(upbeat country music) (upbeat country music) (whooshing) (shimmering) (shimmering) (whooshing) - Hi, I am Paul Kriescher, welcome to "Heart of a Building”.

Did you know that buildings account for about 40% of all energy use in the United States?

We're hoping to make a dent in that percentage.

This show dives into building designs that are cutting-edge, really pushing the envelope of energy efficiency and sustainable living.

Along the way, we'll also explore the motivation of the people involved in these great projects.

In short, the “why”.

Today, we're in a quiet neighbor in Westminster, Colorado between Denver and Boulder, at the home of John Avenson.

Though you might not be able to tell at first glance, this is a net-zero energy home.

This means this home creates as much energy as it takes.

And it goes even further to be a zero-carbon home, which means it's a home that does not emit greenhouse gases at all.

John has been on the cutting-edge of sustainability and technology since his home was built in 1981 and he never stops pushing for better results.

He's always happy to share what he has learned.

In fact, his home's a research center for those interested in following in his footsteps.

We'll get to the “how”, but first, let's talk about his “why”.

Come on along with me.

Come on along with me.

John, it's so wonderful to be here at the Avenson residence, checking out your home.

You are such the embodiment of educating people about energy efficiency and sustainability in homes, we had to do an episode on you.

Why did you buy this home decades ago, and why have you been working on doing so many great things to make this an amazing home?

- When I was nine years old, Dad took us on the family trip to the Indian cliff dwellings of Colorado, and the ranger there told me that they dug their houses on the side of the cliff, where the sun hits them in the wintertime.

And I'm thinking, as a 9-year-old, "Well, why don't they make houses like that, instead of the furnace running?"

Plus you had the science fictions going on, of the '60s, and so this house is an embodiment of Anasazi, 1,000-year-old Indians, and science fiction.

(chuckles) When Carter created this project and he created SERI, Solar Energy Research Institute, it was like a choir of angels to me going, (gasps) here's my 1,000-year-old Anasazi house in modern version.

And yet it's also my Jetson house in the first ever parade of green homes.

- For the original tour, there were 12 homes.

And what year was that again?

- In 1981, February, March.

- John's home is an excellent example of beneficial electrification.

What is beneficial electrification, you might ask?

(upbeat country music) (upbeat country music) If you start with solar, you've started at the wrong end of the equation.

You wanna start at the beginning looking at insulation, the air tightness, the windows, then looking at the mechanical systems to be electrified.

And that's a simple way to think of it, but, in this episode, you'll see how we walk through a checklist of the things that get you from point A, if you're at the very beginning of starting your journey to make your home more in harmony with nature and wanting to become beneficially electric, all the way to the end.

Doing this all in the right order will save you money.

Doing this all in the right order will save you money.

The first step of doing your beneficial electrification starts by having an energy audit of your home.

John has had multiple energy audits.

Like going to the doctor to get a checkup, he goes back every so often and gets an update.

But start with your first visit to the home doctor, and get on your pathway to beneficial electrification.

After the energy audit, what you do to air-seal and better insulate any home, any building, is critical.

And, again, to get the beneficial electrification, you want to have a great thermal envelope, with high levels of insulation, great air tightness.

And today, I get to spend time with Todd Collins, air-sealing insulation expert.

Todd, thank you so much.

- Thanks for having me on.

- Now, you've worked on this home of John's on a number of different occasions, and air-tightness is a critical piece.

- Right.

- Share with us why it's so important to have a great airtight home or building.

- Some would say that a house needs to breathe, and it really doesn't, it needs to be vapor-open.

If moisture gets into your house or into your wall assemblies, it will actually damage the walls.

And there's a membrane that goes on the exterior (blooping) and it's a blue membrane, and it's very strong, and it's like Gore-Tex for your house.

- Ah, okay.

- So the way to think about that is, Gore-Tex will allow vapor, (blooping) or sweat, in the case of a jacket, out of your jacket.

- Yeah.

- And that's exactly what you want, you want the walls to be able to dry.

You don't want 'em to breathe, you want them to be able to dry.

- Yeah.

- And on the inside, you would use a more vapor-closed product, that, there's now smart membranes that are dual-permeance membranes.

So, in short, you want it as tight as possible.

- Good.

- The key is, is once you get it very tight, you have to mechanically ventilate the building.

- Yeah.

- So, make it tight, ventilate right.

- Right.

