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Celebrating Thirty NESEA Members Who Accomplished Something Really Hard

January 10, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Fifty students registered for Marc Rosenbaum’s ten-week Zero Net Energy Homes course in the Fall 2012. This is a graduate-level course, with a rigorous workload and lots of homework. We incorporated a final project in which students are asked to design a zero net energy house, submitting plans and elevations, a wall section, an HVAC plan, R value calculations, and an annual energy model. The calculations are done in a series of simple calculators Marc put together in Excel.

Nearly everyone made significant contributions to the discussion, but we’d like to recognize thirty students who put in the extraordinary effort to finish the final project. This the first graduating class, and they deserve public recognition for what they’ve accomplished:

Bob Lemaire

David Holmstrom

Rob Lewis

Brenden Maloof

Gerry Smith

Al Prendergast

Neil Randol

Rich Kinkel

Michele Sopher

Tobias Richon

Al Heath

Ben Hemberger

Erin Crafts

Nick Corsetti

Mary Rogero

Chris Lee

Evan Hardcastle

Jesse Smith

Chris Redmond

Clare Dow-Ramirez

David Sayers

Peter Brooks

Newell Pledger-Shinn

Brian Wohlleb

Tim McCarthy

Rheannon DeMond

Matt Coffey

Greg Milne

Ruben Valenzuela

Some of these graduates will be showing their work at the BE Conference in March. If you have a few extra minutes while you’re walking the show, take a minute to check out their work and congratulate them on what they’ve accomplished. These are the are some of the up-and-coming professionals who can help lead the conversation in years to come.

Filed Under: NESEA Members, Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

Remembering Robert O. Smith and his many contributions to NESEA

November 28, 2012 By Leave a Comment
I wanted to share some sad news that lifetime NESEA member Henry Vandermark sent my way late last night.
Henry shared that Robert O. (Bob) Smith died on November 20th.  Bob was one of the founders of NESEA, and started the Mass Bay Chapter. He was honored with NESEA’ s Distinguished Service Award in 2006 for his many contributions to the organization.
Bob’s wife, Julie, shared that while Bob had Parkinson’s and other facility had failed him he remained very sociable and was well liked in his nursing facility.  She and his step-children Duncan and Cindy were there when he peacefully stopped breathing. Julie asked that Henry contact the old NESEA gang and let them know.
There will be a memorial service and reception at Christ Church Cambridge, Zero Garden Street  (Harvard Square) at noon on Tuesday, December 18. There should be an obituary in the Boston Globe on Thursday.
Without people like Bob NESEA would not be what it is today. He was a teacher to many in our community.
For those who would like to reach out to Julie Smith, her email address is jesmith@rcn.com
Below are some of the comments received from longtime NESEA members about their interactions with and memories of Bob:

Joel Gordes Tue, 27 Nov at 4:23pm

Attached please find a photo of Bob accepting the award and another of him engaged in conversation with Mary Rickle-Pelletier.  He was truly a NESEA original and a great mentor to many.
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Jim Kirby Tue, 27 Nov at 5:59pm

Being fearless and without knowledge, I built a solar heated machine shop in l975.  After that experience, I thought it would be good to find someone who knew something. I found the Mass Bay chapter of ASAS or NESEA. Bob Smith was there along Norman Saunders and Bill Shurcliff, who all knew things and had been working and researching.  Inquiring minds and able teachers.  I thank them all

Jamie Wolf Tue, 27 Nov at 6:18pm

I did not know Robert O. Smith, but obviously, I am standing on his shoulders. What his passing makes real to me is the way in which NESEA is more than the committed community that I share an aspirational identity with.
It is the embodiment of a living legacy that encompasses those who plowed these fields and nurtured this soil so that our practices would each be richer and fuller. In time, and more and more in the coming years, we will be made aware again and again of how richly this community has given, in the thinking and actions of one after another remarkable members, to the ground we continue to gain.
Thank you Robert O. Smith. Thank you to all NESEA members at every stage of your career and the contributions you are each making to our common pursuit.

Alex Wilson Tue, 27 Nov at 7:22pm via email

I interacted with Robert O many times during my years as executive director of NESEA. Always a thoughtful, modest man with a keen intellect. He will be missed. -Alex

Filed Under: Uncategorized

High Performance Multifamily Buildings: The Future of New York City

November 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment

An open invitation from Andy Padian, NESEA Board Treasurer and GreenHomeNYC Board Chair

This is an open invitation to join a unique and timely one day event for owners, managers, investors and developers on Saturday, December 1, at Hunter College in Manhattan.

The Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA) and its NYC Chapter, GreenHomeNYC, have assembled a slate of local experts and owners to help those involved with multifamily buildings in New York City get a leg up the new requirements and learn the best, most profitable path forward for their buildings.

Andy Padian, a board member of both NESEA and GreenHomeNYC and chair of the conference said, “Understanding the new benchmarking and energy auditing requirements in NYC is a first step to reducing your energy and water bills. After you navigate that, you need to hear from some of the best practitioners in the field about running your building efficiently, safely, and considering our recent brush with Hurricane Sandy, emphasizing resilience.”

