B.K. – Barnardsville, North Carolina
Builder: Brian Knight, Asheville NC area (an amazing builder – Fine Homebuilding featured – knows his stuff!) www.springtimebuilders.com.
This home when reviewed by a HERS rater was the most energy tight home they had ever measured.
Client Comments on the Home's Energy Savings!
Blower Door Rating: 0.282 ach50
HERS Rating: 40
(EP note: most Eco-Panels clients do not bother with paying for a HERS rating – and for the HERS Ratings that we see on the market we often see little correlation with real world performance at the edges. Note we are perfectly fine with a client hiring a Home Energy Rating System professional, especially if the person putting the structure together is not familiar with high performance homes, but we have often seen those HERS raters give what we consider bad advice, so be careful and be as informed as you can. Certainly not all HERS raters are familiar with high performance homes either since stud framed homes are so common and that is what they are most familiar with. And beware of the ones that seem to just chase tax credits for the client – like many children chasing a soccer ball, they seem to miss the bigger picture.)
On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 4:10 PM BK wrote:
Charles,
We have come about a complete year of usage and we are quite pleased with the results. Granted we are not living there full time yet, but we are coming in far below the HERS projection. Our HERS rating was 40, and projected $1117 annual cost.
Original HERS Report Energy Consumption Estimation:
Actual Consumption:
On Thu, Aug 14, 2014 at 11:44 AM Charles Leahy wrote:
Thanks so much for this feedback – very informative, I think. I’ve got a couple of follow-up questions:
You note that you are still living in the home part time – What percentage of time are you living there?
Were you surprised with the only $136 credit for the solar? I would have assumed that this would have been feeding back to the grid year-round, regardless of when you were there.
Thanks again!
Charles
A note from the client about a year after they moved in — but had not yet moved to the area full-time:
Charles,
We occupy the house about 1/3 of the time, but we keep the HVAC, HRV, water sanitizer on at all times. Ironically, some of the smallest months bills were when we were around the most. For example November, December, June & July. When we are there we increase the amount of lighting we use, but that is almost exclusively LED. Our stove is induction, which is super-efficient too. We do use the wood burning oven (picture enclosed) to cook quite a bit. That leaves the geothermal system as the largest (winter) and smaller (summer) main energy consumer.
As you can see by the Jan-Feb bill, the geothermal efficiency falls in the deep of winter, and we don’t get the benefit of preheating our water heater water with the waste heat of the geo system. (Picture enclosed)- Geo on right, pre-warms the buffer tank in the middle with waste heat, and buffer tank supplies warmed water to heat pump water heater on left. The buffer tank is not electrified.
The $1117 Estimate is from our actual HERS report, so that was our target number for our 1st year. We only have 1kW of solar array installed at this time, the other 2kW will come sometime in the future as the budget allows. We do not currently have a solar power tracking system to record the actual electrical production, so all production is netted out. But if the HERS -$136/kW solar production holds true, we could be looking for annual electric bills in the $355/yr range when we build out the addition 2kW in the solar array.
A note from the client in 2020:
Eco-Panels Team,
We have been in our home for seven years and we are very satisfied with our decision to use Eco-Panels. The house is incredibly quiet and energy efficient too. We average less than $500 annually for our electricity usage, and we are all electric household utilizing ground source heat pump for a/c and heat. Being at higher elevation we get plenty of wind and we never hear creaking from the structure shifting in the wind. We spent quite a bit of time researching materials and systems and we are totally satisfied with our selections. I would certainly use Eco-Panels SIPs if I was to build again.
Latest Energy Data for Previous Year
