Future friendly homes don’t fit this mold. As the “Not So Big House” advocate and author Sarah Susanka invites, great homes needn’t be outsized to provide utility and comfort. Less space, designed wisely and using resources responsibly, can actually feel like more.  In turn, Passive House principles suggest that simpler forms and smarter building practices result in exceptionally efficient, durable, safe (healthy), and dependably comfortable homes. Unfortunately, measuring these qualities confounds the appraiser.

What’s a builder to do?

In a disturbing trend, the answer seems to be to fit that old oversized model in a new “green” girdle so it will appear inviting in its bright new green outfit. This outfit comes in many variations and features some gee whiz technologies that seem worthy of green bragging rights. As some of the participants in the CT Zero Energy Challenge proudly claim, you can have the “luxury and looks without sacrifice” and “make it look normal” as in being “virtually indistinguishable” from the conventional homes that banks and builders are longing to continue to build, finance, and sell.

An Entry in the Zero Energy Challenge

These “green giants” encourage us to believe that the building industry has this all figured out and we’ll be enjoying “Zero Energy” living in McMansions with solar panels and atrium entries. Overhyped and unnecessarily expensive ground source heating and cooling systems and (deeply subsidized) oversized solar systems are misguided substitutes for what we would be wise to acknowledge: Consuming less of a lot is not the same as responsibly using your fair share of enough. We will (and must) continue to understand more and more profoundly and consciously: Energy is precious.

Future friendly homes are a reverent response to this dictum. In time the market will recognize and reward the difference. For now though, the market confuses us into giving birth to these inappropriate and misleading “Jolly Green Giants.” They are the equivalent of that archetype of excess, the super-sized SUV, now being sold as a hybrid.

Don’t be duped!

People have been talking about this “zombie economy” and referring to “zombie banks” and looking at “zombie industries” like Detroit or education or the health care system and wondering how to bring them back to life. What exactly does this mean?

These zombies all have one thing in common. They are operating as if what worked when “things were good” is going to keep working if we can just provide the right stimulus or discover the right technology or act more efficiently. Let’s make Frankenstein walk!

But really, when “things were good” is more appropriately expressed as “when things were different”. Now that “things are bad” we need to acknowledge a simple, and liberating, truth: Things are different.

What this means is that we can’t count on the modes of operation that these zombies once lived by; notably cheap energy, easy credit, and a willingness to consume resources faster than they can be replaced. Those debts are coming due.

This requires us to ask new questions. If things are different, how do those differences invite us to act? Probably not by hoping we can make a better version of what isn’t working. Probably by endeavoring to acknowledge and respond to what has changed.

The building industry, like so many others, walks on in “zombie” mode trying to build “green” versions of the outsized and remote homes too many still equate with a past we might return to. It’s not going to happen. And more importantly, it shouldn’t.

The prospects for a living building industry depend on this necessary realization: our homes must endeavor to provide comfort and utility while using dramatically less energy and resources, less space with better utility, and at the same time provide significantly better comfort, health, durability, and stability. In short, we need “future friendly” homes.

To operate a building business that intends to walk among the living and not continue to march side by side with the living dead requires a commitment to discovery. To own up to the reality that “things are different” we depend on a healthy dose of curiosity and a equal measures of commitment and courage. We get up and come to work every day emboldened by this challenge.

We know we’re equipped to make this work.

It’s been a hot July. Day after day in the high 80’s and 90’s with only the briefest relief. Most folks respond by turning on the AC. It’s the “EASY” button for comfort in this heat.

No AC? Folks are calling our very busy HVAC contractor to see about installing a system in a house without one. That or getting the one that is installed to actually work. Too expensive? Then it’s a trip to the hundreds of stores advertising (inefficient)window units at cheap prices in the paper every cooling season. Or hauling out the units that have been stowed away since last summer.

But as author Stan Cox points out in his recent history of air conditioning “Losing Our Cool”, pushing this EASY button has consequences. The vast amount of energy required to run these systems is largely generated by fuels that are contributing to the very warming they are equipping us to endure.

It’s not that what we want is air conditioning. What we’re after is comfort. And comfort generally means relief from the oppressive heat and humidity. How much relief? Comfort certainly means different things to different people depending on their individual metabolic rates, activity level, and clothing as well as the temperature, humidity, and air movement in their environment. Can we control some of these to produce comfort without using so much precious energy? Absolutely.

