The Greens

It’s been a very intense couple of weeks as I try to establish Green Making in my “copious spare time”. To publicize the site and to build connections in the local green building community, I’ve been out to several events, including the
San Francisco Green Festival and Clean Tech Open’s Green Building Symposium (“The Future Is Energy Efficient Buildings”).

Both these proved to be great places to meet people involved in green building and learn about what local companies are promoting. I’ve put links to all the companies I encountered on the Green Making website under “Recent Finds” (in the left panel).

I’ve also met with people who are building related businesses, including Petalyn Albert of Remodeling Couples and Nils Davis of Barrier Busting.

Petalyn and I discussed some of the barriers to getting people to do green remodels. One, of course, is pricing; and that will become more of an issue as the economy struggles along. Petalyn said that there was often a split between what architects were designing, which generally on the expensive side, and what builders could build for a reasonable price. The customer might get a design from an architect with the expectation that it could be built at one price, but then not be able to get a builder to build it for anything like that price. And, because of our system of “lowest bids”, customers often got an estimate that was far from realistic, resulting in cost increases all along the way as they learned that the options they wanted always came at a higher price.

This was true of remodeling, too, where initial estimates will give way to much more expensive options once the remodeling has started. This creates distrust between the customers and contractors. But a green remodel is also the route to selling your home in a down market. Green homes are selling when their plain neighbors are not, and a green remodel (if done right) may even increase the value of the home. So, how do you do that without overspending?

My take is that many green products are within hailing distance of their traditional (let’s say “polluting” cousins). If you can do a remodel with green materials and spend no more than, say, 5% above what you would have spent anyway, then you will probably profit from the results. Are there enough green options comparable in price to reasonably do a green remodel in the Silicon Valley area? To find out, I went shopping.

I wanted to find out what kinds of green building materials I could buy and not blow my (theoretical) budget. To get started, I went to the nearest building supply store, Orchard Supply and Hardware, in Sunnyvale, CA. While this isn’t a national chain, it’s still large enough to sell all the typical building supplies, for both consumers and residential construction companies. I went to the lumber department, because I expected them to at least have certified sustainable lumber (something from sustainable resources, such as forests maintained and harvested, instead of virgin forest, something maybe with an obvious FSC-certified label). I asked what they had for green building.

The immediate answer was, “Nothing.” I was told that they don’t sell this kind of lumber, and that they didn’t know anything about it. They directed me to the commercial desk, on the theory that maybe they had something for contractors.

On the way to the commercial desk, I stopped at the paint department. I asked if they had any low-VOC paint. It turned out that they had a small section of Dutch Boy Clarity brand paint. This was apparently a low-VOC base paint. The guy in charge said that the paint starts out with no volatile organic compounds (VOCs), but that the tints add VOCs. The paints with the lightest colors have the lowest VOCs. I was able to get pricing for both the Clarity and the comparable default Dutch Boy paints. (I’ll post the results of these comparisons a little later when all the data is in, but the premiums ranged from 15 to 25%.) I was told that OSH planned to replace the Dutch Boy brand with another within about six months, so the paints and pricing will all change. But it’s a data point.

After leaving the paint department, I went down to the commercial desk and talked with someone there. I asked generally if they had any green items in the store (explaining, of course, that I was talking about eco-friendly products, not objects painted green). Blank stare. Crickets. So, we went to talk with one of the store managers, who said that they had CFLs.

Without being too hard on Orchard Supply, I was expecting more. How long has “green” been in the news? How long have people been specifically talking about green jobs (as the salvation of the economy)? How long has the environmental movement been moving, for that matter? But, the truth is (as borne out below, I think) that businesses haven’t got the message at a gut level. Major companies might know that they need to “go green”, but it hasn’t trickled down to the floor. (I can tell you that if I were running OSH, there would not be any employee who didn’t know that the first time the customer mentioned “green” that they were supposed to buttonhole them and take them on a veritable tour of all the green item for sale. It’s that or die, as a company.)

But the manager I talked with did give me all the contact information for the main office in San Jose, so I will be contacting them soon to find out what they have to sell that’s green. Also, I was reminded in the paint department that Kelly-Moore has a store in the neighborhood (right across the border in Mountain View), so I went there next.

