Despite a hectic week (nothing to do with Christmas, believe me!), I still read the news and found you a few things to read. I post more on Twitter and Facebook!

> A green roof, natural light and minimalistic design and furnishings attracted me to this Max Brunner home!

> Over the last several decades, woodstoves have gotten cleaner as far as emissions. Now the manufacturing process at Morsø in Denmark is more eco-friendly, too.

> Your zero energy home can supply all your energy needs AND charge your electric vehicle!

> Here are some excellent solutions in the design of a small, energy efficient house to maximize space and keep it from feeling too… well… small.

> Have you ever heard of an eco-hut? I hadn’t!

Here’s a little bit of green building news I found this week. You can read more by following me on Twitter and Facebook!

> ‘High-scale design, sustainable principles and prefab can come together to create an attractive home.’ LEED Platinum Boulder House First in US to Use German System

> Martha Stewart goes green?! BUILDER Magazine Reveals New Concept Home

> MODERN Living showhouse – a home made from more than 80% recycled materials that was designed and assembled in just 45 days! VIDEO: The Road to Designing Sustainable, Modern Green Living

> Hemp, hemp, hurray! Hemp Makes a Lovely Design/Build Home

> I say efficiency first. The less energy you use, the smaller your renewable system will be, saving you money twice. Efficiency First, Renewables Second … or Vice Versa?

Here’s a little bit of green building news I found this week. You can read more by following me on Twitter and Facebook!

> Solar-powered window shutters – brilliant! Why didn’t I think of that?!

> The Southwestern CSP Solar Surge – The Department of Interior today announced final approval of two large solar energy projects in southern California that will produce 754 megawatts of clean renewable energy to power more than a quarter million homes and create almost 300 permanent jobs and about 700 construction jobs.

> Affordable Boston Apartments Being Renovated to LEED-Gold Standard

> Illinois Developer Breaks Ground on 132-Home Net-Zero Community

> World’s First Zero Carbon Conference Center Opens in Dublin

You need to reserve the first Saturday in October every year for the National Solar Tour! This is a wonderful event around the country showcasing solar homes and businesses. It’s also a great time to volunteer and get to know like-minded folks.

There is no excuse, either, like ‘Our family is going to on vacation,’ because this is a national event! Practically everywhere you go in the United States, you’ll be able to attend a Solar Tour.

From the website:

The ASES National Solar Tour is the world’s largest grassroots solar event. This event offers you the opportunity to tour innovative green homes and buildings to see how you can use solar energy, energy efficiency, and other sustainable technologies to reduce monthly utility bills and help tackle climate change. More than 160,000 participants will visit some 5,500 buildings in 3,200 communities across the U.S.

Now in its 15th year, this event is coordinated nationally by the nonprofit American Solar Energy Society in collaboration with dozens of outstanding partner organizations. It takes place annually during the first Saturday in October in conjunction with National Energy Awareness Month.

> Find out the details of a tour near you.

> American Solar Energy Association (ASES), based in Scottsdale, AZ

> Find a local chapter, and get involved!

Here are the southwest area chapters:

> New Mexico Solar Energy Association (NMSEA)

> Arizona Solar Center (AZSC)

> Solar NV (Southern Nevada Chapter)

> Utah Solar Energy Association (UT Solar)

> Colorado Renewable Energy Society (CRES)

Get out this weekend, and learn! Having worked the Solar Tour and the Greenbuilt Tour of the New Mexico Chapter of the USGBC, I can tell you that homeowners LOVE to talk about their green homes! You can get quite an education by visiting these buildings and asking questions. And like I said before, you will meet a lot of like-minded people. I have made long-time friends on these tours!

Volunteer, not just on the tours, but for your local chapter. They are always holding educational events at schools, businesses and festivals, and volunteers are like gold. Solar education, as in all green building, is key to getting people to know about it, understand it, see the benefits and use it!

Here’s a new twist on my weekly recap – I’ll feature five green buildings once in a while. Gotta shake it up some. I found these while I was surfing around this past week. I read about many beautiful and innovative homes, and posted a lot of them on Twitter and Facebook already. Here are a few more to share!

I went for a walk the other night with my 83 year old neighbor, who out-walks me, by the way. She is very outspoken and does not mince words. We got on the topic of climate change, natural resources, conservation and the ‘green movement’ (for lack of a better term).

