Eco Brooklyn » Passive House

NJ Contractor Builds Passive House and Creates an Educational Video

Gennaro Brooks-Church — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 21:27:42 +0000

Ed from NJ Renewable Energy made a great video about the construction of his passive house that you can view below. It discusses the many benefits of building a Passive House, the amazing energy savings that are possible and the details behind how they built this specific one in New Jersey.

As a NY Passive House contractor we appreciate his hard work and dedication to sharing the information with the public.

Passive House Video from NJ Renewable Energy

New York Contractor Builds Passive House out of Salvaged Materials

Gennaro Brooks-Church — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 03:06:24 +0000

Here is a short video we threw together of the Passive House renovation in Harlem. The video mostly discusses the budgeting of the project.

Now that the construction is for the most part done I think that our initial budget of $175/sq.ft is not sustainable. Of course it is great for the client in the long run. But as a company that practices the triple bottom line - people, planet, profit - our budget did not satisfy all three items.

Out of the three I can say without a doubt the planet was benefited by this job. We built a Passive House. We salvaged almost everything to build the house, creating a negative impact on the dump, meaning the house removed more garbage from the dump than it created.

Unfortunately the other two items – people and profit – did not get a fair deal. The workers were not paid enough, the client is not happy and the company did not make enough of a profit. Workers and company need to be taken care of in order for us to continue to make a meaningful impact on the world. Happy clients means more opportunities to build green.

The clients came to us with a very tight budget, $800,000, which is not enough for the scope of the complete gut rehab Passive House. $1,200,000 would have been more realistic.

But being realistic in not what got Eco Brooklyn to where it is now. You don’t start a cutting edge green building company because you are realistic. You start it because you are deeply idealistic and willing to sacrifice everything in the hope that it will make a difference to the world. There are huge risks to this.

So in that spirit we took on the job, our main goal to find a way to build a cutting edge green home on an affordable budget. We accomplished this, so from that point of view it was a great success.

But the clients are not happy and the company was hit hard financially. It may seem odd that the clients are not happy given they gained a $1 million plus house for $800K. We literally saved them hundreds of thousands of dollars all the while helping the environment.

But to achieve that we all had to make sacrifices. The main sacrifice was that as a company we could not afford to hire enough management. The job process was rocky. A green company needs to be even better organized than other companies because we are dealing with new cutting edge technologies with steep learning curves and we salvage materials thus we can’t tightly control the delivery time of materials.

This lack of management meant details were missed and client/contractor interaction was not as common. So even though behind the scenes we felt we were performing miracles to save the client money and add value to their home, the client did not see this.

The client simply felt they were paying what to them felt like a lot of money and we were not delivering as smoothly as they wanted. Because they don’t have a good grasp of what things cost it did not matter how many times we told them they would never be able to get this value elsewhere on their budget.

And when they did look elsewhere for comparison they saw crappy building with nice fixtures – the so called luxury condo that looks like a million dollars for the first couple years and costs a fortune to run. When you compare that to our building that does not look as fancy they felt shortchanged.

Never mind ours costs nothing to run and is built to last a hundred years. Those things are not as sexy as sparkling appliances and brand new moldings.

So we felt we were loosing our battle with the clients. It was very frustrating because we believe deeply that the building we made is decades ahead of any building built in the city today.

Core Values

In hindsight the main conflict was between the company’s and the client’s core values.

The company’s core value is clearly to put the benefit of the planet before anything else, with the understanding that by doing this we are benefiting ourselves as well. And in this case we did it to a fault (we should have done less for the planet and more for ourselves in order to continue strong in the long run).

But going balls out for the environment is both our strength and weakness.

The clients core value was to put their own benefit before anything else. This is not to say they did not care about Eco Brooklyn or the environment. But like most people, at the top of list is their own financial security, their family and their home, and when possible, but only when possible they consider the rest of the world.

I get that. I am a family man.

But I am also a green builder and sometimes things get complicated.

