EEBA Academy

This 1924 Colonial home had fallen into severe disrepair before coming up for sale. As part of the muchneeded renovation, the new homeowners (two Steven Winter Associates, Inc. employees) wanted to eliminate onsite combustion and produce as much of their operating electricity as possible. Other goals included lower embodied energy materials and a healthy indoor environment. LEED v4.1 for Homes offered one platform to address energy, health, and materials. The home was gutted down to the foundation, framing, and floors before the year-long renovation. After the first 8 months of occupancy (July-February), the home produced 14% more energy than it consumed.

This session will provide different examples of hot water distribution including Home Automation technologies and applications that can help support zero energy home objectives. We will be showing examples of designs and tests that have been completed over the last 15 years proving the savings of water/energy in residential and commercial buildings. We will be interviewing two Sustainable builders who have installed D’MAND KONTROLS for several years and get their view point on this and other factors to consider in building Zero Energy Homes.

High performance zero energy homes provide many benefits including cost savings, energy resiliency, durability, comfort, and sustainable operation. While these types of homes have been built for a long time, the knowledge of how to build them has historically been kept by few. Now with increasingly stringent building codes across the U.S., driven by long-term energy policy and growing demands on the energy grid, all builders and implementers need to know how to build high performance. 

Zero Energy Ready Homes can save a bundle for their home owners and they don’t have to break the bank for home builders either. This presentation includes lessons learned from builders across the country who are building award-winning production, custom, affordable, and multi-family homes that achieve remarkably high performance levels, in some cases at little extra cost compared to code construction.