First, when it’s this hot outside we’re hoping for a difference when we come indoors. And feeling a difference is the first step toward comfort. So what we are after is a difference between outdoors and in. How big a difference? That depends.

Some people demand refrigerator like levels of cool in the low 70’s. Others, conscious of the spike in their electric bills and as comfortable with it a few degrees warmer follow the common guidance of a setting at 78. Now here is where it gets interesting.

While the average high temperature for July is 85, the average low is 64. So nearly every 24 hours the nighttime cool is considerably lower than what we find comfortable when it is hot. If we can invite this cool nighttime air in, and then keep the daytime heat from warming that indoor air, we might not need to use energy to keep our cool!

There is nothing new about this idea. It has been practiced around the world in climates considerably more severe than ours. Prevent cool air from being warmed. Replace warm air with cool air when it is available.

Now back to the thermos. One of the most effective ways to do this is to construct a building that dramatically inhibits the ability of heat to be transferred from outside to inside (and vice versa in the winter for comfort then). The Passive House method is the gold standard in achieving this quality of building performance. Every method of heat transfer – conduction, convection, and radiation – is deliberately and rigorously controlled. Like a thermos keeping our drinks cold on a hot day, once an interior level of comfort is established, it is very slow to change, no matter the harshness of the temperature outside – summer OR winter.

But even in a home that is not constructed to the exacting standards of a Passive House, inviting cool nighttime air in and then keeping it there as the daytime temperature rises by closing and shading the windows can create a difference between inside and out that will be experienced as comfortable. Try it and see for yourself. In our arsenal of strategies to use energy responsibly, this one deserves your consideration.

Use less. Save more. Live comfortably.

For more on strategies to “keeping your cool” without excessive use of precious energy, visit this exceedingly practical advice for Simple Strategies for Keeping Cool from Alex Wilson at Building Green.

The poem is a keeper. Really, what’s enough?

So... is heat up the chimney causing the chill?

Among these virtues are strengths of character that require prudence: not being wasteful, saving money, using resources efficiently, living within means. It’s not hard to imagine how these qualities honor the realities of a finite world. Enough for all implies limits for each. These are the good deeds of a worthy citizen.

It seems quite reasonable that to live responsibly we would choose to use less energy, and that an easy place to start would be to turn down the thermostat. In varying degrees, some choose to suffer a little thermal discomfort in return for this virtuous action. This small sacrifice is a statement of character; or as Jimmy Carter famously suggested, a patriotic act.

But we’re only required to sacrifice comfort to exercise prudence because our homes don’t work that well. Cheap available energy made us oblivious to this fact until that year Jimmy offered us a sweater. But rather than fix our wasteful houses or build new ones that treated energy as a treasure we continued to fire up our furnaces and boilers, at least until we received a sobering utility bill or our personal resources were challenged. Then we reached for the thermostat and grabbed the sweater, translating misfortune into virtue.

Maybe instead we should consider how we might discover abundance in the face of scarcity. What if we could exercise prudence AND enjoy comfort. Why not build consistently more comfortable, healthier and more durable homes that use energy by the bucket rather than the barrel; stable homes that if you did change the temperature (or if the system were to go out) you wouldn’t notice for hours, because that is how these homes work.

So let’s put our homes on an energy diet by attending to the ways they perform. Then we can put away the sweater and be happy to invite friends over without shivering (they’ll actually help heat the place). There are certainly times and places that call for us to exhibit qualities of character that depend on personal sacrifice, compromise, and accommodation, but being uncomfortable in our homes needn’t be one of them.

Instead of suffering a virtuous chill, how about living in comfortable homes that happen to work that way while using less energy? What were those virtues: not being wasteful, saving money, using resources efficiently, living within means, honoring the realities of a finite world. What do you know:

Comfort & Character!

As I moved on to remodeling I got to take apart and reassemble all the pieces that don’t get painted. Over many years I’ve come to know every piece of a house pretty intimately: how they’re assembled and again, how they last and fail.

I’ve worked on every era of New England home, from neo-colonial to actual colonial, Victorian to ranch, homes built in the last few decades and the last few centuries, including a few we’ve designed and built ourselves. Remarkably, give or take their formal arrangement and the changing fashions of surface decoration, they’re all constructed in the same basic way. And despite some improvements in insulation and efficiency in equipment, they all leak air and energy (and yes, some more than others) in the same basic ways. And in that regard, as they have lasted, they are failing us.