Filling a very critical information gap, this one day conference combines the best technical information with first-hand experience on exactly how to save money in multifamily buildings through reduced energy and water usage. “We’ve got the people you really need to hear from — the owners who have gone through the process already, of course,” Padian explains.

NYC has enacted one of the boldest initiatives for sustainability in large buildings in the country. Known as the Greener Greater Buildings Plan, it focuses on buildings over 50,000 square feet. In New York City, many more multifamily buildings than office buildings fall into this category, so the new laws become particularly important to these multifamily owners. But this is the first conference to attempt to get owners and managers in the room together to learn exactly how to proceed. “I have invited the building experts who helped develop the framework for the new laws, LL87 and 84, to explain and demystify the process. One goal of this conference,” says Padian, “is that no one will leave with questions unanswered.”

The more typical multifamily building in the city, with 20 to 50 apartments and smaller, has its own complicated path to follow. Owners and building managers need to hear from each other about financing and real costs, and they need to share tricks they have learned that have helped them save money after finally getting an energy audit. “You have to get the owners and managers together to show the mistakes to avoid and to share the best practices to use. The value of this can’t be overstated,” says Padian.

Many organizations are collaborating with NESEA and GreenHomeNYC to get their members to this unique event. These include the CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities, The Community Preservation Corporation, Enterprise Community Partners, The Supportive Housing Network of NY, the NYS Association for Affordable Housing, Local Initiatives Support Corporation, Con Edison, and NYSERDA.

The conference will be held at Hunter College on 68th Street and Lexington Avenue, from 9-4.  Continental breakfast and a bag lunch are included. A reception following the event provides the opportunity to meet and network with the speakers and the other attendees.  The conference fee is $150 and a reduced rate is available for CUNY students.

For more information and to register, go to http://www.nesea.org/buildingenergy/benyc/

Filed Under: BuildingEnergy NYC, Communications, Green Building, Industry, Multifamily buildings, NESEA Tagged With: , ,

BuildingEnergy online is becoming a reality

November 14, 2012 By 1 Comment

I’m excited to share what’s happening with the BuildingEnergy Masters Series (BEMS).

Following a very successful “soft launch” in October, with almost 60 students registered in two courses, I’m convening a working group of 6-8 NESEA members to step back – to help me set policies for how we run the program and how we integrate it with the rest of what NESEA does. Our first meeting is scheduled for December 7th.

Helping us fulfill the promise of BuildingEnergy . . . online, year-round

I view this committee as a natural extension of the BE planning committee, or as a curriculum committee, of sorts. The committee will help advise me on issues such as:

  1. What criteria we should use for choosing the subject matter for BEMS offerings and for selecting instructors
  2. What criteria we should use to ensure that instructors’ content does not unduly overlap with that of other instructors
  3. Whether we should implement incentives, above and beyond a standard revenue share, for instructors who go above and beyond in marketing, and whose efforts bring a significant number of students into the course who would not otherwise have enrolled
  4. What criteria we should establish for manufacturers/vendors who wish to offer courses on the platform, and whether/how we might brand such offerings differently than BEMS courses
  5. What the course schedule should be and how to prioritize which instructors to approach to develop course content
  6. Who we might approach as potential partners and/or for cross promotional opportunities
  7. How can we best integrate this program into others NESEA offers – paying particular attention to integration with our crown jewel, the BuildingEnergy Conference.

Initially, the BuildingEnergy Masters Series was conceived as a way for NESEA to offer BuildingEnergy Conference-quality content year-round to practitioners within our community, irrespective of their locations – and to help NESEA diversify its revenues so that we are not relying exclusively on the success of our annual conference to float the rest of the organization. Based on the post-conference surveys we’ve done in recent years, we knew that many within our community crave the opportunity to learn from, and network with, each other year round. BEMS was conceived as one way to help fulfill that need.

We made a good start . . . now it’s time to incorporate what we’ve learned

When we launched our two courses this fall, we relied upon instructors who routinely draw large crowds at our BuildingEnergy Conference. We knew we could rely on them to deliver high quality content. And we knew that they were excellent teachers who would take the time commitment to develop top-notch educational content seriously. We had hoped to attract 8-10 students for each of the courses we offer in 2012 and 2013, but  Marc Rosenbaum’s Zero Net Energy Homes, and Paul Eldrenkamp and Mike Duclos’ Passive House:  The Future of Building in the US?, far exceeded our expectations. We attracted almost 60 students between the two courses – in large part thanks to Marc Rosenbaum’s extra marketing efforts!

We’re thrilled that the courses and the format seem to appeal to so many. And we’re looking forward to incorporating more opportunities for members to drive the direction of this program, just as they do the BuildingEnergy Conference and Trade Show. If you have feedback you’d like to share about this program or process, feel free to email me at jmarrapese@nesea.org or call me at 413.774.6051, ext. 23. Otherwise, I’ll keep you updated on the working group’s recommendations and the roll out of this new initiative.

Filed Under: NESEA Members, Whole Systems Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Just add water and stir . . .

November 8, 2012 By Leave a Comment

And voila — instant one-day NESEA conference in the Big Apple.

