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By Lisa Loy
If you go back to when I started building, 17 or 18 years ago, it wasn’t called “green,” Tom Haddon said. “You might have heard about solar, or passive solar. There were all kinds of alternative building strategies, but they were very fringe. In fact, they wouldn’t fit into most communities because they wouldn’t fit the covenants or architectural standards or anything else. It was so out of the mainstream. But, in the last several years, the green movement has grown, and it has really developed to the point where people are beginning to ask for it. The market is changing. Builders, if they’re not already interested in it, they soon will be, because they’re going to be asked about it.”
At the recent Albemarle Green Building Seminar and Expo presented by College of the Albemarle and the UNC Coastal Studies Institute and sponsored by the Outer Banks Homebuilders Association, the auditorium included many interested builders.
Tom Haddon said he thought it was interesting the way one of the speakers described commercial buildings who said, “when you build an office building now that’s not green, and you go to sell it five years from now, you are going to get discounted because your building is obsolete.”
“I don’t think that that’s far away in residential,” Tom said. “It may be five to ten years, but it’s not far off. And a lot of it hinges on the things that are being developed now in terms of the green building certification process. Once there is a widely accepted standard, now there are 25 to 30 different standards that have been developed, but there’s not a national standard yet. That’s about to change. The National Association of Homebuilders, at its show down in Orlando that just happened, rolled out their green building guidelines and that will probably become a standardized form within the next few months.”
He believes that once there is a standard to build to, it will eliminate confusion for the consumer. Tom said he believes it’s an exciting time to be a builder. People feel some responsibility and are much more conscious about green. That may be due in part to concerns about the warming earth.
“I really think it coincided with the global warming movement. I really do,” he said. “It seems like in the last year or so, there’s been this mind shift in the public. People have changed from thinking ‘We don’t know if it’s real’ to ‘it’s real.’ That concern coincides with the recent energy crisis. People are aware, and they have a growing interest in energy efficiency. Green is more than that, but that’s a key part of it. And that’s where builders can start – with energy efficiency. It’s the stuff that makes sense to people.”
If people are already dialed in to energy efficiency, getting them interested in the rest isn’t that big of a leap and Tom Haddon said he thinks concerns about global warming really woke people up to their environment.
“Look at the national media, they don’t pooh pooh it anymore. If you’ve got John McCain talking about global warming...well, we’re there, okay.” He laughed. “It’s over, we’ve all accepted it. And you’ve got to give Al Gore a lot of credit, he’s been fighting that fight for 20 years. I think he shifted public opinion.”
On a local level, the Outer Banks Homebuilders Association has formed a Green Building Council that Tom co-chairs with Dennis Saver.
“Our focus this year is education primarily for our builders, and we hope to have some education for our consumers too. We are working toward adopting what’s called a green building calculator. That’s a means of certifying homes to different levels of green. That would be like a bronze level, a silver level and a gold level. This is what the National Association of Homebuilders has just rolled out.”
The green building calculator is actually software that Tom believes will be out by summer.
“There is widespread interest from builders, but builders are concerned about the cost of green, the cost of incorporating green technology, strategy, and what will the consumer pay for.
“Once you get people thinking green, and doing some green things, the rest will come, I think what’ll happen first is the energy efficiency aspect of green building.”
Haddon has already started. He’s putting the finishing touches on a new model home in a new development called Croatan Woods on Roanoke Island. It will be a certified Energy Star home. This means that there is a tight building envelope, a sealed ductwork system, above code insulation, and energy efficient appliances. In 2007 only two percent of the homes built in North Carolina were built to Energy Star standards.
“Certification is made by a 3rd party verification so that’s important to consumers that we’re not just saying it’s green, it actually gets tested,” he said.
He’s working with a company out of Raleigh called 36 Degrees South that performs various inspections during the building process such as a duct blaster test to test your duct work for leakage and a blower door test that checks the building envelope for tightness. He also said that locally, Dominion Power has a representative on the Homebuilders Association board who is enthusiastic and working hard to provide area builders with that service soon.
“When you get the results of the tests, you know quantitatively that the house will perform x-percent better than the building code accepted standard now. So that’s Energy Star, dealing with the energy efficiency and indoor air quality part of green building and that is where I think builders can start. And it’s a great place to start because it will save people money on their energy bills and they can relate to that. The extra that you spend, you’re going to get it back. It justifies the outlay and five to ten years from now I think, if you go to sell your home and you had it built as an energy efficient or Energy Star home, you will command more for that home than a home that’s not built to that standard. What’s the price that energy is going to be five years from now, ten years from now?”
“Depending on the size of the house, it can add three to five thousand dollars to the cost of construction, and if you do that, to the Energy Star standard, you’re going to get information from these testings that show how much energy this house should save, you’ll
know how much your electric bill should be reduced on a monthly basis. And your payback is short. It’s usually two to four years on a payback for the money you lay out.”
“The other bonus is, by building a house to be very energy efficient, you may be able to downsize your heating and cooling equipment. The house is so much tighter that the load on the house is less. It doesn’t always work that way, it depends on the size of the house including how high the ceilings are. The volume can change with the square footage but often you can reduce it half a ton, something like that. So you get a little back there, right off the bat.”
He’s excited about working with the Harvey family, the developers of Croatan Woods because they want to incorporate green not just with the homes but also throughout the neighborhood. “They are 100 percent behind it.” The 40-plus half acre wooded lots in the development, which is enhanced by a soundside park with a sandy beach and a gazebo, are surrounded by National Park Service land so “it’s secluded, it’s quiet.”
“The cool thing about working with Wallace Harvey is he’s a tree hugger of the first order which is wonderful. We marked every single tree we could possibly save,” Tom Haddon said. “In fact, the rear deck on the model home wraps around a tree. We’re excited about what we’re doing and the option of going green in this natural setting. We’ll get those people that want to be green.”
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