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 2007 Project Home Themes
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Seattle is one of the nation’s leading cities for green building — another reason it is the perfect spot to debut the NextGen Home Experience®. Thanks to incredible buyer demand, the home building industry has seen an explosion of green products and services. In this one home, however, you will get to see not only the cream of this green crop, but how each component works together to create the ultimate green home.
The focus on green building for this home began long before the first day of construction. The first challenge for the NextGen Home Experience® team was to tear down the existing home on the site. How can you make home demolition green? It turns out there are many ways.
Builder Anderson Construction Group first went into the home and removed any hazardous materials, especially asbestos. They then began looking for items that could be recycled. In this case almost all of the house’s windows, doors and cabinets were salvageable. The more items that could be reused, the less waste created.
At this stage of the demolition, the entire home was recycled in a sense, taking on a new life as a training ground for local firefighters. “For about one and a half weeks the local fire department used this home to practice search and rescue techniques,” says Chad Quillici of Anderson Construction Group. “They kicked down doors, tore through walls and even cut through the roof. The house served as an invaluable training ground to prepare these professionals to save lives.”
When training was completed, the home was knocked down from the outside in, creating more of an implosion than an explosion, and minimizing disturbance to the surrounding neighborhood.
With construction now underway on the NextGen Home Experience®, the focus on thinking green continues. The home is being built to meet or exceed the new LEED For Homes program guidelines, created by the U.S. Green Building Council. It will accomplish this task thanks to some incredible technologies, one of which is its geothermal heating system by Rehau.
Geothermal heating systems are currently in place in more than 1 million households around the U.S. The result has been a green impact estimated to be the equivalent of removing close to 1.3 million cars from the road each year. Geothermal heating systems work by tapping into the natural heat in the earth – pumping water through a series of sealed pipes buried below the home. In the NextGen Home Experience®, the water is then pumped into a radiant floor heating system that heats the home from the ground up.
Other technologies that make this home greener include the two main components of the home — Insulated Concrete Forms (or ICFs) that are used in place of traditional wood framing, and Structurally Insulated Panels (or SIPS) that combine framing and insulation into one product. The elements of both of these products are very green. Concrete is both a sustainable and renewable element, and SIPS are made from oriented strand board — engineered wood.
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