Those of you who are NESEA members have probably already seen the announcement for BuildingEnergy NYC, a multifamily conference we’re hosting at CUNY – Hunter College on December 1, 2012. The conference will focus on the regulatory arena – the things that building owners and operators need to know to comply with increasingly stringent energy efficiency requirements, on technical know-how, with examples and case studies from hundreds of multifamily buildings that illustrate best practices and lessons learned, and on financing multifamily projects.

The line-up of speakers and topics for this event is really impressive — you can check it out at http://www.nesea.org/buildingenergy/benyc/.

The conference came together at warp speed. Less than five months from concept to implementation, and less than a week to plan the content. Here’s the back story . . . .

In May 2012, the board directed me to focus on launching an event in NYC to help expand NESEA’s reach into underserved parts of our territory, and to help fulfill the promise of our purported service territory – the 10 Northeastern states. NESEA board treasurer and well-known curmudgeon Andy Padian took up the charge and found us a location that we could use, free of charge, thanks to our friends at CUNY-Hunter’s Institute for Sustainable Cities.

On October 19th, Andy confirmed that CUNY-Hunter had space available on Saturday, December 1st, just six weeks away. Warp speed conference planning began!

On October 26th, Andy invited a group of multifamily building superstars from organizations like The Community Preservation Corporation, Steven Winter Associates, GreenHomeNYC, Jonathan Rose, NYSERDA, NYSAFAH, Enterprise Community Partners, Related Companies and elsewhere to a three-hour meeting to plan the conference. They left the meeting with a grid of nine almost fully-fleshed-out sessions. Within the next two weeks, speakers were confirmed, we set up a registration page, and . . . voila . . . instant conference.

Of course we all know that this isn’t really the way it happened. This seemingly “instant conference” didn’t happen instantly. What made it happen “instantly” was Andy Padian’s passion for NESEA, his expansive network of devoted GreenHomeNYC volunteers, and high-powered energy geeks in New York, and his strong powers of persuasion. Now only if we could find a way to clone Andy. . . .

Seriously, BE NYC is going to rock. If it’s as great as we think it will be, we’ll sell out all 300 seats, and NESEA members from other parts of our territory will be lining up to host the next one-day conference. I hope you’ll join us.

Filed Under: NESEA Tagged With: , , , , , ,

And the survey says . . . NESEA’s Green Buildings Open House has REAL IMPACT!

November 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment

For the past 16 years, NESEA has run the Green Buildings Open House tour each year in October in conjunction with the American Solar Energy Society’s National Solar Tour. We have helped to organize homeowners and business owners to open their buildings so that visitors can learn, firsthand, about the sustainable energy improvements the owners have made to their properties.

For most of these 16 years we have taken it on faith that the tours help change behavior – that they help move the market. We have known intuitively that the peer-to-peer conversations that happen as a part of this program influence people to take action. We have heard, anecdotally, from NESEA members who have told us that Green Buildings Open House (GBOH) was their introduction to NESEA and to our community, and that the program inspired them to undertake big energy efficiency projects. But we’ve never had real hard data, from our visitors, to show how widespread the impact of the program is.

Now we do!

In July, NESEA received a grant from the National Grid Foundation that allowed us to develop an online survey to learn more from GBOH visitors about how the program affected them. The survey is being administered in three rounds – the first round occurred before this year’s Green Buildings Open House tour, and the second round was sent out two weeks after the October 13th tour, and the third will be sent within the next two weeks.

Survey results are still being collected, but we’ve learned a lot already. The things we’ve learned so far include:

Of the first-time GBOH visitors who responded to the most recent version of the survey, 17% have already undertaken energy efficiency improvements to their home or business in the month or so since the GBOH tour. The types of improvements they’ve made include:

  • getting an energy audit
  • air sealing their walls, windows, basement or attic
  • replacing their incandescent lightbulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs

Three people even installed high performance systems including photovoltaics, ground source heat pumps, or high efficiency HVAC equipment.

Of the people who made energy efficiency improvements to their home or building, 50% said that GBOH helped influence them to do so.

There are lots more compelling findings to share – and we’ll be doing so much more extensively in the coming weeks and months. But in the meantime, we’re really excited that the results validate that this program is helping to move the market toward more widespread adoption of sustainable energy solutions.

p.s. – Many thanks to UMass student Kelsey Hobson, our Green Buildings Open House program coordinator and survey writer, for all her work to ensure that we have a comprehensive, statistically valid survey.

Filed Under: Communications, Green Building, Industry, NESEA, NESEA Members, Solar, Sustainable Building Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Profound Gratitude: Remarks by Jennifer Marrapese, Executive Director at Annual Meeting, 9/15/12

September 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Welcome everybody to the 2012 annual meeting of the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association.

I am really excited that we’re here in Portland. There’s a vibrant green building and sustainable energy community here – a community that has built what they need in the form of the monthly Building Science Discussion Group, Maine Association of Building Energy Professionals, Passive House Maine, USGBC’s Maine Chapter, the Pretty Good House movement and many other formal and less formal organizations and collaborations.

