The Greens

If you’ve followed this blog closely, then you’ve noticed that postings are few and far between. One day, that will all be passed. But, for now, I’ve put my priority on building the business and not building the blog.

What does it take to build the business? One thing it takes is a lot of networking. To that end, I’ve worked out a rough schedule of meetings, which you can follow on our Meetup.com groups.

A great meeting to go to will be next Wednesday’s < a href=”http://www.meetup.com/Green-Making-for-the-Silicon-Valley-Area/” target=”_blank”>Go Green Without Going Red meeting, which brings together several members of the local building community to talk about how the typical homeowner can approach turning their home more eco-friendly. I’m preparing to record this talk on video so that we can capture the information for release in various formats.

Setting up a good set of meetings has been a considerable problem for many reasons. One reason is that finding suitable public meeting space that doesn’t break the bank is difficult. Another is that publicizing meetings takes time and money. For the Green/Red meeting, for example, I’ve employed Full Calendar to get the word out to about two- to four-dozen websites. In addition, we posted this to local newspaper sites (such as the Mercury News) and the local Meetup group. (We expect to repeat the panel closer to San Francisco, so I did not list it for the San Francisco Meetup group.) A third difficulty is finding the right speakers for events. Susan Davis of Spectrum Fine Homes was kind enough to help organize speakers for next week’s event.

Beyond the meetings, I’ve also been hard at work on the next revision of the website. To make time for this activity, I had to suspend the news links service. Once the website is revised, I plan to restart that service because I think it provides a lot of value. If you have an opinion on this, then please let me know.

Also this month, we’ve joined up with the Clean Tech Open, a competition for business plans. “CTO” gives out prizes to those business concepts that will do the most to promote sustainability. By providing social networking for the green home building community we believe we are in a position to accelerate the adoption of sustainable building and operational practices across the entire home industry. So, we have entered the “green building” category for the contest and have been working on an executive summary of our business, due to the judges on May 30. Yikes! That’s only days away!

A pleasant reward for entering the Clean Tech Open is that they have assigned us a mentor, Michael Mahre, who has extensive experience in the construction services industry and the private venture sector. He has already been invaluable in helping us to put together our summary. In addition, I’ve persuaded Steve Mezak of Accelerance to help research and develop material for the Clean Tech Open.

At the same time, to help move things forward, I’ve drafted additional help to provide marketing services for those in the green home construction sector. This includes a marketing associate and a dedicated collateral developer. This allows us to flexibly respond to this demand.

By far the biggest draw on my time, however, has been the networking aspect of developing relationships with the design and building firms in the area. To do that, I’ve been participating in many meetings, including US Green Building Council guild meetings, Build It Green local chapter meetings, and recently a NARI mixer, which brought me into contact with a number of people doing interesting things.

For example, Jim Stoch is organizing the Generation Green Expo for September in San Jose, CA. We expect to have more about this show later on.

I also took up Veena Amanpaul’s invitation to go look at their showroom in Fremont, CA, Water Concepts. They had some very nice copper basins from Native Trails. Copper, of course, has natural antibacterial properties, and Native Trails (in San Luis Obispo, CA) makes some products from recycled copper and reclaimed wood.

Water Concepts also had some interesting materials and finishes from Robern, but their website (robern.com) doesn’t have any additional information. If they get back to me with additional information, I’ll post it.

I met a number of others at the NARI mixer, and I’ll post them in the Recent Finds area of the website when I have a chance.

I also have to say that participating in the Sustainable Building Forum has put me in contact with a number of thought leaders in the local green home building and remodeling communities, as well as provided access to a wide variety of firms that provide specialized services (such as SIPs, ICFs, and home performance testing). For more on this, check out the Recent Finds page and go to the Silicon Valley Area Meetup group page for a description of the forum. (Look for the most recent meeting, I’m listing one for each week.)

We are also developing a business around marketing green building services in the online world. We have developed tools and techniques for architects, designers, builders, and others to interact with the online world. These services are derived from our experience in social networking, business processes, quality assurance, and research on new developments (such as those detailed in the Groundswell book by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff). From this, we’ve developed a report process that provides insight for businesses about their reflection on the social Internet. For more information, please contact us.

