How Many Miles Per Gallon Does Your Home Get?

What’s New in Housing 3: Or How Many Miles Per Gallon Does Your Home Get

By Ronnie Godfrey

In making the purchase decision of buying a new car, one of the questions you might typically ask is, how many miles per gallon does it get. Seems that should be part of the overall cost consideration. Yet often I hear of folks purchasing a new home with no regard to its total cost of operation. Too bad, as the costs of operating homes of similar size can vary widely depending on how it’s built and what technologies are used in its construction.

We, of course don’t use miles per gallon. Instead the best way to measure one home against another is its Home Energy Rating System ( HERS score). The base score of 100 assumes a home is built to current codes. That home is probably better than a home built some time back to current codes of another era. If you incorporate energy saving into a new home then the score is lower. It’s like a golf score the lower the number the better.

For example, to be and Energy Star Home the score must be 85 or lower. Oh, and by the way that is about to change as EPA is rolling out Energy Star 2.5 in April of this year and the new score will need to be lower. The lower the score the more energy you can save on heating and cooling. The best score, it was thought, was 0, called net 0. Now we hear of homes that make more energy than they use. They are -0 (the building industry is struggling to come up with a good name for these homes).

For now, the best thing in the way of payback is a home with the lowest HERS score that you can afford. I mention “afford” as some of the things you might do to make your home energy efficient can have a significant cost, photovoltaic (PV) panels for example. I built a home a little over a year ago and the homeowner calls me every few weeks to tell me he just had an electric bill of $28 or so. He has solar water heating and PV panels.

The first $1,500- 2,000 spent on energy efficiency is the best and has the greatest/fastest payback. The way the home is oriented, insulated, the windows used, the HVAC system, most important the tightness of the home, these are the things that cost the least but deliver the most miles per gallon. These are the things that will cause the home to have a HERS score in the 50’s are 60’s. The other things like PV’s can be added later as a retro-fit. Of course as mentioned that afford thing comes up. Here’s my take; do those things that get you to a 60 HERS score initially, then as you can afford to add those other more costly add-ons, do so.

When you think of buying a new home be sure to ask to see the document that shows what the HERS score is for that home.

In keeping with the theme of What’s New, here is a website you can look at that incorporates several new colors, finishes, etc… in a home that was designed by Martha Stewart and built in Florida. Watch for the electric outlet in the garage for charging your electric car.

http://www.builderconcepthome2011.com/

What's New in Housing? Part 2

What’s New in Housing?  Part 2

By Ronnie Godfrey

As mentioned in my last article, I will now take up the various suggested subjects of the newer aspects of the housing industry. I promised a review of the proliferation of computer usage and how the buyer could benefit from these. I’ll start with computer generated floor plans.

I mentioned that for several years we have generated floor plans on our computers. Now we can do more than just draw flat lines showing the floor plan on the monitor. We can show the exterior of the home in simulated 3D. We’re able to spin the home around globally so that it can be seen from every angle:

·        Looking down at it

·        Looking up at it

·        A top view

·        A top view with no roof

·        Cross sections

·        Etc…

We can load your home with your furniture so that you are able to see how it would fit in the various rooms. Measure what you have and tell us what room you want to place it and on which wall and then you can see these results from a simple floor plan view or from a 3D camera view.

A fun thing to do is a walk through or actually more of a fly through of your home. We can place the furniture as mentioned, place scenery outside of your home (mountains, snow scenes, prairie etc…), vehicles in the garage and trees, shrubs, and flowers. Then we map out the route that we want the camera to take and record this for viewing in my office or record it on a disk to mail to your friends or relatives.

More and more manufacturers are submitting to our software supplier, catalogs of their merchandise .We can download these and they can be used in the views spelled out in the previous paragraph. I now have catalogs of:

·        Brick and stone

·        Carpets and rugs

·        Multiple brands of paint choices

·        Appliances

·        Flowers and shrubs

·        Doors and windows

·        And more

The estimating process is faster due to improvements in software. The same can be said of scheduling and record keeping, and all of these can be linked to each other. You have right to know when your home should be completed and what the final cost will be.

You can email or call me if you would like for me to go into more detail on the things we covered here. Reach me 817 988 0149 or

What's New in Housing

What’s New in Housing?  

By Ronnie Godfrey

There have been more changes in the housing industry in the past three years than in the previous thirty-three years. That’s how long I have been building houses and developing land. I thought we might explore some of these in a few articles over the next month or so. And then discuss how they might apply, should you or someone you know, be in the market for a new home.

You could probably guess that the proliferation of computer usage would be one of the changes. For several years we have generated floor plans on our computers. That’s no surprise. However the software gets more sophisticated almost daily. We will dedicate a whole article to this and you will see what I mean. I think you may be amazed. Additionally, more and better software is available to estimate, schedule, and record keep, to make the construction job and number crunching go better. You could ask these questions and reasonably expect to get good answers:

·        How much have I spent to date?

·        How much more will I need to spend to completion?

·        How long should it take to complete?

Construction materials and methods is another topic that will require an article or more to just scratch the surface. Again some materials and their uses have been with us, but improvements and new ways to use them are coming to the forefront. Cementious siding (exterior siding made from cement), steel framing members, concrete additives and finishes, modular construction, concrete filled foam blocks called ICFs, to name a few.

Of course design options are greater now. There is more of everything. Paint, flooring, plumbing fixtures many with built-in electronic controls, light fixtures including more LEDs, appliances, etc...

Then there are the energy efficiency features to talk about. There are more HVAC options, solar collectors- both heated water and photovoltaic, and insulation improvements.

And then, there are the new requirements to acquire the coveted Energy Star label. EPA is rolling out version 2.5 now and getting ready to implement version 3.0 by the first of next year. Some of us already meet those new standards and have for quite some time.

This is an exciting time to build a home with all of these things to consider. But remember; Unless the LORD builds the house,
They labor in vain who build it; Psalms 127:1a.