Retrofitness and Thoughtful Building Design

Some of the fastest return on investment you can get is by retrofitting a leaky, energy wasting building with high R-value insulation and efficient appliances. Many estimates show that US buildings use close to 50% of the total annual energy in the country- so this seems like a natural place to start if we want to conserve. But what if you’re building a house from scratch?

Architects and developers have, boutique projects aside, been driven by lower budgets and short time-frames, which means cookie cutter patterns, uninspired design and cheap materials. This inevitably leads to soul-draining layouts and poor use of resources. In essence the concept is “save money now, and let the future pay for itself”. With a little ingenuity and investment, as well as support from local and federal governments, each building can be built to optimize its sited location and materials.

Take for instance the concept of “the passive home”. In the northern hemisphere this type of home has most of the windows facing south (if building in the southern hemisphere have them face north). The eaves are designed to block the high summer sun and let in the low winter sun, so the angle and length of the eaves are determined by latitude. This keeps the house cool in the summer and warm in the winter, functioning as a passive heater. By planting evergreens on the northern side of the house the cold winds of the winter can be blunted, and deciduous trees planted on the south side will block the summer sun. If it can be incorporated into the design, build a thick, massive Trombe wall in front of a south facing window- this wall will soak up the winter rays and radiate heat into the house all night long. Water is a great thermal sink- if you can figure out a way to use the wall to store your rainwater which is then reused in the garden or as greywater, even better! And with a south facing roof you also have a wonderful base for your photovoltaic array and solar water heater. All it takes is a little research and a contractor willing to work with you. An open-minded local inspector doesn’t hurt either.

I’m not crazy enough to think that everyone can afford these elements in a new house, but I bet if you cut the average new house size in half you’d have plenty of cash left over to implement some of these energy-saving, comfort-increasing designs. And you’d be helping get the numbers down on the United State’s biggest energy hogs.
Here’s a couple of recommended books and resources:

Energy Savers (gov’t website)

Federal Weatherization Program

The Passive Solar House – there are lots of books on this subject out there, all are good primers on this important subject.

A Pattern Language – a beautiful book that will captivate your imagination. Written by a group of forward thinking architects and designers who studied recurring patterns, problems and solutions of civilizations through the millennia. They point out the designs and patterns that consistently recur in thriving communities- elements that any city-planner, architect and home-improver should know about before starting an important project. Starts at the global macro-level and zooms down all the way to “a space that only children can access comfortably”.

Energy Retrofitting Article – discusses some of the benefits of retrofitting homes.

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5 comments on “Retrofitness and Thoughtful Building Design
  1. Frank Eggers says:

    Good ideas, but not always practical.

    In the city, lot sizes are limited. If a house is limited to 40′ in width, having roof overhangs becomes impractical. Also, a 2-story house tends to be more energy efficient than a 1-story house because of reduced roof area. That means that while roof overhang may improve energy efficiency for the second floor, it will be less effective on the first floor.

    Air conditioning may require more energy than heating, depending on location, in which case it may be a bad idea to have a large glass area to the south. Shade trees may be helpful, but there again, with a limited lot size, they may be impractical. I actually had one tree cut down because it was an evergreen tree that provided shade in winter when it was not needed and provided no shade in summer.

    Regarding lot size, the increased lot size needed to make some of the ideas practical would also reduce population density thereby making public transportation less efficient. It is not practical to have trees shading the sides of a house when the lot is 50′ wide and the house is 40′ wide.

    Again, some of the ideas are practical under some circumstances, but not workable under other circumstances.

    It would help if insulated concrete form construction were less expensive. I would have used that method of construction for my new house, but the cost was not manageable. So, instead of using 2 x 4s for the exterior walls, I used 2 x 6s so that more insulation could be used. I also had insulation put between the first and second floors so that when the first floor was not being cooled, heat from the first floor would not increase cooling requirements on the second floor. I also designed indirect fluorescent tube lighting into the house, also zoned radiant floor heating.

