When the National Association of Home Builders rolls out its modified green building standards, water efficiency and conservation will top the list.
On February 15, 2008, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) announced that its new Green Building Standard is set for approval by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and will be ready for publication by mid spring of this year. The public comment period for the new standards closed on February 4, and committee members will have until March 4 to vote. In comparison to the US Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) for Homes green building standards—the NAHB standards will provide similar levels of environmentally conscious products and practices with more flexibility built in for builders and homeowners, according to NAHB executives.
Water efficiency and conservation is one of seven standards that also includes lot preparation and design; resource efficiency; energy efficiency; occupancy comfort and indoor environmental quality; and operation, maintenance, and homeowner education. Additional points can be gained from any of the categories.
“Some of this is really complicated,” says Bob Jones, vice-president and secretary of the NAHB, and president-elect for 2010. “Many people in our industry think you just become a green builder, and that’s not the case at all—there’s a lot of detail and depth in all the particular facets.” Jones also owns Robert R. Jones Homes, in Bloomfield Hills, MI.
In developing the standards, the NAHB has worked with the International Code Commission and ANSI. The public was given a commentary period on the proposed standards. “We wanted to be sure we weren’t going to actuate something called a ‘standard’ that didn’t have the consensus of both ANSI and NAHB, because it really offers standing in terms that these standards are real, not self-promoted by NAHB,” says Jones.
Until now, NAHB has advocated guidelines through green-building practices, using them as a springboard for the draft of the standards. “Guidelines were developed by the NAHB over past years, but they still were guidelines,” says Jones.
When it comes to the NAHB standards, the organization’s membership “doesn’t subscribe to the typical mandatory type of standards attached to a point system,” he adds. “Our standards will have a point system, but we wanted to be a voluntary system in terms of what people can select. A key element is affordability. People buying their first home have every right to want a level of green building in their home, and, by making the point system voluntary, they can select the level of green they want [it] to be.”
The basic distinction between NAHB and LEED, is that LEED standards are mandatory to achieve points, says Jones. NAHB levels will be bronze, silver, gold, and emerald—the highest level of ‘green’ attainment.
If approved, water efficiency standards will address issues inside and outside of homes, with respect to both products and design. “From a design perspective, it’s really about water savings, but, it’s also really about hot water in terms of the design component inside the house,” notes Jones.
Such designs could include:
- Locating baths near each other for shorter pipe runs.
- The use of a demand-controlled hot water loop-type system.
- Point-of-use hot water through tankless water heaters.
- Solar heat-assisted hot water systems, which Jones says will be a climate-specific regional practice.
“We did do a little exploration with tankless water heaters,” says Jones. “You’d have to use the small ones in many different locations within a home. There is one that is sized for a house, which costs about $1,200 for use in a 2-1/2 bath modest-sized home. There’s quite a bit of piping that takes place, because there is some similarity in terms of piping to a hot water heater, even though it is a tankless heater.”
With respect to products, NAHB potential standards advocate the use of Energy Star appliances, such as dishwashers and clothes washers, particularly those that are front-loading and those with a water factor of 6.0 or less.
Other products that are being advocated:
- Low-flow faucets of flow rates of 1.5 gallons per minute or less, low-flow showerheads, and water closets.
- Composting waterless toilets; water closets—both grinding and chemically-aided—are another consideration.
- Automatic bath water shut-offs, that provide the ability to turn off a water system when it’s triggered by either excess water flow or leak detection modules.
The EPA reports that an American family of four can use up to 400 gallons of water per day, with 30% for outdoor uses. More than half of that is used for landscape irrigation. To that end, NAHB is advocating outdoor water use landscape design that focuses on native plant selections, which Jones utilizes in his company’s practices. “What we are finding out from a drainage point of view as we develop, is the use of plants to absorb the water,” he says. “Not only is it good for the ground surface, but it also is good, that in the sense of a functional point of view, it will eliminate a lot of piping. It may also eliminate some detention areas in new developments that collect the water, and, in some instances, become eyesores.”
Another potential outdoor standard is the establishment of irrigation systems zoned separately for lawns and for plant beds. “We’ve been doing that for years in our homes, because the amount of water needed in a flower bed or a shrub bed is certainly not the same as a lawn needs,” says Jones.
Other outdoor options could include stream rotators, spray heads, drip irrigation, and bubblers. “There’s quite a bit of drip irrigation being used, where a pipe is drilled at certain intervals and it just drips,” Jones points out. “This is useful in areas such as Arizona, and other regions that have particularly dry plantings that need very little water.
“In addition to bubblers and soaker hoses, a third type of irrigation is subsurface irrigation with a buried line. A significant reason to use that, is so you don’t lose moisture because of evaporation, whereas in a typical irrigation system—whether it be a soaker hose or a sprinkler system—you obviously lose a lot of water by evaporation. Also of importance, is to install irrigation controls that are based on a weather forecast, rain sensors, and soil moisture sensors.”
