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We've been working on building a netzero house on 16 acres up in VT (my wife and I). We should be finalizing construction documents with the architect and builder this week or next and, if folks are interested, I can share some of the experience so far in this thread. The land we bought is up a mountain, but not too far up, it has a few acres of wetlands and the rest is all woods. I am 100% sure there are bears, deer, mink, raccoons, bobcats and other stuff wandering around on the land. I am pretty obsessed by the project and haven't really been able to think about much else since 2016. We are building using mostly Passivehaus specs but we're not being crazy about it. It turns out there's a movement among builders for what we're doing called "Pretty Good House" (https://www.prettygoodhouse.org) which is just taking the practical parts of building to passivehaus requirements but tailoring it to what your actual goals are -- netzero, low emissions, healthy indoor environment, solar, etc. Anyway, I can dump more info about what we've learned, how we got here and other nonsense if this is the place to do it.
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May 26, 2020 13:20
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 01:26 |
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Welp, the "short" version of the story is that we started dreaming about moving up to VT in 2014/2015 because we love it so much there. We've been gradually moving farther and farther away from cities and decided we wanted to go where there are less people. We wanted a very low-energy/net zero home, avoid fossil fuels if possible, be off-grid or off-grid capable, be extremely durable and not require a ton of maintenance and have a setup where, if we have trouble with stairs many years down the road, it won't be the end of the world. We started the search even though we knew we couldn't move until 2021. We've been madly paying off a 15 year mortgage on our current house (in PA) so we have a nice chunk already invested which we can use to reduce costs as much as possible for our new life up north I have two kids from a previous marriage -- one in college, one in high school and graduating in a year (hopefully -- this pandemic is throwing everything out the window currently) so we planned on moving when the high schooler goes to college. Using that date (2021) as a basis, we started researching like crazy to see what houses were available up there for when we eventually want to buy. My wife ran across a pre-fab house maker in Maine called GO-Logic and it totally shifted our gears -- maybe we don't buy an existing house. Maybe we buy land and put a pre-fab house on it. Hmm... GO-Logic is based in Maine and their houses were made in the cold climate and seemed to enbody the ideals were were looking to incorporate into our homes. They were the first site we saw the world "passivehaus" and it took us down a rabbithole of research. We set up a call with them and talked to their team to find out what their houses were all about. We asked if they built many houses in Vermont and they said "Actually, not that many." which surprised us since Vermont is always touting "green" and sustainability. Once we dug into the details we realized it is because, not only does Vermont have a huge passivehaus building movement in the state, but they are also big on building and buying local which also fit very well with our philosophies as well. This phone called launched months of research and had us digging into Vermont builders and architects. We found an architect that built houses that we loved. We wrote him an email and set up a phone call with him. He was surprisingly candid -- Vermont has high taxes (very high), land is expensive, you need to make sure that there are waste water certifications and well certifications included in the land price or else you might buy land that you can't even put a house on, building in Vermont is expensive, building a well-insulated and efficient house is expensive. All-in-all, it sounded... expensive. The dream was kind of dead at that moment but we decided to go through with his on-boarding process, paying a few hundred dollars and get an assessment done that would give us a basic design that would suit our needs and, crucially, expenses. He gave us a questionnaire that was many pages in length. It really forced us to nail down our thinking on what we *actually wanted*. If you're thinking of building a house or looking for one, I suggest this method because it takes your nebulous ideas of "house" and makes them "I want this kind of house" ideas. It doesn't nail things down but suggest things that might prove useful when comparing different features. Here are some of his questions: Please rank the following in order of importance (1=most important, 3=least important)? Schedule (3 ) Budget (2 ) Quality (1 ) Please explain your energy efficiency goals for the project? Please explain your sustainability goals for the project? What is the very essence of the home you can see in your mind and feel in your heart? How long do you expect you will own your new home? Which exterior building materials do you find most appealing? How do you envision your house relating to its site? 21 pages of questions like that really makes you work to imagine where you want to be. We also included tons of photos for inspiration. It all sounded so awesome. We got his design plan and estimate. It was around 3 times the value of our current house. The dream was pretty much dead at that point. We were going to need to find another way to make a house in Vermont happen. (to be continued lol)
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May 27, 2020 12:38
