SolarGlass

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have a fair amount of skepticism about the Department of Energy’s involvement in an initiative to spur the availability of R5 windows. Details in the initiative can be found here. SolarGlass commented the initiative in a letter posted here.
R5 Volume Purchase Program in High Altitude Markets

Populus Sustainable Design Consulting will be conducting Leeds for Home training in our Santa Fe showroom facility Read more and sign up!

Here are energy efficiency claims found on some replacement window competitor websites:

• 45% more energy efficient in winter

• $465 in Energy Savings

In each case, a reading of the fine print and disclaimers makes these claims perfectly legitimate. However, to determine whether you will experience these levels of improvement requires an understanding of glass technology and terminology, as well as glazing to floor area ratio, not the starting point level of homeowner knowledge in our experience.

Moreover, I dislike the sales approach. Statements touting benefits in the abstract and at the high end of the scale are not designed to “set the table” for a information exchange that results in a more confident and educated buyer. Rather, it is a tease and tantalize approach – not my idea of best serving homeowners.

Aside from the sales approach, claims of window energy efficiency or energy savings fail to acknowledge the system’s base nature of how a home and its occupants use energy. More on this in a subsequent post.

Last week I participated in an Alliance to Save Energy webinar entitled “Window Energy Efficiency Beyond Business As Usual”. The webinar touted the benefits of super high performance R5 windows over commercially available R3.33 windows. The Department of Energy is pushing a volume purchase program to help drive the cost of R5 windows down to an acceptable premium.

I think continued evolution in window, door, and skylight performance is good for everyone and will force the better companies to increase the speed of innovation, while weeding out the lower quality/lower price players. I am not sure I agree that a DOE-sponsored volume purchase program is the best public/private partnership, but I remain open-minded.

What I am sure of is that with very few exceptions, the cost of today’s R5 windows is not at all justified by the energy saved or the carbon reduced. This remains true even if you double today’s cost of a therm (100,000 Btu)

The attached presentation puts the R5 vs. R3.33 debate in the context of Boulder City and County building codes and amplifies the “cost efficiency” of commercially available windows. While I take complete responsibility for the content of this post and the presentation, special thanks are due to David Neiger and the Populus team for helping work through the energy calculations.

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On February 24th, I had the pleasure of presenting, alongside Brad Begin of Serious Materials and David Neiger of Populus, to the Santa Fe New Mexico Home Builders Association. We shared information and had a lively discussion regarding high performance windows and energy performance-based building codes. A copy of the presentation is inculded with this post.

The city of Santa Fe is on the cusp of adoption a Home Energy Rating System (HERS) based building code. From our perspective, pushing towards higher performing buildings is a good thing and the better window suppliers will become indispensible partners in the effort.

sfahba-presentation-2-24-09

With the new building codes in the city and county of Boulder, homeowners and building professionals are coming into our showrooms with many questions regarding windows and doors for their remodel or new construction projects. The questions generally ask “which window or glass do I need to use to achieve the HERS (Home Energy Rating System) Score required for my building permit.” My answer is always the same and invariably unexpected. As long as the windows are Energy Star rated for this region (the vast majority of commercially available windows are) nearly any window will do.

I go on to explain that the larger the house, the lower the required HERS Score. Since insulation, air infiltration, HVAC systems, and lighting loads make big and very cost effective contributions to lowering HERS Scores, their contributions will always be maximized. The irony is that the more energy efficient the overall building, the less difference a given window makes!

I further explain that if you are just aiming at a HERS Score, someone could sell you a very low quality vinyl window that is gas filled and the result would make the requisite contribution to achieving the given HERS Score target.

I think there is a lot of data and comparatively little information “circulating in the air.” From our perspective, window and door selection is about the interplay of aesthetics, performance, and price. Aesthetics speaks to the contribution windows make to exterior and interior beauty, as well as ease of operation. Performance includes the embodied energy of production and delivery, impact on heating and cooling loads, product life cycle, and recycling opportunities at the end of useful life. The new building codes add important and beneficial elements to the performance aspect but do not change the fundamental pros and cons, or the trade-offs associated with the interplaying factors.

Any quality window or door company should be able to help you to understand the aesthetics, performance, and price choices available to you and do so in context of your project, building permit requirements, and budget.

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I think today’s joint Alpen SolarGlass Boulder Green Build Guild presentation was well received. The audience was smaller than I expected but it was good to begin speaking on a topic that we all need to learn more about. It was also fun to be paired with the leadership of Alpen Energy Group.

The most important take-away from my perspective is that choosing the right window and door package for your home or project requires balancing a surprisingly high number of variables. While it is not always the case that SolarGlass will offer the right solution for a given project, we will be a consistent, high-quality source of data and knowledge to facilitate your decision making.

The presentation will be available on the BGBG web site shortly and here once I get permission to upload files to my own site!!

On the eve of a very important presentation to a Boulder Green Build Guild (BGBG) brown bag audience, I am happy that I am co-presenting with Alpen Energy Group. While it is true that Alpen and SolarGlass could be viewed as competitors and will at times compete for business, on a larger and more important scale, we are local companies, good at what we do, and uniquely position to be supplier/partners in navigating the implications of the new city and county of Boulder building codes.

I have met and am impressed with Brad Begin and Robert Clarke of Alpen. I look forward to sharing the BGBG brown bag with them. Moreover, I look forward to representing the collective knowledge and expertise of the SolarGlass team.

I will post the presentation content here and share my perspective of the conversation.

Stay tuned!