02 Mar Welcome to the world of G•O Logic!
With the launch of our website we’re offering a line of homes that prove great design, comfort, unparalleled energy performance and reasonable cost can coexist. We’re not here to throw around now-meaningless terms like “green” or “sustainable” to describe what we do. Let’s accept it: every new building on earth has an environmental cost, either initially or over the long term (or both, generally). Here in the frigid north a building can be made to produce more energy than it uses through the application of renewable technologies, but only at an enormous cost. Net-zero is possible and certainly worthy, but it’s affordable only to a very few. G•O Logic is out to show the most sensible approach to reducing energy use in buildings is to push the envelope on performance and at the same time keep costs affordable to the average homebuyer.
We’re in trouble, folks. I just read “Heat” by George Monbiot. In spite of years of official ignorance of the problem, it turns out climate change was and is happening, and the outlook is so dire it’s almost too depressing to think about. But as Mr. Monbiot is a true optimist he spells out a necessary path to survival in the next 30 years: reduce carbon emissions by 90%, nothing less. What does this mean for energy use in buildings? Again, we’re in trouble. Buildings gobble up around half of all the primary energy used in the world (way more than cars and trucks do), but since heating oil has been so cheap historically we haven’t been too compelled to do anything about horribly wasteful buildings. Monbiot cites the German Passive House concept as a reasonable, proven method to reduce energy used for space heating in buildings by 90%, the same as his target. The passive house idea is catching on the the U.S. and we at G•O Logic are designing and modeling our homes to meet that standard.
Specifically what can we do? Create buildings that use the very least amount of energy possible for the various needs we humans have: staying warm, bathing with hot water, and watching episodes of Lost on wide-screen t.v.’s. What we as designers and builders can do is build a building that does such a good job of keeping out the cold we need nothing but the most minimal amount of electricity or firewood or body-heat to keep it warm; specify the most efficient water-heating appliances coupled with a solar-thermal system to cover half the annual domestic hot water load; remove the t.v. room from the floor plan and specify furniture with built-in chess boards. Who said architecture can’t be manipulative?
But don’t these homes cost a lot to build? What level of energy efficiency are we talking about at what cost? In the next series of posts we’ll look at the numbers to see if this plan is affordable and and the reduction in energy use achievable.