The Portland area has traditionally not been as well served by NESEA as many other areas in our territory. And for as long as I’ve been at NESEA, we’ve been hoping to change that. So I was delighted when NESEA board member Phil Kaplan invited me to Portland and asked us to consider hosting our annual meeting here.

Since our first meeting with Phil and the Building Science Discussion Group in June, many of you Mainers have drunk the NESEA Kool Aid. Architect Rick Renner, a longtime NESEA member, is running for the NESEA board of directors. Sam Strickland is serving on a committee to help us create and launch online communities of practice so that geography ceases to be such a challenging barrier for NESEA members who want to learn and share year round. Steve Konstantino of Maine Green Building Supply has become a business member and opened his facility up last night for an annual meeting pre-game – a Building Science Discussion Group to welcome the whole NESEA community to town.

Profound gratitude. As I prepared my remarks for tonight, that was the mindset I started from. I feel profoundly grateful to this community and appreciative of all that we are accomplishing together.

Let me explain to whom I am grateful and why.

I am grateful to the more than 200 members who are really actively engaged with NESEA far above and beyond simply writing a check and receiving their monthly newsletter and their BuildingEnergy Magazine twice a year. It is surely unprecedented within NESEA that almost a third of our members are actively engaged in planning the conference, hosting sites in our Green Buildings Open House tour, submitting content for BuildingEnergy magazine, and serving on NESEA program and board committees.

I am grateful to Jamie Wolf for recently helping us to articulate something that we’ve known intuitively for a very long time:  that the BuildingEnergy Conference is NESEA’s crown jewel, or the center of NESEA’s universe, but that it occurs only for 3 days/year in Boston. Jamie shared with me his vision for BE365, which makes the BuildingEnergy experience available to NESEA members every day of the year through various events, gatherings, online learning and other forums throughout the year.

I am grateful to lifetime NESEA member Bernice Radle, who at the ripe old age of 26 is rallying a group of NESEA member preservationists to plan a kick-ass Green Buildings Open House tour in Buffalo on October 13th, and who is trying to bring the rest of the NESEA community into the digital age with her incredible promotional savvy using twitter, facebook, blogging and Pinterest.

I am grateful to Marc Rosenbaum, one of our NESEA rock stars, who has partnered with us, and who has spent more than 100 hours to develop and help us launch a 10-week online course for the BuildingEnergy Masters Series, and who recently shared with me, “I could develop and market a course like this on my own. Yet what appeals to me about this arrangement is that I get to advance my personal mission of expanding our collective capabilities, while creating an income stream, and also give back to this organization that has been such a key factor in my success. However, it’s a business partnership, not a charity -  NESEA has skin in the game just as I do.”

I am grateful to NESEA board member Kate Goldstein, who, although she is still a starving student, is digging deep for NESEA this year. Not only did she become a lifetime member – a great investment for somebody who’s still in her 20s – but she has also pledged a leadership gift in our annual fundraising appeal, because, in her words, “The diversity of NESEA’s membership is a gift for us who have not yet found our own path. NESEA is the shelter of our community.”

I am grateful to my staff – at least three of whom, despite being handed a salary freeze this year, have decided to invest some of their discretionary income into NESEA membership because they believe deeply in what we’re about here, and they consider themselves a part of this community.

I am grateful to Paul Eldrenkamp, who confided in me that one of the happiest days of his life was the day that he left his last NESEA board meeting in the mid-1990s. He went and sat in his car for a few minutes and let out a freedom cry that others may have heard even from inside the building. Paul shared that the board as a group (not its individual members) was so dysfunctional, and mired in the day to day operation of the organization, that he couldn’t wait to get out. Well, Paul is a testament to how things have changed for the better. This year, not only is he chairing the BuildingEnergy Conference, and bringing a ton of new talent into the organization through his vast network, but he’s also teaching a BuildingEnergy Masters Series class on Passive House online, and running for the NESEA board!

I am grateful to the 20 or so NESEA members – some long timers, some newbies – who are helping us experiment with and launch active online communities so that they can learn together how best to apply systems thinking in their practices and what are the elements of a generative economy. These communities will serve as a forum in which NESEA members can share with each other what’s working (and what’s not) in service of a more sustainable built environment. Based on what we learn from these communities of practice, we’ll launch others in the new year – including one on Deep Energy Retrofits, one on Zero Net Energy Buildings, and possibly even one on our topic tonight, the Pretty Good House.

These examples barely scratch the surface of all we’ve accomplished together over the past year. And all of this is happening in the worst building environment in 20 years.

In many ways, last year represented the “perfect storm.” Almost everything that could have gone wrong financially, did. NESEA’s membership numbers and Sustainable Green Pages listings continued their steady decline since the housing market crash in 2009. BuildingEnergy registration and exhibitor numbers declined, despite a whopping 97% of our attendees saying that they would recommend the conference to a colleague. We lost substantial donations from two longtime donors whose funding focus shifted and whose portfolios suffered at the hands of a lackluster economy.

We knew before the year even started that we were going to run a deficit in Fiscal Year 2012. We even budgeted for it. We invested heavily in staff, hiring a membership coordinator and a communications coordinator. We also invested in our infrastructure, launching a new website, supported by a new, more nimble database. We knew it would take time for these investments to pay off. Unfortunately, the deficit we ran was larger than anticipated.