She does not feel hopeful.

She feels there are too many people on the planet to offset her recycling, and water and electricity conservation. She wonders why she bothers doing those things, when our population is too great for our resources. Her point is: What’s the point?

In 1985, in Gaia: An Atlas of Planet Management, I read that our resources could maintain 2% of the then current population. That meant 98% of the 4.85 billion people inhabiting the Earth had to die off for the planet to be in balance. Over-population.

Today we sport almost 7 billion people on the planet, and naturally, we have fewer resources than 25 years ago. As long as too many people are sucking up too few resources, the earth’s massive ecosystem will not be in balance.

So do our small, personal recycling and conservation efforts offset the imbalance between resources and the number of people on the earth? My neighbor thinks not. She feels her efforts are a waste of time. She does them, but wonders why.

A colleague of mine feels his efforts to educate people through his progressive website are for naught. When he digs up information such as Monsanto and BP donating money to The Nature Conservancy and Halliburton being named to the Dow Jones Sustainability Index in the Global Oil Services sector, he wants to give up.

He does not feel hopeful, obviously.

It’s frustrating to be working towards reducing CO2 emissions, cutting back on consumption, educating everyone around you, and feeling you’re making progress in restoring and maintaining the health of the Earth, only to find out that some big corporation has more sway than you do. Much more sway!

So do our efforts make a difference?

If several million individuals:

> recycle
> close lights in unused rooms
> drive less, carpool or cycle
> build or remodel energy efficient homes
> not fly
> bring reusable bags to the store
> turn down the thermostat
> buy local and organic food
> etc,

will their actions offset one dirty, underhanded, non-transparent, anti-environment corporation greasing the palm of a non-profit that is supposed to be protecting and conserving nature?

What are your thoughts?

What a short week! Even being self-employed, I can feel the effects of a Monday holiday. This week, I have all home things to share. Follow me on Twitter and Facebook for a variety of eco news.

> I’m a huge fan of solar. I have solar hot water and passive solar heating as well as a solar greenhouse. I love them all! I don’t have PV, because it wouldn’t pay for itself in my lifetime. My electric usage is minimal, and my bill is about $30/month. But if you are in the market fo PV, here are some simple solar options.

> I have gone back to school for Residential Planning, because I want to design and consult. More on that later, though. The last class I took was Color Theory. I have always loved color, so I enjoyed this piece about using color for various effects in your home. Be sure to use low VOC paints!

> We had a discussion in our drafting class about how furniture needs are changing. My input was that people are more mobile, choosing smaller homes, and want compact, affordable and portable furniture. Then I ran across this!

> Remodeling junkie am I! I have a slew of stories to tell, and some of them sound like this one.

> A picture is how many words? Structural Insulated Panels, or SIPs, are a great way to build efficiently. It’s a modular system that produces a very cozy home with excellent insulation. Here are a series of green modulars built with SIPs. Scroll down about half-way to see how they are installed. People ask me about them all the time, and it’s hard to explain. This is a great shot.

> Frank Lloyd Wright built with the land. I also believe a home should take inspiration from and fit into its surroundings. This New Zealand home uses local stone, recycled timbers and native plants. It is also built into the hillside.

I’ve been seeing a lot of articles about Passive Houses (or Passivhaus) in the news lately. I’m glad, because this is the construction technique of the future, reducing utility bills by 90%! As energy prices rise, buildings will have to be more efficient. There is no excuse to not build a green home, and the Passivhaus is the best choice.

The Passivhaus, a performance based building standard, was developed in the late 1980s in Germany by Dr. Wolfgang Feist and Bo Adamson. The first passivhaus was built in Darmstadt, and Dr. Feist subsequently founded the Passivhaus Institut in 1996. Today there are approximately 15,000 residential and commercial buildings built to this standard in Europe.

Construction features of a Passivhaus are:

> Compact size – 50 square meters (approx 538 sq ft) per person
> Super insulation of floors, walls and ceilings
> Air-tight envelope with no thermal bridging
> High-performance doors and triple glazed, insulated frame windows
> Heat recovery ventilation (HRV)
> Passive solar
> HERS score 20-30
> PHPP Certification (Passivhaus Planning Package)
> Space heating must be no more than 15 kWh/sq m (4.75 kBtu/sq ft)
> Overall energy use must be no more than 120 kWh/sq m (38 kBtu/sq ft)
> HRV air exchanges must be 0.6 or less per hour at a pressure rating of 50 Pascals.