The problem was that we feel looking out for the environment is the best thing we can do for the client in the long run, even if it means less of a perfect construction process in the short run. The client however just wants a home for their family. Getting that done is challenge enough, never mind some idealistic and abstract global thinking.

Because of this we found ourselves at odds. For us if we could help the environment more we would. Even at the expense of short term discomforts and stress imposed by our main mistake – not budgeting for enough management and budgeting too much for the green building items – which arose from our over ambitious attempt to build a home for hundreds of thousands less than normally it would cost.

The client however found this inexcusable. If it is a choice to go some time without water in order to get gray water plumbing installed or skip the gray water and have water for their kids to take a bath they pick the later.

Unfortunately we were doing the building and not them. And we are very hard headed.

We picked to do the gray water, which delayed the job and meant the clients went without water for longer. Inexcusable in their eyes. Simply bad management. In our eyes it was a small sacrifice for something that will benefit the planet for many years to come…..which in turn benefits them.

It wasn’t like we expected the client to sacrifice alone. Eco Brooklyn always sacrificed first. If we found a way to satisfy the client and the environment at the cost of our profit then we made sure we did that first. Our priorities were planet, client then us.

Maybe we are wrong. Maybe that priority serves nobody. But I have this idea that we are connected and the ecology is in a lot worse shape than we are. Since we are ecology that needs to be dealt with first……?

But when the client is spending their hard earned money and the feel like the second fiddle, good will goes out the window fast and they stopped caring for us.

Towards the end of the job when we realized our ecological zeal had put our finances in tight stretches we got no mercy from the clients. In their memory was the lack of water and they made sure to withhold money accordingly. Water is just an example our of many conflicts of core values that arose.

What have I learned from this?

I can’t expect others to sacrifice for my cause. Next time I will only take on clients who can afford $1,200,000 and be done with it. They will get the job they were promised and I will be able to build houses that harm the environment a lot less.

This means that many people will be priced out and not benefit from Eco Brooklyn’s amazing green building.

But I have learned the hard way that when things get tight people hunker down and look out for themselves. It is about survival and humans can be the most brutal creatures on earth when they feel their own is being threatened.

I can’t put myself in that position of dealing with clients like that. Nor can I put the clients in that position. The clients of this house are scared. They feel we managed the job recklessly and this puts them at risk.

When they came to us they entrusted us as professionals to guide them in the building of a green home. They had no idea how much emphasis we put on green and at some point they wondered if we even cared about their home.

So in the future we won’t try the affordable green building thing because we can’t trust the client will be as willing as we are to build green. Instead we will charge. That way it won’t be a choice between having water on time or having a gray water system. We will have a budget to do both on time.

The clients of our current house had a tough time of it. I think with time they will forget the discomforts of the building process. As that fades they will see the value of the house. They might even be grateful towards us. But I doubt it.

Would I do it again? Yes. I think the struggle was worth the gain. It is an amazing house.

It is the first time in the history of building that a Passive House was built with such a high percentage of salvaged materials. It is revolutionary. And we did it not on some plot of land in Oregon but in one of the most expensive places to build on earth. For the price of a crap “luxury condo”!

But like all revolutions it was painful. And I am hurting more than anyone. I made sure I put my money where my mouth was. The clients probably will never understand that. But that is ok. I care about the house that we brought into existence.

When we are all dead that house will still be a wonderful home for families. That is a great gift. It is the least I can do for the planet and my fellow humans.

Here is the video that prompted this post.

Two Rammed Earth Walls

Yi Deng — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 19:34:53 +0000

Part of being a green contractor means studying emerging technologies offering more eco-benefits than conventional construction. In this case we’re looking at old technologies: the rammed earth wall, one of humanity’s oldest building techniques.

When it comes to walls, a couple of rammed-earth techniques are available as alternatives to your standard insulation-filled 2×4 frames:

The Earthship model uses old tires as receptacles for rammed earth, and then uses them as building blocks for durable, energy-efficient walls. They use waste and locally available raw materials, so the largest investment is labor.