When I talk about our experience in social networking, this includes growing experience on Twitter. Please look for my Twitter posts. You can find out more by going to our Twitter information page, where you can also sign up.

A number of other projects have come up that I’ll need to deal with, as well. But, as you can see, there’s plenty going on right here at Green Making! Please help by participating in our forums or writing an entry for the blog. It is a great way to publicize what you’re doing.

–Rich Wingerter

It took a little time, but finally we were able to hold a green building meeting specifically for our San Francisco Meetup group, Green Building. Nils Davis of Keeping the Lights On came and talked about the passive house conference.

Nils attended the 13th International Passive House Conference 2009 held last week in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He reported that over a thousand people attended the conference, where they got the latest update on passive houses, buildings so energy-efficient that they don’t require a heating or cooling system.

A number of people new to the Green Building group showed up for the meeting (at Prana restaurant, part of Temple nightclub). We took suggestions for future venues. (If you have a suggestion, please contact us). We need someone from the group to step forward to be the point person for the group, someone who can be the host for future meetings, so if you live in San Francisco and can help us out, please volunteer!

Some members stayed after the meeting to tour Temple. From the left: (top) Nils Davis, 150 year-old Buddha statue, Rich Wingerter; (bottom) Florence, Alex, and Kathryn

One question that came up was whether to be a member of both the San Francisco and the South Bay Meetup groups. Events are placed on the calendars depending on whether we think that people in that area would be interested in the event. For many events we cross post them to both groups because we feel that the topic or speaker would be worth a little travel. Also, events in the middle of the peninsula are likely to be within easy travel for both groups. So, my advice is to join the group that centers on the place you are closest to. If you are closer to San Francisco than to Silicon Valley, then the Green Building group is a better bet. If you are near the Palo Alto-Santa Clara area, then the Green Making for the Silicon Valley Area is probably better.

Temple provided us with a tour of their facilities, which aim to be a totally green nightclub. From the vertical garden on the front wall to the green roof being installed, the owners are committed to building a sustainable operation. A new piezoelectric floor to be installed will capture the energy of dancers to create lighting. Most solid waste is diverted from landfill.

Nils provided a detailed update from the conference. Passive houses represent a huge step toward building zero-net energy houses, but making them widespread in the U.S. will need to overcome some barriers. Only about 20 to 30 passive houses have been built in the U.S., mostly in the mid-west. Nils said that he thinks cities need to provide incentives to builders and the concept of the passive house needs to be publicized. Then it is a matter of making the proper materials available, such as heat exchanging ventilators and high-performance windows and doors.

We plan to schedule Nils for a meeting in the South Bay so he can tell us more about the conference. Please look for the announcement on our Meetup group.

I want to thank everyone who came to the meeting for helping to make it a success!

–Rich Wingerter

As noted in Green Salon Opens in Menlo Park, we are expanding our in-person meetings to include the Green Salon, as well as Green Making member meetings. The Green Salon meetings are a great way for people who are interested in developing a green career to meet others, network, and possibly pick up opportunities.

The Green Making member meetings are the place to meet with others who are interested in green building. These are designed to bring together many interested “green” parties:

• Architects
• Engineers
• Government Agencies
• Interior Designers
• Non-Profit Organizations
• Primary Contractors
• Real Estate Agents
• Subcontractors
• Suppliers
• Technology Developers
• Trades
• Writers and Journalists

And, of course, those who want to build a green home to live in or sell.

You can get more information about all meetings at our Meetup group Green Making for the Silicon Valley Area. Join Meetup.com and keep these meetings on your calendar!

In addition, we now have a professional group on LinkedIn. This group, the Green Making Home Construction Professional Group, is designed specifically for architects, engineers and primary contracting companies. You must be a professional in one of these areas to join. You can visit the group here, but you also need a LinkedIn account to join the LinkedIn group.

We hope you will take advantage of the new services from Green Making. Thank you for your support!

–Rich Wingerter

Monday, I attended the State of Green Business Forum sponsored by GreenBiz.com and held in the PG&E auditorium in San Francisco. You can probably find out everything you need to know about the conference itself elsewhere, so I just want to touch on the most important observations here. (You can see videos of the conference here.)

