Energy-efficient ‘green’ house is smarter than average home
Posted on Saturday, November 1, 2008
Just inside the first floor of Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry’s Smart Home, a 20-yearold re-upholstered Crate & Barrel sofa flanks a cool-to-the-touch ethanol-burning fireplace that floats in the middle of the room. The flame can be seen from any of the six thrift-store dining chairs revived with creamy white faux leather and tucked in around the high-sheen, rough-edged slab of a fallen Michigan ash tree given new life as a sculptural table.
A few steps deeper into this light-soaked space, there’s more old-meets-new where another seating arrangement pulls up to a wall-mounted LCD flat-panel screen, outfitted with Motorola’s VIP 1216, its IPTV (Internet Protocol Television ) Set Top box with DVR for viewing content and entertainment options in multiple rooms. Along with providing television and movie watching, this screen is the remote-controlled command deck for this high-tech 2, 500-square-foot prefabricated earth-friendly house assembled on museum grounds.
“We wanted to tell a technology story and a green story in a modular, sustainable, fully functioning home,” said Anne Rashford, the museum’s director of temporary exhibits. “It’s an icon now. People visiting are saying, ‘This is the house I want.’
Living “ green” the Smart Home way starts with a state-of-the-art — and artistic — dwelling that borrows from the past and courts the future with each low-volume toilet flush, composted apple peel and collected raindrop tracked by the structure’s digital brain. The so-called green movement focuses on reducing waste and cleaning up the earth.
The house is equal parts sophisticated design and technology, including a digital mechanical room. Smart Home includes small ecological gestures (native prairie plants as minimal landscaping ) and big-ticket ecological design options (the latest energy-rated appliances and bamboo floors throughout ). Smart Home: Green and Wired is a collaboration of the museum, Oakland, Calif.-based architect Michelle Kaufmann, builder All-American Homes, gardeners at the University of Illinois Extension Service, technology adviser Wired magazine and utility sponsors ComEd and Peoples Gas. The exhibit, whose plans, materials and design earned it the designation “Chicago’s Greenest Home,” is open to the public through January. See www. msismarthome. org.
DON’T LIFT A FINGER There is something slightly futuristic and conceptual about the way this technology-studded three-story structure with garage is put together and operates. The digital nerve center includes a PC-based automation system that controls temperature, lighting and window coverings to reduce energy consumption. In the morning, the house’s LifeWare software-driven automation system clicks on the lights, raises the shades and cues wake-up music from the NuVo digital music system. The motorized skylight opens when detectors sense a cool breeze, saving on air conditioning. Digital probes in houseplants send a voice-mail message when water is needed. When the doorbell rings, a touch screen reveals a wireless video feed from the front entry. And a few clicks put the entire house in shutdown mode, automatically securing doors, turning off lights and lowering heat or air as residents leave for a vacation. More and more U. S. households embrace resource reduction and waste reuse each day, but most aren’t tracking their electricity, gas and water use and energy output by computer and available on command. (On one summer afternoon, the monitor showed $ 6. 17 worth of consumed energy versus $ 5. 25 produced by the home’s solar energy collection, equating to less than $ 1 spent. On days when the house produces more than it uses, it racks up credits. )
SMARTEN UP The Smart Home is architect Michelle Kaufman’s mkSolaire model, a loftlike design that is scaled to fit an urban lot and meant as an alternative to often light- and air-challenged row houses. The plan, like many of her other variations found at mkd-arc. com, is based on five principles:
Smart design. That means a house built to human scale with clean lines, abundant natural light and air circulation, plus the technological advances that make tracking electricity and controlling heat and cooling, among other features, effortless.
Material efficiency. This includes off-site prefabricated construction that shortens building time and the use of renewable and recycled materials where possible. Energy efficiency. This is found in appliance choices, use of large windows and sunshades, and a green roof (a roof at least partially covered in vegetation ) that helps cool in the summer, insulate in the winter, absorb rain water and eliminate runoff. Water efficiency. Features include low-flow showerheads and dual-flush toilets that vary the amount of water used and that rely on collected and reused “gray water” from the sink. Healthy environment. Includes the use of nontoxic materials in rugs and bedding and air filtration.
“Design big, rather than build big, is one of our main mottos,” Kaufmann says. The single-car garage has just enough space to double as a home theater and kid’s play space, for instance.
The Smart Home, priced from $ 250 to $ 275 per square foot (which includes construction and permit costs but doesn’t include land ) begins life as factory-built modules.
Proponents of this building method argue that on-site construction jobs do not have provisions for materials storage and since most materials have to be cut to length in the field, cutoff waste is often just trashed. In the factory, drywall, wiring, sawdust, vinyl and other scraps are collected and recycled.
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