Tax Incentives

This was in response to a question in a Builder Forum concerning the $1500 tax incentive for 2009 and 2010:

Tom, I've heard that from several vendors who were selling windows and insulation that the client really was doing this regardless of the cost because they wanted the tax "break". Many were spending thousands of dollars to save a small portion on their yearly tax burden. A one time benefit that they could easily have recouped by just putting the money in an IRA. Thankfully you were able to see the benefit of this "break" from the government and I hope that your business is able to generate the same numbers without the incentive.

No taxes have been cut though. Is your tax burden smaller this year? Assuming you are the business owner did your FICA, MCARE, and Fed Tax burden go down? I expect not. Will you be paying a smaller portion of your income to taxes in April? Again, I expect not. $1500 is about $30 a week for the wage earner. Would cutting payroll taxes by a small percentage create a greater "stimulus" in the marketplace? Maybe; but it would not be targeted and therefore not benefit the chosen industry regardless of who in Washington controls the purse.

What may be truly interesting is did these purchasers pay for the service with cash or did they finance it? What is the cost of that financing over the near term? Does it outweigh the benefit of the $1500? Do you truly save on your heating, cooling, or electric bill just just by replacing a window when this if factored in? Was just the sash replaced or was the trim removed and the jamb space air-sealed? Have the plate to sub-floor or plate-to-plate connections been air-sealed? Was the siding removed and a building wrap installed? In my own home air-sealing the furring cavity at either the attic or the crawl is the way to go; how many do this? Is the client willing to have a PV array large enough that it will truly give back to the grid? Or are they just cutting a monthly bill? Does this return on investment depend on your cost per kwh? Sure does. I installed an on demand hot water heater three years ago. Currently I am ahead on the electric bill by $6. At that rate it may take 750 years to pay back. I suspect I'll have to replace it by then so will it ever be cost effective? BTW - Electric rates in Virginia are some of the lowest in the country.

Potential short term benefits will come from Government action in regards to increases in consumerism on a macro economic scale when an item otherwise out of the reach is provided at a lesser cost. (Why do you think Going out of Business sales work so well?) These benefits will end when the incentive ends with nothing lasting created because there was nothing lasting to begin with.

It's too bad that your thriving business cannot sustain more employees with this incentive from the Government. It would seem that all that has been accomplished by the Government borrowing this money has been to keep you employed during this downturn. While I think that is a worthy goal I would still rather have my $30 back.

As I said I hope your business continues to grow and that you are able to prosper. Good luck!

Thanks for reading and I hope you will visit my website

www.cshadedesign.com

Conditioned Crawl

Conditioned Crawl

Conditioning a crawl space along with air-sealing the exterior envelopes are two items that should be implemented by all homeowners and builders that would like to bring “Green” construction to their project. These two items alone can account for the most energy saving benefits that you will see as a homeowner.

One thing is true especially in older homes: There is a forced air heating and/or cooling system that was either added 30 years ago or placed when the home was built and it is in the crawl space or the attic. Either way one of two things is happening. 1. The system’s ducting was never insulated or was built using duct board. (If it’s duct board run away!) 2. The duct system was held together using Duct Tape, now called Duck Tape because it did not work on ducts and this tape has failed and the ducts are leaking air all over. A third option especially with 30+ year old systems is mechanically fastened galvanized ducting that is not sealed in any way but also is not potentially coming apart. Trust me this stuff would stay together in a tornado. This latter type of duct is a great candidate for a conditioned crawl space. It is already leaking enough air to keep the crawl space pressurized therefore keeping ground borne pollutants at bay. And it’s easier and better to condition the crawl than it is to mastic seal and insulate the duct. Create a conditioned space around the duct; allow it to be brought into the building envelope that is already full of conditioned air much as a Mechanical Room inside the building envelope is.

Most old homes (and a lot of new ones) are leaking air around windows, doors, walls, electric outlets, light boxes, overhead fixtures, at wall corners, thru plumbing penetrations, floor joists at the exterior, attic access stairs and doors to attics, fireplaces, chimneys, kitchen and bath exhaust fans, dryers, what did I miss? Because of this the home is essentially one big chimney where hot air rising creates a need for cool air to fill this void. Conditioning the crawl space is one way to help plug this chimney and keep ground pollutants out of your living space.