That changes now. How our homes perform suddenly matters much more. Performance is an exciting new dimension to how we think about, build, and remodel those homes. As much as I love them, the same basic way all those homes were built is obsolete. It’s time to build different. It’s time to build better.

No more leaks as the source and mechanism of ventilation. No more big equipment to make up for lost heat. No more thin walls (yes, a 2×6 is a thin wall). No more ducts in the attic. And no more being a bit uncomfortable to save on fuel.

When we have the chance, we’ll work to overcome the liabilities of all those homes built in the same basic way. And everything new that we build will perform in a whole new way. Better thermal comfort. Better health. Better durability. Better stability for a decidedly uncertain future.

Newly aware, we know to stop building in the same basic way. Homes that fit are homes that work.

Built Different. Built Better.

We stand at the refrigerator and stare at the contents. We rummage through the boxes and cans and bottles and jars in the pantry. We open drawers of spices and grains and close them again. There is all this food. But there’s nothing to eat!

“We need to go shopping.”

“Let’s go out!”

“Let’s order a pizza.”

“Call Dad and he’ll pick something up on the way home.”

Days later we’re dumping rotting produce, outdated rice boxes, dried out spices, and that half jar of pasta sauce at the back of the fridge all covered with mold. All the food that was sitting there when there was “nothing to eat”.

Why don’t we “see” this food? Why can’t we make a meal that doesn’t come in a box or rely on the exact ingredients in a familiar recipe? Is it just easier and more desirable to go out or order in? What makes our abundance invisible?

I’m blaming the kitchen!

I’ve been cooking differently lately. It started with Terry Walter’s great book CLEAN FOOD and its focus on eating well by choosing fresh seasonal food acquired close to the source. It got me thinking about the role of our kitchens in the journey from farm to fork. Here’s what I noticed.

First, we are so accustomed to the way kitchens are set up and used that we don’t even notice that we generate a lot of waste because, well – its easier to throw things away than to compost or recycle. And our storage is designed to stock boxes and cans and bags and jars of prepared foods, but not necessarily set up to bring home raw beans, nuts, seeds and grains and put them up or prepare them to use.

So I removed my trash can and discovered that it wasn’t so hard to redirect most “waste” back to nature or another use. I replaced most of our plastic containers with glass and discovered the aesthetic delights of seeing beans, nuts, seeds, and grains and recognizing just what was in the refrigerator – because I could see it. It’s a start.

Bit by bit fewer and fewer of the foods I eat are coming out of packages and more and more are “real” food. Maybe best of all, getting closer to the food has me comfortably assembling meals from my abundance in ways that may not fit a particular recipe; I’m just gathering what’s fresh and combining it in familiar ways. I thank Terry for teaching me that.

But now I have a job to do. If I’m going to blame the kitchen, I need to examine all my assumptions about how kitchens are designed and strive to imagine new ways to create kitchens that encourage us to see our food. We need to open our pantries and crack the fridge and roll out the drawers and say, “Look at all there is to eat!”

It turns out that our houses ask us to come up with a host of similar workarounds for their shortcomings. Short on what we imagine were basic expectations for comfort and health, we’re left to acquire devices that might overcome these deficits. Fortunately (?) there are whole industries eager to help.

I got a catalogue the other day for products that are essentially solutions for the way our homes don’t work. Out of the box as it were. I started thinking about the insidious way in which we accumulate these devices and their costs accrue. They don’t last all that long, and they require all these replacement parts and filters, not to mention the energy required to use them, not a small thing for devices that often run 24/7 or use electricity to generate heat, the most demanding of household electrical applications.

Here’s a table of some of these devices, their cost and upkeep, and an estimate of their service life.

Here’s the thing that gets me about all this. We can design and build houses that make all this unneccesary. These workarounds cost thousands of dollars to buy, and hundreds to maintain and operate annually. Why is this?

First, until fairly recently, driven in part by the sudden awareness that climate change and the rapid depletion of cheap energy might make our current approach to building obsolete, we weren’t sufficiently aware that we could build remarkably better buildings. Now we know.

