The benefits of green building materials and practices have been discussed when creating our homes and workplaces for a while now. The COVID-19 pandemic required a light-speed adjustment in this direction, as our offices were locked down with stay at home orders and everyone worked away from office colleagues and technology support. Working remotely, although not a new concept, became our new normal, and hybrid and remote office environments will continue to be part of our future.
In a short amount of time, it became apparent that we would need to embrace green building concepts such as daylighting, orientation, insulation, ventilation and mass (DOIVM*) for a healthier home environment. In addition, technology needed to be integrated into our work-from-home lives in new ways we had not thought of before. As people spend more and more time at home, it will be essential for homebuilders to include these innovations in future builds that create a more sustainable and durable home for families who use their in-home appliances and resources more than they did in the past.
Remote work technology is here to stay
Zoom meetings from home offices have become widely used— in addition to other tech tools like Skype, MS Teams, Bluebeam and CaptureQA— to support productivity at home and for business to continue. Working from home reduces commute time, saves gas and encourages savings. Equally important, working from home requires creative solutions to “unplug” from work. This involves physical and mental separations, including programmed downtime to maintain work-life balance.
The physical separation can be achieved through architectural design solutions for new construction or remodeling and creative space-planning ideas for previously established home layouts. These designs and redesigns address the need for multiple work areas for dual-income earners or home-schooling needs where families are all working and studying under the same roof. Without establishing these boundaries to separate work and personal time, the pressures of home and work-life stresses can lead to burnout, overwhelm us emotionally and ultimately compromise our immune systems.
How are we integrating green building products and principles?
We all know about plug loads creating excess electrical demand and occupant behavior putting wear and tear on home operating systems. Both can unravel the most sustainably designed and constructed healthy home-work environment. This risk of poor system performance grows when five or more people are all living and working at home—around the clock, and potentially taxing the home’s systems, such as active or passive ventilation. A healthy home supports occupant health.
But without feedback loops, we have no metrics to measure brewing problems, which can lead to a subtle deterioration of indoor air quality or potential long-term deterioration of the home. Sensors that measure temperature, humidity, moisture level, water leaks, hot spots, cold spots, mold growth, carbon dioxide (CO2), volatile organic compounds (VOCs), carbon monoxide (CO), supply and usage of site-generated solar energy and battery charge levels are just a few examples of things to keep an eye on. The integration of these sensors into a data hub or dashboard— either centralized at one workstation, distributed throughout on a room-to-room basis or both—is also important. The dashboard can provide immediate feedback to understand occupant effects, system function and overall home performance. Examples of a power usage dashboard have been demonstrated by Southern California Edison in their Southern California Energy Education Center, showing variable costs in real time when several appliances automatically turn on and off throughout the day, either in parallel or in series.
Measuring this cost will help occupants adjust their behaviors to schedule usage during non peak pricing periods. The real test will be when major equipment and appliance manufacturers provide integrated plug-and-play whole-house solutions on a large production scale. These advanced systems can also include the programming of home maintenance activities into the system, with maintenance alerts, monitoring for compliance and tracking completion with automated record keeping. A robust online customer service system could then be a game changer for sustainable building practices.
What does the future hold?
The COVID-19 pandemic inspired some sustainable concepts, but the future holds many more building technologies, including leading trends from Europe and American universities that could gain widespread adoption by homebuilders. These concepts incorporate energy efficiency, resource conservation, automation and modern technologies, including different levels of integration. Here we explore a few examples of sustainable techniques and technologies, such as dynamic glass and flexible building skins that could be adopted by homebuilders. It’s the home of the future, and the future is now. We learned about several of these new technologies at the International Advanced Building Skin Conference in Bern, Switzerland.
Level 1: Aerogel insulation is a high-performance product that marries thermal functionality with fire prevention properties. Aerogel insulation presents a new product with construction applications not only in exterior (building) envelopes, but also in fire resistive assemblies. It is reportedly such a good insulator that a blowtorch on one side won’t ignite a match on the other side. In fire-prone areas, we think this idea will be embraced by builders and buyers alike.
Level 2: Transparent solar panels are thin and flexible “see-through” membranes for application on exterior building assemblies and envelopes. These are a topic of research in MIT’s “Center for Excitonics,” an energy frontier research center funded by the US Department of Energy. The efficiency of these transparent panels is not as great as conventional solar panels, but partially and fully transparent solar panels can be integrated into windows in buildings and cover larger areas than their traditional counterparts. In terms of overall electricity potential, it’s estimated that there is five billion to seven billion square meters of glass surface in the United States. And with that much glass to cover, transparent solar technologies have the potential to supply some 40% of energy demand in the United States—about the same potential as rooftop solar units.
Level 3: Dynamic glass windows can help enhance indoor comfort while providing unobstructed views to the outside. In some applications, dynamic glass windows, each with a unique IP address, allows occupant-controlled shading through an electrochemical process inside the glass. This light-sensitive window glass can change from clear to tinted on demand to achieve various levels of shading without mechanical systems. Electromagnetic glass automatically tints when heat from direct sunlight warms the glass. The shading results in a lower heat load for the building. These features combine translucent functionality and energy efficiency in one elegant solution.
Level 4: Technology solutions include current market solutions and blue-sky future concepts to explore.
- 1. Remote mobile security is currently available in the nation’s markets as evidenced by numerous products integrating digital image, sound capture and two-way communications with access controls and emergency service provider notifications.
- 2. Remote sensing functionality for lighting and HVAC systems integrates with the mobile security features above, allowing control of several house-specific operating systems. This is like a programmable 24- hour setback thermostat to mirror in-home occupant behaviors, which can operate remotely from your cell phone. Sensors can also detect leaks or system trouble signals, alerting users to issues before major damage or complete failure occurs.
- 3. Precise point-of-use delivery designs promote water use efficiency and energy conservation through trunk, branch and twig pipe sizing coupled with a primary and secondary water heater closer to the point of use. When coupled with a demand pump, water is no longer wasted.
- 4. Power generation and energy conservation blend solutions above with sustainable building designs. Passive haus designs are super-insulated buildings with DOIVM-driven design attributes.
Level 5: Lifestyle predictive behaviors is a programmed set of parameters for all the above referenced technology solutions, which recognize changing needs over time. Community wide examples include age-specific active adult master-planned communities with a wide array of physical and social recreational programs. Home-specific examples include universal designs for aging in place. And even one step further is embracing baubiologie, or healthy home designs, to respect and respond to these age-related lifestyles.
The nation’s building industry is experiencing a dramatic renaissance of innovation, driven by concurrent revolutions in digital data capture and green building practices. These trends have accelerated thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, driving rapid adoption and diffusion of new technology. We believe that these products and principles will persist long after the pandemic is over.
*Credit to Chris Prelitz, sustainable home builder and consultant in Laguna Beach, CA for the acronym, DOIVM.
