Greening your existing home in Minnesota

The summer is almost over, and now is a great time to be making those energy improvements to your home! One great resource in Minnesota is the Neighborhood Energy Consortium. They can help you test your home's energy efficiency and also find energy loans, rebates and tax incentives to pay for improvements.

They also offer a great online tool which takes you room by room of a house, focusing on ways to reduce energy use without making huge improvements. Click here for the ENERGYSTAR @ Home Tool.

Rater solution and Greenbush LEED® registration completion

Today a compromise was reached about the LEED^® rater, who will verify that the house is built to the proper standards and will deliver this data to the LEED^® provider.

I wanted to use someone local to the Greenbush project, but a LEED-trained rater is not available in the region (a common occurance in rural areas). Currently, there are only a few raters with LEED-H training (LEED has plans to add more eventually). The closest is located in the cities, which is 6.5 hours away from the project.

However, a local RESnet energy rater has been found, and the LEED provider has okayed her involvement for the energy portion of the Greenbush project. She will not be able to sign off on any other data besides the energy portion, nor will she be able to receive official LEED training through the project, but she will gain LEED experience. She can become properly LEED trained later if she decides to.

The LEED rater (the rater for the non-energy portion) has agreed to minimize our travel costs as much as possible. I had hoped to get a guarantee from him that he wouldn't need to visit the site and that all data verification could be done digitally. He promised to try, but he has never worked with us or with our builder before, so it is understandable that this may not happen. Thankfully the worst case scenario is if that this project incurs a lot of travel expenses, it would still pave the way for future LEED projects in the area to go entirely digital and diminish travel expenses altogether.*

The LEED rater also applauded the fact that the project involves the local Community Alliance (our builder is from the NWCAA), because then the builder will gain green building experience that can spread throughout the community. I am going to invite other Community Alliances to look at the project so they can benefit as well.

So today I mailed the check into our LEED provider to complete the registration process. Here we go!

*(This is a pilot and a great deal of flexibility has been given. This is not business as usual because we don't know what the limitations will be when the program launches completely in a couple of months. LEED expects to add more people to cover a larger portion of the country sometime in the future.)

Finding a Local Energy Rater

Now that LEED^® registration is almost complete, it is time to choose an Energy Rater.

The Greenbush project is taking the Energy Star path of the LEED Energy and Atmosphere category. This means the home design will be evaluated for meeting Energy Star requirments, and then will be tweaked to increase the level of energy efficiency beyond Energy Star standards. More points can be achieved by incresing the level of energy efficiency. An energy rater is needed to measure and verify this data. They will sign off on the LEED Energy and Atmosphere credits and send the information to our LEED provider.

Typically the LEED provider can suggest an energy rater to you, and it will most likely be someone that they have had positive experience with (and someone that can do the non-energy data collection too - more about that later). If you are building a LEED Home in a rural area like I am, I would suggest shopping around a little bit. The rates to certify a home as Energy Star differ from rater to rater. You can use anyone as long as they are RESNET (Residential Energy Services Network) certified (this is true whether you certify the LEED Home using Energy Star's Guidelines, or LEED's guidelines for Energy). With energy-efficiency increasing in popularity, the number of RESNET certified raters is growing daily. To find a certified RESNET rater close to you, go here.

It is my strong belief that if you can go local, you should. Buying local has less environmental impact and stimulates the local economy. Using a local energy rater also means that value is placed on their services, which promotes sustainability for the entire community by increasing the likelihood that more people will seek energy-efficient practices after word-of-mouth advertising.

By choosing a local rater, there are economic benefits to your project as well. Energy raters in rural communities are typically cheaper than raters found near an urban hub. For example, one energy rater local to the Greenbush project was half as expensive as one based out of the metro area. Most raters charge for transportation and lodging costs as well, which can really add up if you they need to drive 6.5 hours like they would for Greenbush.

The energy rater will perform two site visits to test the home’s energy-efficiency. One is after insulation, just before drywall is installed. The other is just prior to occupancy. The onsite inspections should include the following:

• a blower door test to test the leakiness of the house,
• a duct test to test the leakiness of the duct system, and
• a thermal bypass inspection, which is a visual inspection of common construction areas where heat and cold can escape from a home.*

*information provided by the EPA

Energy rating is just one part of the LEED criteria verification. Other portions of it need to be verified as well. Sometimes, this person will be the same person who is your Energy Rater, if they have the proper training. As the LEED-H program has not been offiically rolled out yet, there may not be someone local to Greenbush to perform the non-energy data collection, and a rater from the metro area may have to be used. I am currently checking with the LEED provider on the options. I will get back to you on that progress as soon as I know!