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I'm generally pretty unlucky. Various dumb accidents over the years have messed me up (who needs a heart operation after a bike accident? me) and tons of investments have gone south for me over the years. But that all kind of changed in 2017 or so when my wife said that her company's stock, that we had ignored for years, had gone nuts (she was one of the first people hired). Without going into the gory details, she had a LOT of stock options that were basically worthless for years and now they weren't so we sold whatever was vested and cashed it out. There was still a bunch of unvested options but that's a story for later. Around the same time, my wife's father's house was put up for sale. Her father had died years ago and his current wife was living there. When she passed away, the house was put up for sale and, since half of it was my wife's father's money, half of the proceeds of the sale went to her side of the family. Another huge chunk (about the value of our equity in our current house) of money out of the blue. All of a sudden, within the span of a month, we could afford to build a house in Vermont. I still can't believe it. So we contacted the architect and said "I think we're going to do this" and started looking for property. If you've never done this before, looking for property is nothing like looking for a house. We went on Zillow and entered in criteria for what we thought we wanted -- at least 4 acres, wooded but not all wooded (wife wants a garden), not up too crazy a mountain road, not near a busy road (we live near one now and it succcckksss), needs water rights and septic permit. I created a spreadsheet that had criteria listed out and we put properties in there and rated them all based on the "adherence" criteria I had specified. How close was each one to our ideal for location? Size? How much effort will it take to make it buildable? How close to our budget was it?  We compiled a list of about 40 properties that made the cut, sent them to a realtor in the area and headed up to Vermont for a week's vacation during mud season. We drove hundreds of miles up and down the state, focused on the area we were interested in and narrowed the choices down to four properties. Really, two. Same price but very different situations. It was between one property that was truly out in the middle of nowhere. It was situated near a cow farm, up a pretty severe elevation. I never really "got" why people wanted "a view" until I saw this place. Imagine waking up to this every day.  The other property was in Stowe. It was a fairly quick drive into town (4 minutes or so) but in a very secluded "neighborhood" that was made up of 16-25 acre chunks near the top of a mountain. It was originally a giant parcel that had been subdivided and sold and the last subdivision was still available.  It had wetlands surrounding the main house envelope and then a huge area on the other side of the wetlands.It was shaped like a huge mitten where the house was in the thumb and the finger part was woods with another clearing deep into it. The dealbreaker was that the mountain-view house didn't have any internet service. We looked into satellite but, since my wife's work is all internet-based, it felt like a bad idea to bet on a dodgy satellite connection and have no recourse if it didn't work (and even the best satellite was going to go down according to everyone on the mountain that we talked to). The site work costs were going to be very high too since we'd need to pull electricity halfway up a mountain. We hated to let that place go because it was so so so beautiful (it even had a writer's cabin and a small pond up there), but we felt there were too many unknowns and dealbreakers to get involved with. So we dug into the Stowe property and did some research, hired a lawyer to research the situation with any lingering codicils or liens, etc. We also called our architect to come look at the site to assess it for things like orientation to the sun for solar gain and other things that would help with building an energy efficient house. Oh cable internet has already been run up to this mountain so we were safe on that front. Whew. (now work calls. to be continued)
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May 27, 2020 14:50
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Lead out in cuffs posted:Huh. I can see why poo poo is so expensive in Vermont. Stowe is just a two hour drive from Montreal, and there's an Amtrak line 40 minutes away. Oh and it's basically a ski town, surrounded by state parks? Like, have you considered running a B&B on the side once you've gotten set up? yeah we're excited about the trips to Montreal. Neither of us have visited it before. And there's an airport 40 minutes away too, with flights to Philly and North Carolina where we both have family. Once we get settled up there, the goal for us is I quit working and take care of our young kid (yes in addition to the two older kids, we have a third kid who is almost 3). The whole setup for us is that the house is essentially zero cost to maintain and run. We'll have internet and food and taxes as our main expenses. My wife is going to keep her job and I'll either end up working part time to supplement income or just ... who knows. Our dream is that we reduce expenses to the point where we have a lot of flexibility and can do whatever we want. If things go as planned, we end this thing next spring with zero debt, a new house that has low expenses, and a ton of flexibility with our time. We won't be ready for another project for a while. We did talk about building another small cabin in the "fingers of the mitten" part of our land and renting it out on AirBnb but that's pretty far off though  . One project at a time!Wetland-wise, the entire area is considered off-limits for any activity, including a 50' setback for the developable land. We have done a ton of reading about owning and caring for woods (list below) and plan on harvesting wood out of the non-wetlands area for firewood (which we won't need much of) and otherwise leaving it all as natural as possible. There's talk of making a small trail from our house site to the larger clearing set waaaaay back in the fingers of the mitten. That'd be a long multi-year project probably. Some books we are reading to guide our forest decisions or just learn more about the trees and vegetation (and ecosystem) Reading the Forested Landscape by Tom Wessels A Beginner's Guide to Recognizing Trees of the Northeast by Mark Mikolas The Trees in My Forest by Benrd Heinrich Native Plants for New England Gardens by Mark Richardson and Dan Jaffe Wetland, Woodland, Wildland: A Guide to the Natural Communities of Vermont by E. Thompson and E Sorenson The Walker's Guide to Vermont by the Green Mountain Club Native Plants of the Northeast: A Guide to Gardening and Conservation by Donald J. Leopold Nature Guide to the Northern Forest: Exploring the Ecology of the Forests of NY, NH, VT, ME by Peter Marchand AMC's Complete Guide to Trail Building and Maintenance by AMC's Trails Dept More than a Woodlot: Getting the Most from Your Family Forest by Stephen Long