Did Kelly-Moore have green products? Yes, they did, and they didn’t go blank when I asked. They quickly put me in touch with one of the sales reps, Brian Vonderwerth, who had a pretty good grasp of what I wanted and what they could provide. Again, their store brands had a low-VOC base but the tints had some amount of VOCs to them, and the lighter the color the less it outgases. They had an option with a zero-VOC, as well, and gave me pricing so I could compare with the default versions. In addition, they carried Yolo Colorhouse® paints, which are zero-VOC base. (Yolo notes that VOCs may be added depending on what colorant system the retail location uses. This would indicate that if you bought them at Kelly-Moore, you would likely get some VOCs added, but you might not if you bought them direct from the company.)

BTW, Kelly-Moore also had some other green products (when pressed) such as cleaners and strippers.

Brian said that Yolo provided essentially the same type of paints as they did, in that the chemicals used were the same. How true this is probably depends on where you get your Yolo paints, but given that they probably put their own colorants into the Yolo base at Kelly-Moore, that’s probably true. When pressed, he was only able to identify the brand value as being different. That is to say that Yolo is a company committed to environmental principles throughout, and part of the value of buying from them is that you are buying from a company with a commitment to the environment. This was backed up by their in-store display, apparently made from recycled paper and other materials. Their brochure (on the non-bleached paper) tells us that they use alternative energy for company headquarters, as well as bio-diesel and rail for shipping. But the paints at the Kelly-Moore end were really no different, except that Yolo was more expensive.

Okay, so why would someone buy Yolo paints? Brian says that they are specified by architects. Basically, if you go to an architect and ask them to design you a green home, they will specify real green materials. But these are typically special-order items and are not the ones that builders or stores would give you by default. And they carry a higher premium. This essentially confirmed Petalyn’s point about the difference between what architects specify and what is available at the building end.

Let’s take an example, interior acrylic flat paint (1 gallon). You can get any of the following at Kelly-Moore’s Mountain View store:

• Premium Regular
• 1500 Enviro-Cote (low-VOC base)
• Yolo (zero-VOC base)

At the prevailing price, the Enviro-Cote was actually cheaper than the “non-green” Premium Regular, and the Yolo (on sale, 20% off) was more expensive than the Enviro-Cote. Enviro-Cote was 3% cheaper than the Premium Regular and Yolo was 21% more expensive than Enviro-Cote.

While not an apples-to-apples comparison, one other option would be to use latex instead of acrylic. For those walls where this would work, you could get zero-VOC interior latex flat (2000 Green Coat) for a 24% premium over the comparable non-green “Professional” interior latex flat. (But this option is also 12% cheaper than acrylic flat Enviro-Cote.) In addition, Brian said that their acrylic will become zero-VOC by next April.

So, at least at Kelly-Moore, you could green up your remodel some by going with the low-VOC option, but if you wanted to eliminate VOCs altogether you would probably have to contact Yolo and get colorants with no VOCs and pay at least 20% more for the base.

So, here is part of the answer. Can you do a green remodel for less than a 5% premium? It depends on what you mean by “green”. If you want the Yolo level of green, then probably not. But if you just want to make your remodel “greener”, then probably yes. For this one option, it was actually cheaper to choose a green option (low-VOC paint) over the comparable non-green option. But the result is far from universal. In many cases, you could end up paying far more for the green option, so careful comparison shopping is called for if you are going to paint before you sell.

Would this result hold up if I shopped elsewhere? My next stop was Lowe’s, in Sunnyvale.

My initial experience at Lowe’s was almost identical to that at OSH. The first couple of people I encountered had no clue what I was talking about. Blank stares. Crickets. Finally, we went looking for a manager and ran into three of them. I asked them what they had at Lowe’s that was green (no, not that kind of green). You know, do you have any lumber that’s certified or cement with fly ash or… yes, it turns out that one of them was Joe Roche, a Regional Commercial Sales manager, who understood what I was looking for.

Joe was good enough to walk through part of the store with me. We went to the lumber section and looked for certified lumber. We didn’t immediately spot any, but Joe said that they often have it even if it’s not marked. He said that they had done a LEED-certified project, and they had to special order the lumber so that it all came stamped. I had him on the hook, now, so I asked about windows. Do you have any low-e windows? We went down to the windows department and took a look.