    There are many different situations and what is practical in some areas is not practical in other areas.

  2. All good points Frank, thank you. Of course if any element of a design is impractical alternatives should be considered – as you point out, environment is usually the decisive factor.

    In high density areas many of the things I wrote about initially are not applicable. In these cases insulation and high sustainability products are more critical.

    What it really boils down to is intelligent designers with an aim towards sustainable and comfortable construction doing the hard work required in each individual case, as opposed to cookie-cutter design work that may not be appropriate for the location.

  3. Frank Eggers says:

    Stephan,

    Your basic article and graphic are good; they just need a bit of editing so that they will take into consideration multiple conditions and circumstances.

    My new house has a hot water recirculation pump to eliminate wasting water while waiting for it to become hot at the faucet (tap). I have a button at each location where hot water could be used. The intent is to turn on the recirculation pump briefly before opening the faucet. Unfortunately, there is no off-the-shelf control system to make it work and I have not got around to designing and making one. The only thing available is a timer, but that would be of limited usefulness because the timer obviously would not guarantee that hot water would be immediately available when needed and also it would run the pump when hot water is not needed. In calling around, I was told that a push-button activation system would not be good since it would require that people push the button! If pushing a button is a hardship, then perhaps people need to do finger exercises.

    A push-button system to activate a hot water recirculation pump would also require that the pump move water fast enough to minimize the wait time.

    It seems to me that there would be a demand for such a system if it were readily available and people knew about it and understood it. There would be no technical problems to implementing it; the only problems would be marketing and they could be readily overcome. Such a system should be included in all new homes. Already some building codes require a recirculation pump, but they do not require an efficient method to activate it only when it is actually needed.

    • I’ve been fighting with my new on-demand water heater for a year now, ever since installation. The contractors put it right under the kitchen and bathroom area… great! But they plumbed it back to where the old water heater was, which meant about 25 extra feet of plumbing when it really only needed to go straight up into the existing plumbing. So we spent a few months of running the hot water for two minutes before the hot water hit, which felt like a horrifying thing to do, especially considering we got the on-demand heater as part of a home-efficiency upgrade.

      If the people installing the efficiency upgrades can’t even be bothered to step back and think for a moment about what they’re doing, we’ve got problems.

      This really speaks to a bigger issue: if people are asked to install new-fangled “smart” and “efficient” designs in their homes, but what they get is very poorly designed, poorly thought-out and, in some cases, retrograde, then they’re going to lose faith in the movement. And we can’t afford that.

      I can tell you it was a miserable feeling when I realized that my “on-demand” hot water heater meant that I had to stand around and run the water for 2 minutes (literally!) before it got hot, whereas with my old water heater it was practically instant… and here in the Pacific Northwest water is expensive. I had to chop into the plumbing myself and reroute and insulate- not a good feeling after spending 15k on a house update. That feeling does not engender a warm and fuzzy feeling about home-efficiency.

      I’m rambling, but what I’m trying to say is we need thoughtfulness at every stage in the product design/manufacture/sales pitch/installation cycle. And that means we need well-educated engineers, designers, fab programmers, salesmen and contractors. That’s a lot of IQ points floating around. But man, wouldn’t that be cool?

      • Frank Eggers says:

        Stephan,

        You are quite right. Lack of thinking creates many problems. Blind adherence to general rules that do not apply to all circumstances makes no sense. I guess that the challenge is to teach people to think.

        My sister and her husband had a hybrid water heater installed when the old heater failed. Basically, it’s an on-demand heater with a very small storage capacity. They have more patience than I have. Generally, when a water heater fails, people want a new one installed as quickly as possible and do not take time to do any research work. Even though they live in Minneapolis and the water heater failed in the middle of winter, they took over a week to do the research work before having a new water heater installed. They took their showers at the gym. How many people would tolerate being without hot water for that long?

        My water heater is an indirect one; it gets its heat from the heating boiler which is supposed to be 95% efficient.