NESEA’s reason for being is to advance the adoption of sustainable energy practices in the built environment. The rest of the industry is finally catching on as well.

Last year’s bottom line fails to tell the whole story. It doesn’t tell the story of the momentum we’re building, one practitioner at a time. It doesn’t tell the story of the quality of engagement within our membership, within the BuildingEnergy planning process, and at BE itself.

I truly believe that we’re planting the right seeds, and that if we continue to provide quality engagement experiences, the numbers will follow. I also know that we’ll continue to learn and adjust the plan as we go!

So I’m grateful. I’m invested in this organization and in this community, not just professionally, but also personally, as I complete my own deep energy retrofit and prepare to showcase my home on NESEA’s Green Building Open House tour, which will be held on October 13th throughout NESEA’s 10 states, from Maine all the way down to Delaware.

Now’s the time for you to invest as well. Invest in NESEA and in our future in a way that makes sense for you. If you’re not a member, join. If you are a member, consider donating or sponsoring above and beyond your membership contribution. Or give the gift of NESEA membership to a colleague to help grow our community.

If you’re a newcomer to our community, invest in your own professional development as you get to know us better. Enroll in one of our BuildingEnergy Masters Series courses and partake in  high quality interactive educational content from the comfort of your home or office. Learn about zero net energy homes from Marc Rosenbaum, the man who’s probably engineered more of them than anybody else in the Northeast. Learn about Passive House from Mike Duclos and Paul Eldrenkamp, a member of the inaugural group of Passive House certified consultants in the U.S. Then connect with others in your class to share what you’re learning and create a community of practice that can meet in person at next year’s BuildingEnergy Conference.

Attend the Building Energy Conference, exhibit there, sponsor. Even better, help shape our content by joining the planning committee for the BuildingEnergy Conference. Register your most recent project for our Green Buildings Open House tour in October. Enter your best work in NESEA’s Zero Net Energy Building Award to compete for our annual $10,000 prize. Submit an article for publication in BuildingEnergy Magazine, our peer-reviewed journal by and for sustainable energy professionals in the Northeast.

Invest in the community that is building your knowledge base, your practice, your career, and a more sustainable built environment.

Before I close, I’d like to thank a few people without whom this meeting would not have happened. First, thank you to our committee of locals who advised us on all of the nuts and bolts decisions we needed to make – from the beautiful location we are in to the buildings we should include on the tours earlier today to the Pretty Good House speaking program tonight. Those committee members include Matt Holden, Steve Konstantino, Dan Kolbert, and Rick Renner, among many others.

Next, I’d like to thank our sponsors for tonight – Sparhawk Group, Maine Association of Building Energy Professionals, and Thorton Tomasetti Fore Solutions. And a special thanks to sponsors Kaplan Thompson Architects and Pinnacle Windows, who are hosting a party after tonight’s meeting at Grace, a beautifully restored church and restaurant with an awesome looking menu!

Huge thanks also to Phil Kaplan of Kaplan Thompson Architects for advocating in favor of holding the meeting here in Portland and for connecting us with all the folks here who could help make it happen.

And finally, thank you to Kelsey Hobson, our summer intern from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. Kelsey came in at the beginning of the summer and flat out handled all the logistics for this meeting, with almost no guidance. She herded a group of benevolent but busy cats to score us this great location, and planned all of the building tours. She did such a great job that we decided to hire her permanently – or at least as permanently as she’ll have us. This is one NESEA emerging professional with a very bright future.

And now, I’d like to welcome to the stage NESEA board chair, James Petersen. James has been a huge champion of our work to “expand the choir,” and has supported these efforts personally by being a NESEA evangelist within his own professional network. James will share with you an update on where the board would like to see NESEA head, and on what your role might be in helping to create our future success.

Filed Under: BuildingEnergy Conference & Trade Show, Communications, deep energy retrofit, Events, Green Building, Industry, NESEA, NESEA Members, Renewable Energy, Sustainable Building, Whole Systems Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A Clean Slate

August 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment

This post first appeared on the blog of NESEA member Beyond Green Construction, at http://beyondgreen.biz/2012/08/a-clean-slate/. It describes a chapter in the deep energy retrofit my family is undertaking, and that challenges associated with the project. There will be more updates as the project progresses!

Well hello again!  Thanks for stopping by to check out our progress.  A few weeks ago we gave you a little intro to the Marrapese family and a beginning look at our latest retrofit project in Deerfield, MA.  I’ve been dropping by the site every so often and things are moving really fast.  It’s incredible how quickly things can turn around with an experienced, committed team and an approaching deadline.  This week we’re going to dive in a bit further and give you some visuals on the progress, so you can see first hand what goes into such a delicate and complicated retrofit.