Thanks for reading and please visit my website

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I look forward to hearing from you…

Lead Safe? As in the Element

Lead Safe?

Was your home built prior to 1978? Then you have a 25% chance that there is lead based paint in your home. 1960? Then there is a 66% chance of lead based paint. Prior to 1940? 86%. And don’t think that it is just the paint on the walls. Nearly ALL surface coatings of these eras contained lead. This means cabinets, floor finishes, stained woodwork, and especially exterior finishes. Knowing what is lead based on your home is knowledge that your kids can learn on.

The best way to remove lead from your home is to well; remove it. Hiring a qualified lead certified contractor who has completed the EPA’s course on Lead Safety for Renovation, Repair and Painting (RRP) is a good place to start. Containing the lead thru a new paint job can be a viable option to mitigate small hands from putting chips in their mouths. What to look out for here is the sanding of the existing surface prior to the paint being applied.

Have you ever spilled or even opened a packet of Sweet-n-Low or Equal? This is about a gram of substance. More than enough to become airborne, land on horizontal surfaces and be moved around the home. What’s interesting is that you will taste this on your tongue or in the nose simply by breathing. That somewhat sweet taste on the air can be pleasing and pleasant. It may even catch you a little off guard. Lead dust doesn’t taste, or smell, or otherwise heighten your senses. You just breathe it in.

Take the time to limit your and your homes exposure when refinishing a surface. Ask for and hire a contractor who has been certified by the EPA’s RRP program and be proactive about keeping you and your family safe during a remodel or renovation of your home.

NARI Central VA is committed to having its contractor members RRP certified to help you when you need to add-on, remodel, or renovate.

Thanks for reading and please visit my website

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I look forward to hearing from you…

Mechanical Space

Mechanical Space

When I started writing this I was using the acronym HVAC for Heating, Ventilating, and Cooling. Since none of the equipment ventilates the areas that it conditions I am going to just call it HaC for Heating and Cooling

I prompted my Wife that the home we now own was the right one to purchase partially because the heating and cooling equipment is within the building envelope. It was built in 1954. Is full masonry construction and has old leaky windows. Having the HaC equipment within this envelope is a situation that rarely happens in new construction. Something that I discovered later and to my dismay I had abandoned is that each room of the home had a supply and a return in it. Interestingly the supply is in the center of the home and the return was at the exterior wall. Both of these are at floor level which is not generally accepted these days but we often still feed from the floor and return under a staircase which is generally low in the wall. Or in the case of second floors is fed from the ceiling and returned from the ceiling. Today we supply over or below exterior openings since these are usually cooler or warmer depending on the season and through a process called the stack effect the warmer air moves to the top or the cooler air moves to the bottom creating convection in this area that helps to mix the air. (I would assume this is fairly localized and does not mix all the air in the room well.) In my case we abandoned the floor returns and placed a sealed duct return in the attic to the HaC equipment in the mechanical room. This allows for the air to be moved from floor to ceiling thus helping to even the temperature throughout the space. New construction HaC equipment is relegated to crawl spaces and attics. Generally this unconditioned space is either extremely hot or relatively moist in relation to the surrounding environment. In the former the air-conditioning has to cool that 140 degree attic air before it can cool the air in the home. On top of that cooling is a process of removing moisture from the air, so unless the system is sized right and allowed to run for extended periods of time it will not remove latent and occupant moisture from the air and therefore not cool. The crawl space system may have an easier time of conditioning the air in its environment but it has the unenviable task of keeping all that dirt, grime, and possibly mold associated with crawl spaces out of the air-stream. This in and of itself is the best reason to seal duct work in the crawl space.

Conditioning the crawl space helps with the ducting problem and goes a long way to mitigating moisture and other contaminants in the crawl space environment. This also will allow the equipment to generally only work with conditioned air and will have an easier, read equipment sustainability, time of maintaining the temperature set at the thermostat.


Thanks for reading and please visit my website

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I look forward to hearing from you…

Does Your Home Suck?

Does Your Home Suck?

