I am sure we have all seen graphics like these, giving us a pretty picture of what is one of the primary contributors to climate change, as buildings contributed nearly half of all the CO2 emissions in the united states in 2010. Not to mention it gives us an idea of what kind of pace we are using our fuel sources, and as they become more difficult to obtain, costs will just continue to rise. Energy usage in our homes is becoming a big deal as energy codes are becoming stricter and utility companies are being required to produce a certain percentage of their product by renewable sources and provide energy efficiency programs for their customers.
Related to home energy usage, I have noticed a lot of press on Net Zero Energy Homes and even attended a webinar by Matt Grocof who renovated a home built in 1901 and is now the oldest home on record to be a Net Zero Energy home. Now most Net Zero homes are new homes as it is easier to build new rather than retrofit energy efficient systems into an existing home, hence the reason for my attendance on the webinar. With more than half of the 113.6 Million homes in the United States, over half this number was built before 1980. This leads to a huge potential of improvement in energy usage with our existing housing stock and that is why organizations like the Affordable Comfort Institute (ACI) have created the 1000 Home Challenge to create case studies of how to drastically bring the usage of our existing housing stock. Therefore I was hoping to learn more about some of the retrofit strategies that were used to obtain net zero.


Therefore, a couple of years ago now I wrote an article stating my interest in participating in the
Now what I took from that article is not the name dropping of who he met early in his career, but more of what he did with those connections and new found knowledge. He applied it, he took what he learned from those individuals and put it into his then home building practice. And to this day he is still refining some of those early construction practices.