Second, (and here is the really hard part) we are inclined to tolerate conditions that are less than ideal. When we end up sick, or too cold or warm, or find our homes too dry or maybe growing mold, we employ these readily available workarounds. And when we are offered the opportunity to take actions to eliminate the conditions that create these maladies, whether in our existing homes or when contemplating constructing new, we become daunted by the necessity to make up front investments in perpetual relief from these intolerable states.

When we talk about Future Friendly Homes, this is what we are talking about. Being rid of these ridiculous workarounds. Cancel that catalogue. Live a better, more comfortable, and healthier life in a home that is designed to sustain it, right out of the box!

What did he mean?

Not that long ago when it was cold out, it was kinda cold in. Or hot for that matter. We had a pretty visceral relationship with our climate. Getting warm or staying cool were relative conditions that we tolerated broadly. There were fuels to gather and places to burn them, layers of clothing to assemble or shed, buildings shaped to shelter us from what was harsh or gather what was desirable: a breeze when it was hot or the sun when it was cold.

Along comes the industrial revolution and the discovery of oil, gas, and the generation and distribution of electricity and systems that could convert these remarkable sources of what was soon abundant energy into plentiful heat, and later cooling. It wasn’t long before there was this gizmo on the wall that would allow us to choose a steady state of comfort. That ubiquitous round thermostat was manufactured by Honeywell.

Why does it matter?

Well, once we had this comfort switch on the wall, and it was connected to a system that would churn out that comfort without requiring us to ever think much about it, we could go ahead and design buildings that were pretty much indifferent to the need to accommodate their climate. “Honeywell” took care of that.

We could, and did, add lots of windows, and created architectural bumps and jogs, and made our rooms taller, and our houses larger, all without consequence to our comfort. Honeywell took care of that. Well, almost.

Despite the mechanical marvels that promise us reliable comfort, many of our homes aren’t actually that comfortable. They can be drafty, hot here and cold there, stuffy, dry, dusty, moldy – all the while that thermostat is assuring us of a constant setting.

It has been our design habit to design the building the way we want it and, without climatic consequence, to expect those systems to make it comfortable. Honeywell put us to sleep.

If we wake up and pay attention, it turns out that we can actually have remarkably greater comfort, use less energy, and become aligned with the climate we live within. When we talk about Future Friendly Homes and Passive Houses we are talking about buildings that rely first on the genius of the building itself, and last on the small fraction of energy and systems we actually need to live much more comfortably than we presently know. Homes built with this wide-awake awareness are cleaner, healthier, have constant fresh air, and are reliably comfortable in every corner of the house.

It’s time to wake up!

Do fish know they’re wet?

Like clueless fish, we’ve lived within a world of cheap available energy our whole lives. We have no visceral understanding of how remarkable this actually is. For instance, what’s a Watt?

How’s this for a start. Lifting an apple from the floor to a tabletop every second equals one watt. Powering a laptop computer takes forty watts – or the equivalent of lifting a small basket of 40 apples to the table, every second. Do you see where this is heading?

Let’s keep moving.

1000 watts, or a Kilowatt is about what it takes to boil water. Our apples are already uselessly out of scale. A few guys on treadmills maybe? That might work. We’ll get to that.

Picture this: 33,400 Watts can be created over the course of an hour by one gallon of gas. That’s approximately the equivalent of a person working for three weeks.  Too abstract? Try this. Putting aside the efficiency of a particular vehicle, imagine the energy it would take for you to push your car the distance one gallon of gas propels it.

Impressed yet?

Let’s give another idea a try. Keeping in mind the remarkable capacity of fossil fuel energy, how about this notion.  Imagine a fit young person pedaling a stationary bike, without a break, riding up hill. Imagine that it would take 147 of these athletes – let’s just call them our energy slaves – riding up that hill to create the energy we depend on to live; that is to travel, light and heat our homes, keep our food fresh and cook it, entertain and clothe ourselves, and of course, to keep our phones charged and operate our televisions and computers. For instance, here’s what it takes just to light my home:

Don’t you find this metaphor compelling? One can imagine a vision of alternative energy that employs people’s eagerness to keep fit. Here’s what that might look like if I were to take that notion literaly:

Well it turns out that this notion was put to the test by the BBC. Take a look at this experiment in energy slavery. I’m thinking you’ll never take a shower for granted again!