An Insider's Secrets To Building Green

His residential green building company, based in Santa Clara, California has a philosophy that green is better and can come without sacrifice. The company's model home just won the 2007 Acterra Business Environmental Award for a sustainable built environment and is about to be certified the greenest home in California by Build it Green's Green Point Rating System. Edwards spoke with Matter Network about his beliefs, experiences and predictions for the green building industry.

MN: It seems like a lot of attention has been focused on developing zero carbon homes for the future. How realistic is that goal?

DE: I think zero energy homes are realistic and fairly simple. It's quite easy to make a zero energy new home. But making a zero energy new home and actually having it be zero energy, meaning zero electricity, are two totally different things. You can make the most energy efficient house in the world but a homeowner could leave all the lights on and it won't be zero energy. There is a component about homeowner understanding and effort. But a zero electricity home is totally doable.

A zero carbon home is almost impossible to achieve in any environment that isn't 70 degrees all year long because we all have to cook, clean our clothes and heat and/or cool our homes. You can get very efficient heating systems like ground source heat pumps, but they're still significantly more expensive than any other type of heating system. Electric clothes dryers consume an enormous quantity of energy compared to gas. Cooking by electric cooktop is the same way. You have to massively oversize a photovoltaic system and have all the items in the house run on electricity in order to be zero carbon and zero energy. And people don't have big enough roofs for this size of photovoltaic system. I don't know of a house that's built zero carbon. It's much easier to achieve a zero carbon commercial building than a zero carbon residential building.

Durability is a huge tenet of green building. The less often you have to replace the material, the less material and effort needs to go into maintaining it, the diminished cost for upkeep, and the less frequently you have to replace it.

MN: Do you think green remodeling is getting enough attention?

DE: Green remodeling isn't getting enough attention because it's much more difficult to do a green remodel than it is to do a green build because there are so many fewer choices for materials and options. As the scale of the project increases, the potential solutions to any specific problem are dramatically increased. A small remodel like a kitchen or bathroom has very few choices as to what we can do to increase the efficiency. Adding the best insulation in the world to a bathroom remodel won't affect the homeowner's utility bills substantially. It's like putting a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound. You have to temper expectations with realism and the scope of the work. The smaller the remodel the much harder it is to make a difference in something the homeowner is going to see. A bathroom could have full thickness quality tile, you can use cement backing for the tile that won't potentially crack the tile or cause water infiltration, and you could use low flow water for the vanity and low flush toilets that perform much better. People will see that, but the durability of these kinds of things doesn't take effect for five to 10 years once you're done with the project. And they could only have a max of a 10 to 15 percent impact on household use of water. One bathroom is not that huge of a thing.

On a full house remodel it's much easier. We could upgrade all the insulation and materials and put durable high quality materials that are energy and water efficient in a project and people will see that. They'll see their electricity and gas bills decrease. Green remodeling is very important but getting people to embrace that is much more difficult because of the limited apparent rewards for a small project, although there are lots of rewards. How do you put a value on health with materials off-gassing, etc.? You have a larger net expenditure on a larger project but the modifications that make a project energy efficient or durable or healthy have a smaller difference in price when compared to standard building products. You get a bigger bang for your buck because you've changed more of the whole structure by remodeling a large project than a small project. You'll spend more money building a house that's fancy and not green than building a house that's fancy and totally green. Our show house will soon officially be the greenest house in California, by Green Point ratings, and we've applied for LEED platinum certification. It cost me about what most of my other projects cost me. We paid a lot of attention to design and material choices and methods of putting it all up and coordinating all the systems. A tremendous part of building things green is the design. Saving money by not building an extra 200 square feet and putting that money into appliances and low VOC (volatile organic compound) paints, etc.

MN: What are some of the simplest, least expensive changes people can make to current homes to be greener?

DE: They can use materials that don't off-gas, durable materials, and conserve water and energy usage. Buying energy efficient appliances is extremely important, using water conservation showerheads and aerators in sink faucets. One aerator in a sink faucet would use a quarter of the water that a standard faucet does. The highest efficiency clothes washer costs about $1,300 but uses on average $11 of energy per year for five loads per week and 10 gallons. The older machines use 40 gallons of water per cycle and cost about $70-90 per year to run. In five years you've easily made back the money.

MN: When someone wants to do a green remodel, what should they look for in paints, flooring, etc.?

DE: In flooring, we always try specify Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified flooring – the only true third-party, non-biased rating agency in the world that certifies forests as sustainable or not, kind of like the United Nations of the timber industry. They really set the standard for everything. If it's FSC certified, you know exactly what portion of forest a piece of lumber was certified from, who milled it, who shipped it – it's called chain of custody. A lot of manufacturers will say something is sustainably certified but don't have any certification. That's called greenwashing, which is a total marketing ploy where they say they're sustainable but they're really not. Unfortunately there's no federal mandate that regulates when a product is labeled green. So that's very difficult. I've tried to follow these statements to their source and I've called mills in Brazil specifically to identify their sustainability claims and they're totally unverifiable. The companies in Brazil don't have any kind of sustainability tenets so it's something the United States made up to sell more lumber to people who think they're being sustainable.

MN: I heard about how some bamboo products are sold but aren't sufficiently hard because they're logged before the bamboo has time to mature. Is this common in many brands of bamboo flooring?