Benefits:

> Improved indoor air quality
> Increased physical comfort
> 90% energy reduction
> Minimal conventional heating system
> Suitable for retrofits
> Affordable

The point of passivhaus construction is to minimize energy loss by restricting air flow into and out of the building. The building stays warm in winter and cool in summer. There is not one passivhaus design. Feist says that style does not matter, as long as the efficiency and air circulation goals are achieved.

> The envelope is super-insulated, up to 16″ beneath the slab and in exterior walls (R 60-70). Strawbale, SIPs and ICFs (insulated concrete forms) or Rastra are suitable for passivhaus construction.

> Ceiling insulation of dense-pack fiberglass, cellulose or spray foam has an R value anywhere between R 60-100.

> The triple-glazed windows have a very low U-factor of 0.14. Some in Germany are as low as 0.17. The U-factor rating of the National Fenestration Rating Council (NFRC): the lower the number, the more efficient the window, based on the glass, frame and spacer material.

> Points where indoor materials meet the outdoors (thermal bridging) are sealed, as are all points where air can move. A blower door test is run several times during construction to test for air leakage before the building is completely closed up and finished.

> Once a building is air-tight, it needs ventilation. A heat recovery ventilator (HRV) exchanges indoor air with outdoor air with minimal heat loss. Most people will crack a window to get some fresh air in winter, and what happens? The heat goes out the window! An HRV reduces that type of heat loss while keeping the indoor air fresh and healthy to breathe.

Because passivhaus is performance-based, the buildings are monitored after final construction. The CEPHEUS project monitored 250 passivhaus’s in the EU, and their results showed an energy reduction of 90% on average.

I have heard varying estimates of the extra cost to build a passivhaus with a range of 5-10%. This is offset quickly with the huge energy savings. The payback period depends on each individual home’s energy use. The best thing to do is begin to conserve energy before building or retrofitting with passivhaus standards.

Passivhaus construction is not catching on quickly in the US, but the Passive House Institute US, based in Urbana, Illinois, is trying to change that. The Director, Katrina Klingenberg, a German architect, built her own passivhaus in 2002. PHIUS is authorized by the Passivhaus Institut in Darmstadt as the official Certifier of Passive Houses in the US, designing and certifying homes and training designers and consultants.

In an email, Dr. Feist told me that the only thing keeping the passivhaus becoming more popular is education.

‘There is no limit to growth for Passive Houses – only the availability of specific components (which can be produced regionally in the EU as well as in America) and the distribution of the know how. This is indeed the bottleneck at the moment. But education programmes are already available – so it will be overcome.’

The European Commission has already mandated that all new buildings in the EU be ‘nearly zero energy’ after 2020. Feist says, ‘The Passive House is the prototype of a “nearly zero energy building.” Seen this way, in 2020 the fraction of Passive Houses of all new built will be 100% in that part of the world.’

The addition of renewables (solar, wind) can make a passivhaus a net-zero home, but the energy creation and consumption of a passivhaus is meant to be just that – passive. To me, that is a gentler way to live, and there are no moving parts to maintain. A 90% reduction in the energy consumption of a passivhaus is good enough for me!

Here are a few tidbits from the past week that caught my eye.

> Just over the mountain from Taos to the east is Las Vegas, New Mexico. It is the home of NM Highlands University and lots of gorgeous Victorian architecture. It looks like Highlands is going green with a green roof on their new, contemporary student center. Bravo!

> There is a lot of confusion around solar power for the average person. By putting my solar home up for sale, I have found that, in general, people don’t understand it or know what questions to ask. If that sounds like you, here are a few myth-busters to help start you on your solar journey.

> Good old Yankee ingenuity in green building! Originally being a New Englander, I know how hard those folks work, how inventive, resourceful and creative they are, always finding a better, more efficient way. So I’m not surprised to read that Tedd Benson, a timber framing pioneer from Walpole, NH, has moved to super-insulated modular homes. He even has a passivhaus design!

> Green building is more than materials. Here is a home that is built with sensitivity to the landscape and utilizes plenty of natural light to keep electric bills low. I just wouldn’t want to drop a ball!