- I have a shirt that actually says that.

- I love it.

(laughs) (Paul laughing) - Now I get to spend time with Ty Newell, an indoor air quality specialist.

In many homes and buildings we've been involved with, one concern that's always come up is people are saying, you know, "If I build this home so tight, aren't I gonna make it an unsafe space to be in?"

- I mean, absolutely.

You seal up, you know, you're in a spacecraft, a submarine, or deep in a coal mine, and you don't have sufficient air, and you don't have sufficient air, it's bad for you.

And what's gonna be bad for you is your own breath, that's what's gonna kill you, not a lack of oxygen.

Having the capability to both push and pull air into a home is very important.

- So, the ERV that is in John's home, I'll just say this, is a beautiful example of smart-home technology that's using sensors to say when it really needs to run that's using sensors to say when it really needs to run to deliver fresh air into the home.

- It's not that we're advocating a huge amount of ventilation, and walk into a space, that space is gonna sense me bring in 40 cubic feet or more of airflow, and when I walk out, it's gonna drop down.

That turns out to be a lot less ventilation than today's odor-based ventilation, which is simply blowing air all the time everywhere.

With all the synthetic materials surrounding us, our noses just aren't tuned to a lot of these chemicals that are creating so many problems.

And I served on an air quality advisory board with a fellow named Caleb Finch, and he's a faculty member at University of Southern California, and he started the field of the science of aging.

He is in his eighties, and he'll tell you with certainty that three quarters of cancers have environmental background in it.

The lower we get particulates, the better.

(cheery country music) (cheery country music) - I super-insulated the house in 2015.

Even though in 1981, the house did have an inch-and-a-half of polyiso rigid foam panels on the outside at that time.

- Wrapping the entire home.

How much thicker is it now?

- Now that wall is eight inches thick.

- Eight inches thick (blooping) as far as extra insulation outside the framed walls.

- Right.

- And you have insulation between the framed walls, but eight inches of foam on the outside of the frame walls, which is amazing.

(blooping) In the 1970s, ‘50s, '60s, a lot of homes did not have any wall insulation, just like shows in this demonstration.

John's home, because it was a research home in 1981, at least had R9 in the walls.

But you took a step fairly quickly on, to do what, what did you do here?

- I knew that I had not only a low R value, but a leaky house.

- Okay.

- By dense-packing into all the corners, and around breaker boxes, we now have a hugely increased less leaky house on a windy day.

- So you hired a company that came in and drilled holes into each of the wall cavities, right?

- Yep.

- And ran a fill tube down to dense-pack it full of cellulose over the top of the fiberglass.

- Correct.

- It's a great step.

It's still a challenging step for a lot of people, because you have to patch the holes, because you have to patch the holes, even the texture on the walls, and then repaint, so that was a big step.

- But it was a more comfortable and quieter house with this dense packing.

(upbeat country music) - To show how much more comfortable the walls are now, we conducted a test with a blow dryer on the model.

The original insulation was much less effective than the dense-packed cellulose insulation.

Dense-packing can be done in any home with under-insulated wall cavities.

with under-insulated wall cavities.

(upbeat country music continues) (upbeat country music continues) Step four on the checklist, windows.

Thank you, Craig, for being here today.

Your company put these windows into John's home, and these are quite exceptional windows, but they're, thankfully, becoming more common.

- John has both fixed windows and operable windows, and he chose to utilize our Quad Pane 9 Series glass in those windows.

And the uniqueness about that, is it's the most insulating windows manufactured in the country.

- Tell me about the solar heat gain coefficient, 'cause my understanding of that, that's the amount of sunlight hitting the window that passes through, and brings us beneficial free heating in the winter time.

So, how are these windows doing?

- We will directionally tune the structure with solar heat gain of low, medium, or high solar heat gain, to allow more solar heat gain to come into the structure so you can use that as energy, or to push it away.

In John's case, with a very passive house-inspired type build, he has all of these windows on this side of the building as high solar heat gain, so they're gaining that southern exposure to the sun, and harnessing the power of the sun to create energy inside of the house that can be reused.

- So, in this case, you have these south facing windows on both levels, let in around 40 or 45%.

- Yeah, right around 45 to 50.

- Yeah, and I know a lot of new windows, people are blocking out like 70 or even 80% of the heat.

So, it's great to let that free heat in.

