Builder, Realtor team up for greenest jewel
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7/5/2009 - 7/5/09
Maxine Swisa and the Dancers are doing more than going for the gold: they're shooting for the Emerald. That's the highest green-building certification in the new BuildGreen New Mexico standard. They're also thinking their new house project in the Monte Sereno subdivision will win the Platinum certification in the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) system.
Partners in the house on Broken Sherd Trail are Maxine Swisa and builders Faren and Lainey Dancer. It looks more or less like a standard Santa Fe house, but there are dozens of features that its developers feel qualify it to be called "The Zero-Energy Jewel of the Southwest."
During a mid-June walkthrough, Swisa, an Eco-Broker with Santa Fe Realty Partners, and the Dancers pointed out many of the features, including high-performance Solatube skylights; motion-activated ventilation fans in the garage; super-insulated, triple-pane windows; blown-in cellulose insulation; and vigas in the master bedroom and posts on the portales made from standing dead pine from the Viveash fire near Pecos.
Wood used in other parts of the house is reclaimed lumber salvaged in the Midwest. Faren Dancer used the Internet to scout out old barn beams in Minnesota, Indiana, and Ohio, and followed it up with driving trips. That yielded white oak, beech, walnut, maple, ash, and hickory woods for use in beams, ceiling planks, flooring, and cabinets. Matt Surprise made the cabinet doors and facing with dense, beautifully colored, old-growth walnut, on non-formaldehyde cabinet boxes.
The walls are double-framed 2 x 12: in cross-section a 2x6 and 2/4 with space in between for insulation. Dancer says the walls will have an insulation value of R-42. The strategy is designed to prevent heat loss due to thermal bridging. This house is very tight, but has a continuous supply of HEPA-filtered fresh air, and all paints and finishes are low-VOC or no-VOC. Radon-mitigation was built into the foundation, which saw the substitution of fly ash, a waste product from coal-burning, for some of the concrete.
Dancer is a New Mexico distributor for OASys evaporative-cooling systems, and of course that is part of the Emerald Home. The OASys, he said, is a dual-stage, high-efficiency system that runs on 500 watts of electricity and uses 40 percent of the water used in conventional systems. "Also, you only get 60 percent humidity versus up to 90 with the old technology, and when you backflush, all of the water goes into the cisterns," he said.
Eighty percent of the rainwater falling on the roof is captured and directed to three cisterns that total 5,100 gallons of storage. This water is pumped to supply the drip-irrigation system for landscape plants. Inside the house, water is conserved with dual-flush toilets — a half-flush for liquid waste and a full flush for solid — and with low-flow faucets and showerheads.
Home temperature is moderated with a technology that is routinely mislabeled as "geothermal." Dancer says it's really a "ground source heat exchange system." A glycol solution in hoses is pumped through six 200-foot wells, where the constant earth temperature of 58 degrees is transferred to the fluid and then to the house. This minimizes the energy required to cool the house in the summer and to heat it in the winter.
A pleasant temperature will be maintained in the Emerald Home more easily because of all the thermal mass inside: the interior walls all are made of compressed earth (with a some Portland cement added because the earth, from the building site, is a little sandier than ideal).
There is an electric heater, but it is powered by photovoltaic panels. There are rooftop arrays of solar thermal panels, to heat water for household uses; and of photovoltaics to generate electricity - part of the latter array is a PV tracker that follows the sun's trajectory during the day to maximize solar gain.
"A typical house of this size has a heat load of 135,000 BTUs and we only require 35,000," Dancer said.
The home is equipped with a Lutron lighting system. The LED and compact-fluorescent lights can be activated to various "mood" profiles by pushing buttons on wall-mounted keypads.
Appliances are Bosch and are Energy Star-rated, including the electric induction cooker, which uses half the electricity of the typical home. According to bosch.com, the technology employs "the power of magnetic energy" to boil water almost twice as fast as on a gas cooktop.
Yes, the house costs more than a standard, traditional Santa Fe house, but that's comparing apples and kumquats, the developers say.
"In a traditional house of this size, the average utility bill is $600 per month, so over a 30-year loan period you're saving more than $215,000," Swisa explained. "Also, you can't really compare this to a standard house, because there are some less-tangible issues having to do with the carbon footprint. For example, we use a lot of reclaimed materials, so there's a level of resource efficiency your typical home doesn't have. And in our framing we use finger-jointed studs, so we're able to use shorter pieces of the two-by lumber that would normally go to the landfill."
You saw it first in the Santa Fe Real Estate Guide, but National Geographic may be next. Faren Dancer recently had a visit with a reporter from that magazine. She was at first interested in the water-saving features, but went away fairly excited about all the other aspects of the Emerald Home as well.
When he moved to Santa Fe in 1989, Dancer had behind him work as a laborer, woodworker, sculptor, homebuilder, and theater producer/director in California. He has settled into green building and green campaigning, but he still enjoys creating carved and inlayed sculptures and furniture.
Dancer is currently serving as president of the Santa Fe Area Home Builders Association. He and fellow members Dalinda Bangert and Kim Shanahan spent a great deal of time working with the city of Santa Fe's Katherine Mortimer to draft the new residential green-building code that went into effect on July 1.
"There are six categories in the Santa Fe Residential Green Building Code — site impact, water efficiency, resource efficiency, energy efficiency, indoor air quality, and homeowner education — and we're going to be the highest designation in all six, which is Emerald," Dancer predicted.
"Aside from these virtually carbon-dioxide-neutral fireplaces we're using, we don't have any carbon emissions at the site."
"Well, the barbecue," his wife, Lainey, said.
"The barbecue's the only one. We're pretty damn close," he responded.
Faren Dancer is working on curriculum materials for a Santa Fe Community College course in zero-energy building. The main teaching instrument will be the documentation of the Emerald Home construction; that documentation was financed by SFCC through a grant from the U.S. Green Building Council.
Maxine Swisa said they expect to complete the Emerald Home this month, and it will be on the Haciendas: A Parade of Homes tour in August. Meanwhile, you can find out more at theemeraldhomesantafe.com.