Another potential standard is the installation of rainwater collection and distribution systems for non-potable water needs. “What we’re really talking about here is cisterns, which are really no more than tanks, but this kind of rainwater collection can be used for irrigation and flushing of toilets,” says Jones.
“What you’ve got to figure is how you get the distribution. You would use pipe of one form or another to get into the house in terms of using it and some kind of a pump.” Another potential standard is the separation and re-use of greywater for non-potable needs, such as water closets.
“You would get it out of the cistern as a potential source to reuse the greywater,” says Jones. The standards process promises to be an education, not only for homebuilders, but for consumers as well, Jones notes.
“This is a plus from the homeowners’ and builders’ side,” he says. “I can offer many positives of how it’s good for this reason or that, but know what? It’s the right thing to do. It saves in terms of the environment, whether it be water, the lumber that’s used, or the land development. There are a couple of ways to educate the consumer. One is that you’re forced to in drought conditions. Obviously, in Michigan we’re not confronted with drought conditions, so ours is a little different type of education. In Arizona, there’s a different education.”
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Photo: McIntyre Builders Inc. |
| Front load washers can save one-third of the water used for clothes washing. |
Through the interconnectedness of the environment, consumer, and homebuilder, there are regional differences in how green approaches should be effectively addressed, Jones says. “For instance, rarely are there basements in Florida, because you go down two feet and you’ve got water,” he says. “But in Michigan, you’d be hard-pressed to sell a home if it didn’t have a basement.
“So, in developing standards, we believe we must be very flexible about what the needs are in Florida, in Arizona, in Michigan, and in Minnesota, to name a few. Obviously, our industry is in Alaska with many homebuilders. They are all building things, and one of the things we want to provide for our homebuilders and the consumers across the United States is the flexibility.”
The flexibility of NAHB’s standards to incorporate various practices throughout the US mirrors that of many state-based green-building programs. “It seems there’s a bandwagon rush right now to get on board,” says Jones. “In many of the states, green is the thing to be for the constituencies and the electorate. I think they are rushing in some instances to be sure they are green.”
But some homebuilders are already instituting water efficiencies in their own green- building practices before the standards were even being developed. In the homebuilding industry, Tucson, AZ-based green builder and solar pioneer, John Wesley Miller has been “green” before green was popular, his peers say. “In Tucson, we’ve always been very water conscious because we live in the desert,” says Miller. “I grew up running the hose from the evaporative cooler to a tree or a plant, so we used the water twice. Over the years, I was learning more. When the US Department of Energy started realizing that pumping water was part of energy and by saving water, we saved energy, they made the law to go to the 1.6 gallon toilets instead of four to six gallons.”
And while energy, as well as water savings, became evident, most people still don’t make the connection between the two, Miller says. “I think we need to get that message out more that, if you save water, you save energy—if you save energy, you save water—because it takes a lot of water to generate electricity,” he says. “It’s on our mind much more out here in the desert than it would be in areas where there is a lot of rain and rivers.”
Among Miller’s accomplishments, is the construction of his second, zero-energy home in his new development, Armory Park del Sol. Zero net-energy homes consume the same amount of energy they produce. The 2,168-square-foot, all-electric home features photovoltaic panels that produce electricity from sunlight, high-efficiency appliances, and a rainwater-harvesting system. The home was built with the help of the NAHB Research Center and Tucson Electric Power Co.
Armory Park del Sol has attracted other accolades as well. A 2006 water use study indicates that, when compared to Tucson’s water use of 247 gallons per house per day in homes constructed in 2000 or after, Armory Park del Sol utilizes 119 gallons per house per day. The study shows that over a decades-long lifespan of a home, Armory Park del Sol residents’ water savings will exceed 1.4 million for each home.
Some of the features at Armory Park del Sol that led to the water-efficient numbers, include the elimination of high summer peak water use by concentrating run-off during project start-up, the use of xeriscaping and water harvesting, the development of small individual lots with ‘inviting’ common areas, and ‘conscientious occupant behavior.’
“That’s really significant,” notes Miller. “Part of it is the nature of the people buying our homes. They tend to be more environmentally concerned, and that’s why they look us up and buy here.”
When it comes to water efficiency, Miller says his company first considers the land planning, utilizing stormwater as to minimize or eliminate the need for domestic water. “You do the land grading so you can retain the water on each lot as long as it is safe,” he says. “Then the whole development has good drainage. Because of our erratic rainfall—we’ll have no rain for six months and then the sky will drop out—we have to grade our development so we have retention/detention areas in our master planning.