But these, it's pretty exceptional that they can let that much heat in, 'cause these are four panes of glass, correct?

- Well, they're four layers of surfaces that are inside this.

You have two panes of glass on the outside, and then, in the center we have, what we've traditionally manufactured is a mylar film that has a low-E coating on it.

And in John's case, there's two of those layers in the center, and that's where you get your quad glazing.

One millimeter-thin glass on the inside, still really lightweight, but allowing us to get a triple or a quad pane unit into that same framing structure.

- So, thin glass, like one millimeter of thickness, what can we compare that to as far as- - You have it on your cell phone you have it on flat screen TVs.

- It's that thin?

- Yeah, that's what you see utilized in the technology, our latest technology of our windows.

- And that's to make the windows lighter.

Having that extra air gap adds so much.

(upbeat country music) Now we get to be tickng items five and six off the checklist, having to do with space heating and cooling, as well as domestic water heating.

Bill, thank you.

- Hey, Paul.

Nice to see you.

- Good to see you.

So, you were involved in John's home on the mechanical systems for this home.

- I was.

- So, for starters, tell me what is a heat pump?

- It sounds complicated, it sounds fancy, but your refrigerator's a heat pump, your air conditioner is a heat pump.

So, anytime you're not using electricity to go through a resistive element like a toaster, to create heat, you're using energy to move a liquid, a refrigerant.

- Yeah.

- But anything can be a refrigerant, anything that can change phase.

And with a heat pump, specifically for heating and cooling a house, or heating water, we're basically taking heat from one place, and we're pumping it to another place.

Let's say we're trying to heat our house when it's zero degrees, or -10 degrees.

Well, that's a lot warmer than -30, or minus -50, or -100, so there's still a lot of heat.

So, it's not a matter of, "Oh, it's -10 outside.

We can't get heat from outside and bring it in," because we're taking little pieces of heat, and those extra degrees that we're gathering, we can gather a lot of 'em, and bring 'em into a house and heat our house.

So, we're not creating heat, we're not burning things, we're not burning electrons, we're using electrons.

So there's what's called a coefficient of performance.

- Yeah, CoP.

- A CoP.

So, the warmer it gets, the easier the heat pump has.

Hey man, it's 65 out, he wants it at 70?

Eh, I don't have to work very hard.

It's 20...I need to work a little harder.

It's -20...I gotta work.

- There's some magic in what happens, like you said, to get the air from outside when it's, let's say -5.

When that happens, how is it getting up to 90 degree air, and moving that through?

It has to do with phase change, right?

- It does have to do with phase change.

- It's all magic.

It's physics.

- So, I'm a avid cyclist, as I know you are as well, we've ridden before together.

So, they now have, instead of using a pump to pump up your tires when you're out in the middle of nowhere and you get a flat, they have CO2 cartridges that are filled with air, and these are filled with high-pressure air.

And as soon as you open that CO2 and expel all of that high pressure air into your tire, and blow it up, the pressure increases here, and if you could feel it, it would get warm.

But what you're holding onto is the CO2 cartridge, it gets really cold.

You've dropped the pressure, and it got cold.

That's all a heat pump does.

And so, it's just physics.

This stuff's been around forever We've been cooling like this for 100 years.

- (chuckles) Right.

- But we're now recognizing that hey, burning fossil fuels is basically releasing sunshine that's been stored for years.

Let's use sunshine now to power these electric appliances, really reduce the amount of carbon that we're releasing when we burn it.

And so you get this almost magical solution, in a way.

- Yeah.

- And it goes beyond heat pumps, it's to cars, it's to stoves, it's electrifying our life.

- Right.

- But heating and hot water, this is the future.

- So, John's home has a heat pump-based water heater.

- That's right.

That's right.

- So, tell me a bit about that.

- So, it's the same idea with an air conditioner, we're moving heat from inside the house to outside the house to make it cool.

Well, if you think about a heat pump reversing, we are moving heat from out to in, a heat pump water heater moves heat from out, and it can be air sourced, it can be ground sourced, and it moves it to in.

So, what is in is the water tank.

We're moving heat, and in this case, we're moving heat out of the air, the ambient air, it's making the air colder to make the water warmer.

So, new heat pump water heaters operate at a CoP, Coefficient of Performance, of almost four, meaning they're 400% efficient, four times more efficient than burning electrons in an electric water heater.

- Right.

Yeah.

