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Zero energy ready homes are coming

energy.gov

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Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#91

Post by jimt1234 »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #13

This is a pet issue of mine, having lived in two off grid homes going back to the 80's. The barriers are not materials, technology, or labor, but purely regulatory. I could take my current home off permanently grid with solar today for less than 10k but to do so would be illegal. Permitted grid connected solar costs 5x that and disconnecting from the grid is not permitted.

I'm just curious: what happens if a home owner installs a bunch of solar panels and batteries, declares the property "off grid" (for electricity), then simply stops paying the local utility. I'm sure the local utility will stop service, which is what the home owner wants by going "off grid". But does it go beyond that? Will the local utility put a lien on the house? Will the local utility send any unpaid "fees" to collection? Does the local municipality condemn the property (or something similar)? Are there potential criminal charges?

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#92

Post by ahoy »

This is good, in the way that filtered cigarretes are better than unfiltered.

As long we we keep building & being forced to live in low density, single-family houses, we'll keep consuming the huge physical and energy resources necessary to sustain them.

I'm not saying we have to turn every neighborhood into manhattan, far from it. But this is similar to the gas -> electric car change. Yeah, it's a marginal improvement on what we're doing now, but its so far away from the kind of changes we need to make that it's almost dispiriting to see it presented as some kind of remarkable progress.

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#94

Post by mikeyouse »

giantg2 wrote: post #44
Syonyk wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/buildings/zero-energy-ready-home... seems to be the main landing page, and it's a bit handwaving... > A DOE Zero Energy Ready Home is a high-performance home that is so energy efficient that a renewable energy system could offset most or all the home's annual energy use. "Most or all" and "annual energy use" allow for some massive wiggle room. Annual energy use by who? A family with a coup…

I was really interested in the insulation part and building design. The only thing I could find was that it has to be energy star, which is only 10% better insulation than code.

ACH2.0 in most of the upper part of the country is pretty aggressive. The 2015 ICC isn't a slouch either -- say you're in Chicagoland building a new home, this would mandate R49 in the attic, R20 in the walls (or R13 in the bays + R5 exterior), R15 on basement walls, R30 in the floors.

It could of course be much more aggressive, and likely will be eventually, but if you had a ACH2 house with those insulation values, minimum U-0.3 windows, >0.94 efficient gas furnace / high quality heat pumps, it would be a very efficient house.

Table R402.1.2 here: https://codes.iccsafe.org/content/IECC2015/chapter-4-re-resi...

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#95

Post by paiute »

olau wrote: post #81
paiute wrote: post #47

Those dehumidifiers make these places uninhabitable for me. Constant low humidity is really unhealthy. Without them these ultra insulated homes have major vapor and mold issues. Being highly insulated is good but at a point it's just silly. I'd rather see efforts to insulate old trailers, manufactured homes, etc. Rich people experimenting with zero energy homes don't need a credit.

I agree on low humidity being bad, but your remark on insulation does not seem correct. I'm only familiar with cold climates, so perhaps I'm overlooking something, but mold needs moisture to grow, so it will appear where water condenses out of warm air on a cold surface. You can typically see this in windows. So you need to prevent cold surfaces. The best way to do that is improving the insulation. The reason you can…

It's not super intuitive at first, but its cold climates were this is actually a big issue. Water vapor "wants" to equalize from a more humid to less humid environment. So when it's cold out - the humidity can drop rather low. Then you take a shower and create water vapor - which flows into the walls, through the insulation, and condenses against the colder exterior. Open a wall in any stick frame house in the rocky mountain region and mildew will be present. I am building a highly insulated house in a cold climate area and have blasted all the wood with copious amount of a silver based coating to inhibit mold growth.

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#96

Post by amluto »

mikeyouse wrote: post #88
amluto wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not at all convinced that exterior insulation would have lower labor cost. You have to competently install sheets of rigid insulation, and then you need to competently install siding over it. Insulating cavities needs some skilled labor if you use mineral wool, but a skilled installer goes fast . Or you can use some kind of blown in product, which takes very little labor. (I have never seen competently installed…

Insulting cavities well is immensely labor intensive and unfortunately is still required in homes with exterior insulation so you're kind of getting the worst of both worlds. Exterior insulation is an absolute breeze in comparison though, there are tons of product on the market that integrate the sheathing and insulation into a single unit so it installs just like any other exterior sheathing would.