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May 27, 2020 18:32
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 We looked at so much land before settling on the Stowe property. It was a fun search and, according to folks who live up here, they were extremely blown away that we were able to find a place when we did and for what we got. I attribute this mostly to going up in mud season which is the time in VT when the snow is melting and the roads aren't yet open to big vehicles due to the snow melt creating giant muddy morasses all over the place. We didn't find it too bad and it was definitely the tourist off-season. The land we found was put on sale right before mud season started so we got the jump on people coming up in the spring to look for a place to build their dream ski chalet. If you look at the property, north is on the right, south is on the left. Our property goes from the road on the left side all the way to the driveway on the right (which is actually on our property technically and is protected legally by an addendum to the deed. Beyond the driveway is a big pond owned by the guy down the street a bit. It's hard to tell just how big the land is by looking at this but you're driving for a good 40 seconds before you get to the spot where they are going to do the curb cut. It's just dense woods along a gravel road. The only people who really need to use the road are the people who live there or the people who want to see the haunted covered bridge at the far end of it -- a far cry from the busy motorcycle raceway we currently live on. The "thumb" area of the map is the house site. There is a proposed driveway on the diagram and we'll probably do something like that. We're still working on grading plans for that. The thumb area is large. If you look at the picture above. I took that from about 2 car lengths in from the road and the property continues to the treeline in the distant fog. Beyond that is the wetland. If you can picture that, then you can apply that same size model to the "finger" side of the mitten. There is a *ton* of land that isn't wetland and just wandering woods waiting to be explored. The main house orientation for our house will be to the right side of the map (pond side) which is south. That's also the side of the roof that will have the solar panels on it. If anyone has questions on buying land, I'll try to help or at least tell you how it went for us. Also to get an idea of taxes, the land as it is now is costing us $5000 a year or so. Once the house is built, I suspect it will be between $17,000 and $21,000 a year. Yowchhhhh.
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May 28, 2020 00:18
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:Property taxes vary hugely by state and even municipality. Vermont has the 6th highest property tax rate in the country, about 3x what some other states have. The taxable value of land or a house in a fancy ski town is also going to be much higher than some dirt out in the middle of nowhere. Public school funding is usually tied to property taxes, so this leads to a similarly huge variation in schools/public service funding from place to place too. This is correct. Stowe public school is the highest rated in the state and a lot of taxes go there. Taxes are almost completely tied to property taxes in the state and Vermont has a very low population which means that fewer people bear the brunt of the tax burden to run things. It is a trade off. Only about 4000 people live in Stowe. Another thing that factors in is that Vermont provides a lot for its residents as far as services go. Much more than my current state, Pennsylvania. For instance, in PA, we have to pay for child care for our youngest child and it costs us about $17k a year and we still need to work out something during the summer which is additional expense. Conversely, in Vermont, there is state-funded preschool which costs almost nothing (or often nothing, depending on the town). Stowe subsidizes preschool for their residents, so even though we're paying a lot in taxes, it will actually reduce our yearly costs by $17k a year (plus PA taxes which are $4000 currently). Ironically, the fact that Stowe is a ski town means that our taxes are lower than other towns close by like Warren, Waitsfield, Morrisville etc. because the tourist dollars help offset resident property taxes. They also created a tiered system in town where residents pay one tax tier and people with a second home (non-residents) in Stowe pay a higher tier which also helps residents. he1ixx fucked around with this message at 16:56 on May 28, 2020 |
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May 28, 2020 15:22
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His Divine Shadow posted:You got some insane loving taxes in the US for being such a tax-adverse country. There is no way in hell we could afford taxes like that, home ownership would be impossible on our salaries (~30k € for me, SO studies but might earn around the same when she starts working full time). We make pretty average salaries for Finland. I also should note that the taxes are high because we're building an expensive house on 14 acres of extremely coveted area of town. I'm sure most properties aren't that high in Stowe (but they still aren't cheap by any stretch). I will write up another post on this because its very pertinent to the thread of building green but building a netzero home means that a lot of the infrastructure of the house is higher cost than normal. There are systems in house that don't exist in "normal" homes. Triple glazed German windows, electric car hookup, Solar panels, HRV/ERV (air recyclers), highly efficient heat pumps, induction cooktop, and others all cost more than their more common versions. Plus the materials we are using are all sustainable, local and non-poisonous (cellulose insulation in super thick walls). I'll post more on that later. It's super interesting.
