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Title 24 Compliance for Alterations and Remodels

Posted on 30. Aug, 2010 by Rebecca Firestone.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you. The new Title 24 is tough! In past articles, we harped on the HERS verifications as a way to earn credits towards Title 24 compliance for those hard-to-pass houses. However, there’s another angle that needs attention: issues for additions, alterations, and remodels.

(Above image shows a whole-house remodel and addition by Mark English Architects. Photo: Michael O’Callahan)

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Quantum Builders Brings Passive Houses to California

Posted on 06. Aug, 2010 by Rebecca Firestone.

Imagine a home built in the Plains region of the United States that stays warm in the winter without central heating, and cool in the summer without massive air-conditioning. It’s airtight but with an endless supply of fresh air constantly circulating through a filtered, pressure-balanced ventilation system. Every surface is comfortable to the touch, neither too warm nor too cold. Street noise is barely audible through the gasket-sealed, triple-paned windows. 

It sounds futuristic, but so-called Passive Houses have been around for at least 15 years, and it’s yet another strategy for saving energy. Unlike a Net Zero Energy home that might rely on “active” power generation, albeit from renewable sources, a Passive House is just that – passively absorbing heat from its surroundings to release it slowly as it is needed. (In hot climates, Passive Houses are designed to recover and store cooler temperatures.)

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Mark English Architects Project Earns GreenPoint Rated Certification

Posted on 15. Jul, 2010 by Rebecca Firestone.

Mark English Architects is proud to announce that a recently completed project of ours at 97 Pepper Drive in Los Altos has just received its official “GreenPoint Rated” certification. We spoke with GreenPoint Rater Andrew Arnold of Arnold Engineering, who performed the analysis.

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Green Certification: Is It Worth It?

Posted on 12. Jul, 2010 by Rebecca Firestone.

When we’re advising our Title 24 clients on their residential projects, the first concern is whether the project will meet the State of California’s requirements for efficient energy consumption – and, if it doesn’t, what measures are needed to bring the project into compliance. A home’s Title 24 compliance “score” is expressed according to the percentage by which the home exceeds the baseline efficiency standards set forth by the California Energy Commission, and these standards are tightened every 3 years.

For the most part, people are relieved just to get their home to zero. For many projects, this is challenging enough. But sometimes, additional measures could boost a home’s compliance score higher, and are much easier to take while construction is already occurring. For example, in a remodel where walls are opened, why not insulate those walls? Well… obviously it’s an additional cost that budget-conscious owners may not want to absorb at the time. But, aren’t they potentially leaving money on the table, too? What value is there in achieving a positive compliance margin?
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HERS Inspections and Title 24 Compliance

Posted on 12. May, 2010 by Rebecca Firestone.

A few months ago we published an interview with a GreenPoint Rater to de-mystify the GreenPoints system that was suddenly taking California building departments by storm. Like LEED and several of the current rebate programs, GreenPoints has tie-ins to Title 24’s energy compliance scoring, and so we’ve had to help our clients to interface with this new standard.

There’s another standard that’s been around for a long time – the Home Energy Rating System, or HERS. For the first time, we are having to tell our clients that they will have to do at least one HERS verification in order to meet the new 2008 standards of California’s Title 24 energy code. Suddenly, everyone had questions. What in the heck do HERS raters actually do, and what does it cost? Is this going to be a huge headache or a minor annoyance? What benefit is there to HERS testing apart from compliance? What does a person have to do to become certified as a HERS rater?

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Occupant Thermal Comfort in Energy Trade-Offs

Posted on 16. Mar, 2010 by Rebecca Firestone.

Green living is sometimes viewed as a sacrificial process whereby one by one, all our pleasures and comforts must be set aside in the name of saving the planet: walking instead of driving, sweeping instead of vacuuming, home cooking instead of take-out, turning the thermostat down in the winter while our hands and feet turn into blocks of ice, low-flow showerheads designed by bald men that take forever to rinse the shampoo out of a long-haired-girl’s mane, limiting one’s diet to only locally available seasonal produce (which could be nothing but cabbages if you live in Chicago), calling three hardware stores to find one that carries low-VOC paint, giving up meat because it takes too much grain to feed a cow, trudging everywhere with a backpack filled with stuff that otherwise we could just keep in the car. In essence, the increased physical hardship comes from asking our own bodies to start doing more of the work. And what’s our reward? A nice warm feeling of altruistic glow, and maybe a slimmer figure.

Efficiency is often seen as achievable only at the cost of comfort – some of us East Coasters remember shivering through the 1970s oil crisis as our dads re-defined 58 degrees during the day as “normal” and turned the thermostat down at night till the pipes froze, and our mothers finally complained. Well, so what? What’s the big deal? We all have to give up something. Well, the problem is that this “fix” didn’t really fix anything. Reducing consumption is not the same thing as having an efficient building, and neither approach presents qualitative factors like comfort or contentment as worthy of consideration.

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SolarClover: Plug and Play Installation

Posted on 22. Feb, 2010 by Rebecca Firestone.

With the solar industry booming, manufacturers and installers are racing to improve their products in every conceivable way: more efficient PVs; better inverter technologies; remote control, sensing, and automation; better energy-use reporting; smarter appliances; open systems integration; and a proliferation of grid-tied and off-grid configurations. One area that hasn’t gotten quite as much attention is the installation, which takes special training, and can be as much as 30-50% of the cost of the system.

Bay Area startup Armageddon Energy has a new angle with a patented product that GreenTech Media has dubbed “The Ikea of Solar”. The SolarClover snaps together in cute little 3-panel modules, each with its own inverter. Lightweight and easy to handle, these modules can fit “almost anywhere” as they say. That includes small areas of roof, or uneven roofs that wouldn’t accommodate larger arrays. Three of them (9 leaves), make a 1-kW system that’s enough to power most major appliances for an efficient household.

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Designing For Solar: What Every Architect Should Know

Posted on 18. Jan, 2010 by Rebecca Firestone.

While researching solar technologies, we at Green Compliance Plus heard from solar installers  who all seem to think that architects are hard to work with. So, we spoke with Fernando Valenzuela of Alter Systems in Berkeley about how to design a solar-ready home. Note that only about 5-10% of Alter Systems’ customers are owner/architect teams. Usually it’s the homeowners approaching them directly because they want to “go solar”.

So… why are architects hard to work with? “They have a groupthink… they like design, the look, but they don’t understand systems. They ask questions like ‘why can’t we use this roof’ without realizing that you can’t split up an array. Their projects aren’t always quick, either, and rebates that were designed for may be gone by the time the project gets through approval.”

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Going Green Where It Counts: Your Wallet

Posted on 28. Dec, 2009 by Rebecca Firestone.

“Sustainable residential design is transforming from a market niche to a widespread set of consumer priorities… because consumers realize that going green is good for their wallets.” So sayeth the AIArchitect, official voice of the American Institute of Architects – and they’ve quoted us, along with a slew of other designers and builders.

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