As I mentioned in our first post, in order to do this job right, we have to stop the moisture problem at its source.  The source of trouble is coming from the constant moisture being funneled up into the house from the very high water table beneath.  The home was never given a moisture barrier between the slab and the house itself.  This got me to thinking, why was it that it was never given a proper moisture barrier?  Was the original builder cutting corners?…or was it just regular practice not to in 1977?  I probed Irene Winkelbauer, (that’s her over there on the left) a member of the BGC team and a certified LEED Green Associate & BPI Building Analyst and she said “Building practices change over time, so it’s probably not that unusual for a build that was done at that time.  Building code is the minimum expected best practice, so if the moisture barrier wasn’t a part in the original build, it may not have been part of code in 1977.”

To give you a quick mental picture, between the years of 1964 and 2002, the highest recorded water level was just 1.42 ft below the soil…seems like living on a houseboat isn’t far off!  With the more recent event of hurricane Irene, it may have been even higher since.  The home has been sucking up this moisture like a straw for 35 years, so as you can imagine, it’s caused quite a bit of damage.  To be frank, it’s all but destroyed the entire house.

Now, I’m going to press the rewind button for a minute and fill in a few important blanks in the story that lead us to getting started on the work.

As I mentioned briefly last week, the project had to be put on hold (for 6 weeks!) while the home went through what’s called a “Request for Determination” by the Deerfield Conservation Commission.  This included submitting a detailed report of the proposed work, along with diagrams of the area and measurements of how close the property is to the wetland. “The strictness with which you will have to build is determined by how close your home is to a stream or water source,” says Winkelbauer.  Luckily because the Marrapese home is a pre-existing structure which was already placed far enough away from the wetlands, the Conservation Commission allowed the BGC team to begin with their work as long as they took the appropriate precautions.  This means keeping the nearby water source free of any run-off from the work site, which has been accomplished with a silt fence and about 100 feet of hay bales.  The picture below gives you a visual map of the standards that have to be met in order to keep the wetlands protected.  The stream on the left needed to be protected by at least 25 feet of undisturbed vegetation and then the home has to be 50 feet from the edge of that vegetation.  After the determination was given by the Conservation Commission that we would not be disturbing any of the wetlands, it was a green light to get started on the work.

The determination was only just given on June 28th, so with a deadline of August 31st to finish the project the team is on an extremely tight schedule.

That just about brings us to the present time.

Being a green company, we are always looking to salvage as much material as possible, but with this home there is unfortunately not much to save.  After taking the house apart piece by piece, our team found that the mold not only extended through the walls, the insulation, the carpet, the tack strips, the floor boards, but even up to the roof!  And the mold on the roof is indeed from the moisture problem beneath the home, not from rain or snow on top of the roof.  See the picture to the left as Andy Jeffords first discovered the mold on the roof.

So what’s the plan of attack when a home is in such a state?  Eliminate the problem, salvage what you can and make it right…it’s as simple as that.  Well, simply written, I’d hardly categorize it as simple work.  The team has been working in 90+ degree heat with very long days to get this done on schedule.

After tackling the mold and stripping the house down to its remaining usable parts, it was onto the sun room addition.  Remember I told you in the previous post about the floor caving in?  The mold and rot were so bad the team had to take it all down and start from scratch.  After accessing the ground beneath the sun room, the team “decided on a more robust technique that we’re very confident about” said Sean Jeffords, principal of BGC, which involved bringing in 130 tons (yes TONS) of sand to fill up the previous crawl space which will be consistent with the sand filled slab on grade that the rest of home has.  (Read in the coming weeks, how we came to that conclusion) But of course, no project is without its curve balls.  On this day, that curve ball came in the form of a truck in quicksand.  Say what?  Here’s what I mean.

The truck which made 5 deliveries of 26 tons (260,000 lbs) of sand drove onto the property and quickly sunk into what they call “sugar sand,” or sand that was not properly compacted during the original build.  It’s apparently just like “sinking into quicksand,”  says Jeffords.

After towing the truck back out of the quicksand, it was back to work.  Two members of the BGC team, Gary Hutchins and Chris Russel worked on spreading and compacting the sand in the sun room, which will actually be the kitchen when the project is complete.

That’s about it for this week.  Next time, see just how we lift an entire house off the ground! Until then, stay happy, healthy & be green!

 

 

 

Filed Under: deep energy retrofit, Green Building, NESEA, NESEA Members Tagged With: , , , ,

From Ghastly to Green – a foreclosure purchase story (or how I spent my summer vacation)

August 15, 2012 By 1 Comment

Hi all,

This blog post was written by Shannon Tate of Beyond Green Construction (a NESEA member of course) about a deep energy retrofit my family and I are undertaking. It originally appeared on Beyond Green’ blog at http://beyondgreen.biz/2012/07/from-ghastly-to-green-a-foreclosure-purchase-story-2/.  I plan to post additional updates as they are available . . . it’s clearly still a work in progress. I’m sure the practitioners among you will be shocked . . . shocked to hear that the schedule has slipped further since the post was first written. Hoping for a September 20th move-in date at this point – fingers crossed!

