SEATTLE, Washington -- Rick Courson came to building "green" houses the hard way.
Shortly after Courson, a contractor by trade, built his home on Puget Sound's Bainbridge Island in 1990 with the usual building materials, bad things started happening.
His family began having low-grade illnesses, and over time the symptoms became more serious -- including increases in heart rate, kidney distress and asthma attacks.
Courson noticed that the symptoms would go away in the spring and return in the fall, when the weather pushed them back indoors for most of the time. Finally, the kids' pediatrician suggested that they were victims of poisoning, and Courson traced the problem to the carpets.
"We discovered that our house was, in fact, killing us," Courson said.
That's when he decided to get out of the old place and build a newer, safer home.
Everything in Courson's current home has been designed to minimize exposure to formaldehyde and other volatile organic chemicals. And since 1993, he has adopted the same approach to all of the homes he builds. Indoor airflow is another prime consideration in designing the homes.
Along the way, his company, Cedar Bay Homes, has won numerous environmental building awards, including the Build a Better Kitsap Environmental Achievement Award.
His house was included on a tour of environmentally friendly buildings and housing developments at this week's "Building Green" event sponsored by the National Association of Home Builders Research Council (NAHBRC). The group promotes both new technologies and some time-honored strategies for making the construction industry more energy-efficient and ecologically sound.
"There are a number of different ways to tackle green building," said Richard Dooley, an environmental analyst with the NAHBRC in Maryland. "We can do it through materials selection, we can do it through designing a house such that you optimize the use of the solar heat gain -- orienting the house in a certain way to make sure your house is as energy-efficient as possible."
"Basically, countries that cut down the trees in the time of King Arthur went to non-wood products quite a long time ago," said Mike Kennaw, a sales manager for Arxx Building Products.
Both Arxx and Eco-Block use fireproof Styrofoam forms for concrete walls. Using the industrial equivalent of hollow-center Lego blocks, the walls can be snapped together, then filled with concrete. The Styrofoam forms remain in place after the concrete sets, as a dual-layer insulation material that is covered by interior and exterior wall coverings.
"We have forms that actually swivel and change, so you can have any angle you're looking for. Forms can be modified to provide a radius," Kennaw said. "It's the form, it's the installation, it's the framing, and it's all done at one time, as opposed to multiple trades coming in."
The advantages, in addition to being fireproof, are that the forms offer better sound reduction and energy efficiency than traditional building methods; plus, laboratory studies show them to be virtually hurricane-proof. Approximately 50 manufacturers are making systems under the general category of insulated concrete forms in North America, and similar systems have been used in Europe for the last 15 or more years.
"Some of them contain recycled content in their eventual forms, to go ahead and provide builders with an alternative to the standard stick-frame house," Dooley said. "Once the builders sufficiently understand the way in which they use the product, they can actually save time and money, so it's not only from an environmental standpoint that it's advantageous to them, but also from a cost standpoint."
Kurt Johnson, project manager for Astro Power, one of the world's largest manufacturers of solar photovoltaic panels, said that photovoltaics have become efficient enough now to work just about anywhere the sun comes up. "It's just a matter of how much it's going to work," Johnson said. "We tint the cells so that they're a blue color, because that's a color that works on a broader spectrum (of light)."
In San Diego, a 24-module system that takes up about 2,400 square feet generates an average of just over 250 kilowatt-hours per month throughout the year. In Seattle, the system would generate about 70 percent as much. "You get about a 30 percent reduction, which surprised me when I heard that," Johnson said, "because you never seem to get any sun up here."
Windows, floors and what holds up the walls were all prime concerns for the builders, and various alternatives dominated the discussions in both the workshop sessions and in the exhibit hall, where about 60 companies and government agencies vied for attention. Some of the more exotic materials being pushed included bamboo flooring to replace hardwood floors, and compressed wheat-straw panes for interior walls that require no additional support, eliminating the need for wood frames for the non-load-bearing walls.
Steel for framing was widely touted as an alternative to traditional wood-frame houses -- not surprising, given the desperate state of the American steel industry. The principal advantages, according to the promoters, are that it is essentially fireproof, lighter weight (and so less costly to ship around the country) and impervious to termites and other household pests.
Joyce Mason, VP of marketing for a Southern California developer, said one significant change in their approach was to look at the whole home as a system, combining energy-efficient units for heating, cooling and lighting alongside high-tech options such as solar electric systems to make the goal of zero net electricity from the power grid not only achievable, but cost-effective.