“We utilize the water on the development as long as we can,” he says. “There’s a major area where it has to fill up to a certain point before it can run into the storm sewer and put a burden on the municipal system. We have low-water to no-water use and drought-tolerant plants in all of the common areas.”
Homeowners are educated to dig tree wells down so that when it rains, the water soaks in around the plants and sits there as long as it’s safe from such factors as mosquito breeding. On the inside of homes, Miller has been utilizing such approaches as a 1.6-gallon, low-flush toilet, water-conserving showerheads, and tub fillers.
While the 2006 water study concentrates on household water use per day, the common area water usage is much less than any other part of town as well. “When you look at the way we graded the lots, the patios, and educated the people on the plants we used, combined with the low-water use fixtures and the smaller hot water line so people don’t have to wait as long for the hot water line to evacuate the cold water before they get the hot water, all of those things combined together get an average that’s less than half of the city,” he says.
Miller says one of his goals is to demonstrate what homebuilders can do to “make our quality of life on this planet better, starting with utilizing solar energy, which involves water conservation and then all of the other green elements. The fact that we are now working on a green-building program as a nation of builders is encouraging to me,” he says. “I believe we’ve had a paradigm shift in the last few years so that builders have passed the point to where they’re saying it costs too much; now everyone is trying to get in on it—even the big guys. When you look at the overall operating costs and money saved over the next 10 to 30 years, there’s a payback.”
Another builder who’s on board with green building is Arn McIntyre of McIntyre Builders in Grand Rapids, MI. McIntyre also is a member of the Census Committee on the National Green Building Standard that has worked to develop the emerging standards. He helped develop water and air quality standards.
Water efficiencies in homebuilding are situational, says McIntyre. “One of the reasons we use the National Association of Home Builders standards is because it is a flexible document,” says McIntyre. “Depending on the situation and what the homeowner wants, there are a lot of commonsense things that are cost-effective and easy to implement.”
His company uses low-volume flush toilets, and water restrictions on showers and faucets. “We use on-demand hot water heaters quite a bit,” he says. “We don’t just use them, but design them properly into the home to greatly reduce the amount of piping so there’s less water volume.”
McIntyre points out that the more water volume there is in pipes and fittings, the more wasted water there is, because it has a longer run to get hot water to a particular spigot or faucet. He designs it differently, “instead of typically having the hot water heater in the basement or in a crawl space, the hot water heater is right in the master bathroom in a closet, right next to the shower and sink. Then, the next room over is the kids’ main bath and it might be right above the kitchen, so you have very short hot water plumbing runs, so, thus, you get water quicker and there’s less wasted water.”
Next to toilets, clothes-washing machines are the second biggest contributors to water usage in the home. Combined, they account for 50% of the water usage in a home, says McIntyre. “Front-loading washing machines use up to 18,000 gallons less per year for the average family,” says McIntyre. “That equates to less detergent and less hot water heated, so there are other benefits.”
On the outside, McIntyre Builders utilizes such measures as alternate or low-impact stormwater management techniques, such as rain guards, bioswales, and native plantings. Irrigation systems can be zoned, or water can be distributed through drip irrigation or subsurface irrigation.
“You’re getting water to the point to where you need it most effectively with the least amount of waste,” he says. “That can be combined with a rain sensor system, and maybe soil moisture sensors, so you’re not watering when the soil is moist enough.”
Commonsense water efficiency measures can be cost-effective, McIntyre adds. “Some of the things, like flow restrictors, are very cost-effective. Other things like dual-flush toilets —which were quite a bit more expensive in the past—are getting competitive nowadays, and are becoming more of a value to the consumer. The on-demand hot water heaters are probably the most costly, but you’ll get a payback within three to seven years, depending on the family’s size and how the family uses it,” he says.
McIntyre points out that water efficiency needs differ from one region to another. “In Michigan, I’m sitting about 30 miles away from a fifth of the world’s fresh water supply,” says McIntyre. “Michigan is very protective of the water supply, so there is an awareness of water consumption, even though we are right in the middle of all this fresh water.”
Ask homeowners what their two top requests are in residential green building and they’ll say energy and air quality, McIntyre says. ‘Those are the two that have immediate impact on the pocketbook, or in the health and living environment in the home. The third thing on the list is water. Most people don’t have an awareness of it from a monetary payback,” says McIntyre. “Even with the on-demand hot water heaters, the payback is energy because you are burning less energy. Water is one of those ‘feel-good’ things that if someone can get it with everything else, they’re going to do it.”
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Photo: McIntyre Builders Inc. |
| A water heater saves water, when located properly, to reduce water volume in pipes. |
While there is more of an awareness of the need for water conservation in the Midwest now than a few years ago, McIntyre notes it’s “nothing like what it is in the Southwest and Florida—those areas of the country where exterior water consumption, water management, and irrigation are very critical items.”