 

 

Well hello and welcome to our very first blog post!  My name is Shannon Tate,
a sustainable design and green building enthusiast and newby here at Beyond Green Construction.  (That’s me over there on the left.)  Here at BGC we are passionate about doing our part to make the world a better place and healing this planet!…we feel the best way to do this is through education.  We think the best form of education that we could share would be to give you all the nitty gritty, good, bad, ugly details of our present Deep energy Retrofit projects.  It’s not easy work for us or the homeowners, but it is incredibly rewarding and life changing in the end.  Our approach is to be 100% transparent with you.  No holding back, no sugar coating.  Our blog will be presenting the real deal.  It’s especially exciting for us because we are starting our blog love with a really HUGE project that we just began work on in Deerfield.  So here we go.  Happy reading.

Meet the Marrapese family…Jennifer, Bill, their two little girls and sweet pup.  Jennifer is the Executive Director of NESEA, the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association and Bill is a nurse in Brattleboro, VT.

(This photo was taken outside their current rental in Deerfield, where they anxiously await the completion of their new home.)

Jennifer and Bill, who moved here a year ago with their family, recently purchased a 1977 ranch in foreclosure just a few blocks from their rental property in Deerfield.  The house is a fixer upper…to put it lightly.

“Sean and the inspector were with us and everyone suspected that there was going to be major work to be done”, says Bill.

“That being said…we knew it was in rough shape but it’s turned out to be in worse shape then we thought” says Jennifer.

The homes most substantial problem stems from the fact that it’s built on a high water table and “it seems that the slab was never insulated against the water coming up from underneath.  The slab was acting like a straw to suck the water up into the foundation and the walls”, says Bill.

As the reader you may be asking yourself, “why the heck didn’t they find all this out before they bought the place?”  The answer is, when purchasing a property in foreclosure, there are many things you can’t do during a home inspection.  You can’t lift up carpets, you can’t do anything that is invasive, where you’re peeling anything open or examining something from within…you can only look at the surface and take it as your eyes perceive it.  So it wasn’t until after the purchase went through that the damage could truly be assessed.  Carpets ripped up, beams exposed, and mold in clear view, everywhere.  Mold was found in the insulation, roofing, walls, carpet, tack strips, everywhere.  ”I think the homeowners believed at the time of purchase that they could do a lot of the demo work themselves, but once they started removing carpet, they realized how dangerous that would be,” says Jeffords.

A secondary problem of the home is that it has a sunroom addition on the back which was done extremely poorly.  Bill calling it a “Ham and egg job….or I’ll give you a pizza, you give me an addition.”  That explains it pretty perfectly.  After the purchase went through, the BGC team came in and realized that adding to the already lengthy list of problems, the floor in the addition was about to cave in as well. 

Even with all of its problems, this home does have its charms.  The homeowners had their hearts set on this neighborhood and this particular street when their search began.  They were serendipitously invited to a barbecue on an earlier visit, which happened to be on the very street they purchased on.  ”We met a lot of people on the street who we ended up clicking with” says Jennifer.  ”It’s a dead end street, it’s sunny so immediately we both looked at each other and said this is the street we want to live on.  So when the house came up in foreclosure, we thought it was the perfect opportunity, especially since we knew we wanted to do energy work and we didn’t want to pay extra for a house that we were going to have to rip up anyway.”  There were also many other plus’s on Jennifer and Bill’s list.  ”We have some land, it’s perfectly suited for solar and we paid probably $45K less than if we had purchased it from an owner, ” Bill says of the house.  Jennifer adds “and there’s farmland behind the property and it’s protected”  ”It’s still a little bit of a scary investment”, she admits.

The couple says that although they wouldn’t call themselves “sustainability experts”, that for a very long time, sustainability has been a part of their daily practice and a part of their values.  ”We’re really excited to take this project as an opportunity to explore and live into that”, says Jennifer.

Even with all of the lists of “green building experts” at her disposal through NESEA, Jennifer says that they really “didn’t do a lot of interviews for the job” and that she chose the BGC team “largely on reputation within the community” and that Jeffords was very familiar with how to go about finding monetary incentives through the energy companies, theirs being Western Mass Electric…which the couple will be receiving $19K in incentive money from.  (If you’re interested in looking into incentives for your green project, go to www.masssave.com to learn more.)

The couple closed on the house in April with hopes to acquire a building permit quickly and start work with the BGC team.  But, like many projects, things didn’t move along as quickly as hoped.  The couple, along with the BGC team lost 6 weeks of time after the building inspector thought they needed to bring the project plans to the conservation committee for additional approval.  He came to this conclusion because the home has an intermittent stream on the property and they needed to be sure wasn’t a part of the wetlands.  They eventually were given a negative determination and could move forward without any additional approvals, but that was 6 weeks lost.  The Marrapese’s found this difficult as they were already paying the mortgage and had to add on two additional months in their rental…not to mention that Jeffords had his team ready to go.  It was a set back, but they put that time to good use, making sure all their plans were in place and were sure of exactly how they would proceed with the project.

The plans are a pretty huge undertaking in and of themselves.  After determining how extensive the moisture problems were and that the source was the foundation, BGC’s engineer, Chris Vreeland from Precision Decisions Inc. devised a plan to actually lift the house off of the foundation with a series of jacks that will be attached to the foundation wall and a piece of “4x”6 angle iron bolted into each and every wall stud.  The house will be lifted 8 inches off the slab and then a moisture and thermal barrier will be created with high-density foam topped with 4 inches of concrete that has radiant floor tubing imbedded into it.  This will stop the mold and moisture problems at their source, so that when they re-insulate the house and tighten it all up, the indoor air quality will be healthy for the family.  Also included in the plans are the installation of a Solar Thermal System with electric back-up and a wood stove for an alternative heat source on the off chance that they would lose electricity because of a storm or power outage.

