LEED, or Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design
LEED is a green building certification program created by the United States Green Building Council that recognizes best-in-class building strategies and practices. To receive LEED certification, a building project must satisfy prerequisites and earn points in eight separate categories to achieve different levels of certification.
February 2, 2013: Today was my first meeting with Chris & Dave to review their existing home. Her father had the house built in the 1950s, with additions made during the 1970s. The home is filled with good memories and many of her father’s woodworking products, such as custom interior doors and cabinets. Chris wanted to keep the existing home, but make it more energy-efficient and handicap accessible. All the bedrooms are on hard-to-access second floor, and they they are currently spending as much as $460/month to heat this little 1800 sf cottages. The all-wood exterior walls are 1″ thick and have zero additional insulation. The concrete slab floor is only 4” thick at the edges, and has no insulation below or at the edges. Overall structural integrity is equally poor. It was my opinion that the cost of remodeling in order to fix structural problems and increase insulation would far exceed the cost of building new.
Chris and Dave agreed, and that decision quickly led to a discussion of following LEED-for-Homes guidelines. I had already completed one LEED Platinum home, and Chris had taken courses in green building in California. While that stte has very stringent programs for environmental design, one of the important elements of LEED requires that is not part of other green building programs is the education mandate: LEED homes must expand the knowledge base of the public, the project crew and the owners. Chris & Dave have always been huge supporters of environmentally-responsible living, and saww LEED as a way of sharing this.
Chris is a self-employed house painter who has completed green building training in California, and Dave is an electrical engineer who has worked on communication systems for the moon landing program. When asked about their reasons for choosing to build a LEED home, Chris responded with this quote:
“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.” President J.F. Kennedy
This iconic speech has given us guidance on what we are doing. Dave answered that call by the president many years ago to go to the moon. We are now working on “the others” such as climate change as best as we can as individuals. In the absence of national and state guidance on this matter, LEED has at least given a framework for energy and environmentally sound building practices. I’d better stop now. I know I’m preaching to the choir.Chris Kellems
July 2013: Chris and Dave sent info about a solar water unit for domestic hot water and heat they’re considering. After lengthy discussion and much research, this idea was rejected due primarily to cost, and the desire to focus dollars on more important items.
December 12, 2013: got a note from Chris saying she and Dave just bought a Tesla S, so we’ll need to include a charging station in the garage. They also want to put a public charging station on the exterior of the garage, with a “free-will” donation box. They plan to integrate the Tesla into the emergency electrical back-up system of the house. Cool. Zero to 95 in about four seconds….like a very quiet rocket ship!
December 19: first set of preliminary plans: Tried to optimize the passive solar gain; however, this is a narrow lot and the garage faces street to the south, and the primary views to the canal and Bay face north. Tradeoffs are to maximize insulation & roof orientation, so they can install a photovoltaic system and offset energy costs with solar electric. I did a very preliminary sun study, approximately height of neighboring trees.
December 30: Note from Chris: It looks as if Sturgeon Bay Utilities pays $.30/kWh on the solar PV buy back program. Wow! So Dave said we will put PV everywhere on the roofs. Tesla suggests a 3 kW system just for the car, so a 6kW is probably in our future. That would be around 24 -25 PV modules.
Feb 11 2014: met with Chris. She and Dave intend to salvage as much of the existing cottage as possible for use in the new home. We will re-use all the existing interior doors and cabinets (many of which Chris’s father built) and most of the log beams and railings. They also plan to dismantle the wood plank loft floors and possibly the wood plank roof, to repurpose as additional interior doors and possibly second floor flooring.
Feb 20, 2014. I learned the property is located in a flood plain. The spur of land this neighborhood sits on was created in the 1950s from canal dredging, and over time has settled. The existing cottage, like all the others on this street, sit about two feet below the 100-year flood plain level. In order to comply with current zoning, the home must raise so that the lowest finished floor is two feet above the floor plain. So the Kellems first floor will be nearly four feet higher than their neighbors.
DNR zoning also requires that that grade around a house in flood plain must be 1’ higher than the flood plan, extending out at least 15’ from all sides of the house. Since the lot is so narrow, we wouldn’t have room to devote that much space around the building without creating flooding issues for the neighboring properties. I talked with the DNR and the Marty Olenizcyk, the City Planner and they both agreed they would support a variance allowing us to eliminate the higher grade on the west side of the house, because of our plan to construct drainage swales and retaining walls to guide water directly to the canal and into rainwater catchment tanks which Chris will use for her gardens.
In order to keep the height of the building down as far as possible we opted for slab-on-grade construction, and decided to use the concrete slab as the finished floor, to be stained by local concrete artist Dylan Lauger of Lauger Concrete. I’ve worked with Dylan on at least a dozen homes over the past ten or so years, and he’s a real straight-shooter with a dry sense of humor. When I told him about the Kellems project he asked if I was planning to sandbag the exterior…obviously raising my curiosity. Turns out there is a new home at the end of this street that has sunk about 4” since it was built….because the soft dredging material making up this spit of land is sinking. So…..that meant we’d have to build the house on piers.
Not only will we have to apply for a zoning variance because of the flood plain, but we’ll also have to install concrete piers in order to keep the house from sinking…..cha-ching!
