Top 10 Most Efficient Home in America

hey guys the build show is on the road today driving with my friend Steve basic you probably saw our other videos Steve's an incredible architect based out of this Boston area but works all over the country we're going to see a project that he built a couple years ago with a retired engineer that just his super interesting and super efficient I heard Steve earlier in the day say it's probably one of the top ten most efficient most interesting projects built in the last couple years in America so that's a high bar this is gonna be fun Steve it's exciting times man Dan Dan Roy with his help being a retired mechanical engineer we took a passive house to zero energy level he's been in the house about five years and he's never paid an energy bill and in fact all he's done is cash checks from the utilities five years no energy bill how about that that's pretty cool Steve and Dan's in front of us in his Chevy bolt he then drives about 15,000 miles a year on the production in his house man that is cool that is cool all right we'll pick the video when we get to Dan's house here in a couple minutes hey we're here Steve here we are Dan Roy's house oh man that is a pretty house it looks like a normal house to me nothing special at the street nothing special at the street but all the specialty is in between the walls and it's all special inside those energy bills window look when every month when that energy bill shows up and that bottom line says zero point zero zero gotta make you a happy homeowner like you to meet my good buddy Dan Roy here he is the homeowner of the Roy passive house here that we built about four or five years ago it's a certified passive house it's the second one in Massachusetts Wow and it was the feature in the fine home building series that we did on the construction of this house dang it's an incredible house look at this pretty very pretty give us a quick exterior tour what do you notice on the outside that's different on a passive house Steve so I mean obviously this is the south-facing facade here it's about 30% of the facade is glass it faces due south one of the interesting parts of this house is 57% of the heating energy for this house comes through those windows as sunlight so that leaves you only to have to pay for the remaining 43% which we do with electricity and the PV panels of the tuned system that we put on this house to take it to zero energy and you can hardly see the PV but it's right up there at that Ridgeline right it's right up there at that Ridgeline then we have what is it seven point eight point seven kW system up on the roof there you know one of that one of the challenges in designing this house was that the southern facade was on the front of the house so obviously we want to put a lot of glass but we had to create kind of an environment here that was inviting in that would handle all that glazing so we came up with the exterior patio and gardens etc to kind of soften this front elevation here with all the glazing very cool so all right let's go have a look then let's go inside shall we oh man this is a pretty house simple open floor plan beautiful again it's built for you know a couple retirement couple so it's you know the the aging-in-place ease of everything all the rooms are kind of tied together as one big room it's all connected well so that Dan and Vern can live out their years the way they wanted Steve for for someone who's not familiar with passive house give us the like one-minute version when you say passive house I don't necessarily know that everyone watching this video knows what we're talking about gotcha so simply passive house is if you google it it's the most strict building guidelines that we have in the country so I think somewhere here in we have a certain we have the passive house plaque on the wall yeah yeah so we'll get a picture of that but this is a certified passive house which means that there's a set of building standards and an air tightness standard 0.60 CFM at 50 Pascal's that has to be third-party tested and verified so the whole house was built to a set of documents that were accepted under passive house and then after was built was then certified to being built to those specs to be a certified Passivhaus and in the general idea on a passive house Steve is that you could passively basically survive if the electricity went off in a house like this right yeah related an airtight well enough that if the grid goes down and you're stuck in your house for three days even though it's 10 degrees out your house has enough insulation you've got enough of a down jacket on in this cold climate that your house can coast for that period of time yeah we had a similar house in western mass that was being monitored and the electricity went out for five days the house dropped about ten degrees in five days holy Dan monitors he's got temperature monitors the retired engineer in him forces him to understand everything about the house so he monitors the morning temperature and then the afternoon temperature so he gets to see the temperature rise just by having that sunlight pour through those soft glazing windows and like I spoke up we're talking almost 60% of the heating energy comes through the windows as sunlight so we're just borrowing from nature so this room that we're in living room kitchen that's the only heating cooling unit in the entire room we subsequently installed we pre-wired and piped for a second unit upstairs dan had pre-planned in case the humidity levels upstairs and the temperature rise in the summer was just on the verge of uncomfortable so he elected to add the secondary unit but understand the secondary unit is not about load it's about distribution right the problem is is we can get a machine that can give us the right amount of heat and right amount of cooling we just can't get that heating and cooling around the whole house so we put the second unit in for distribution not for load okay quality and Ferrari performance beautiful very well and the exterior is an aluminum cladding well that's pretty and look at that that's the part that really is get that double seal on there yep so you got seal one there you got seal two there we've got a little okay and then you've got this real thick frame and then you've got triple glazing on these windows right that's why we're so thick in this spot and what kind of what kind of values are we getting on the one we like that's the these are the the same single band glass that we saw in the shook oh these are probably 0.1 0.1 3 depending on what whether it's fixed or obsolete drains like that and our value for us are seven plus okay 7.5 on some of the fixed windows so see what are we looking at here so one of the things about a passive house is over here in february/march I probably don't want it so much in August so how do I deal with it we can do exterior shading which we did but the real shading device here is a roll down screen where we cut down about 50% of that energy coming through the windows well you didn't really feel it there so and it makes a difference and some people want to put shading devices on the inside but like I said that's a dumb idea because if you put the shading device on