As you can imagine, this is not a cheap project.  We have a budget to work with of $100 per square foot (brand new builds on average are $150 + per square foot) and with the home at nearly two thousand square-feet, we’re nearing $200K.  That being said the couple says they’re just “makin’ it happen”, doing what they have to do with  their own saved money, a line of credit, borrowing from family…they are determined to make it happen within their budget.

Their budget is being helped greatly with the resource of the Eco Building Bargains in Springfield, where they bought used solid oak kitchen cabinets and laminate countertops for only $1400.  They plan on getting their bathroom fixtures from there as well and found a great deal on flooring through Hampton Carpet.

In the end the Marrapese’s will have a super energy efficient, healthy house for their family.

With the August 31st move in date quickly approaching the BGC team needs to work smart and fast.  We’ll give you more of the details next week!  Until then, have a good one.

 

 

 

Filed Under: deep energy retrofit, NESEA Members Tagged With: , , ,

Building an Infrastructure for Collaboration – How are we doing?

June 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment

How do NESEA members propose new programs they’d like to be involved in launching?
How does NESEA engage members in projects that align both with their passions and their skill sets?
How do we build the capacity of our members to be effective leaders and collaborators for the projects we take on?
Who decides which NESEA programs get launched and which ones don’t?
How do we reinvent legacy programs so that they align with NESEA’s mission and its brand?
What’s the mechanism for welcoming new members into our community?

These are just a few of the questions we’re attempting to answer in our “Infrastructure for Collaboration” (IFC) working group. The IFC group launched in May 2012, after NESEA held two charrettes during which the members present requested that we develop better processes for engaging current and new members and for deciding which programs and initiatives to undertake.

The underlying premise of these two charrettes was that NESEA is at its best when its programs are primarily member-driven and staff supported. (The BuildingEnergy Planning Committee’s process, although by no means perfect, is the best current example of this.) Thus, the IFC group has been attempting to take what’s good about the BE planning process and adapt it for re-use in other areas.

We’ve made some progress, and IFC group chair Jamie Wolf and I thought it would be a great time to bring you all up to date.

What we’ve done so far

So far, the IFC group has developed a workgroup template. This template is intended to walk a NESEA member, step-by-step, through the process of proposing a new program/initiative. In the template, the member is asked to:

  • Give a brief description of the project/program/initiative
  • Articulate the purpose of the program (and how it fits in with NESEA’s mission)
  • Specify the objectives of the program
  • Articulate the process by which the group/program will accomplish these objectives
  • Propose a timeline for the program
  • Specify what type of support is needed to launch the program (including staffing resources, equipment, money, etc.) and what plans are in place to secure that support
  • Address how the group will communicate, both internally and externally
  • Specify who will lead the group and who will be members (or how members will be selected, what their roles will be and how they will be held accountable
  • Articulate what the end product will be, if any, from the project/program (how will success be measured)

Once this template is completed, the appropriate NESEA staff representative (typically me in my role as executive director) completes a companion template to provide feedback/a reality check on the proposal. In this template, staff answers questions about:

  • Whether we support the proposed initiative
  • Whether we believe the project can be accomplished with the resources projected, and what other resources might be available
  • Whether/how the project will likely fit in with other, potentially competing priorities, and the conditions that must be met in order for staff to support the project optimally
  • Who on staff will be the primary staff person on the project
  • What authority the group will have to act on its own

We’ve also developed a member survey that will help us start to catalog our members’ skill sets and their interests, so we can do a better job of filling the gaps in various NESEA projects and committees.

What we’re learning

Developing these templates felt a bit abstract to many of us in the IFC group. So we decided to try them out – first to apply the process to the Communities of Practice that Robert Leaver is heading up, and then to our own work within the IFC group.

What we’re learning is that it takes discipline to remember to follow the process. As a staff person who focuses primarily on member support, my inclination is often to jump into projects when they are proposed – and especially when they are proposed by members I have worked with, and those I know have the horsepower and the follow through to get the projects done. But I’m recognizing that this process may have value in encouraging those who are new to the community or inclined to be less vocal to propose ideas that otherwise might never reach the surface.

We’re also learning that it’s hard to foresee every possible variable that we should ask for in a proposal. We want the bar to be set sufficiently high so that we’re not getting new requests for new, big, resource-intensive programs every day. But we don’t want to set the bar so high that somebody with a fantastic idea can’t figure out how to get it to us, or gives up trying.

What’s next?

We’ll continue to experiment with these templates just a bit longer, and try to vet them sufficiently so they’re ready for you to use. We’ll keep you updated on our progress!

– Jennifer Marrapese, Executive Director, NESEA, and Jamie Wolf, IFC group chair

Filed Under: Communications, NESEA, NESEA Members Tagged With: , , , , ,
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