New company Earthco Megablock has developed an automated mechanical system to generate compressed earth blocks. Their materials leave a minimal carbon footprint (but still more than using manpower and recycled tires) and require less manpower to get the job done.

To clarify, I’m only talking about walls here: Both companies use rammed earth to make walls, but Earthco Megablock uses their technology to build “normal” 4-walls-door-and-windows houses while Earthship encompasses a whole sustainable lifestyle. You could, for example, build an Earthship using Earthco’s blocks.

Earthship saves money by relying on networks of volunteers, while Earthco reduces labor costs and building time by streamlining and automating the construction process. Earthship is good for when you have time and people, but no money. Earthco doesn’t require time or people, but you do need money…and somewhere to put their machine.

So if you’re building in, say, Haiti, you’d go with Earthship because it’s easier to truck in volunteers or laborers instead of shipping in a huge honking machine from the U.S…and that’s exactly what happened in the latest Earthship project, which you can see on their website. Meanwhile, in America, there might well be a market for the professional service Earthco has put together.

One of Earthco’s goals is to change green construction from an idealistic collaboration into a commercial presence. To quote from their web site: “While some people are not yet convinced about the need for “green” construction, everyone is into superior quality and saving money.” They have a point: the best way to make green building methods mainstream is to beat the mainstream in price and quality.

The trick is to do this without incurring the hidden costs that typical construction has (one example, the cost of new 2×4 lumber is so cheap because nobody is paying up front for the environmental costs of clear cutting a forest).

We’ve discussed Earthship before, but Earthco is a new find, so here’s a quick summary of their method, followed by some pros and cons:

Giant Compressed Earth Blocks are made by transporting proprietary machinery to your location, where local dirt is squeezed into compressed earth building blocks that are immediately built into walls.

Benefits:

Production is sustainable and affordable. Using local materials and manufacturing on site means almost no carbon footprint. Mechanized placement means less labor. In general, walls can be built at twice the speed and half the cost of conventional lumber construction.

The walls are thick and offer thermal mass that retains heat while blocking wind. Simply replacing lumber/insulation walls with block walls nets you 50% in energy savings. Building to passive house standards (ensuring airtightness) boosts savings to 90%. (But you can achieve similar results with conventional materials, which we’ve done.)

The blocks are virtually indestructible. They’re built to withstand F5 tornadoes, wildfire, and gunfire. In impact testing, a relatively shoddy block wall took a brick traveling at something like 1000 miles an hour. The bullet, of course, disintegrated. The wall hardly took a dent.

Drawbacks:

Simple earth block walls are not suited for areas with high humidity levels, as the blocks are water-resistant but not waterproof. They need to be enveloped in some kind of waterproof outer layer, such as insulation, adobe, or stucco.

You can’t run electricity or plumbing through block walls. You’d have to cut grooves to accommodate wires or pipes, or run them in through the ceiling or floor.

Personally, we wouldn’t be able to make use of this technology because we couldn’t get the machines into a Brooklyn backyard, and we’d run out of local dirt fast. Trucking in the dirt or the blocks would defeat the purpose to some extent. Tire-based rammed earth walls, on the other hand, are feasible because we could work at a smaller scale.

Eco Brooklyn has a rammed-earth wall in the cellar of our green show house. What we did was more like this, because we have people in New York, but we don’t have space, so giant compressed earth block technology wouldn’t be a feasible choice for what we do. We do a lot of retrofits on existing New York brownstones. There isn’t a lot of room for rammed earth construction in our neighborhood, though rammed earth walls can be an aesthetic option.

That said, the most practical green construction method is always the one that makes the most efficient use of resources available to the builder. Other than their use of rammed earth, Earthship and Earthco’s earth block technology are very different innovative green building techniques with the potential to bring green building to different markets.

Eco Brooklyn is a big fan of the Earthship building technique and lifestyle. The Earthco find is a nice addition to our resource list, and a company to keep an eye on.

Composting Toilets Demystified

Yi Deng — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:33:48 +0000

When you flush a toilet in America you have every expectation that whatever just went in there is going away forever, no questions asked.