the inside the energy is already in the house I'm not shading I'm not stopping anything we want to stop that energy from coming through the windows and that's cool yeah huh how do you like them excellent really is that right no problems with it at all even my Wow this is how you taking a shower or sub to get where's the light on that we're seeing a little tiny LED light okay so now this is gonna run for 30 minutes and then this is sucking the air out right here damn and how many see if M is that do you know right now it's about 20 CFM okay so it's not run a bunch yeah yeah max sorry it's about 35 35 but it's enough to get the steam out of here yeah and then wait don't forget when you're done it still it's still evacuating right so it's running all the time push for shower like that I just saw a push for shower so then you've got timer off you get 30 10 and 60 yeah I also put it in the wall heater units here yes a little supplemental in here right here oh that's for your meddlin demand pump right that's right and where's your pump located okay yeah basically hit that thing and it'll run the pump for about 45 seconds yep and primes the water at the showers and when we turn that on right your hot in a couple seconds right right yeah that's cool right now it's about 10 CFM when it's running just steady-state okay so we're in one of your upstairs bedrooms now Dan and you see you've got two grills on the wall one there and one there that's connected to your fresh air system yeah by Zen right so in its sending in filtered air 24/7 basically and then this one's sucking air out of the bedroom is out returns both supplying fresh air okay although all the evacuation is in bathrooms and in the kitchen gotcha and this is just a puff of air basically if you put your hand up there you're feeling maybe just the 10 you know 15 CFM something like that and where's that system located dan where's the the lungs of the house as they call these things what's up see where my loop used to be oh this is good you can really see it hey Steve will you narrate what's going on here all right then we give us the so what is this if someone says what is this big octopus in here what do you say its purpose is to provide continuously filtered fresh air into the home because it's an airtight home you want a good source of fresh air so this is taking in outdoor air here mm-hmm coming through this device here which is a heat exchanger which is sucking stale air out of that place here from the bathrooms coming through here and not touching the air but actually through a heat exchanger taking some of this cool air from the indoors in the summer and pre-cooling the hot air coming in from the outdoors so then the stale air gets exhausted out and so the whole thing is about 80% efficient so and then it's and then it's a balanced system right so if we're sucking out a hundred and some CFM we're gonna you know inside this unit that that provides a match when they commissioned the unit they they measure all the CFM's to make sure that they match and then we talked about this earlier but how does this unit know when to come on what's the control system for this it's basically running all the time okay we do have a sensor down on the first floor co2 sensor that will measure the carbon dioxide in the home and so if there's a lot of people in the house it'll ramp up this system and then if there's less people it'll just ramp it back down gotcha and that actually works quite well and actually should say quite a bit of energy that's very impressive very impressive and these are all sealed ducts right I'm seeing some mastic on there so these this is a sealed and insulated duct system right and tell me about your Ava Smith volt ex back here yeah that's actually a very good unit it's we only run it on heat pump we've never run it on the resistance heat which which it has you know all these heat pumps come with both resistance and heat but you can run it on heat pump only and so basically it's sucking heat out of them out of the room out of the house and pumping it into the water all right so that actually you put 1 watt of electricity in you get two and a half lots of cooling out two and a half roughly that's really cool ones this is how old is this one this is 2013 we put it in okay so it's been running for four years now right no problems whatsoever no that's great just change the filter every six months or so clean it it's just clean it okay so that's the met Windham and pump so when you when you go in the bathrooms and hit that button that's just a low voltage switch like a doorbell button basically and then there's probably a inline sensor in there that goes hey the water's hot turned me off exactly and now we've circulated out the cold water dumped it back into the system so nothing gets wasted down the drain that's right so basically when you hit the shower it's got hot water right away that's really cool all right guys let's close this out what an incredible tour Dan this is an amazing house to see you great job so if we could summarize all this you know we saw a lot today we talked about the systems and the processes and how Low Energy this house is what's what's kind of the thing in your mind that sells it to someone to say hey this is I really get it now why I want to build a passive house well I think the Android is in in my portfolio it's probably the most successful high-performance home that I have I mean his house just simply works and I think Deana I've seen him present on his house and he puts it very simply in his last slide the question shouldn't be why should I do an energy-efficient house or why should I do this the question is why wouldn't I do this yeah that's the question it's a no-brainer and and Dan is proof that that's pretty interesting dan what do you what would you say to people here they say that we love living in a passive house it's incredibly comfortable we have no energy bills including our house which is all electric and the car in the car - you're paying to charge your Chevy bolt - Chevy bolt with a B as in Boston charge the car for my roof panels so we're basically using our solar energy for the home and our transportation wow that's pretty amazing yeah so basically everything in the house is all electric collection electric induction cooktop electric heat pump water heater - mini split heads and is all the teaming and cooling this house right everything's electric and then you've got a gas line to the house though right right we use that for a gas grill out back and for a little high-efficiency gas fireplace on your porch basic outside of the passive but on that your house is so efficient and so comfortable and makes so much power that you can even power your car right as well as the rest of house impressive guys thanks for joining us in today's video I'll put a link to Steve's website in the description below and I think there's been at least some other videos or Papers written on building yet fine home buildings got some I'll put a link to those if you're a fine home building online member you can get to those in the description below otherwise hit that subscribe button new content every Tuesday and every Friday we'll see you next time on the build show you