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May 28, 2020 15:46
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So far our process has been this: Tell the architect / interior desinger / builder what we wanted in theory - Net zero or passivehaus if possible. - Solar as only form of power (no propane for heat) - Self-sufficient off-grid operation if possible - Age-in-place for the most part (all main house functions are on the 1st floor) - Fireplace as a concession to aesthetics over efficiency - A ton of pantry space and storage - Some extra room for when the older kids visit or friends come to visit - A place to keep the TV that's out of the main living area - Area outside for a garden with good light and access to water - Quick hookup for a generator (because a bad snow storm could knock out electricity and water pump uses an electric pump) Over the next 6 months or so the architect "built" various versions of this house for us using design documents and we made choices.Each round honed the ideas and helped us better understand what we were getting into. Some things came into focus as we went through this process. Many of them started on the first day at the site, before we even bought it, with the architect. South facing windows are super important for a passivehaus or really any house looking to be energy efficient. There are ways to make less ideal sites work but as we were starting out fresh, having a south facing wall would be key. Passivehaus design generally has a wall of large windows facing south with an overhang above them. When the sun is high in the summer, the sunlight is blocked from entering the house at its highest and hottest. During the winter, the sun hangs lower in the sky and the light will come into those big windows and heat the surfaces inside. So windows are a big thing for a netzero home and you shouldn't skimp on them because they are one of the most important elements of the house. Especially in a bitterly cold environment, the need to have light to heat the house coupled with not losing heat out of the glass surface is a major issue. Here are the windows we are buying. There is a 3 month lead time for windows and doors right now which is wild. https://www.europeanhomesolutions.com/schuco-living-82-md Other names you'll hear are Marvin, Klearwall. Heating, cooling and power are the next big topic. To get to netzero you need to size your heating and cooling load such that you have sufficient amounts of both but not so much that you oversize your systems (thus drawing more power then necessary). To get to a fairly educated guess, there are services you can get that will run models on your designs and give you expected values for your needs. Luckily for us, there is a group in Vermont called Efficiency Vermont which is funded in part by the state that will run those models for you and help you size and source (locally) heating and cooling systems. We sent them the design documents and they ran them through their models which gave us a hopefully-good first guess at heating and cooling needs for the house. Here's an example of an estimate from an HVAC contractor bidding on the job. Keep in mind that the house is currently around 2450 sq/ft. 1-Mitsubishi 42,000 BTU Cold Climate heat pump Condenser Requires 50 Amp 240 Volt breaker 1-Mitsubishi SLZ-KA12NA Ceiling cassette 13,482 BTU'S of heating for the whole 1st. Floor master bedroom end 1-Mitsubishi SLZ-KA09NA Ceiling cassette 10,112 BTU'S of heating for the whole 1st. Floor living/dining/Kitchen area 3-Mitsubishi MSZ-GL06NA Wall mounted cassette 6,741 BTU'S of heating for the office, Kid's bedroom & Guest room 1-Mitsubishi PAC-MKA50BC Branch Boxes for Refrigerant piping distribution to the indoor units & to the outdoor units 2-Mitsubishi MHK1 Wall mounted wireless thermostats for all the 2 ceiling cassettes The 3 wall mounted cassette comes with handheld remote controls Refrigerant Piping from the Condenser to the branch box then to all 5 indoor units Condensate piping to the outside or a nearby drain line 1 Stand and 1 pad to set on and to keep the heat pump condenser up out of the snow We take care of all the low voltage control wiring between units But we will need 240 Volts 50 Amps for the condenser and 120 volts to the branch box which will be located in the mechanical room Installation of a Zehnder Q350 ERV and an Electric heater on the incoming air that will need a 220V 20 amp circuit Installation of all the flex to the register boxes for a total of 18 flex lines, Installation of all the grilles for supply & Exhaust Since the only power source we have planned for the house is solar (other than emergency backup) we need to make sure that system is sized appropriately. The problem with a lot of this is that we can only model and try to build with some extensibility in mind. We can build with only as much forethought as the models provide some of this is guesswork which is a scary feeling since these could be $50k mistakes. The solar panel system we designed should provide us with about 12.37 MWh yearly. We are spending an extra $1000 to make sure the system is sized such that we can expand with another panel if needs change down the road. It's far cheaper to spend that $1000 now than another $12k later. This