So why would anyone want a toilet that takes your dirty business, stores it right where you put it, and hands it back to you again after a few months??

But that is what a composting toilet does. A composting toilet is exactly what it sounds like. It takes your waste and stores it in a tank, where a combination of bacteria, heat, and time slowly turn it into “delicious” compost for your landscaping projects.

Walk through the objections with me.

That sounds inconvenient.

To help the waste break down you need to add small amounts of carbonlicious material: sawdust, dirt, popcorn, etc. and crank a handle to mix everything up nicely. You have to do this weekly. It’s not as much work as having a cat and cleaning out its litter box.

Wouldn’t installation be a hassle?

Nope, individual units are completely self-contained. Put one in a closet and you’ve got a bathroom. If you want several units that lead to a central tank, you’d have to put in some pipes, but it’s simpler than dealing with wet plumbing, sewage, and/or a septic tank. Space considerations are minimal because waste loses most of its volume when water is removed.

They’re probably expensive.

The initial investment is more expensive, but you can save in the long run. For current models they can range about $1,200 for a single unit SunMar unit to $6,000 for a large house Clevus Moltrum system. Overall you save money on water (composting toilets either use very small amounts of water or are dry flush) and plumbers…not to mention gardening stuff.

What if you poop more than they can handle?

Composting toilets come in many sizes. A small stand-alone unit would be better for a vacation home, or a couple of people. A system with a central tank can handle constant use by multiple people. Pick a tank capacity that meets your anticipated need. Clevus Moltrum systems handle thousands of people a day at the Bronx Zoo.

Most importantly…What do they smell like?

Nothing. They’re vented like normal toilets.

And finally, aren’t there sanitation codes against this kind of thing?

Yes, unfortunately. They vary widely depending on what state you live in. Florida, for example, encourages the use of composting toilets while Nevada doesn’t approve them at all. Most states have vague regulations somewhere in between. New York building code currently stipulates that new construction must include a plumbing system, and we weren’t allowed to install them in our Harlem passive house.

The objection the DOB gave us when we applied to install a composting system legally was fraught with misconceptions. Basically, they didn’t know enough, so they gave us some random excuse and rejected it outright. Hopefully as the NY DOB continues to learn about green building techniques they will become less scared of them. So for now a composting system in NYC has to be installed illegally.

In NY state composting toilets are permitted in remote or arid areas, but the processed compost must be either professionally hauled away or buried a safe distance from food crops and water sources. Having to destroy the compost defeats the convenience and purpose of having a composting toilet in the first place. This is another example of a lawmaker not understanding the system and imposing incorrect restrictions on it.

Who uses composting toilets, you might wonder? These days, mostly people in remote or very dry places, where the lack of wet plumbing is beneficial. They also show up in public spaces like roadside rest stops and national parks. And was we mentioned, the Bronx Zoo uses them. As ecological awareness continues to rise, though, they’re appearing in more urban and personal settings.

Composting toilets, gray water, storm water management, low flow toilets and sinks all play an important role in NY ecology. New York City has a single plumbing system, meaning when you flush the toilet and when it rains it all goes into the same pipes. The sewer system is woefully under sized for New York so a lot of the sewer is dumped into the waterways.

This is a real problem. Eco Brooklyn is increasingly becoming a water management expert in this area. Through the use of living walls, green roofs, dry wells in the gardens and rain garden we make sure that not one drop of rain leaves a parcel of land, thus greatly reducing the burden on the sewer system each time it rains.

In the building we implement gray water systems where all the water from sinks and showers are collected instead of passed to the sewer. The gray water can then be used to flush the toilets, which is currently illegal in NYC, or to water the outside plants.

A composting toilet greatly adds to this equation by diverting water and waste from the sewer and turning waste into a valuable food for gardens.

We strongly believe that these water management techniques are the key to having NY waterways that you can swim in and eat from. As NY buildings have their plumbing upgraded it costs relatively small amounts to implement these water diversion techniques. They can be done in stages as well.

