Confusion With All The Green Building Standards Out There [Video]

SolarDave: Seems like there are a ton of standards out there from the City of Boulder Green Points, LEED points, HERS ratings - do your clients get as confused at I do with all these standards, do they even know about them or even care?

Mary Coonce: You most of them that come in are aware of energy efficiencies and want them on their home - I don’t know if they understand them completely but they know we match the green points and go above.

I have had people really investigate the standards, there are a lot things you can do on a practical basis with the green points rating and the HERS programs and that kind of thing that are very energy efficient very natural that they used to do automatically like how the house would face, south facing north facing, window placement - one of the easiest things to do is cross ventilation. We have a lot of windows in our houses so that is not a problem but a lot of subdivisions like Rock Creek or DR Horton or that kind of thing is just as few windows as possible. A lot of the homes were not built to be naturally efficient.

Getting back to your question Green Points, LEED points, HERS ratings - It is very confusing. It would be great if there was one standardized list. Every municipality has their own rules and guidelines it would be great if everybody had something a little more consistent.

It does cost more money to build in an energy efficient way especially to the level that the city of Boulder wants.

LEED certification is new to residential - they were mainly commercial for a while so now there is going to be an adjustment. I think Elisabeth Shutaka the one that led the green points program did a lot of research with the LEEDs program so I think there is a lot of overlap.

But one sure way to know if you houses is energy efficient is to get a blower door test done - you seal up the whole house, you have a fan basically that blows air through and they can tell where there is leakage. That is not going to tell you what the solar efficiency is going to do. That is a test you are going to have to do a test on every house to ensure that they are energy tight.