10 Questions for . . . Don Ferrier, Green Builder
In this first installment of a new feature on the Home & Garden blog, we put 10 questions to Don Ferrier, president of Ferrier Custom Homes in Fort Worth, Texas. Ferrier (shown below) is at the forefront of the green-building movement in this country.
Q. You’ve been called one of the godfathers of green building. When did you first become interested in energy-efficient practices?
A. In 1881 my Scottish grandfather immigrated to the U.S. because the state of Texas needed masons to build its new capital. He settled in north Texas and had 12 kids, one of whom started a structural concrete business building bridges. I eventually joined the family business and in 1982 a couple approached us about building an earth-sheltered, underground home.
Imagine a bunker with concrete on three sides and the fourth, which typically faces south for passive solar orientation, made of glass. The result was an extremely energy-efficient structure that’s also storm-resistant and easy to maintain. That’s how I got started in green construction, although we didn’t call it that at the time.
Q. Nowadays you’re building more-conventional homes, although the emphasis is still on energy efficiency. What major developments have taken place in the ensuing quarter century?
A. There’s been a tidal wave of change. To give you just one example, in 1985 I built my first home out of structural insulated panels, or SIPs. Today, 95 percent of the homes we build are made of the material. (Editor's note: Only 0.5 percent of U.S. homes built in 2005 were made with SIPs,
according to the Structural Insulation Panel Association; 70 percent were built with conventional framing techniques.) The amount of knowledge about this sort of construction is no longer obscure. Public education is the other development. I’m a big fan of the LEED for Homes and the NAHB Green Building programs. Both organizations do a phenomenal amount of good and are tremendous resources for builders as well as homeowners.
Q. Can you describe the greenest house you’ve ever built?
A. That would be Heather’s Home (shown above) a prototype home that we started in September 2005 for LEED and the NAHB near Fort Worth. It’s named after Heather, my then 25-year old daughter, who came to me saying she wanted to build a very green home and wanted to do it on a tight budget. That was more a less our mission statement. It’s not the cheapest house out there but it’s far from the most expensive.
Q. What are some energy-efficient features of Heather’s home?
A. It starts with orientation. In our climate, that means controlling the sun to keep the house from getting too hot. A combination of trees, porches, and overhangs shields the glass portions of the house. They’re angled in such a way that during the summer, when the sun is high in the sky, solar heat gain isn’t an issue. But come winter, when the sun is lower in the sky, it warms the house. The house is built with SIPs, which make for an extremely tight, well-insulated house. Then there’s a high-efficiency air-conditioner unit and water heater. The lighting and appliances all have Energy Star ratings. And the outside of the house is a combination of stucco and low-maintenance fiber cement.
Q. What about indoor air quality? How does this relate to green building?
A. Here’s the dilemma. The average home is leaky. That makes it inefficient, but it lets enough outdoor air into the home that you don’t have to worry about indoor air quality. An energy-efficient home is very tightly constructed. But if you’re not careful about what you put inside, you’ll be left with polluted indoor air. So you have to watch what products you introduce into the home. For example, you have to watch out for the VOCs that are in many materials, including cabinets, countertops, carpets, stains, and paints.
Q. What about water conservation?
A. We install rainwater catchments and use the water to irrigate the yard and also flush the toilets. Inside, we put in ultra low water flow faucets in the kitchen and bathroom faucets, as well all showerheads. They use roughly 40 percent less water than the average low-flow fixtures.
Q. So what’s the bottom line in terms of the energy cost?
A. Heather’s house has 2,028 square feet and her energy bills have been running about $75 a month. In our region, that’s anywhere from a third to a half of what the average person pays.
Q. Heather’s Home isn’t tiny but it’s not huge either. Why did houses get so big in recent years? And is the McMansion era over and done?
A. I think you had a lot of us baby boomers that grew up with very frugal beginnings, but then had a small to a large degree of success. We never had the big house earlier in our lives and so it became a status symbol. ‘I was raised without and I had to do without and I don’t have to do that anymore, and I’m going to build something to prove it.’ Fortunately, the mindset has changed. There are still McMansions being built but not as many. You see a lot of people saying they want to do the right thing now.
Q. Given the current economic situation in this country, what do you tell homeowners who worry that building green is too expensive?
A. Even before the economic downturn this was a question we had to deal with. You have so many options when you’re building a home. There are literally thousands of products that you do or don’t put into the home. This often results in a war between the heart and the wallet. So you have to make some tough decisions. In order for our clients to have an energy-efficient home, they’ll say, we’re not going to put into the hardwood flooring, we’re just going to seal the concrete. We’re not going to put granite counters in the kitchen and the bathrooms, we’re just going to put a laminate that’s Greenguard certified. The idea is they’ll give up these amenities to build the energy efficient house. Then down the line, if the amenities are still important, they’ll put them in.
Q. What are some retrofit green ideas for people who aren’t at the construction phase?
A. It’s very similar to what we talked about with new homes. First, you need to control the environment through air tightness. Old homes are very leaky, but there are a number of things you can do to caulk, seal, and insulate the envelope. Then you want to control the sun, for example by building a porch or awning or by planting a tree. Then you check the energy efficiency on appliances, the water heater, the air conditioner, and so on.
Q. What’s on the horizon of green building?
A. I think the next big thing will be increased awareness. This ties into the U.S. Department of Energy’s Builders Challenge, which I’m proud to be a part of. It challenges homebuilders to construct 220,000 high-performance homes by 2012. By 2030, it aims to make a net-zero-energy home available anywhere in the United Stares and at a cost no greater than a non-zero-energy home. I think as energy bills go up and awareness increases, we’re going to see more and more efforts like this. But only time will tell.
Interview by Dan DiClerico
Posted by: SP | May 12, 2008 5:24:17 PM
Great article, and good call on pointing out the inportance of indoor air quality... Often people install air circulation to filter the indoor air, when the better solution is not bringing in VOCs and other pollutants in the 1st place.
Posted by: Ralph Jackson | May 20, 2008 2:10:40 PM
Nothing was said of the closed-loop Ground-coupled heat pump system to replace the conventional AC and heating systems. An option to heat the water using the heat removed during the warm seasons can be added. The system uses wells either to remove heat or to add heat from the groundwatr into the house and uses a heat pump and heat exchanger instead of a compressor, and is much more efficient.