Eco Brooklyn is always on the lookout for new and innovative ways to turn New York buildings green, but actually a composting toilet is neither new nor innovative. Composting toilets have been around for thousands of years. Unfortunately building codes and social acceptance have yet to catch up. We hope to one day legally offer composting toilets as an environment-friendly option for our ecologically minded clients. We offer composting toilet installation now but unfortunately it falls into the real of what we call civil disobedience.

Civil disobedience is non-violent refusal to follow laws that you believe do not benefit the common good. We strongly feel composting toilets in NYC would benefit us on many levels.

Salvaging Materials at EcoBrooklyn

Stavros Ladeas — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 19:37:33 +0000

Gennaro Brooks-Church, Director of EcoBrooklyn Inc, discusses the significant element of salvaging materials for use in the company’s green renovations. Currently we are wrapping up a full-renovation of a brownstone in Manhattan where we’ve been working hard to attain its stringent Passive House requirements.

Check out our video below, and feel free to leave us some feedback!

New York Passive House Window Installation

Gennaro Brooks-Church — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 01:18:11 +0000

In our Manhattan green brownstone renovation in we used Rieder windows because they allow us to meet the stringent Passive House standard. They came from Austria so it took about two months lead time to get them. All said it cost about $30,000 just in window expenses to supply the brownstone with your basic front and back configuration, including front and back doors.

That price was just to get the windows onto the site. The cost of making window boxes, air sealing and the many other steps of installing the windows was on top of that. So they are not cheap. And we got their most affordable model.

But they are gorgeous. The quality can’t be beat. The triple pane requires an extra beefy frame so they feel solid. Like really solid. And they have such good air sealing that it feels like a bank vault door when you open them. Whooosh.

Another window company we would like to install is the Intus Eforte Window brand from Lithuania. Another Passive House contractor used them and had good things to say.

Passive House Building in NY

Gennaro Brooks-Church — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 19:03:47 +0000

Here is a good article in the NY Times about Passive Houses in NYC. As a Passive House builder we are excited to see growing interest in the technique as we feel it is a key element in building a greener New York.

Here is a side shot of your typical Passive House window. Notice how thick it is. They are like vault doors.

Bringing Passivhaus to Harlem

Dan Hunter — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 17:41:41 +0000

Check out this great article about our Eco Brooklyn’s Passive House in Harlem. GreenBuildingAdvisor.com, a great online source for building, designing, and remolding green homes, sent Richard Defendorf to our Harlem site to check out our work. Read his write-up of all the techniques we used to seal our passive house!

http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/green-building-news/bringing-passivhaus-harlem

Hi-Performance Tape

Eric Ansanelli — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 17:20:03 +0000

At Eco Brooklyn, we do energy-efficiency retrofits that involve huge amounts of air sealing, air barriers, vapor barriers and insulation. We aim for the super stringent Passive House building envelope standard and net-zero energy consumption. This is as radical it gets in energy conservation.

Sealing the home in an airtight shell requires a bit of patience and a lot of tape. You wouldn’t believe the number of tiny pinpricks that managed to perforate our plastic membrane, and their aggregate effect on air leakage is equally surprising.

Currently, there are both European and American companies that specialize in several unique kinds of tape for different stages of the envelope sealing process. Onetape, for example, has a soft fabric edge that allows the builder to plaster it airtight against masonry surfaces like brick walls. Another is made for simple, airtight patching over those small pinprick holes.

At the Harlem Passive House we used products from Siga andPro Clima. We’ve purchased custom tapes through Four Seven Five, a new distributor based in NY. 3M has some special tapes but the European products above are still much better; we hope the US companies will catch up.

Eco Brooklyn’s Clay Wall Application

Dan Hunter — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 15:30:15 +0000

Eco Brooklyn’s Gennaro Brooks-Church discusses our clay wall application. Creating a better seal on bricks and more insulation, Eco Brooklyn applies clay to walls all over New York City. Most recently we applied clay in our Harlem Passive House and in the downstairs apartment in our Brooklyn Show House.

Check out this great video!