I Made A Mistake Building My New Net Zero Home
I Made A Mistake Building My New Net Zero Home. Open an Atmos account today and take a step towards aligning your finances with the climate. www.joinatmos.com/undecided But that's not all - with an Atmos solar loan, you can amplify your environmental impact by embracing clean energy for your home. Join us in the journey towards a sustainable future while enjoying the benefits of lower energy costs. My new net zero energy home build is almost done, but there's been a few issues along the way that could be a good learning lesson. The high level goal for my new net zero home has been to build an energy efficient house that will produce as much energy as it uses over the year, as well as tying in some of the latest and greatest tech to make that happen. Tech like a geothermal heating and cooling system, as well as Enphase solar and home battery. And all of our electrical feeds into a Span Panel with EV charger for smart home energy management. It's all awesome stuff, but I made some decisions that have over complicated things. So why did I do that? And what would I have done differently? There’s a good learning lesson here.
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I suggest from my own experience of having a house built to allow a lot of ventilation [ even in winter ] for the first 12 months despite energy loss. The building materials,sealers, paints, varnishes out gas an unhealthy amount.I did not do that and my wife got very sick over the first few months [ she works at home so she was home 24/7 ]. Sort of a chronic fatigue syndrome that disappeared in spring when windows were opened.
As a former specialist in construction, and armature architect, I've learned that you want to have a general idea of where larger components are going before breaking ground, and have exact details finalized 2-3 steps ahead. It also doesn't hurt to meet with all your crew leads day one and learn early wither to use carrot or stick with them. Either way being a GC is much like being a cat-herder with louder messier cats.
I am a big believer in conditioned crawlspaces and / or attics for many of the reasons you mentioned. It keeps envelope penetrations down, and allows for easy routing of any ducting, pipes, wires, etc when the building is being built and more importantly, down the line when you want to add anything or make changes. It is a great feeling knowing that your house has the freedom to grow and change as time goes on.
I started watching this and was thinking, " wow he's over complicating this install" I'm glad I watched to the end where that was exactly what you said. We started an EV and battery installation business this year in CT. Keep learning and growing and life will never get boring. Good job Matt and yes being the GC can be a lot of work.
I think an additional problem is that many contractors aren’t familiar with this new technology so they wouldn’t have known how to do it all either.
In my house I did a full double wall. Insulated, sealed, dry walled everything. Then built a whole new interior wall and framed drop ceiling. All my hvac, electrical, cat cable runs inside the envelope. Costs nothing to heat and cool plus later modifications won’t require disturbing the sealed wall. Only downside is the 12” thick walls are weird at doorways.
I took a very different approach to my "new" home.
Love following along this journey, Matt. It's inspiring and will definitely help me in my own endeavor of turning my 1980 home into an energy-efficient one!
Congratulations on your inspiring project, Matt 👍🏻
If you include a service layer in your ceiling below your vapor barrier, the extra money in 2×4 will be saved tenfold in envelope management and penetrations. Then you run all of your wiring inside the envelope and only have to deal with plumbing vents penetrating the ceiling. Low profile clip in potlights help facilitate this setup.
Being an early adopter of way to much tech, I feel your pain Matt. Sometimes it is pull it out and start over, sometimes the answer is 'live with what you got' (until the next shiny thing comes by anyway), but KISS is always a reasonable guiding light. We all need to remember that Murphy is always hiding ing the corner waiting for us to stub a toe. We all need to take our 'Murphy Moments' as learning/remembering opertunities and not to flog ourselves over it (70+ years of beating my head against the wall of experience here!)
I built mine 25 ish years ago, and one of the things we did was run some unused extra conduits "just in case". Since that time, that have been used !
Matt,
Definitely do a video (or several) on your home automation and network. I think that would be good for a ton of people. Great video, keep it up!
Amazing system and house. Living in my van with two lead acid RV Batteries I recently found real battery cables. This is great no more alarms from my 80 watt inverter that it is starved for energy.
Vehicle to house that supports >20kw is going to be a game changer to energy independence. That coupled with DC fast chargers located in more locations. In an ideal world you'd charge your car off solar and use that as the battery bank to supplment the existing 20 kWh you already have. Run low? Go and top off at a dc fast charger near by and move the energy from car to house bank.
I wasn’t quite expecting the issue you ran into! I had commented about modular home electrical being tricky awhile back, but this video was so interesting in what exactly your problems ended up being. You explain things very well here and it’ll definitely help people who are looking into the stuff you’ve done to your house for themselves.
I now live by the idea of SSI, Super Simple Implementations. You can always scale up from there, but you cannot easily scale back down with many things.
Thank you for being transparent to share what you learned, your mistakes, and what you would’ve done differently. I appreciate the insight and it further adds to your credibility.