I watched a crew install a blown fiberglass product: they stapled fabric over the walls, poked holes in it, and stuck a hose in each hole so a machine in their truck could flow fiberglass into the cavity. It went very quickly and fully filled the cavities.

John Mansville Spider Plus looks like another interesting product — blown fiberglass that is just sticky enough that it can supposedly be applied to walls and even ceilings without anything to contain it.

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#97

Post by Syonyk »

anonuser123456 wrote: post #90
Syonyk wrote: post #28

When you've confused "per kWh cost" with "energy to the house delivery costs," this sort of stuff sounds good on paper, but it doesn't fundamentally solve the problem that in the winter, homes use a lot more energy than they can generate, and in the spring/fall, they will generate a lot more energy than they need. I've got a large ground mount solar install I put in a few years ago (15.9kW nameplate, though mostly ea…

Sounds like you need a geothermal ground loop.

I live on what can be reasonably approximated as a "pile of rocks." It's fairly thin dirt on top of a lot of basalt. I've considered it, but the cost to install such a unit is quite staggering, before I buy a backhoe to install it.

I'll consider one of those if I have to replace my unit at some point, but I'm far more interested in adding simple solar thermal collectors to directly add energy from the sun on the partly cloudy or clear days we have, vs ripping up half an acre of rock to put the loops in, or figuring out where I can punch another well for heat exchange.

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#98

Post by IncRnd »

xyst wrote: post #64

I just see this as another subsidy for single family housing developments. The home may be "zero energy ready" or whatever greenwashing term they want to use. But the fact is they are spending that energy in driving from the sticks (in some cases >20 miles away) and back, driving from their home to the grocery store and back, driving to areas of interest (ie, parks, restaurants, doctors appointments). All of this is…

> All of this is dependent on highways and new roads, new electrical, water, and sewage infrastructure. This is all very expensive to build and maintain, and the cities and municipalities are left to foot the bill.

That's not generally how this works. There aren't necessarily highways and new paved roads going to rural properties. Electrical service isn't only downtown in cities but for miles outside of them or from solar, propane, or any one of the many other technologies.

As everyone who has built a property outside of some service area knows, the homeowner is the one who pays to drop the lines or service to the properety. Water almost always comes from a well on the property, and sewage tanks are how the sewage are handled.

Later, if Frank & Martha's property gets annexed into the city, they will pay taxes and will be just as entitled to city services as others. They already pay county, state and other taxes, which means they are entitled to whatever their taxes pay for.

"In general, rural areas in the United States have higher homeownership rates than urban areas. Compared with urban areas, where the homeownership rate was 59.8 percent, rural areas had a homeownership rate of 81.1 percent." [1]

[1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2016/...

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#99

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

xyst wrote: post #64

I just see this as another subsidy for single family housing developments. The home may be "zero energy ready" or whatever greenwashing term they want to use. But the fact is they are spending that energy in driving from the sticks (in some cases >20 miles away) and back, driving from their home to the grocery store and back, driving to areas of interest (ie, parks, restaurants, doctors appointments). All of this is…

> This is all very expensive to build and maintain, and the cities and municipalities are left to foot the bill.

Look, I hate Single Family Housing as much as anyone - but roads are BY FAR the most expensive part of infrastructure you mentioned - and those are financed by gasoline taxes.

If the people in the sticks are buying a lot of gas, they're paying a lot more taxes for the roads, too.

It'd be nice if property taxes were slightly higher in suburban areas to make up for the higher costs - but it really wouldn't need to be that much higher. Houses usually cost more than condos - so you're paying more property tax already by having a more expensive home...

Sure, there's exceptions like condos in Manhattan and near the beach and ski resorts, etc...

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#100

Post by bitwize »

xyst wrote: post #64

I just see this as another subsidy for single family housing developments. The home may be "zero energy ready" or whatever greenwashing term they want to use. But the fact is they are spending that energy in driving from the sticks (in some cases >20 miles away) and back, driving from their home to the grocery store and back, driving to areas of interest (ie, parks, restaurants, doctors appointments). All of this is…

Indeed. Time to break out the omnitool Hackernews favors for solving very large scale problems: government regulation. Nationalize zoning laws, ban home ownership, and herd the population into bughive arcologies in major cities, where they'll be fed vegan or insect-protein-fortified food brought by Amazon delivery drones.

If Hackernews believed in god, surely this would be their idea of heaven.

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