As a home designer for the past 10 years and a believer in energy efficient homes I feel pretty confident in how to design and implement an energy efficient home.
Insulation R values are a valuable tool but are not the end all be all of keeping energy costs low. Even doubling the R values required by the code (especially with batt fiberglass) will not have a cumulative effect if air-sealing is not part of this system. Too many builders ignore sealing of the exterior envelope, as is indicated in the article above around windows, to make the most energy efficient building systems.
Good holes, i.e Windows, Doors, Walls tightness; is the best way to create an energy efficient home. $150 vinyl windows are not the way to achieve this regardless of their NFRC ratings. They will fail.
Testing of the system when implemented by a Builder who has decided to create an efficient home thru the use of quality windows, doors, air-sealing and HVAC is the only way to achieve any long term energy efficiency in a home.
Retrofitting old homes with "new" "energy efficient" windows is a band-aid at best and will be money thrown down a well for the most part. Education of the public may help but don't count on there being a critical mass of purchasers making the change to informed consequential home design and building.
The use of Green Building in the industry has become so abused that it is now for the most part feckless in determining whether or not a home is built well or efficient. And the illusion of payback over time can be demonstrated for some systems and product choices but these are few and often have too many variables to predict. One of the energy efficiency gurus that I have worked with over the years likes to point to a spot in the house and say "My house leaks right there!" He knows where he has controlled the movement of air in the house and knows that what he has put in place will work. There are far too few looking at this level of design or implementation. Don't fall into the trap.


Thanks for reading and please visit my website

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I look forward to hearing from you…

Green Building Three

Green Building Three

3. WINDOWS AND DOORS – Opening in the exterior envelope are the big holes that need to be addressed thru the use of well made quality fillers. Most upper end window manufacturers have made great strides in providing a standardized system by which to judge windows and how they will perform under different conditions. The National Fenestration Rating Council was born of this desire to quantify windows and doors and has been instrumental in bringing the industry up across the board. These fillers work with the sealing of the Building Envelope to create that energy efficient bubble that we are trying to achieve.

4. HVAC – Heat, Ventilation, and Cooling. Which of these is the most important? In a well designed and executed home design they are all equally important. Ventilation may carry the most weight but is often the most neglected. As a home efficiency expert once told me he likes to be able to point to a vent and be able to know that his home leaks right there! By leak he means he knows where unconditioned air enters and/or leaves the home. Because he knows where that is he can condition it by either heating or cooling it as it enters the building envelope. This is generally achieved by using a heat or air-to-air exchanger which draws warm moist air from the bathroom and kitchen areas, thus helping to control latent moisture in the home and depositing this conditioned air into the supply side of the air conditioning system. This in turn allows your air conditioning system to work more efficiently because the air it is conditioning is already partly conditioned. And to continue on that theme, having the air handler in a conditioned space such as the crawl space or a mechanical room inside the home moves this equipment into the building envelope and helps the system work easier and better for its lifetime.

Builders who practice these several items will have HVAC contractors and other Trade Contractors who have bought into the practice of creating an energy efficient home. We built homes that the second floor required that a ½ ton air handler was all that was required to heat and cool the space. Of course a one ton unit was used because we could not get one that small! This is where the real payoff began. The cost of 2-3 tones of heat and air equipment was moved into the sealing of the building envelope which generally created a minimal if any cost at all to the homeowner. Instant payback! Whereas the windows may be a big cost up front these help the building envelope and therefore the energy efficiency and ultimately the cost to heat and cool your home on a monthly basis. There are many documented cases of 3000 square foot homes costing as little as $35 to heat and cool without resorting to drastic building techniques.



Thanks for reading and please visit my website

www.cshadedesign.com

I look forward to hearing from you…

Green Building Two

Green Building Two

I have had two clients recently, two in the last seven years to ask for Green or Energy Efficient qualities incorporated into their home design. This started me thinking about when I became involved in Green Building. A builder that I worked for started me on this path in 1998 when this movement was in its infancy. We had a client who worked for Virginia Power who was looking for Energy Efficient design that Virginia Power was pushing. At the time Virginia Power was looking for ways to increase the use of heat pumps and therefore power but underneath that they were creating better more sustainable homes. From my involvement then and through continued involvement over the past decade I have come to believe that there are a few simple things that can be done to provide superior energy efficiency that will pay for itself in a limited time frame:

1. CONDITIONED CRAWL SPACE – Conditioning the crawl space does several things that are beneficial to the home. Moisture control is probably the top item. Homes are starting to be built tighter but controlling moisture is not generally considered in the building code or by the builder. As humans we create and transport quite a lot of latent moisture into our homes. We need to be able to control this and having a conditioned crawl helps in that the moisture from external sources has one less path to enter the home.