Obama Panel (from the left): Joel Makower, Jeff Anderson, Sanjay Wagle, and Holly Kaufman

Observation 1: It’s no longer fringe. I estimate there were four to five hundred in attendance, nearly filling the auditorium. Most of these people were official corporate suit-wearing managers, not tie-dyed, granola eaters (at least during the work day). They also spoke corporate-speak: “Innovation as a Green Strategy”, “Energy Efficiency Rises Again”, and “Is Water the New Carbon?” Officially, the conference featured the role out of GreenBiz’s latest “State of Green Business 2009” report, available free here (with registration). We are not wiring up mud huts with our hands and spare bailing wire.

Observation 2: Sometimes green is only skin deep. One participant (Peter Williams of IBM) noted that if green is centered in CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) then the company isn’t serious.

Observation 3: Just because we’re experts, doesn’t mean we know what we’re talking about. One question to a panel was, “Is this just a fad?” See Observation 1. Look, the first time this came around in the 1960s there were 3 billion humans. Now there are nearly 7 billion and we’re looking at 10 to 12 before it’s all over. The average person in the U.S. uses five times as much energy as the average person worldwide, but everyone wants our standard of living. (Well, YMMV, but as a generalization….) So, are we going to produce seven or eight times as much energy in the world as we currently do to fill all that need? Using oil- and coal-fired power plants? Not! QED.

Observation 4: It’s still not obvious how to sell “green”. Another question that came up was, “Why has it been so hard to establish clear needs?” The reason seems obvious to me: the needs are global but people feel needs on an individual level. I don’t need to buy sustainably planted wood to put up studs in the wall, but if no one does it then all our forests may disappear. Figuring out how to turn this tragedy of the commons into a personal tragedy is the key to selling green to consumers.

Observation 5: You can’t go it alone. Maybe this is a corollary to Observation 4, but if your company does green and your competitors don’t then they are playing you for a sucker. To get around this, Levi Strauss developed the practice of bringing their competitors into the loop. To preserve watershed, for example, they went to other clothing manufacturers and created a “CEO mandate”, which brings them all together to set standards for water use.

Observation 6: You don’t need to go it alone. At least, you don’t always need to. Many companies are reluctant to implement energy-saving changes because they doubt manufacturers’ energy-saving claims about products. To combat that, PG&E is doing product testing that can tell their customers whether products live up to their claims, according to Lee Cooper of PG&E.

Observation 7: Laggards are losers. That’s not an observation from the conference, but it is an important concept in evaluating when you are going to jump on the green bandwagon. You might want to consider what Geoffrey Moore has to say about the motivations of early adopters vs. laggards. What drives an early adopter? The knowledge that they can sometimes use new technology to steal a march on their competitors and reap the huge profits that follow from capturing markets early. They are willing to trade high risk for high rewards. So, if you are a high-rewards type, don’t wait too long to get on the green bandwagon. See Observation 1.

–Rich Wingerter

Working with my friend, Nils Davis, we now have some in-person meetings going in the Silicon Valley Area. Nils hosted his first Green Building Salon at the Round Table Pizza in Menlo Park, CA. Attendees represented a wide variety of backgrounds, including architecture, marketing, interior design, and product management.

Nils observed in his notes several themes that came up, including the role of liability in holding back innovation in the building industry, the perception that green is more expensive than brown, and that success will require that the whole green market move across the chasm from early adopters to mainstream (a concept promoted by Geoffrey Moore).

A number of attendees are looking for career changes that will land them a “green” job. As I noticed at the recent State of Green Business Forum, pinning down exactly what a “green job” is eludes even the experts. But, on an individual level, it’s not too hard to identify what it means. For me, it would be a paying job in the home building professions (architecture, engineering, construction or whatever) that combines my experience as an alliance manager with my background in understanding green building needs. For Kirsten at our meeting, it would be finding interior design clients who are “green enough”. (I think this means that care about what they put in their homes—Is it non-toxic? Is it from environmentally sustainable materials? Etc.) For others, such as Janice or Corinne, it might be a job with a solar company or a role in marketing translating between the green needs of clients and the green desires of the company. For Phil and other architects, it might mean finding differentiators that lead to green business.