Matt Belcher, a green builder in St. Louis, MO and owner of Belcher Homes, is finding it easier to comply with green-building guidelines, because the fixtures are getting easier to find on the market, with more manufacturers throwing their hats in the ring. “The green market is the largest market for manufacturers,” he says. “There are new products all of the time, and some of the big companies like Kohler and Moen are coming out with products that perform better, and have low-flow and water-conserving features. Enough of them are doing it that prices are somewhat in check, which is good.”
Belcher agrees the emerging NAHB standards provide flexibility. He frequently meets with other homebuilders throughout the US, and notes how builders in the arid Southwest will modify water requirements to meet drought conditions while in his part of the country, when there’s an ample water supply with the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. “There’s no reason to wait until there’s a problem to address it,” he says. “It’s so much easier to incorporate these features into our homes now anyway; it’s becoming a no-brainer, which is good for me.”
Belcher Homes is constructing a 170-acre development with about 280 units, a mix of townhouses, cottage homes, and detached single-family homes. The community, Rock Hill Trails, is across the Mississippi River from an existing conservation community that has received acclaim, Prairie Crossing. The development Belcher Homes is constructing is part of a larger area of acreage owned by a family that has operated the farm on it since pre-Civil War times.
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Photo: McIntyre Builders Inc. |
| A dual flush toilet that flushes at 1.6 or .9 gallons per flush. |
“Louis and Clark probably walked this exact farm here looking for something to eat while they were ready to go on their boat trip up the Missouri,” says Belcher. “This particular tract was adjacent to the City of Wood River and ripe for development. The owners had been approached by developers we bought out, and they knew it was their family legacy that it would be developed at one time, so they put an extensive effort into educating themselves on low impact development. They wanted to develop it using those techniques and also to build all of the homes green. They contacted me and I jumped all over it, because this is a phenomenal project.”
Among the many planned water-saving features, were: no storm sewers, but piping to transfer water from one bio-retention area to another; various curb structures to control water, such as V curbs or ribbon curbs; constructed wetlands, in addition to bioretention areas; roadside infiltration gardens, green gardens, and other measures to control hardscape run-off will be utilized to slow down stormwater and channel it into bioretention areas; the use of native plants to negate the need for mechanical irrigation; the installation of rain barrels to use for irrigation; the construction of an underground cistern-type facility at the community center to use for its irrigation needs; and a moisture meter to ensure wet ground is not being irrigated.
In the homes’ interior, water-conserving measures will include low-flow fixtures, low-flow, and dual-flush toilets and tankless water heaters, if practical. Belcher Homes utilizes front loading washers and energy-efficient dryers. “Front-loading washing machines use less water to get clothes clean, so that allows you to use less drying time,” Belcher points out.
Belcher Homes also is considering PEX piping—a type of tubing threaded throughout the house like a wire. It goes through a manifold and has return lines, so it operates more efficiently. “We’re working a smarter house design to minimize the use of materials, not only in the plumbing, but in everything else,” says Belcher. “Standard features comply with the green-building guidelines, which will be launched as green building standards, so we comply with those minimums and offer others as upgrades.”
Potential homeowners have expressed excitement over the project. “You think it is going to have to be a big educational process, but it seems like a lot of people already have a basic idea and know enough about it that they want to learn more,” says Belcher. “They are somewhat savvy and fascinated to be able to actually see it. We’ve received nothing but positive remarks from people interested in how things are going and when they can get out to see it, which is obviously a good thing.”
While Belcher has always been an advocate of green building, the NAHB’s guidelines—soon to become standards—have given builders like him “a lot more focus,” he notes. “By focusing on different areas like shorter pipe runs, that saves me money and lowers my bottom line,” he says, adding he’s also cut solid waste by two-thirds by recycling items like cardboard.
“Our bottom line has tightened up quite a bit and there’s a lot to be said there,” Belcher says. “There’s a benefit from the environmental standpoint based on population growth. We hit 300 million people in the United States last year and they all need a place to live. It’s good that our industry is looking at how we manage the resources it takes to provide that shelter.”
There will come a time, Belcher believes, when green building will be the standard, with conventional builds being an exception. “The guidelines being made into a national standard is the first huge leap to get there,” he says.
McIntyre points out that green-building associations are growing in membership on an ongoing basis with an increasing number of homes being certified, as more builders are taking training. “You can look at that a couple of ways: There are builders out there who truly are the core of the organization, are environmentally-conscious, and looking at sustainability,” he says. “Then there are builders who see the market need, and see they have to get involved or are going to be left behind. The general feeling of the builders who have been doing this—and even the ones who have just started doing it but are very astute—is that in five to 10 years, green building will be the norm.