Channel: Matt Risinger

Views: 347,351

Keywords: passive house, passive haus, phius, efficient home, steve baczek, boston build, certified passive hoise

Id: fhbLjEKKLVM

Length: 17min 22sec (1042 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 04 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/deeptroller]

To all the commenters, I am a builder and have exclusively chosen to build to the passive house standard for the last 5 years. Every home in that period has cost one of my customers an additional $10,000 over what they would have spent for similar standard construction. This cost is born from the excessive additional insulation and premium triple or quad glazed windows. The air sealing doesn't really increase cost it just takes understanding construction techniques. There is no savings in mechanical cost, as we have a substantially undersized heating plant but spend the savings on high quality balanced energy recovery ventilation systems.

The passive house philosophy is basically design to reduce waste of heating and cooling energy. As apposed to the net zero philosophy which is build a normal high consumption house and then install enough solar panels to break even on energy cost.

The conflict to me as a builder with ethics, is at home we consume nights and weekends and produce energy during the day with solar. So in Colorado where I live we primarily produce power with coal. So no matter how much you offset with solar on your home your still consuming coal powered electric. If you have an electric car you charge at night your still topping up with coal powered electric. So you have a poorly optimized solar on your residential roof, that's powering high day time users like your local grocery store or office building.

[u/deeptroller]

There are also side benefits to passive house that are more about comfort. These houses are extremely quiet you can have crazy winds or some neighbor kid bumping the base and you don't hear it. The mass of insulation dampens the sound waves.

Also to address the concerns of the homes ability to function in weeks of dark shady weather. They do just fine. You model the heat loading taking in to account light bulbs your refrigerator the hot breathing occupants ect to provide heat. The sun is just one component. The biggest problems we have with comfort are actually overheating in the spring and fall when the sun angle drives heat into the windows when we don't need it.

[u/m15cell]

My house is passive aggressive, when I don’t clean it the heater breaks and I have to shower with cold water.

[u/mcatrage]

On paper sure. Curious what happens during the winter with a few days of the sun not coming out or just overnight in boston area when it is below freezing.

That 2nd unit added for "distribution" was probably for that load he kept on saying it wasn't for.

EDIT: Are there any articles not behind paywalls on this?

[u/turbodsm]

One can dream that those kind of homes will be standard one day. For the builders popping out homes left and right, the process to build these would get perfected and the price would come down. A huge community went up near me a few years ago. I contacted the sales office and asked if the homes were energy star and they said no. That was an immediate non starter for me especially given the premium. Given the longevity of homes, there should be a lot more focus on their annual energy demand.

[u/[deleted]]

The "air tightness" of the home is a bit disturbing. What happens if it breaks at night or when you're away? Also, how much money does it cost up front? And wouldn't the solar energy also only work in very sunny areas? I cant see this working in NY, for example.

[u/hughk]

I'm in Germany and these are very popular here. I don't live in one (a previous generation high efficiency house) but some friends do.

Solar energy is not required. Any small top up heat is fine and makes a difference. The problem is that the whole house goes to the same temperature through the air circulation system. Not so good as the bedroom normally should be a bit cooler for comfort while sleeping. Oh and the windows don't open on proper passive houses.

[u/deevil_knievel]

it's so weird that those windows arent standard in this country... every time i visit europe i love checking the windows out. i think i read somewhere recently they're code for new houses in eu?

[u/Elliott2]

future house goals