As a result of the meeting, Nils is setting up a new professional group on LinkedIn that will bring together people who are looking for green jobs. (You can visit the group here, but you need a LinkedIn account to join.)

One huge value to this group is bringing together such a variety of backgrounds. Attendees had backgrounds in textile design, evidence-based design, daylighting, market adoption, congressional activity, the semiconductor industry, and much more.

More Green Salons are planned. In addition, Green Making will be sponsoring a similar in-person meeting in Sunnyvale on 11 February 2009 at the Palace Café on Murphy Street, Sunnyvale, CA. This meeting will focus more on residential green building and we are inviting everyone in the area who has an interest in building green homes. This will be an informal, round-table meeting for us to get together and get to know each other. Future meeting will probably include a short presentation by someone in the trade.

Information about all meetings can be found on our Meetup group Green Making for the Silicon Valley Area. Join Meetup.com and keep these meetings on your calendar!

–Rich Wingerter

Acting on a tip from my friend, Greg Merrill, I went to California Paint Company on El Camino Real in Sunnyvale, CA, to look for eco-friendly paint. Greg says that Benjamin Moore is higher rated than Kelly Moore (which I mentioned in Green Shopping) by Consumer Reports for paint quality.

At California Paint Company I talked with Thomas and he gave me a tour of the store. (He did this because I kept asking questions like, “Is that all you got that’s green?”) Benjamin Moore, like the other manufacturers, seems to be trying to eliminate VOCs from their paints. They have just replaced the Moorcraft Super Spec® line of low-VOC paints with a new Eco Spec® line of zero-VOC paints. (Of course, low/zero-VOC refers to the base, and tints can add additional VOCs.)

There are two big differences between the Eco Spec and the Super Spec paints they are designed to replace. The first is that Super Spec is designed to be low-VOC (below 100 grams/liter) and Eco Spec is designed to be zero-VOC (zero grams/liter). According to Thomas, the other is that the newer paint has the full range of colors that Benjamin Moore offers, unlike the former product. However, the Benjamin Moore literature says that Eco Spec has limited colors, so I would double-check on this before buying, although this may have changed since their brochures were printed. Colors in Eco Spec are waterborne, which means that the paint can be thinned with clean water and all you need to clean up is water.

Thomas gave me comparison prices for four different types of paint they offer. This runs the spectrum from their older Super Spec paint, bought primarily by contractors, through Regal® (the paint probably most often purchased by the public to do their own painting), to Aura® (“quite simply the finest paint we’ve ever made” according to the Benjamin Moore literature), to the new Eco Spec (again for contractors, but for green purposes maybe really the best paint of the bunch). I might note here that the literature says that Aura is also a waterborne paint that “meets the most stringent environmental regulations”. It may, but as “only” a low-VOC paint, it isn’t the most environmentally friendly.

What about price? First of all, the older Super Spec was considerably cheaper than the other paints. Just getting the contractor paint could save you 28% over getting Regal, or 44% over getting Aura, and that’s without dithering on the price. If you were a large contractor, you might be able to get a better deal. What do you give up for this? Well, one thing is the color options, which had not been as good. (But with Eco Spec, this problem apparently disappears.) For another, the consistency of the color may not be as good. You may not get exactly the color on the paint chip from the store. For a homeowner or designer trying to make their color scheme work, this could be a big consideration. But, on the other hand, Thomas told me that Super Spec tended to match better if you had to patch it.

Second, the newer Eco Spec carries a 35% premium over the older Super Spec. This is a fairly substantial premium for getting a zero-VOC base. On the other hand, Eco Spec is actually cheaper than both Regal and Aura (by 2% and 24%, respectively). So, if you are considering buying Benjamin Moore, then it is definitely worth a look.

Is this the best deal? Probably not. While Benjamin Moore might beat Kelly Moore in quality at Consumer Reports, the Eco Spec at California Paint Company was more expensive than the Green Coat at Kelly Moore. Since prices may vary considerably between stores and between projects (perhaps if you negotiate a good deal), I’m reluctant to provide a percentage comparison. You may also find that the quality matters more for your project. But, shop around, as they say.

