"Green Geeks" Prove Benefits of Green Building | Green Real Estate ...

For the past three years, Catherine and Paul Mohr have been busy designing and building their dream green home in Mountain View, California. But the Mohrs are not your average green home builders. They design surgical robots for a living, and as self-professed ?green geeks,? are incredibly brainy.

So to help the rest of us follow their green home-building adventures?and perhaps inspire some to follow in their path?they created a blog documenting the process in exhaustive detail. 301 Monroe, as the site is known, attempts to track the embodied energy expended by the construction and maintenance of the house, down to the kilowatt.

Frustrated with media reports that look only superficially at green home improvements, or focus exclusively on improvements that make relatively little difference like finishings, the Mohrs set out to determine just how energy-efficient their new home could be. They undertook this daunting task the only way they knew how?by tirelessly counting, measuring, and estimating every last bit of expended energy.

The results, while not entirely surprising, are compelling enough to convince the most steadfast of green building skeptics. As built, the Mohr home cost 151,355 kilowatt/hours (kWh) of embodied energy, which is the amount of energy expelled from the excavation, processing, transportation, and construction of all the materials used in the home. That is less than half the 365,687 kWh spent on the average U.S. home.

They were able to achieve such a drastic reduction in construction-based energy consumption by implementing a laundry list of sustainably grown and processed materials like high fly ash concrete, cellulose and strawbale insulation, bamboo flooring, and locally-sourced stone.

The Mohrs also calculated that the new home uses only 7,149 kWh of energy per year, compared to 32,864 for the typical home. Contributing to these annual savings are a passive solar heating system, heat recovery ventilation, superb insulation, and earth tubes.

Of course, as the Mohrs are quick to admit, the construction of any new home is most often more energy-expensive than the retention of an old home. But the couple calculated that the new green home is so energy-efficient that it offsets the energy expended during construction in just 6 years. Renovating the existing house to a more environmentally-friendly standard would still need as long as 22 years to recoup the energy expended during new construction.

So the Mohrs did all they could to mitigate the environmental impacts of new construction. After having bought an existing midcentury ranch home with an expansive yard, the Mohrs deconstructed the original structure piece by piece to recycle the materials, and rolled up the old lawn to be replaced by a native garden, watered by a rainwater catchment system.

Today, the Mohrs happily inhabit their new home and are busy landscaping the yards. Their project was long and at times grueling, but as a result, the rest of us can benefit from the knowledge that green homes really do make sense.

For more on the Mohrs, check out Catherine?s great TED talk above.

Source: http://greenrealestateinvestingnews.com/green-real-estate-investing-education/green-geeks-prove-benefits-of-green-building-down-to-the-last-kilowatt.html

vertigo alice cooper packers balmoral trump angus t. jones thor movie