One in a series of occasional updates on construction of three innovative green homes. Previous entries in the series. Syracuse, NY -- Energy consultant Hugh Henderson is more accustomed to working in skyscrapers than small, single-family homes. But Friday, Henderson could be found on a ladder at Live Work Home, 317 Marcellus St., installing monitors on the home’s “green”...
Emmanuel Haddon, of Home HeadQuarters, sands boards for window casings at a home under construction at 317 Marcellus St., Syracuse. That home, and two others at 619 Otisco St. and 621 Otisco St., are being built as affordable, energy-efficient homes in an architecture competition sponsored by the Syracuse University School of Architecture, Home HeadQuarters and the Syracuse Center of Excellence.One in a series of occasional updates on construction of three innovative green homes. Previous entries in the series.
Syracuse, NY -- Energy consultant Hugh Henderson is more accustomed to working in skyscrapers than small, single-family homes.
But Friday, Henderson could be found on a ladder at Live Work Home, 317 Marcellus St., installing monitors on the home’s “green” heating and ventilation technology.
“We’re going to measure the performance of these systems in a fair amount of detail,” said Henderson, founding principal of CDH Energy Corp., based in Cazenovia.
CDH Energy was hired by the Syracuse Center of Excellence to install monitors in all three of the innovative green homes being built as part of the Near West Side Initiative. The other two houses are at 619 Otisco St. and 621 Otisco St.
The three designs for affordable, energy-efficient homes were chosen in an architecture competition sponsored by the Syracuse University School of Architecture, Home HeadQuarters and the Center of Excellence.
View full sizeLive Work Home, 317 Marcellus St., SyracuseData will be collected on all three houses for three years to document their energy consumption. The Center of Excellence will pay for the monitoring project with $80,000 of the $500,000 federal appropriation it received in December through U.S. Rep. Dan Maffei, D-DeWitt.
Friday, Henderson and project engineer Jeff Cosgrove attached temperature and air flow sensors to the heat recovery ventilator, an apparatus that brings fresh air into (and sends stale air out of) the tightly insulated house.
In the basement, they installed a dedicated gas meter and more sensors on the mini-boiler (its given name is Munchkin, it's so small), the hot-water heater and the under-floor radiant heating circuits. Under the monitoring plan, data will be collected every 15 minutes and fed into an Internet database for analysis.
Two weeks ago, the custom kitchen cabinets were installed. They were made by Cab Fab, 124 Burnet Ave., out of 100-year-old beams reclaimed from the Lincoln Supply Warehouse a few blocks away. Cabinetmaker Chris Clemans matched the tight grain in adjoining panels of Southern yellow pine so they look like facing pages in an open book. Instead of glass, the cabinets feature translucent panels made out of recycled water bottles by a company called 3-Form.
View full sizeR-House, 619 Otisco St., Syracuse. Homeowner Kathy Miranda said the kitchen counters will be made out of honed green slate from Vermont. The countertop in the bathroom will be IceStone, a “green” product made in Brooklyn from recycled glass and cement. The vanity it will sit upon is being custom made out of antique beech by Doug Holland, of Levanna Restoration Lumber, in Auburn.
After interior trim work and painting is finished, the crew will install nine-ply engineered floorboards that Holland had made out of Southern yellow pine reclaimed from the house that once stood on the site. Appliances, plumbing fixtures, stairs and walls that move on tracks also await installation. So do the porch and the plywood facade with a hole pattern copied from nature.
At 621 Otisco — the house called TED — air sealing and insulation are done and sheetrock is up. Next comes paint, trim, flooring and other interior finishes.
At R-House, 619 Otisco, one exterior wall is covered by its corrugated aluminum skin. It was too hot last week for the crew to work with the shiny material. Inside, 16 inches of blown fiberglass insulation fill the exterior walls and ceiling. Sheetrock comes next, followed by paint, trim and the poured concrete floor, a “thermal mass” that will store heat from the sun.
View full sizeTED, 621 Otisco St., Syracuse. Last week’s test of the house’s airtightness showed it exceeds German Passivhaus ultra-low-energy standards.
Though it could be heated with the energy it takes to run a hair dryer, there are no hair dryers involved.
A Zehnder heat recovery ventilator, made in Europe by a Swiss company, will bring in just enough fresh air to maintain a healthy environment inside the airtight house, said David White, of Right Environments, a passive house consultant based in New York City.
White designed the heating and ventilation system for R-House. He also advised architects Della Valle Bernheimer/ARO on the home's orientation, window placement, insulation and other aspects of its super-energy-efficient design.
In addition to capturing heat from outgoing air, heat from the gas-fired water heater will be used to warm incoming air, he said. Two small electric heaters upstairs will provide supplemental heat on the coldest days. Flexible ducts that fit into standard wall spaces carry the air to and from the Zehnder unit.
The heat recovery ventilator is a little bigger than a dorm refrigerator but has 340 square feet of surface area in its heat recovery core, a honeycomb of criss-crossing channels, said Barry Stephens, sales and marketing manager for Zehnder America. A consumer unit costs $4,000 to $6,000, depending on the size of the house.
The technology is common in Europe, Stephens said. For example, about 25 percent of new houses in Austria are built to passive house standards.
“The U.S. market is slow on the uptake but accelerating very quickly,” said Stephens, a Fayetteville native now based in New Hampshire. Zehnder is working on more than 100 projects in North America, he said, including a couple of “green” retrofits on New York City brownstones.
Marie Morelli, mmorelli@syracuse.com, 470-2220.