In addition, California Paint Company carries Natura ™ zero-VOC paint, a premium waterborne paint. This wasn’t available at Sunnyvale and I didn’t get a price, but Thomas said they carry it at their Palo Alto store. This is a designer product, maybe comparable to the Yolo paint carried at Kelly Moore. In the Natura literature, it says that Natura follows the Gennex® color platform, but that Eco Spec has limited colors. It would be interesting to compare the price and quality of Yolo and Natura to see which of these might offer the best buy in this category, and to further compare them with their contractor-grade competition.

While I was at California Paint Company, I shopped for other green products. Before engaging the staff, I wandered around to see what else was available. I immediately saw a “green” paint thinner, but little else. I looked through the wood stains and noticed that a number of the cans were marked with their VOC levels. These ranged from maybe 300 to 500 grams/liter. I didn’t expect wood stains to be particularly green, so I wasn’t too surprised. After checking out the paints, I asked Thomas if he knew of any other products that had noticeably changed to greener equivalents. None came to mind.

I asked him about the green paint thinner. He said that he had had one person return it, complaining that it didn’t work. That’s kind of disappointing, but perhaps not fatal, especially if the trend is to move from oil-based paints to waterborne paints. Nevertheless, I suspect we will have oil-based paints around for a long time, so a good solvent would be a plus. On the other hand, a green thinner seems like an oxymoron.

I also asked about the wood stains. Thomas said that they didn’t have any that were low-VOC (where this means under 100 g/l), but that companies were working on that. So, we may see some waterborne stains on their shelves in the future. (I’m not knowledgeable enough to know whether waterborne stains are available generally.) Generally, if you wanted to “stain” wood in an eco-friendly way, you would probably use a wax or other natural finish. I’m not able to find a reference to the type of wax finishes I have in mind, but Aglaia Natural Finishes produces biodegradable plant- and mineral-based products with no petrochemicals or artificial resins.

One of the things I noticed about California Paint Company that I liked was that they had good information on colors and other paint factors. For example, I picked up a nice gloss level chart that shows 10 levels of gloss with paint samples (all in Hazy Blue). I also found a nice, but content free, brochure on how “the natural world can inspire a vision of the way we want our homes to look and feel”. Information on the Aura paints was particularly good, and there were good displays of color chips. They had a really excellent brochure called “Color Language: a color guide for home decorating”, which would be helpful for the non-designer to get some clues. (Designing a room so that the colors work is no small feat, and this only covers some of the basics. However, the limited advice they give is solid.) So, for the shopper who can’t afford a designer, or one that wants to independently research their facts, there was abundant material to help them out.

I also noticed that Benjamin Moore has partnered with others, such as Pottery Barn, to come up with color schemes. They had a brochure with Williamsburg colors and a corresponding brochure about visiting Williamsburg, VA. I personally find their Willamsburg color scheme particularly attractive, so it may figure in paint for our home at some point. (But I wonder how it would go with the southwestern motif I’ve got for other furnishings, like rugs. Hmmm.) Anyway, for whatever reason, I found the color options broader here.

Now, I know I’ve been remiss in not getting back to OSH HQ to find out about their green products, but I’ve still got it on my schedule. Maybe next time.

–Rich Wingerter

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

In 1996, after selling the house in Ben Lomond, we moved into the upper floor of a condo in Palo Alto, which we rented from friends, and started looking for a new house to buy. We were very motivated buyers because prices were rising all over California. While this had helped us sell the house, it made buying a new one increasingly expensive. Our total savings and proceeds were enough to buy a house, but one in Silicon Valley would be very small, especially compared with the one we just left, which had about 4,000 usable square feet. But, any house that was “big enough” tended to be on the outskirts. As a result, our search kept widening until finally it took in an area from San Luis Obispo to Mendocino and inland to the Gold Country. It was pretty clear we were going to live “out in the country”.

With some cramping, we figured we could get into a house under 3,000 square feet. It needed to be big enough to accommodate Kathryn’s business and the remains of mine, which I had just sold after taking a day job in Palo Alto. We started working with a real estate agent in Los Gatos, who found us some houses before they came on the market (and would then be subject to bidding up by other buyers). Eventually, we found a house in the foothills east of San Jose, near the San Jose Country Club, that was about to come on the market, roughly the requisite size and something close to our price. It just had a few minor problems. It needed a new roof. It had a pool that needed repair. The master bedroom had a giant, in-wall air conditioner and was on the west side of the house, which indicated that it suffered from heating and cooling problems. Oh, and you had to drive through (how do I put this delicately?) a slum to get there. For this they wanted over $100/square foot. (We can look back on these days with some nostalgia, can’t we?)