- Which makes it cost a fourth as much, and it makes the cost of heating your water less than it does with gas.

- Yeah so, along with saving energy heat wise and electricity wise, is water savings.

- Right.

- And so, just like hotels have constant hot water when you turn on their faucet, there's a recirculating pump.

So, the pump is underneath the bathroom vanity, push a button in the morning, and it turns on the pump, the hot water comes across the house, it hits a thermometer on that pump, and shuts the pump off.

Now when I go to wash my face, the hot water's immediately there.

Such a luxury.

- So yes, you have great comfort while saving energy, while saving water.

- Yeah, there wasn't two minutes of cold water going down the drain.

(upbeat country music) (upbeat country music) - Checklist item number seven, solar PV.

And I get to be talking with Whitney and Bart, who are solar PV experts who've installed the solar PV system for John here in his home, and this is a great system, an over 14 KW system that's on this home, with battery backup.

- For John, you know, his goal is to be self-contained.

- Okay.

- And he's built this very efficient home.

It's a very responsible approach he's taken, and it's a really responsible solar system as well, in the sense that he's offsetting his demand, and he's doing it at the most important times of day by using the battery to mitigate.

When the grid is under burden, John is operating instead off his battery, he's not demanding from the grid, he's not driving that curve of high demand.

- So not just being in harmony with nature by having the green electrons, but he's working to help the utility company be able to have something that works better for his neighbors.

- Yes, and he's electrified everything in his home, so, when he is doing that, he is not demanding anything else on the fossil end, he's using just the power he's made here on-site.

- Truly making him zero carbon in his operation.

- It's absolutely essential to electrification.

- Now, Bart, I want to ask you, I'm curious, there's some panels on the north side of the home, and my training back in the day is like, "Huh, that's odd."

- You know, when we first started installing solar, it was about $10 a watt.

- Okay.

- Installed.

- Okay.

- We're installing solar now from, it depends on the size of the system, but a system this size without a battery (blooping) is about $3 a watt.

- Okay.

- So when we first installed everything faces south.

- Yeah, it's expensive.

- Yeah, it's expensive.

(blooping) - But this is a retrofit, and it only has so much roof on the south side.

- Okay.

- John wants to offset all of his usage.

And so, yeah, you'll make maybe 20% less.

If it's on the north side, it's fairly flat, so you're getting quite a bit of sun still.

- Yeah so, about 80% of what you get on the south side?

- Surprisingly.

Yeah.

- So that was all to optimize, and that was part of him wanting to have the battery, and wanting to offset and avoid demand charges that many of us now face from utilities, like peak time of use, and so he avoids all that, he's generating all the power he needs, and having this battery offset if it was a cloudy day, right?

- He's getting an additional financial benefit when he's doing that.

When he leans on the battery at the costly times of day, he sends his extra solar out to the grid, and he is getting that higher rate in recompense.

- Ah, that's called paying it back.

- So, it's very thrifty.

(laughs) - Yeah, very smart on his part.

Now, solar, historically, had been one of the most expensive things to do on the sustainability side.

Sounds like that's changing.

- It's changed a lot.

It's a conversation changer, because, truly, in the big picture, we're not gonna get where we need to get if we can't have the entire middle class in the conversation, because most of the energy use and most of the rooftops.

- Yeah.

- And we gotta be able to make that accessible.

- Yeah.

- And so, fortunately, with the cost coming down, and, you know, really good financing, because people who buy solar systems pay back their financing, and so all of those doors open to really provide some reassurance to us, as a society, that we can get where we need to get.

(upbeat country music) (upbeat country music) - Now we get to spend time looking at smart technology.

John's home integrates so many amazing, practical things that help for comfort, help for energy efficiency, help with entertainment, and absolutely help with convenience in making his home work optimally.

He's been an innovator in it.

Jon-Luke West, an expert in this area, tell me a bit about what John has done in this home.

Can you highlight some of the things that he's integrated into this home?

- Yeah, the best way to say this is, everything.

(Paul laughing) Really.

- It's not surprising to me.

- Right?

- What is a smart home?

- For most people these days though, the vision of a smart home is a smart speaker, a voice assistant, a light.

- Or maybe turn on the lights, on and off.

- Exactly.

A light turning on and off.

So that, though, is not smart.

That's just a fancy remote control.

- Ah, okay.

- You're still doing everything, - Ah.