DE:In four to six years, bamboo grows up to 100 feet tall but different species grow at different rates and it needs five to six years to grow to maturity, at which point most of the channels used to bring water to the plant are filled with a solid matrix that gives the floor its strength. If bamboo is harvested before that happens then it has open cell structures and is very soft. During our first project with it, we dented the wood with our standard nails. A Janka hardness rating is a measurement of the hardness of the material. The harder the Janka, the more abuse-proof it is. The standard is 1,000. Many sellers will claim a wood has a rating of 1,400 to 1,500, or as hard as red oak. But many sell it at about 500 to 700.

Durability is a huge tenet of green building. The less often you have to replace the material, the less material and effort needs to go into maintaining it, the diminished cost for upkeep, and the less frequently you have to replace it. Bamboo is a grass, not a tree, so it doesn't really fall under FSC standards. The most important thing to look at is the hardness and then talk to a green builder or a hardwood flooring installer who has installed it before.

MN:: What is the perfect green house?

DE: The philosophy of our company is that there is no perfect green house so trying to build the perfect green house is an unattainable threshold. Houses by their very nature are inefficient uses of space. It is more efficient for us to be in large multi-use buildings with stores nearby. But no one wants to live there. So we're trying to build standard homes with good quality that are reasonably green. We're trying to diminish the impact of the way we live in the environment. We say green without sacrifice, it doesn’t give to cost you more money and you don't even have to know that your house is green.

MN: What are some of the biggest mistakes made in green building?

DE: Greenwashing by far. People saying they're green -- whether it is a material supplier or a builder --but not knowing enough to build a green product. People with good intentions who are willing to pay with money or time or effort to specify their homes as green, they can hire an architect who doesn't know about green. There are lots of architects and contractors who don't really know enough or practice green. They don't know about FSC lumber, or think about the adhesives used for the lumber and use formaldehyde glue that off gasses for 10 years into the environment. I spend a lot of time doing research and testing materials. Until I know how something works, I don't put it into one of my projects. There is no perfect manual to build green because it's evolving so quickly.

MN: From an insider's perspective, what types of products are being sold as "green" that should be avoided?

DE: The biggest greenwashers are hardwood floor manufacturers. It's very difficult to get true FSC or salvaged hardwood floors. We absolutely love salvaged hardwood floors. There are some manufacturers that get products from railroad ties or pole houses in Asia – material that's gorgeous, super durable, completely salvaged and unlike anything you've ever seen before. Energy-efficient appliances is another area. Just because it has an Energy Star label doesn't mean it's really efficient. The clothes washer we spec out is 97 percent more efficient than the Energy Star washers. Anything we see, we always look at third party verification – not EPA or Energy Star. We look at CEC or CEE, the California Energy Commission or the Consortium of Energy Efficiency, or third party testing of water usage, like on a toilet. Toilets can be labeled low flush but still only get 1.6 gallons per flush. That's no longer water efficient. That's standard. Water efficient is less than one gallon per flush.

MN: What technologies do you see influencing the future of green building and remodeling?

DE: Well, electrical lighting – LEDs that are super high-efficiency lighting fixtures, more efficient than fluorescent lighting. But they're really expensive. I think we'll get a lot more requirements for oxygen sensors on lighting circuits, which is a great idea. When someone walks into a room the light turns on, when someone walks out it goes off. I have those in every room of my house. It costs $30 to buy them at Home Depot and it'll save you tons of money over the lifespan of the light switch.

Photovoltaic systems – there's a new technology coming out in the next seven years called CIGS – a thin layer deposition similar to printing technology in laser printers for laying down silicon in photovoltaic panels. It's pliable and uses a tenth of the amount of silicon, which means they can be made much more cost effectively, which could bring down the cost of photovoltaics threefold. There is going to be an enormous transition in environmentally-responsible building. When we can produce electricity in every house for a reasonable amount of money with an expected life span of 25 years and the return on investment goes from 7-10 years to 3 years, people will start adopting it.

Hopefully at some point, California will adopt similar protocols to Arizona and New Mexico about grey water. In California, 40 to 60 percent of water used in non-agricultural use is in landscaping. Grey water is essentially water from showers, tubs and kitchen sinks but it could very easily and effectively be used for landscaping. Also, cost effective production of polyurethane insulation (around freezers and fridges), is twice as effective as standard insulation, and is idiot proof once installed because it swells and is completely airtight. We think it's a cost effective upgrade to our projects, but we would like it to be standard protocol.

We're a big fan of ground source heat pumps, but they're expensive right now. We would love to incorporate those into our projects at a more reasonable cost. They're much better than conventional forced air systems. MN: How can natural sunlight be used to reduce the cost of heating and cooling?

DE: I think it's a fantastic area to go in, largely dictated by architects and designers. It's a free resource which very few architects and designers make effective use of. Many projects are built on tiny little lots, with two stories and 3,000 square feet on a 4,500 square-foot lot with no yard and very little exposure to the sun, so you can't get effective light infiltration when your neighbor's house is seven feet away.

MN: How do we encourage and support more people to build sustainably?

DE: I think everything could be solved by education. I do whatever I can; I give more than 20 talks a year to builders, engineers, community groups, city managers, whoever will listen, about the benefits of green building. I truly believe that the population is not ignorant or mean-spirited. I think they just lack the understanding of all the benefits of going green – saving money and time. It's green without sacrifice. There is nothing detrimental about green. People need to know what will make their lives better. We need to show the population that green is what the base level should be.

MN:How do you expect the cost of green building to change over time?

DE: It will absolutely get more cost effective. We can already build green without charging more than building a standard good quality house. But when you push the envelope and go super-green, with photovoltaic panels and full thickness hardwood flooring, those things cost more. But green is better. Sometimes it costs more. Sometimes it costs less.