precast concrete floor panels on the first and second floors.
- A properly sized HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) system that includes a Viessmann condensing boiler, a Viessman indirect water heater and a solar storage tank. The excellent insulation properties of the foam building systems allow for the downsizing of the HVAC equipment, reducing initial and operating costs.
- Low-e windows from Pollard, which block most solar heat gain while allowing visible light to enter the home. Windows treated with low-e film help keep occupants comfortable in both winter and summer, with little heat leakage coming inside on hot summer days or leaking outside in winter.
- A REHAU plastic plumbing manifold, which acts as a control center to feed hot and cold water through flexible supply lines to individual fixtures. Together with flexible plastic piping, plastic manifolds offer installation- related cost advantages over conventional plumbing systems.
- A two-stage, variable-speed Amana air-conditioning system and UltimateAir RecoupAerator whole-house energy recovery ventilator (ERV) with carbon-dioxide control and a HEPA filtration function. The ERV improves indoor air quality by supplying clean, fresh air every two hours while helping to control indoor temperature and humidity levels.
- A Siemens automated home control and security system with touchscreen programming, so the occupants can control the heating, cooling and other systems in the house.
Other green and energy-efficient features will include Whirlpool Energy Star appliances, natural linoleum flooring, a gluing component that will stop air infiltration and seal cracks, compact fluorescent bulbs from Philips, and the use of paints and sealants that are low in volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which can affect indoor air quality. In addition, the Florida Solar Energy Center has donated a monitoring system that will track the energy performance of the house.
A Team Effort
Building a home on the scope of the Paterson Showhouse required the efforts of a great many individuals and organizations, all of which made important contributions from the BASF team to Grad Associates of Newark, N.J., and the Partnership for Advancing Technology in Housing (PATH), to the many companies that provided products and services, and to the city of Paterson.
Paterson mayor Jose Joey Torres, for instance, was involved from the beginning and sees the project as having two primary purposes. First, it will provide a home for the family of a quadriplegic boy, who was seriously injured in a car accident at the age of five. Torres says that as soon as he heard of the boy’s plight, he was immediately committed to helping. “The process has taken a while to reach its culmination, but a few years and 50 companies later, here we are,” he says. Noting that the boy has been living in a specialized facility since the accident, he adds, “We’ll be able to bring him home again.”
In addition, the project will help reestablish Paterson as a leader in smart community development, says Torres. “Paterson was the first planned industrialized city in the United States,” he notes. “In 1792, Alexander Hamilton formed an investment group called the Society of Useful Manufactures, which funded the development of the city that later became Paterson. The Showcase project,” Torres notes, “will serve as a prototype for infill developments in the city, where fireproofing and staying cool in summer and warm in winter are important.”
Another organization that helped streamline the building process is the Chrisner Group, an environmental consulting firm based in Hamilton, N.J. The firm helped steer participants through the sometimes arduous paperwork process, and ensured the products used met environmental goals through the United States Green Building Council s LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) rating system. “The goal, ” says Scott Chrisner, one of the Group s partners, “is to make sure that when we re done with a product, it will have a useful life. We can ensure it won t hurt the environment and will [be recyclable].”
From the beginning, the goal of everyone involved has been to create a home that can, in some small way, contribute to the overall environmental health of the planet. “It’s not just the materials used,” says BASF s De- Santis, “but how you combine them for a synergistic effect. It’s the attention to details. A small or major builder could do it over and over, and save money for themselves and for the occupant.”
“And, ” he notes, “it’s something every homeowner can do, in one form or another, to decrease energy bills by almost half and ultimately lessen dependence on fossil fuels, resulting in not just better homes, but a better planet as well.”
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