> I couldn’t have compiled a more engaging group of beautiful solar homes from around the world. Well done, 1BOG!

(This is a guest post by David Quilty, owner and publisher of The Good Human, a comprehensive site on sustainable living and progressive politics. Follow him on Twitter.)

Looking to increase the energy-efficiency of your home this year? Well, you are in luck – if you purchase an energy-efficient product or renewable energy system for your home, you will probably be be eligible for a decent-sized Federal tax credit. Not bad, considering that whatever you do is also going to save you money on your utility bills! While most people would think that if they just buy Energy Star rated products then they would be eligible for the credits, not all Energy Star items can qualify, so be sure to do your homework before running out and buying the first thing you come across. In addition to Federal tax credits, there are also state-level incentives to going green at home, which will be discussed after the Fed ones. There are different dollar amounts, percentages, and dates for different products and jobs, so be sure to check out the details for what you plan to do very carefully. Let’s take a look at what tax credits are available, dependent which efficiency upgrades you make at your home.

Until December 31, 2010, you can get a tax credit of up to 30% of cost up to $1,500 on the following items.

The work must be done on an existing home and this home must be your principal residence. Rentals and new construction do not qualify.

> Biomass stoves – Biomass includes wood, wood waste and residues (including wood pellets), plants , grasses, residues, and fibers.
> Advanced Main Air Circulating Fan – A fan which blows the air that your furnace heats up through the duct system.
> Air Source Heat Pumps – During the heating season, heat pumps move heat from the cool outdoors into your warm house; during the cooling season, heat pumps move heat from your cool house into the warm outdoors.
> Central Air Conditioning – I think we all know what these are!
> Gas, Propane, or Oil Hot Water Boiler – Heating units that use water circulated throughout the home in a system of baseboard heating units, radiators, and/or in-floor radiant tubing.
> Natural Gas or Propane Furnace – Uses the combustion of fuel and air to create heat.
> Insulation – Just what you think it is. The credit applies to weather stripping, spray foam, and house wrap.
> New Roofs – Metal roofs and asphalt roofs that reflect some of the sun’s rays.
> Gas, Oil, Propane Water Heater – Heats up the water for your home.
> Electric Heat Pump Water Heater – Heats up the water for your home.
> Storm Windows & Doors – These can enhance efficiency by creating another barrier from the weather outside.

Until December 31, 2016, you can get a tax credit of up to 30% of cost with no upper limit on the following items.

Existing homes & new construction qualify, as do both principal residences and second homes. Rentals do not qualify.

> Geothermal Heat Pumps – Similar to ordinary heat pumps but they use the ground instead of outside air to provide heating, air conditioning and, in most cases, hot water. VERY efficient.
> Residential Wind Turbines – Yep, turning the wind into energy to power your home.
> Solar Energy Systems – This includes both solar panels and/or solar water heaters.

Until December 31, 2016, you can get a tax credit of up to 30% of the cost, up to $500 per .5 kW of power capacity on the following item.

Existing homes & new construction qualify, and the home must be your principal residence. Rentals and second homes do not qualify.

> Fuel Cells – Not too common, especially in the U.S., a fuel cell is an electrochemical cell that converts a source fuel (usually hydrogen) into an electrical current.

So, how would you go about applying for these Federal tax credits and rebates? Well, after you have done your homework and purchased the appropriate products/had correct items installed, head on over to the Energy Star website, which provides information on the necessary tax forms and other information.

However, don’t stop there – there may be State credits and rebates available as well!

The Database of State Incentives for Renewables & Efficiency, or DSIRE, provides a full list of state, local, utility and federal incentives and policies that promote renewable energy and energy efficiency. Created by the U.S. Department of Energy, it is an amazing reference to all things related to your home state, so be sure to remember to use it in addition to any Federal information you may find. You don’t want to leave any tax credits or rebates on the table while they are still available!

A major key to our communal survival on this planet is by using energy in a much more efficient manner. We cannot continue to destroy the planet in order to continue living the exact same way we did 25 years ago, so we have to make changes in the way we both harvest energy and use energy at home. Upgrading your home to be more energy efficient is a huge component of this, so please – when remodeling, building, or when just wanting to “go green” at home, take advantage of these tax rebates and credits whenever possible. They will save you some money and save us all some energy.