ENERGY EFFICIENT

Affordable technology and better designs now exist to build super energy-efficient homes, but since a non-rigorous building code largely fails to consider these technologies, and since consumers understandably don't know much about them, houses are still commonly built with just average windows, fiberglass batts, house wrap, and no attention to sealing the building envelope.

We can do better. Fokus Builders, LLC partners with companies like Energetechs to ensure our homes meet high standards for energy efficiency. The design and construction of the building envelope of a home has the single greatest impact, over any other feature, on the energy efficiency of a home and we focus our efforts there.

Tight Building Envelopes

"Build it right and build it tight." The building envelope of your home should be sealed tight and not allow air to escape or enter through hidden leaks. That is, the foundation, walls, exterior, and roof of your house should not allow conditioned interior air to escape, or outdoor air to enter, in and uncontrolled manner. Yes, a house must breathe, but only in a controlled manner (see HRV below). You paid money for the warm (or cool) air in your house and having it escape in an uncontrolled manner is a waste.

Tight houses don't happen by accident. They require careful attention to detail and close supervision and coordination of subcontractors such as framers, plumbers, electricians, and insulators. The old way of building leaky houses is still alive and well because building envelopes are not well understood by many builders, and even if understood, many builders are not diligent with the detail and careful coordination required to achieve a super-tight envelope.

Fokus Builders, LLC provides the attention to detail and close supervision of subcontractors necessary to achieve a super-tight building envelope. We perform a blower door test on every house we build to help find and plug hidden leaks and to definitively confirm the tightness of our building envelopes. Our goal is to achieve a tightness rating of 1.0 ACH (air change per hour). That's tight!

Heat Recovery Ventilation (HRV)

For safety and health, tight houses require controlled ventilation with heat recovery ventilation (HRV) units. These units refresh the indoor air by blowing stale air out and pulling fresh air in. In the process, these two streams of air pass through a heat exchanger, which warms cold incoming air in the winter and cools hot incoming air in the summer, helping preserve indoor air temperature without additional energy consumption.

Best Insulation and Minimal Thermal Bridging

For excellent sealing of the building envelope, and the best R-value per inch, we use ozone-friendly spray foam insulation from NCFI in walls designed to have minimal thermal bridging. Specifically, our wall design uses a 2x6 plate with staggered 2x4 studs. This gives us a wall with an R-value of over 30 and minimizes the conductive heat loss that result from typical 2x6 wall in which each 2x6 stud acts as a thermal bridge between cold outdoor air and warm indoor air.

Optimal Value Engineering (OVE), also called Advanced Framing

Traditional framing practices use a lot of unnecessary wood in the building envelope. The biggest problem with extra wood is that when wood takes the place of insulation, the R-value of your envelope decreases. OVE framing practices place studs at 24" on center (rather than 16" on center), use two-stud corners with drywall clips, single top-plates, right-sized headers, and other wood reducing measures. Modern builders break with tradition and strive to get the wood out! Read more here.

Best Windows

Thermally speaking, windows are the biggest hole in your building envelope. You should plug those holes with windows that have the lowest U-values (highest R-values) you can afford. We prefer Serious Windows since they have the lowest whole window U-values in North America, and they do so using double-glazing (two glass layers) rather than heavier and pricier triple-glazing (three glass layers). Clawson Windows also manufactures excellent windows locally that have good U-values and include locally harvested wood from North Slope Sustainable Wood.

Fine Homebuilding Magazine had an article recently about the 2009 Passive House Conference in which it mentioned North America's best window maker: Serious Windows. Check it out here.

Insulated Concrete Forms

To build foundation walls, we use insulated concrete forms (ICF). These forms are made from expanded polystyrene, install as stacked blocks, and after the concrete is poured in their interior, they stay in place for basement walls with excellent thermal performance. Read more here.

Passive Solar

If you build a home, you'll be spending plenty of money on building materials. Why not orient those building materials so you can get as much free energy from the sun as possible? When the sun shines in the winter, you'll be glad you did.

Using simple software tools from Google and following the best passive solar guidelines currently available (thanks Energetechs), Fokus Builders, LLC designs its homes with the proper amount and type of window glazing (high SHGC values) and thermal mass required to take advantage of the winter sun. Carefully placed window shading keeps your house cool in the summer. Interior thermal mass stores the sun's energy inside your home in the winter, and absorbs that excess energy to keep your house cooler in the summer.

Passive solar design and golden rectangles

The Passive House Standard (Passivehaus)

The passive house standard is the highest home building standard on the planet and we take inspiration from it, with a little dose of Montana sensibility. This standard requires extremely high insulation values, a super-tight building envelope, passive solar optimization, HRV, and therefore, no need for a standard heating system. Please read this very well-written article about this standard in the New York Times to better understand the important ideas behind this powerful, emerging standard.

Net-Zero options with solar hot water and photovoltaics

A "net-zero" home, a home that produces as much energy as it uses, is expensive. Period. These homes must start with excellent building envelopes, like our houses, combined with photovoltaics and solar hot water from Sustainable Building Systems or Big Sky Solar and Wind. If you want a net zero home, we can easily add these features. They cost a lot, but the prices are coming down and incentives are there. Remember, you can't have a net-zero home without beginning with a tight, well-insulated building envelope.