Lowe’s had at least one brand marked as low-e, ThermaStar by Pella. Joe left me to work with the windows department, and I got an estimate. (Thank you, Sandy.) There are a lot of options for windows, so I just asked for three data points to get a sense of the expenses. For the ThermaStar windows, I got prices for clear, low-e, and low-e with argon gas (between two panes of glass). It turned out that the low-e version was 15% more expensive, and the low-e with argon was 42% more expensive. So, for windows at least, it is unlikely that you could remodel for within the 5% limit I set. However, windows are one of the points where you might get a high payback. At the Green Building Symposium we learned, for instance, that the standard windows on sale (even including all the green options) rates the equivalent of about an R 2.8. In other words, putting a window in a well-insulated wall is like poking a hole through it. (New developments may lead to windows averaging more like R 5, and there are commercial windows available that rate the equivalent of R 22. I’ll try to cover this later when I catch up on the Green Building Symposium.)

After leaving the window department, I walked down through the store and spotted the appliances department. I know they have to sell EnergyStar appliances, so I went in there and talked with the department manager, Tone (one syllable). He turned out to be the most knowledge floor person I’ve encountered, so far. I asked what they had that was green, and the first thing that came up was stoves.

The hot item seems to be induction cook tops, which save considerable energy. An induction cook top works by creating fluctuating electromagnetic fields. These cause iron molecules in your cookware to oscillate, creating heat in the pans. Since the energy goes directly into the cookware without directly heating the stove top or air, it is more efficient. (These things get hot by contact with the cookware, of course.) In a way, they are analogous to microwaves in that the energy is more concentrated on heating the food (but the underlying physics is quite different.)

Not all pans will work with them. (In fact, I learned that glass cook tops in general have to be treated carefully. Copper pans heat up too much, damaging the glass, and cast iron can scratch them badly.) With induction, you have to use special cookware that has a magnetic material (like iron) embedded in it. The staff looked up prices for a regular electric cook top vs. an induction one of the same type, and we got that the induction one carried a 28% premium. (I’ll have to research how much energy savings there is for this option. Obviously, induction cooking has other benefits and probably drawbacks, so not all of the difference is just in the energy savings.)

I asked about the refrigerators, since those are well known energy hogs that are commonly EnergyStar certified. In fact, virtually all their refrigerators were EnergyStar. Tone said that EnergyStar changes each year, so that the standards get stricter. So the year of manufacture (which should be on the label inside the appliance) matters. In my test case, I picked one of the only non-EnergyStar refrigerators they had, a freezer-on-top model (so common) and one that was about the same size and otherwise identical. It turned out that the EnergyStar model was quite a bit more expensive (9%), and the advertised costs of use didn’t vary all that much. The EnergyStar model only got $3 a year in savings, hardly worth the fifty dollar premium on the model. However, most people now buy side-by-side models or even ones with pull-out freezers on the bottom. Virtually all of these are EnergyStar, and the non-certified models may simply be unavailable before long.

From there we went to look at water heaters. Here the trend is toward tankless water heaters, and many people are putting them in when their water heaters break down. The popular variety at Lowe’s were Bosch gas heaters, which come in two sizes. Since they don’t have a tank, they don’t have a volume. They are measured in how many major applications they can support simultaneously. They are more expensive than the heaters with tanks, generally by 20% for the one application variety, and much more expensive for two applications. (However, someone, probably the state, is running a $300 rebate at the moment on these, which may make their prices comparable to the “tanked” variety.) In addition, they require careful installation by a specialist, and a few hundred dollars in additional parts, typically to route the gas lines to the right places. They also need to be vented properly, so they can’t go in an arbitrary location.

Electric tankless water heaters were also available, and slightly cheaper, but I suspect that they are more expensive to operate in the Bay Area, where electric heating is generally more expensive than gas.

I think the conclusion is that green building or remodeling in the South Bay Area has not really worked its way into the popular consciousness. While companies are trying to market green building materials, and in many cases probably have them in stock, the word hasn’t really filtered down to the sales floor. I expect that to change, here, and it could well be different in other areas. My friend, Heidi, who lives in Half Moon Bay, says that the stores there may be a lot more aware of the needs of green builders. I’ll have to go over there and do some research.

–Rich Wingerter

Tags: argon filled windows, Clean Tech Open, energy-saving appliances, EnergyStar, Green Building Materials, Green Building Symposium, Kelly-Moore Paints, LinkedIn, low-e windows, low-VOC paint, Lowe’s, Nils Davis, Orchard Supply and Hardware, Petalyn Albert, San Francisco Green Festival, Shopping, Silicon Valley Area, zero-VOC paint

This entry was posted on Monday, December 22nd, 2008 at 9:48 pm and is filed under By Organizer, Interest Stage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.