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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: , , ,