In the middle of this, Kathryn was called on to take care of her aging father in Sacramento, and had to go there to stay with her parents. While she was there she called me up and said something like, “They’re selling new houses over here for $65 a square foot. Should we buy one?” So, I went to take a look.

These houses turned out to be in Roseville, CA. Roseville was booming in the mid-1990s, with many people who had made their killing in Silicon Valley moving out to the corridor along I-80 east from Sacramento and buying houses that were essentially half the price of ones in the Bay Area. A steady stream of jobs was following them out there (although most of these were sales jobs and the like). Every day a new big-box store or a mall would open.

Roseville had been a train hub for decades, and its small core was built around the train yards. It also had a few major businesses, including a large HP facility. The rest was sprawling residential and retail development, pushing out into what amounted to a desert. Unlike Silicon Valley’s wonderful farm land, this land had previously been used for grazing cattle, and there were ranches for miles in every direction. I had no qualms about covering it with a house. Also unlike Silicon Valley, temperatures in the summer hit 100° Fahrenheit and stayed there for weeks at a time. Cattle could only survive here because of irrigation. At some point, ranchers figured out that watering humans was more profitable than watering cattle, and they started selling off all the ranches and turning them into housing.

We drove through the new fields of houses in Roseville, looking at many models. We quickly discovered that the houses on the north side of I-80 were smaller and tended to have cramped lots and neighborhoods. Those on the south side were more spacious. The development Kathryn had found, Eureka Village, was on the edge of Granite Bay, an upscale community east of Roseville that continued out to Folsom Lake. A little tract of some fifty houses was mainly surrounded by fields and more residential and business construction. Three or four models at the entrance were completed, along with a street of houses. The rest was empty lots and a couple of houses under construction. One of these had come on the market, probably because the buyer had dropped out. We decided to buy it because we could still determine what interior to install, we could get into it quickly, and it was quite spacious. The construction company quickly finished it off, and we had a landscaper put in a yard. After ten months of searching and some months waiting we finally settled in.

Nothing about this house was particularly green, other than perhaps it had good insulation. We did, however, think that we could potentially raise some organic vegetables in the backyard, and we had the landscaper put in a couple of raised beds. These were untreated wood with crushed granite paths around them. We had them filled with organic soil, and a couple of sprinklers from the irrigation system installed, so that they would get water even if we went on vacation. I started taking the train to the Bay Area once a week and staying in the one room I continued to rent from our friends in Palo Alto.

Some weeks later, Kathryn called me at work. “There are trees growing in our raised beds.”

“Trees?”

“Yes, they’re all soggy.”

“The raised beds?”

“Yes, the raised beds.” (“What else, dodo?”)

Sure enough, when I returned that weekend, there were cottonwood trees growing in the raised beds. And cattails. We had created a swamp in the middle of the deserts of Roseville.

–Rich Wingerter

While we’re on the subject of site selection, I should mention that Kathryn and I moved into a house some years ago that, on second thought, was probably not the ideal site. We picked a house in Ben Lomond, CA, deep in the Santa Cruz Mountains, which had a spectacular view of the redwood forest through huge picture windows around two sides of the living room. With a newly installed redwood deck around two-thirds of the house, it was composed almost entirely of redwood; including redwood paneling, planks and beams, and the naturalness of the wood encouraged us, as did the potential privacy of a property at the end of a private road.

The main floor consisted of a spacious open kitchen/living room with a massive stone fireplace on one side, and a set of smaller rooms (including a bedroom/master bath, a bedroom and a separate bathroom) on the other. Upstairs we had a semi-finished attic, with a twelve-foot peak that sported four dormers with enclosed storage between them. A single staircase in the middle of the house allowed access to the attic, but a standard door closed it off at the top. Everything was carpeted with a brown woodland shag. While it had no basement, it had a large wooden shed.

It was the darkest house imaginable.