is a grid-tied system meaning that our electricity is fed back to the electric company and they give us credits. We wanted to build an off-grid system but that looked like it was going to add another $30k to the house cost which seemed extravagant for what it was going to provide. I should extrapolate on that since it was a big misconception for me when I first started this journey. Building an off-grid modern home is complicated. If you are in town limits, some places have regulations against being totally off-grid and require you to tie into the grid in some way. If you are allowed to do it, your biggest concern then becomes power storage. Batteries are very expensive right now and some designs (like the Tesla) have serious concerns regarding the chance of a fire if certain conditions are met. You need to size the system to store enough power for long periods of low sunlight OR will need to have a standby gasoline generator to charge them when there's not enough sun. You can get smart systems that kick the gas generator on to charge the batteries when the amount of solar generation is low and your battery charge is critical but generators are loud and require fuel which creates another issue (how much fuel do I need and how do I get it to my house?). When you add all of these things together, it just was a bridge too far for us to deal with. Not to mention the added cost. And the goal was to be assured of power during an outage and the outages are rare up on the mountain and fairly short. It's just not worth the added tens of thousands of dollars to mitigate that risk. If things go really bad, we are planning on making it easy to tie the house's electrical system to a gas generator that hopefully gets rarely used. Here's what the evaluation for the currently designed system is telling us: What your solar array saves in one year Carbon Offset (lbs): 18,690 Gallons of Gasoline: 956 Trees Saved (tons): 4.46 Computers Powered: 96 Tons of Coal Not Burned: 2.49 Appliances in a netzero home are pretty straightforward. Our choice is an induction cooktop with an electric oven. We would love a propane or gas cooktop but having no fossil fuels in the house was important and it also reduces another system that can fail. One thing to keep in mind with an induction cooktop is that you need pots and pans that are metal and that can conduct magnetic energy. We mostly have compatible pots and pans already so it shouldn't be an issue for us but if you have expensive copper pans or things like that, you might have to invest in new cookware. I'll post about insulation and house structure when I have more time. Let me know if you have questions on anything above.
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Jun 12, 2020 15:09
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 01:26 |
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Baronash posted:he1ixx, I appreciate the write ups about your housing plan. My wife and I rent, which isn't likely to change for a while yet, but we're both in agreement about wanting a net-zero home when we finally decide to settle someplace for more than 2-3 years. Good question. We started by looking for builders and architects who specialized in net-zero and passivehaus. There are apparently a lot of new technologies and techniques in that space and they are constantly evolving. Because those folks are steeped in it, they tend to keep up with it better than the average architect. It is an entire strata of house building all its own. Depending on your state, it may or may not be more prevalent so like, with Vermont, there are net-zero architect associations (usually look for "energy efficient", "net-zero") to find one of those associations near you (Vermont has a few like "Vermont Green Home Alliance" among others). Once you start down the path, you'll find that architects usually like working with specific builders because they know how the net-zero houses are put together, how heating and cooling systems are designed, how they even do "basic" stuff like put up a wall. Both our architect and builder both mentioned that, if you don't find subcontractors who have done this before, they they will invariably oversize your heating and cooling systems, adding cost etc. They basically can't grok the fact that the house envelope can really be that efficient so they fall back on their standard calculations. One quick story -- our architect said to me a week or two ago "Imagine if you have super efficiently insulated wall that is well sealed and just doesn't leak air. A traditional contractor will come in here and oversize your heating based on standard air leakage. It sounds like that wouldn't be a big deal but what you get is a system that comes on, blasts hot air in order to heat a much leakier space and it ends up not being good for the heating system, it causes temperature spikes in the house and often causes moisture and dampness issues because the temperature doesn't come up slowly." So in a nutshell, the little things end up mattering a lot and having someone who has dealt with it in the design stages before will save you time and money down the road.
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Jul 20, 2020 01:52
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