2. BUILDING ENVELOPE – The crawl space is a part of this but equally important is how the walls perform. There are methods to create a wall of windows that is more energy efficient that a solid wall but very few of us live in glass houses. Air-sealing the building envelop thru the use of caulks, foams, and/or blown in batt (cellulose) or icynene (expanding foam) insulation will help to stop air infiltration thru the thousand of cracks that are in the framing. Building wraps, such as Tyvek, do much the same thing but should be viewed as a supplement to these other suggestions not as the cure. The building code now requires a building wrap to be placed under the exterior cladding and in my area 15# tar paper is just as effective as the Tyvek or other high end building wrap. The environment in my locality does not support the literature for the use of high end building wraps because we do not get too warm or too cold for too long.

This is the first installment, please check back for more...

Please contact me at

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if you have other questions

Green Building

The Green Movement has been building in earnest for many years now. Some simple steps were taken and demonstration homes were built 30+ years ago. Throughout time everyone has been working to build an energy efficient home in order to stay warm in the winter. Recently the global community has been rallying to mitigate the effects of what is now labeled global climate change which in and of itself would help make our winter warmth a bit easier to achieve. To that end home builders and community activists are pushing green building initiatives such as Green Globes, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), and Earth Craft Home certification. These programs seek to achieve energy efficiency thru a variety of check lists and points system and rise to environmental stewardship as well thru the use of sustainable and recycled components. Many of these choices have been incorporated into homes by builders because they last longer and create fewer warranty calls for the builder to have to address. By doing so the building community has begun creating better products for the homeowner and is helping to make the environment better.

What do you want to achieve?

Environmental friendliness? Sustainable building materials? Less carbon footprint? Lower energy bills? Safe worker environment? Low Volatile Organic Compound (VOC) allergy tolerance mitigation? These are a few of the areas where a green building initiative can come into play. You can do very simple things that will make the home energy efficient or you can do very invasive things that will go even further. It truly is up to you and making sure that you have a builder that is capable of providing this service to you.

I’ll write more on this subject in the ensuing weeks.

Thanks for your time and consideration.

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On Demand Hot Water Heater

My family and I have been living with an on-demand tank-less hot water heater (HWH), or instant HWH for nearly a year now. There are several things that I have learned during this time that I believe are good to share with future buyers.

1. Having a tank-less HWH does not mean that you will have instant hot water when you turn the faucet on. The water still has to travel thru and heat up the same pipes as the tank type water heater that you used to have.
2. The bigger the better. Even in the best of circumstances when the second shower is cut on the first will cool and need a little recovery time. While this is not objectionable it is a bit exciting when you are rinsing your hair in the winter and the water gets cooler.
3. We live in Virginia and have always enjoyed low electricity rates. This combined with what are reasonable gas rates make the payback for the unit about 20 years. I do not believe this to be a deal breaker. In our case there were space issues that the tank-less helped with. It is nice to be able to turn it down in the summer and up in the winter saving gas costs.
4. Summer water temperatures around 115 degrees allowed for cool showers and clean dishes. When I set the temperature below this I noticed that the dishwasher did not work quite as well. The winter temperature is now at 125 degrees and we may move it to 130 as the daily outside temperature drops lower coming into January and February.

SET THIS HIGHER TEMPERATURE ONLY IF YOU ARE COMFORTABLE THAT YOUR FAMILY UNDERSTANDS SCALDING AND POSSIBLE INJURY FROM THIS HIGH TEMPERATURE.

5. Environmental friendliness? Maybe. I do know that it is a choice for each family that bears a high upfront cost especially for replacing a tank HWH. My plumber stated that this was the first one they had done as a replacement because it costs 2-3 times as much as a conventional tank gas HWH.
6. Electric tank-less HWH use a lot of power, somewhere in the neighborhood of 120 amps or more. Your panel box would need 6-8 blank spaces to accommodate the breakers and the electric meter would look like an anemometer in a hurricane.
7. The aerator, that's the piece on the bottom of the faucet that makes the water stream pretty, needs to 1.5 gpm or higher. We had a .7 gpm aerator and it did not let enough water pass thru the system to ignite the HWH. You may want to limit your water usage but this can get you in trouble.

Hopefully this will give you some more choices in deciding about a tank-less HWH.

Please contact me at

www.cshadedesign.com

if you have other questions