- Right, if your home is not helping you make decisions, - Right, if your home is not helping you make decisions, is it smart?

So, you have to control everything, you have to set all of that up.

But so how do we actually make it smart?

- Yeah.

- Data.

- Okay.

- Sensors.

- Okay.

- Looking at everything.

Watching it.

Right?

And I know that might seem a little scary at first.

- If you have more data collection, more sensors, plenty of people are like, "Whoa, big brother, there's people watching.

What is going on?

I'm a little worried about my data getting out there."

How is that avoided?

Or how do you tackle that?

- It's a fantastic question.

It's something I really, really want to encourage people to focus on, so I'm really, really happy that you're talking about this.

- Yeah.

- Too often I get this attitude "Eh, my data's already out there."

You know?

Or, "I'm not worried about it, I'm probably already exposed."

No, no, no.

Let's actually be worried about this.

- Yeah.

- And if there's so much data being collected in your home, not just about your home, but about you, and anybody else that is in your home, we have to think about protecting that.

- Yeah.

- So, the best way to think about that, and start it is, is the data leaving the home?

- Okay.

- So, cloud is the term that we're all now familiar with.

- Right.

- Right?

- Isn't that more secure?

- No.

- Oh, okay.

- No.

Right?

Because the data leaves your hands.

You don't have control of it anymore.

- Okay.

- So the best way to approach this is to think of everything as locally controlled.

- Okay.

- Make sure that your devices are talking to something in your home.

These are single-board computers and it's everything in your laptop or your desktop, but mashed down into about this size, right?

- Okay.

- So, that is a great example of what we can do with the technology now.

You don't need a server.

Like we say, server, yes, right, but we're not talking a big computer, talking something about this big smaller than the router, in your home.

- Now, you have some really cool features in this home.

The mylar blinds on here are there to help keep the heat out when the home gets too warm in the summertime, but also probably helps with glare.

- In 1981, as part of this project, solar shades were the big fad, and so all these windows were wired for electric shades way back then.

- Yeah.

- So that you can have active control of the heat.

So the inside shades come down like this, (shades whirring) and they are reflective, they're gonna keep the heat in the house.

When the clouds come, the shades come down, keep that heat in the house.

When the sun comes back up, the shades go back up, and that says a one-way valve, let the sun in, but don't let the heat out.

- Beautiful, and it's automatically set to be in harmony with the cycle of the year, right?

- It's all temperature-controlled, with temperature sensors on the glass.

There's a weather station up on the roof.

- Okay.

- All that goes to the central house-monitoring computer.

I'm trying to make it the most sustainable house possible.

And that takes a lot of smarts and sensor input.

The lights in the house will turn off (blooping) after I leave a room.

And then another one that I love is, if the stove is left on more than 45 minutes, (blooping) we blink all the lights in the house on and off.

- Really?

- The last thing I can think of is sensors in the chair.

You sit in the chair, and the immediate task light comes on near that chair for reading.

- It's so fantastically convenient.

- I got conscious of nature.

- Okay.

- In the '50s, we actually heard that we had conquered nature.

- Right.

- And so I'm always thinking about, how can I be in harmony with nature?

It's driving my life, driving the reason for this house.

The city planning should allow all homes to have winter solar access.

Trees should not be blocking the southern windows.

- Right.

- And even landscaping is so important.

If you're looking out the window you'll see that the left pine tree is short, the next one's tall, or taller, that's 7:00 AM in the winter, eight o'clock, nine o'clock, 10 o'clock.

(Paul laughing) - So, you even pruned the trees to be optimizing with the home.

That's outstanding.

- The first winter season, I'm gonna bring the public in, and I'm gonna teach them what's possible.

Don't settle for minimum code homes when you can have free energy houses.

- Right.

- And, at the same time, I wanna show that this is not the hippie movement, I am living in super luxury.

- Yeah.

- And I don't have to sacrifice anything to have an energy-free house.

- Yeah.

(upbeat country music) - John's home is such an amazing of what can be done in homes all across the country.

A special thank you to John for sharing his research and knowledge with all of us.

And thanks also to everyone we spoke with who helped make this home a reality.

who helped make this home a reality.

And of course, thanks to you for joining us, and we'll look forward to seeing you next time.

(upbeat country music continues) (upbeat country music continues) (shimmering) (shimmering) (upbeat country music continues) (upbeat country music continues) (person laughing) (person laughing)