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Earth Day 2020
Carriage House Retrofit wins AIA DC Citation for Sustainable Design!
The DC Chapter of the AIA held its annual awards jury this week, and our Stable Carriage House retrofit won a Citation for Sustainable Design. All of Izumi’s hard work managing a very difficult project paid off! Congratulations to the entire team. You can see who was on the team and check out the project […]
Arlington Zero Energy Passive progress: footings in place
After extensive excavation on a difficult site, the footings were poured this week, and as I write this post, the formwork for the basement walls is going up. What makes the site so difficult is the steep slope and the very little room onsite for equipment and storage of earth. The procedure for the footings […]
DC Landmark Stable and Carriage House Deep Energy Retrofit Now Complete
Work is now complete on our DC Landmark carriage house deep energy retrofit. We have published pictures and a description of the project here.
Work begins on our newest Net Zero home
Site work has begun on our newest net zero home. The builder is O’Neill Development, with whom we have worked on all of our Passive Houses. The first step was to de-construct the original house, in which the owners had lived for the past twenty years. De-construction is being completed this weekend by Deconstruction Services, […]
Report from our Maine Deep Energy Retrofit
My family just spent two weeks of Christmas vacation in the 1850 SF farmhouse we renovated last year. You can learn more about the renovation on that blog. Here is how it performed with a family of 5 plus a couple of extras beds filled from time to time: Heating: We heated exclusively with […]
A proposed microgrid community of modular net zero homes
This YouTube video is a presentation we just did for a community development group in Virginia interested in developing a new neighborhood of high performance net zero energy homes. Our concept is based upon using a combination of several basic modular designs to create both single family homes and duplexes. We show them with both […]
The Microbiome and Your Home
I have been reading recently of developments in the study of the human microbiome and its interconnection with the larger environment. It is changing my thinking about how we should be building our houses (and hospitals!). A microbiome is basically the collection of organisms that inhabit a particular environment, be that the intestine or a […]
Recent speaking engagements
It has been a long time since our last post and I’ll start with an update of some speaking engagements, as we have continued over the last year to get out the word on high performance building design. In June, Matt and David both gave presentations at the Arlington Initiative to Rethink Energy workshop On […]
Work underway on Landmark DC Carriage House Deep Energy Retrofit
Construction is underway on our first deep energy retrofit of a historic structure. The Spencer Carriage House, listed as a DC Landmark and on the National Register of Historic Places, was built in 1905 to serve one of the large mansions in the Dupont Circle area. It is one of the last of these carriage […]
Open House at Fairfax Net Zero Home on March 25
The Fairfax zero energy home will be complete within the month, and the garage is expected to be complete by mid-May. Our will be opening the house on the 24th to Fairfax County officials, and have generously allowed us to follow up that tour with two open houses on Saturday the 25th. The morning tour is […]
The Fairfax Zero Energy House: Mechanical system overview
The mechanical system for the Fairfax house differs from our earlier houses in several ways. We have zoned the house differently; we have taken a different approach to the heating and cooling equipment; and we have changed the ERV equipment. This house is zoned from side to side rather than up and down. This decision had to […]