Hill House

I had a great meeting this past week with Earth Advantage, who is our local LEED provider.  It was fairly informative.  We’ve already learned a fair amount of the process with our SIPs house.  One thing I didn’t fully understand are the tax incentives.  I know the state has some, as does the federal government, but we also have the Energy Trust of Oregon, who provides incentives to the builder…in this case, that’s me.  To qualify, you have to, at a minimum, install one renewable resource system.  In our case, we’ll be installing a solar hot water heater, which qualifies.  We may consider a PV system, but our solar access is fairly poor.  Geothermal is another item that would qualify.  

The City of Portland is now talking about allowing gray water reuse.  I don’t know all the details, but it looks like when this is approved, you can reuse your gray water to irrigate your plants and lawn.  We aren’t planning on having much of a lawn due to the steep nature of the lot, but we are considering capturing and using our rainwater.  It is rumored that rainwater harvested off of your roof is actually cleaner than the city provided water…that’s motivation enough for me.

One of the largest categories for LEED is Energy and Atmosphere.  It’s worth a whopping 38 points.  The reason I like the value of this category is that it rewards us to make a very tight, efficient building envelope.  Sure we might spend a little more money on insulation…maybe a little more on framing, but we’ll save money on our energy bills, won’t need such a large HVAC system (if we need one at all) and our building will be more efficient over it’s life time.  We’re planning on using a staggered stud framing system.  We’ll be using an 8″ top and bottom plate, with 2″x4″ framing spaced 16″ on center (or 24″ on center if our engineer allows it).  The studs will be staggered – offset on the interior and exterior of the 8″ top and bottom plate.  We’ll blow foam into the cavity to create a wall envelope with very minimal thermal breaks.  Our wall R-value will be between R-30 and R-48 depending on the type of foam we use.  We’ll have a supper tight building.  This is key to reaching our LEED goal of platinum as well as creating an efficient and comfortable house.

I’m still working on the blog format to get something clean, simple and visually sexy.  We’ll see what we can come up with.

We have a meeting tomorrow with our local LEED provider, Earth Advantage, to discuss their scope of services and fees. When we started the SIPs project, they were around $2k for their services + $140 or so to the USGBC to register. We aren’t going to settle for anything less than gold or platinum…this will most likely drive the decision.

We also have a meeting with the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability (previously the Office of Sustainable Development).  I like to touch base with them a few times a year to get up to speed with both the current systems the city is allowing, as well as items that may be coming down the pipeline in the future.  I’ll post what we find out during both meetings.

In the mean time, I’m still trying to find a decent Wordpress template I like that allows an Image (or images).  This theme is my favorite so far, but it seems embedding images into the code might be a little beyond my skill set (or level of time dedication) at the moment.