Green Building: Belmont Avenue
One of our core values at RIC is sustainability, which includes creating more environmentally-friendly homes using green practices and materials.
One of the major ways we assess the need and payoff of these sustainable practices and materials is through a home energy audit.Also known as Home Energy Assessments, these tests assess how much energy a house is currently consuming, evaluate measures that can be taken to improve the efficiency of the home, and then follows up at the end of a project to see what improvements were made based on those initial tests.
The first step in this process is a blower door test. We’ve talked about this in previous blogs, but essentially a large fan is put in the doorway of a home that measures how much air is coming in or out. This creates a baseline number for us to work up from. In most of our renovations, we’re digging into houses deeply enough that we can visually see the things that need work and how to improve the home’s efficiency, but the blower door test gives us hard numbers and statistics to see exactly how much improvement was made.
In our recent renovation project for a historic home on North Belmont Avenue we noted the usual list of red flags. The home had inadequate insulation, a poorly installed HVAC system (usually a result of hodge-podge systems installed over the years), inefficient appliances and light fixtures, and plumbing that was not up to today’s standards and codes.
One of the major changes made in this home was the in basement. Driven mostly by the desire to make that space finished and livable, we gutted everything including the walls and concrete floor down to the studs and dirt. This level of demo allowed us to install proper moisture protection and all new insulation.
The rest of the home underwent less major demolition, but everything got a face lift. In every project we have to consider the payoff of gutting a home and re-insulating every wall. The saving in energy costs may not make up for the cost of the labor and materials, depending on how bad the space was to begin with. In this kitchen and dining room space we did a partial demo to update the insulation with spray foam and some of the electrical and plumbing infrastructure.
Compare that to the full gut required in the sunroom due to substantial moisture problems including mold and a leaky roof.
We were able to keep the original windows and floors, and we spent a considerable amount of time repairing and weather-sealing the old windows so that they could continue to be a part of this historic home, while also being more energy efficient. Sometimes keeping original architectural elements like windows really is worth it.
In the end, the numbers showed that we were able to reduce the energy consumption of the house by 40%. Imagine if your energy bills were 40% lower! This number is especially impressive when you consider that we also increased the finished, livable square footage of the house by 40% by renovating the basement.
You can see in this final energy performance graphic that we were able to get this house well below the Virginia average and right around the Virginia target for energy consumption. This is really remarkable when you consider the age of this house and the original elements we were able to salvage.
It’s always exciting to us when we can keep the historic charm of a home this age while also integrating modern updates, ensuring that it will be here for decades to come.