Build energy efficiency savings into new home construction

Well-built houses last for centuries. Today’s decisions during construction of a new home can affect your grandchildren’s grandchildrens’ energy bills.

If you were building a new house for maximum energy efficiency, what innovative technologies could you add during construction that wouldn’t add much to its cost today, but would keep energy costs down over its lifetime?

Metering and monitoring: Design the electric circuits to monitor energy consumption. Incorporate the ability to monitor each outlet or hard-wired appliance and to turn each device or outlet on and off from a central control panel, a computer or a phone app. Set this system up to send alerts if something is on during hours it isn’t normally on or to turn off devices automatically at a set time. You’ll never leave lights on while you’re on vacation again, and you’ll never have to worry about leaving the iron or oven on.

With an interest in understanding how much each devices adds to your utility bill, you’ll be able to create a report showing which specific devices use electricity and at what time of day. And, in the long run, you’ll be prepared for offers from your utilities to save money through direct load control programs, which are popular in the southeast and are in the process of being considered in the northwest.

Lighting: Design the lighting system to take maximum advantage of natural light, using systems like light tubes and skylights. Use well-controlled LED lighting where fixtures are necessary.

Heating, water heating, ventilation and air conditioning: Here are the biggest opportunities for someone building a new house to save money for generations. Roughly half to two-thirds of residential energy use is for temperature control.

Passive heat control systems are easily installed during construction. These technologies include high R-value insulation; windows designed to maximize either heat retention or heat rejection (depending on the home’s orientation and climate); and radiant barriers. Design for energy savings and understand R-value codes for insulation; the insulation will probably affect energy use in the house for 50 years or more. A very new technology, phase-change insulation (which may be difficult to find), may even pay off. This type of insulation uses a polymer mixture that melts at a relatively low temperature to hold heat coming into the house during the summer, or leaving the house during the winter in the attic, reducing the work the heating and cooling systems have to do in the climate-controlled spaces.

Heating and cooling systems themselves can be optimized. Ground-source or water-source heat pumps use local ground and water as heat sources, and are very efficient. They’re easy to install during construction but very expensive to retrofit. Hydronic loop heating/cooling systems, which use heated or cooled water to adjust water and air temperatures, are likely to offer energy source flexibility over the home’s lifetime. Heat recirculation, which uses a heat exchanger to recover heat from water leaving bathtubs and washing machines and put it back into the water heating system, is likely to be easy during construction and next to impossible once the house has been built. Today’s best programmable thermostats can be changed remotely and use fuzzy logic to learn occupancy patterns. They’re widely available and are a must for new construction.