Welcome back to our Third & Bond weekly blog posting on Brownstoner. As promised, 2008 will be full of tricky development issues, like Going Green Part II which is discussed below. But first, a quick recap of the last two weeks: as the pictures here show, demolition has continued apace. We had another visit from the BEST Squad based on a call from a neighbor about demolition of our wall—the one to which he affixed his chimney and cage (see Week 5). This time the BEST Squad sided with us (hallelujah!) and also let us know that we have neighbors who call multiple times per day. Maybe they need to spend less time videotaping us from their windows and more time watching Sesame Street…

…where Kermit the Frog taught us, It’s Not Easy Being Green. But for Kermit, the problem was that green was too ordinary and for us being green is hard to attain—too extraordinary. We are really gritting our teeth to get to the minimum threshold for the Energy Star label. If we can make our building 20% better than the ASHRAE (American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers) 90.1 standard from 2004, then the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) will give us a grant of about $75,000, possibly more, and the Energy Star label which we’ll use for marketing. It’ll also give us a great energy efficiency score on our LEED for Homes point-sheet.

We were forewarned by Steven Winter Associates (SWA) that beating the ASHRAE 90.1 2004 standard by 20% wouldn’t be easy. And when your head green cheerleader sits you down for a reality check, instead of a pep talk, you know it’s time to listen. Still… it sounded so much simpler when we thought of it as taking a regular building and then employing extra insulation and Energy Star appliance.

To start the evaluation that determines if we meet the Energy Star requirements, we gave SWA our 75% architectural drawings. This set of drawings is called 75% drawings because they are about 75% complete. All the buildings and floor plans are there, but we are still working out some of the details. SWA used these drawings to create a model (out of software, not play-doh) that summarized our building’s efficiency. Then they started to tweak the model to get us up to 20% better than the standard.

At first, the tweaks were things we planned to do anyway, like a highly insulated roof of at least R-39 and Energy Star appliances. But that didn’t take us all the way to 20%, so we started adding on some other items that we’d discussed but hadn’t committed to doing, like occupancy sensors for lights in common hallways and adding insulation into the two party walls with adjacent property owners. These changes have brought us up to 18.3%. So close!

SWA has given us a few more ideas for getting to 20% and the relative impact of each idea. For example, super low-flow fixtures that reduce bathroom sink flow to 0.5 gallons per minute and showers to 1.75 gallons per minute would only give us a small efficiency increase. But we are having trouble finding the super low-flow and the aerators that can be screwed onto regular fixtures detract from the design. Since we want to go green in a way that the mainstream market will appreciate, we aren’t ready for ugly fixtures just to be super low-flow. Especially if the energy savings is slight. (In case you are wondering: the energy savings comes from using less hot water.)

Another idea is to find double-paned, fiberglass windows with a U of 0.30 and a solar heat gain coefficient of 0.31. In other words: a glass window that allows as little energy as possible to pass through it. These windows would make an appreciable impact on energy savings, but also on our budget. In addition to fiberglass we are looking at metal clad wood frame windows and some high end aluminum windows. Another issue is that NYSERDA would like to see windows that meet the same requirements as Energy Star windows but hasn’t made that an official requirement. There are relatively few Energy Star windows available. We aren’t exactly certain what NYSERDA wants from us but change is in the air.

If any of you have ideas for windows, we’d love to hear about them in the comments section. Going green is requiring us to learn the latest on energy efficiency and commit to construction costs we wouldn’t otherwise. We still think it will be worth it both from a marketing and an environmental standpoint. And if not, Kermit has already written the song for us.

Inside Third & Bond: Week 18 [Brownstoner]
Inside Third & Bond: Week 17 [Brownstoner]
Inside Third & Bond: Week 16 [Brownstoner]
Inside Third & Bond: Week 15 [Brownstoner]
Inside Third & Bond: Week 14 [Brownstoner]
Inside Third & Bond: Week 13 [Brownstoner]
Inside Third & Bond: Week 12 [Brownstoner]
From our lawyers: This is not an offering. No offering can be made until an offering plan is filed with the Department of Law of the State of New York.”