Feb 28: I received energy calculations for the house from Christi Weber of Design Coalition in Madison, Wisconsin. Christi is a Certified Passive House Consultant I met when I attended the Passive House training session a couple of years ago. Christi reviewed the plans and ran energy numbers based on the wall, roof and foundation insulation I’d specified and compared two window manufacturers so we could choose between them. Using Alpen Windows – one of the most energy-efficient window manufactured in this country – would have saved about 20% in overall heating. But considering the already-low heating requirements for this home, a 20% savings would be a minimal amount compared to the additional $30,000+ they’d be spending to upgrade to Alpen…a great window at an equally great price. In time, hopefully, super-high energy-efficient windows will become more affordable. However, for the money Marvin Integrity windows are really excellent: to the best of my knowledge they are one of the most efficient windows available among the better national brands.
March 25, 2014: Raise-Rite dug test holes for the borings. Test showed that bedrock was 20-22’ below existing grade. With the additional 4’ of height needed to set the house 2’ above the flood plain, we’re expected 25’ piers +/-.
March 28: sent drawings to Rice Engineering, requesting they design the pier and structural slab system.
April 4: Finalize site plan for variance and submitted application.
April 26: Chris and Dave start their journey from their current home in Redwood City, CA to Wisconsin, on a route following electrical car charging stations and homes of friends. The final charging station they identified is a newly-opened one at the edge of Sturgeon Bay.
April 28: Zoning variance hearing at Sturgeon Bay City Hall. Received unanimous approval from committee, with City Engineer Tony Depius commenting that this is one of the most environmentally conscientious site plans he’s seen. He indicated to the committee that the swales, water catchment devices and retaining walls were not necessary by code, but were part of this plan due to the responsibility Dave and Chris feel toward the safety of their neighbors.
May 20: received final structural slab and pier drawings from Rice Engineering, so we can finalize construction costs.
May 24: LEED requires at least 8 hours of “charrette” planning meetings which include all members of the design & build team. This is done in order to educate everyone about the LEED program and to inform them of the specific construction requirements expected.
Because all-day sessions are difficult for the trades to make, and lead to brain-drain, I chose to divide the eight required hours into two 4-hour sessions , with the first one being to introduce the crew to the technical requirements of a LEED-built home, and the second to educate them about the testing and review process, during which they’d meet Tom Krawczyk our LEED rater.
Throughout the process of design I have been meeting individually with subcontractors and suppliers to design and fine-tune the heating and ventilation system, plumbing and electrical, and structure. Because the house is being built without a crawlspace HVAC and plumbing were more challenging: running heating duct through grade beams in the structural slab – not to mention running ducts through very damp soils – was an impossibility, so all ducts will be run through the second floor joists…making the layout more inviting to conflicts between plumbing and heating. Conflicts like this during construction waste everyone’s time, and having a planning “charrette” is the best way to avoid them. (“Charette” is the French word for “cart”. During the Beaux Artes period Architecture students in the French academies being as they are everyone and at all times, project were often completed as they were being pushed on their carts to the room where they’d receive their final reviews. Since then “En Charette” and later “Charette” came to mean a short, intensive design session.)
Today the builder, HVAC, plumbing & electrical contractors, excavator, solar electric designer and materials coordinator all gathered around Chris and Dave’s kitchen table to pour over the plans, discuss how best to create a continuous thermal barrier around a structural slab, determine how to stage the demolition, and what materials could be recycled and how to dispose of items that could not be recycled. We also discussed the double-wall construction and reviewed heating and plumbing runs, and coordination between the electrical contractor, the solar contractor, and Dave Kellems, who intended to do much of the wiring himself. Dave is not licensed in Wisconsin, but can work in conjunction with a licensed electrician.
Chris made a heart-felt appeal to the entire group to always be conscious of the intent of this project: to create a home that is not only beautiful and energy-efficient, but one that has minimal impact on the environment and can be used as a teaching tool for other homeowners and builders for many years to come.
June 26: our second 4-hour charrette. The morning session included owners, excavator, building and electrical contractor to review power, gas and septic lines and discuss demolition waste. Gary Reinhart of Reinhart Excavation will transport all materials except the existing concrete slab to an off-site recycling center in Oshkosh, Wisconsin – 100 miles away – where it will be sorted and recycled The concrete slab will be crushed on-site and used as fill below the new raised foundation.
The afternoon portion of the meeting included Tom Krawczyk via Skype. This was another carbon-saving decision on the part of this team…Tom lives 4-1/2 hours away by car. Chris, Dave, Bryan Neubauer of Ahnapee Construction, Brad Tanck of Tanck Plumbing, Charlie Ricket of Sinkler Heating listened to Tom provide the section-by-section overview of LEED, explain which points we’d be earning under each section, and talk about the various tests he would be conducting throughout the project. It was a great opportunity for all the contractors to learn about the specific details Tom would be looking for, especially with regard to sealing ducts and insulating pipes, as well as caulking and sealing all openings in the building envelope.
July 23-25: Demolition waste hauled to Landfill Reduction and Recycling LLC. 75% of the materials were recycled including shingles, wood, siding, metals and paper/cardboard.
August 5: Staked out pier locations in preparation for structural slab construction.