In fact, despite picture windows along two walls of the living room and two incandescent light fixtures, there was practically no light in the living room at all. After dark, only a couple of lamps and the glow of the fireplace threw any light into the room, which gobbled it up in the brown carpet, brown walls and darkened windows. And dark came early to a house on the north side of a hill, completely surrounded by 100-foot redwood trees!

Kathryn and I set up shop in the attic. We each had our own business, so we each put our office in one corner and set up the other half as a recreation area. The previous owners had sold us their pool table along with the house, and we added some couches to round out the living area. We set up our computers, copiers, printers, etc., and plugged them all in—and the power went out.

Clearly, it was time to do some work. Primarily at Kathryn’s initiative, we completely overhauled the most problematic of the areas.

The electrical problems were somewhat easily fixed by an electrician, who installed new 15-amp circuits in each corner of the upstairs. But as we settled in, it was clear that this wasn’t the biggest problem. The biggest problem was a lack of natural light, and the warmth that comes along with it. So, we began some systematic upgrades.

First, we had sky lights installed. Unfortunately, with the upstairs as such a vital living area, we weren’t able to extend these freely to the living room, where they would have had the most impact. (Doing this now, perhaps we would have investigated light tubes, to bring more light into the center of the room. At the time, we missed that option.) Nevertheless, we were able to route two shafts from the skylights through what had been storage spaces under the eaves to bring light to the kitchen/living room area. We also installed skylights upstairs, which created an enormous difference in the work area, eliminating the need to burn lights during the day.

In addition, we replace the brown carpet with a tan Berber. This was especially important in the living room, where the carpet had soaked up a lot of watts.

Then, we removed the two light fixtures, wrought iron with yellow plastic lenses, which had been recessed up between the redwood beams, and replaced them with clear-glass hooded lamps. These suspended open bulbs well below the beams. The new fixtures with 40-watt bulbs cast significantly more light than the old fixtures with 100-watt bulbs.

But most important of all, we installed a woodstove insert into the open fire place. This was an improvement on many levels. For one thing, an open fireplace creates a lot of smoke, and it is virtually impossible to keep that smoke out of the living space. Second, it is not very efficient at projecting heat. Most of the heat goes up the chimney. But worse, it uses up wood very quickly. Stoking the fireplace in the winter became a constant chore, and all wood had to be carted in from a protected area well outside the house. This area was at ground level, well below the deck and the main level of the house, so it had to be carried up stairs.

To keep from having to go through the whole fire starting sequence each day, we tended to simply keep the fire going all the time. This meant stoking it at night. While temperatures in Ben Lomond seldom fall below freezing, even in the middle of winter, most of that season is unrelenting rain. We chalked up 80 inches of rain one year. So, if the supply of wood we kept on deck ran out, that meant going out in a drizzle to fetch more.

We chose a wood stove with dual combustion, which re-burns the heated gasses that come off the wood when it is heated and thus cuts down on emissions. The woodstove also had glass doors, which prevented most of the smoke from coming into the room. And it had an electric blower, which would push the heat out into the room from wells around the outside of the burn chamber. Installing the insert cut the need for wood to about a third of what it had been.

Even so, we still had some problems with heating the upstairs. This had to be done, primarily, with electric heat from wall heaters. More of the upstairs could have been heated from the wood stove if there were better air circulation between the floors. Unfortunately, the original owner had walled off the stairs and put a door at the top in an effort to keep heat from flowing up. This made sense when the upstairs was largely an attic and the open fireplace barely heated the living area. But now that we had a more efficient heater, I cut a hole in the ceiling not far from the woodstove and installed a register grate. This modification, combine with leaving the stairway door open, allowed for some circulation, and the grate could be closed if we didn’t want heat to go upstairs.

Alas, we could not fix one of the most persistent problems with the house: the neighbors. While our house was at the end of a private road, it turned out that there were other houses further along. The neighbors there had long since taken to using our driveway as if it were a thoroughfare, and eventually we decided to look for a better neighborhood.

So, the lesson is that you can improve a site, but you can’t always overcome every difficulty. This property suffered from two deficits that are nearly impossible to work with: a location on the north side of a hill and a neighborhood that doesn’t live up to the promise of the house. But even with that, it was one of the most pleasant homes I’ve ever had.

–Rich Wingerter