Since 1994, IBACOS has been a strategic partner to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in the effort to improve residential building performance. IBACOS played a pioneering role in the conception and development of the DOE’s Building America program. As the first Building America team and one of the first organizations to apply a systems approach to housing, IBACOS continues to work at the cutting edge of advancing new technology and high-performance best practices in the industry.
Over the course of the last 20 years, IBACOS has developed a unique set of assets that help the company identify industry solutions for better homes and drive sustainability and efficiency to the next level. One such asset is the Energy Efficiency Lab Home. Through collaborative research with production homebuilders, their trade contractors, and product and material manufacturers, we believe we can identify the design, construction and financial approaches needed to make zero energy homes part of mainstream America.
In March 2010, IBACOS and S&A Homes broke ground on the Best Practice Research Alliance’s Energy Efficiency Lab Home in Cobblestone Estates, a community in the northern suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Pittsburgh project explored approaches for pursuing zero energy in the cold climate zone, which equates to roughly, the northern half of the United States.
Construction was completed in October 2010. More than 40 project partners are collaborating to evaluate the Lab Home and its energy-saving systems against three criteria:
1. Performance: How well the home conserves energy, while at the same time providing a healthy, safe, durable and comfortable environment for the homeowners.
2. Constructability: How to make highly energy efficient homes easier for homebuilders to produce on a large scale.
3. Cost: How we can make zero energy homes more affordable to build and buy, while also studying how much they can save homeowners on energy bills.
The Lab Home also serves as an educational venue and a valuable source of information about what we need to do to make zero energy homes an affordable option.
“At the national level, zero energy neighborhoods won’t be built in a day. It takes collaboration and cooperation to meet the many challenges of that goal.”
Adding up the numbers
The Energy Efficiency Lab Home is a highly in-depth research effort. We’ve put in years of work and hundreds of hours of research to reach this point, and the process of designing and building the house has already paid off in what we’ve learned.
But we’ve got a lot more to find out from our house, which is why we call it a "lab home." We’ve modeled the technical systems and have an idea of how they’ll perform, but the proof will be in the numbers and the information that we are collecting from more than 400 sensors throughout the home.
What we’re studying
Five different types of sensors embedded in every part of the Lab Home are collecting data on how all the house systems and the house itself are performing. Because the house is unoccupied, we have ways of simulating almost any situation that might arise for an actual family. Our testing will focus on energy efficiency but will also look at measuring the comfort, durability and health of our lab home and its systems.
One of the most important areas we’ve examined is how the HVAC system and our home’s airtight enclosure work together. Although a highly insulated enclosure is vital to energy efficiency, it can also have unwanted consequences, like condensation forming inside wall assemblies in extreme weather. Our monitors will tell us if moisture becomes an issue, and we can respond by experimenting with different measures to correct it. Although our ventilation system should provide plenty of fresh air, we’ll also be checking to make sure air quality remains high.
We also alternate the use and testing of our redundant systems. For example, we installed three different HVAC duct systems, each using a different material to try to learn how effectively they deliver and throw air and which might be best. In the same way, we are able to study what combination of lighting is most efficient and which of the two varieties of heat pump wells perform better.
Part of the advantage of monitoring the house over a period of several years is that we’ll get a good picture of how the house and its systems respond to different seasons over a long period of time and under diverse circumstances. The wider our data set, the more reliable and accurate our research will be. We’ve run the numbers on paper, and now it’s time to see how our choices perform in the real world to deliver energy savings, comfort and overall performance.
Our Lab Home has a multiyear research life cycle, allowing us to learn important lessons along the way.
Phase I: Designing and building
We built models and did bench testing and system evaluations. We researched costs and financial benchmarks for the building industry, and we held training sessions with our partners to help them become familiar with some of the systems we chose. Together, we identified and addressed some potential construction issues and refined our choices before going out in the field.
Even so, we had to think on our feet during the construction process, constantly monitor costs and quality while keeping an eye on our construction schedule. We learned valuable lessons about how design decisions impact the time and costs of construction.
Phase II: Testing and monitoring (unoccupied)
The house remains uninhabited while we run tests and monitor the results. With more than 400 sensors in the walls, ceilings and floors, we test all the systems in the house to see how they perform under different conditions, just as if a family lived there. We evaluate the Lab Home’s performance with a focus on energy but also on safety, health, comfort, and durability.
“The ultimate goal has always been to reach zero energy in a way that’s affordable for the homebuilder and the homebuyer, without sacrificing the other qualities that the homeowner requires-comfort, health, safety, and durability.”
More than 40 leading industry suppliers and local trade contractors contributed to the construction of the Best Practices Research Alliance’s Energy Efficiency Lab Home. Click on a partner logo below for more information.
|Albert Bauer Plumbing, Inc.
Collective Efforts, LLC
Gorell Windows and Doors
Honeywell Solar Smartgrid
Iron City Excavating
|McMurray Cooling & Heating
RKB Electric & Supply LLC
Stirling Technology, Inc.
Therma Tru Doors
Stone & Company